Sunday Painting. (aka essay procrastination).
J.M.W. Turner ‘The Slave Ship’ or ‘Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying - Typhoon coming on’. 1840.
I briefly studied this painting in my earlier years of University, as it inspired a poem-novel by David Dabydeen entitled ‘Turner’. In the foreground of the painting you can make out the figures of a few slaves thrown overboard, as the insurance for a ‘lost’ slave was greater than the money they would have received for an ill slave in an auction. Turner’s painting is so full of anger, so enraged with fire, and the tones of red are nothing less than blood-like. Although it was painted after the abolishment of slavery in the British Empire, it still serves as a powerful reminder of terrible times.
In Dabydeen’s poem, the postcolonial Other is given a voice with which to speak of the injustice against them; the slaver ‘Turner’ is shown to rape and abuse the slaves upon his ship, but also to teach them his language, like Prospero’s lessons to Caliban in The Tempest that is shown to backfire:
You taught me language; and my profit on’t
Is, I know how to curse. The red plague rid you
For learning me your language!
(The Tempest, Act 1 Scene 2)
Dabydeen’s poem is a great example of a voice that attempts to cling onto an identity, acknowledging the role of language in their captivity as it seeks to attack their mother tongue. In Dabydeen’s poem, the association between the introduction of a ‘new’ language and sexual violence is obvious, as both are effectively ‘raped’ by their oppressors:
‘Turner crammed our boys’ mouths too with riches,
His tongue spurting strange potions upon ours
Which left us dazed, which made us forget
The very sound of our speech. Each night
Aboard ship he gave selflessly the nipple
Of his tongue until we learnt to say profitably
In his own language, we desire you, we love
You, we forgive you. He whispered eloquently
Into our ears even as we wriggled beneath him
Breathless with pain, wanting to remove his hook
Implanted in our flesh.”
This is the most powerful aspect of Dabydeen’s poem-novel, and although the painting with which it is immediately associated implies a narrative which was previously hidden, it is the role of the postcolonial writer to fully reveal these horrors that Turner’s blood-red skies cry for.
