Introduction

By a curious coincidence, ‘The Slave Ship’ was first published in The Southern Review in the same year as ‘Turner’ and subsequently included in Patrick's These Upraised Hands (1995). This collection not only places ‘The Slave Ship’ at its mid-point and uses a repeated line from the text as its title but also bears the image of Turner's violent seascape on its front cover, creative and editorial decisions which combine, ironically, to advertise the poem's preeminence within the volume overall, if not the wider spheres of critical reception and debate.

It is not this chapter's purpose to speculate on why ‘Turner’, written by a black Caribbean author, has been granted such critical prestige while ‘The Slave Ship’, written by an author who is a white American, remains critically invisible, nor is the concern to adjudicate between the aesthetic merits of these two poems, which would seem to have been composed entirely independently of one another. The aim, rather, is to bring the transatlantic encounter between Patrick's poem and Turner's ‘magnum opus’ (Howley 4; italics in original) into sustained critical focus, thus providing a new slant on the corpus of ekphrastic texts that – to a greater or lesser degree – take Turner's painting as their interlocutory ground. At the same time, the chapter serves as a reminder that the institution of the transatlantic slave trade with which both poets deal via Turner is just as much a part of a Euro-American as a Caribbean (or African) diasporic history and in need of interrogation from that perspective too.

1. Setting the Scene: Conflicting Visions in ‘The Slave Ship’

As well as being written from a white rather than a black perspective, Patrick's poem offers an approach to The Slave Ship (and the Zong massacre) quite different from Dabydeen’s, particularly in terms of structure. ‘Turner’ is a posthumous utterance, spoken by the drowned slave whom Dabydeen magically rescues and revives from the tumult of the artist's Atlantic, but Patrick's text has a more intricate arrangement, juxtaposing two figures who could hardly be further apart from one another, whether historically, geographically, ideologically or linguistically. The first of these, located in the late 1780s at the start of the abolitionist era, is an officer of the British Royal Navy whose three-year sojourn in Africa affords him direct experience of the slave trade.