Introduction

In ‘Hayden in the Archive’ (2010), Elizabeth Alexander looks back affectionately to the earlier African-American poet whom her poem's title honours, imagining him absorbed in the painstaking (and painful) labour of researching the transatlantic slave trade:

Here the question with which these lines conclude is rhetorical: the anonymised ‘log’ over which Hayden stoops and broods does indeed ‘yield lyric’, in the polyphonic late Modernist shape of ‘Middle Passage’ (1966), one of the most innovative and sophisticated poems to confront the historical catastrophe at its heart.

For others writing after ‘Middle Passage’ it is not so much the textual as the visual dimensions of the slave trade's archive that provide the occasion for utterance, as demonstrated in the poems by David Dabydeen and William B. Patrick discussed in the previous two chapters; and in those by Alexander herself and Honorée Fanonne Jeffers that are the focus, respectively, for this chapter's first two sections: ‘Islands Number Four’ and ‘Illustration: “Stowage of the British Slave Ship ‘Brookes’ under the Regulated Slave Trade Act of 1788.”’ But while Dabydeen and Patrick take J. M. W. Turner's The Slave Ship as the principal ekphrastic cue for their poems, Alexander and Jeffers look variously to earlier materials, in the form of the seemingly ubiquitous Description of a Slave Ship (1789), itself evoked, if only briefly, in Patrick; and the cognate print, Stowage of the British Slave Ship ‘Brookes’ under the Regulated Slave Trade Act of 1788 (c. 1788), from which Jeffers, of course, takes her poem's title.

While it begins by exploring Alexander and Jeffers's responses to these prints, the chapter moves on, in its third and longest section, to analyse Matthew Plampin's Will & Tom (2015), a densely plotted and tonally mercurial novel about Turner's early career, in which ‘terror’ is often ‘transformed into / Comedy’ (Dabydeen 25) and vice versa. In this ‘dark farce’ (Plampin 60), Plampin gives the Stowage print an important role, imagining how it might have come athwart Turner's path at a point in his life when he is in the process of trying to establish himself professionally, in this case by undertaking a commission at Harewood House, an English stately home constructed in the mid-1700s.