‘I was in hospital again and during the injection of Maximum dose pethadine to kill the pain I drifted off to a landscape Nightmare. I flo[a]ted above everything [on] a sea of glass on which sailed a boat filled with slaves but somehow we were connected by blood and bone and flesh and storms raged’, so Black British artist Donald Rodney writes in Sketchbook No. 17 dated 1987. Surviving as a source of physical, psychological and imaginative wounding no less than of myth, memory and trauma, the history of transatlantic slavery remains the defining catalyst of Rodney's life and work. Dramatically to the fore in his powerful ‘landscape Nightmare’ is his artistic fight against the dominant forces of amnesia and censorship embedded within white national memory and public histories of slavery, which has remained indelibly intertwined with his lifelong struggle against personal suffering. His vision of the ‘blood and bone and flesh’ of the slave ship stands as a powerful metonymic signifier of the ‘storms’ that ‘raged’ against his own body following his hospitalisation and exposure to medication provided to ‘kill the pain’ of a ‘CRISIS: The name given to a Sickle Cell attack’ as he fought the body-and-soul-destroying effects of ‘a blood disorder, that I and many other black people suffer from’. As situated against the powerful backdrop of a history of transatlantic slavery that resulted in a Black holocaust generating genocide on an unimaginable and seemingly un-image-able scale, Rodney's diagnosis with sickle cell anaemia, which he identified as a ‘Black Disorder’ – on the grounds that this disease primarily afflicted Black peoples throughout the African diaspora and continues to be subjected to gross neglect in inferior levels of research funding and medical support – provides poignant confirmation of the enduring legal, political, historical, cultural, philosophical and ideological stranglehold of white racism in the late twentieth century. According to Rodney, the history of transatlantic slavery resonated as a centuries-long institution that experienced a powerful afterlife by generating legacies that remained imbued with white Westernised constructions of Black bodies as a source of disease, illness, pollution, corruption, criminalisation and parasitical invasion not solely within a national body politic, as defined by white supremacist policies but, and more damningly, within the highly charged terrain of a Western art history configured as for whites only.