Mid-Mourning in David Dabydeen’s “Turner” and Fred D’Aguiar’s Feeding the Ghosts

Abstract

Just as Magona’s novel can be read as a critique of the TRC’s tendency—which it shares with trauma theory in its classical formulation—to map Western conceptions of trauma straightforwardly onto an apartheid-colonial situation, so the two literary works that I will look at next can be seen to challenge traditional understandings of trauma, mourning, and recovery that risk obscuring the continuing oppressive effects of racial trauma. David Dabydeen’s epic poem “Turner” (2002 [1995]) and Fred D’Aguiar’s novel Feeding the Ghosts (1998 [1997]) both memorialize the Middle Passage, a history that has come to epitomize the experience of people of African descent throughout the Atlantic world. Both texts resist the temptation to leave the reader with the sense that the story has been told, consigned to the past; that it has been taken care of and can therefore now be forgotten. Rather than affirming a clear distinction between the past and the present, they insist that racist attitudes and practices persist throughout the ages. Disrupting popular understandings of history as a linear progression from a colonial or slave past to a liberated “postcolonial” present, they invite an ethico-political practice of anamnestic solidarity with the oppressed of the past and the present. Taking my cue from Jacques Derrida’s reflections on spectrality and mourning, I argue that “Turner” and Feeding the Ghosts open up a space of remembrance in which historical losses are neither introjected nor incorporated, neither “properly” mourned nor melancholically entombed within the self, but constantly re-examined and re-interpreted.