David Dabydeens Rewriting of Turners Painting - Essay Example

David Dabydeen’s Rewriting of Turner’s Painting: Search for Cultural Identity Through Forgotten Past David Dabydeen’s“Turner” essentially reprises J. M. Turner’s painting “Slaver, Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying – Typhoon Coming On”. Indeed Dabydeen deals more than what Turner’s artwork can do through the visualization of the real world. In his “Turner”, he attempts to overcome the limitations of visual art that tends to maim an artist’s freedom. Undoubtedly Turners’ artwork is not a mere reproduction of reality, since mere production does not allow an artist to have his own purported meaning in the work. Therefore an artist enjoys the self-acclaimed freedom of distorting the reality in order to work out another reality that is greater and that lies beyond the capability of plain eyesight. J. M. Turner’s (who was an abolitionist) primary purpose was to draw the viewers’ sympathy for the slaves. But either because the limitation of visual art or simply because he is not one of the slaved society, he has failed to delve deep into the core of a slave’s existence that is his cultural identity. But Dabydeen has to focus primarily on this particular but relative truth or meaning of the art, rather than simply rewriting it, while overcoming Turner’s limitation. Yet since a visual art is often subjected to multiple interpretations depending on the multiplicities of individuals’ viewpoints, throughout the whole rewriting the painting Dabydeen has to maintain a poetic abstraction of the visual imagery of the his poem. Indeed, for Dabydeen Turner’s art is not more than an objective reality, of the 19th Century, and a part of history that he interprets from his own viewpoint. Hence what Dabydeen deals more with the reality of Turner’s art is his subjective interpolation that evokes picture and imagination of a civilization out of an instantaneous portrayal of a singular reality that might have evaded Turner’s eye, that is, J. M. Turner as well as his society fails to perceive the cultural identity of the slaves. Dabydeen has tried to evoke a cultural identity out of the forgotten past. Dabydeen views that the slave thrown into the sea is floating for “centuries”, and his memory of his origin has faded away, though not completely. Neither he recalls his memory as well as identity, nor is his hope to begin everything anew with the help of Turner fulfilled. Rather it is crushed. In rewriting Turner’s painting Dabydeen has shown a considerable degree of sincerity not to violate an artist’s integrity. Through the use of a number of visual imageries, he revamps the Turner’s painting with a puff of life, while endowing it with the dynamics of a story that tells the history of a forgotten past. Dabydeen’s narration and Turner’s painting often go hand in hand, as Erik Falk says, “The close proximity between poetic text and painting warrants a brief description of the image” (127). A reader who has never viewed Turner’s painting can imagine the slave ship destined toward England in the vast stormy ocean, the maimed limbs of the brutalized slaves being thrown overboard. But Dabydeen does not tell much about the “body parts protruding from the sea”, “a pair of hands and a leg that belong to slaves” who have plunged into the sea headfirst. Rather the scenario has been assimilated in Dabydeen’s narration of the history. In a real sense Dabydeen deals with the forgotten part of the history, he himself acknowledges it: My poem focuses on the sunken head of the African in the foreground of Turners picture. In Turners seas….it has been drowned for centuries. When it wakes up, it can only partially recall the sources of its life, so it invents a body, a biography, and it populates an imaginary landscape. (Dabydeen) The poem starts with a focus on a slave who has been thrown into the sea. Indeed Dabydeen has created two temporal environments for his readers: in one of them, the slave in focus remains afloat in oblivion “for centuries” and in other one, he awakes from “a lifeless sleep into remembrance and speech by a child, tossed from a “future ship” that drifts toward him” (Falk 125). Whereas the previous context prepares a historical plot in which a reader can easily be tormented and affected by the narrator’s nostalgia. But immediately the hope of future can enlighten him or her through the link between the past and the future. Dabydeen’s story moves smoothly forward keeping the readers in between the oppressed oblivious past and an imagined future, as Falk writes, “The preface thus immediately creates two temporal contexts for Dabydeen’s poem: its historical setting, and a present or an imagined future” (124). Indeed Dabydeen’s success in rewriting history lies in the fact that he has been able to take his readers to a pre-1840 spatiotemporal matrix in which they can imagine the arrival of the slave ships as the foretelling of the oncoming destruction that was coming down upon a community. Almost concurrently the readers are also haunted by the slave’s present peril. Drowning into the sea, at a turn, becomes a metaphor of the oblivion in which the slaves as well as the readers are plunging into. But the startled awakening of the slave into “remembrance and speech by a child” essentially serves as a thread that provokes to imagine, more accurately, to awake in the projected historical context. This concurrent manipulation of the past and the present has enabled Dabydeen to bring the almost forgotten past close to the readers’ existence in the time being, as Falk comments on this interaction between the past and the present: The merging of temporal layers imitates the thematic of the poem where two strands of memory constantly entwine in the speaker’s imagination: images of a childhood before the advent of the “stranger” – “Turner” and his slaver companions – and remembrances of the subsequent journey and the exploitation at the hands of “Turner”. (Falk 132) Using his poetic freedom Dabydeen conjures up the history in the form of storytelling the social and cultural dimensions. He narrates the commoners’ lives the aesthetic conjuration of village before the arrival of the “stranger” and his companions. The village and her men are most likely the part of history during the pre-slavery period in the poet’s country. But narration of the country’s history with socio-cultural dimensions from a first person point of view is essentially more of a story than history itself. Rather the readers are assigned with the task of making history out of the story that resembles to other commoners’ stories of the time being, since the village described in Dabydeen’s “Turner” is fraught more with generalities than with particularities or historical facts. The narrator’s description of the village oscillates between imagination and memories. The narrator depicts his village as slow and unchanging, as he recalls “the wisdom / Of our village elders passed down forever / (Until Turner came)” (Turner 7). The generalities that the speaker narrates in the poem echo the underlying vibes of any rural domesticity, it is evident in the following lines: “We play / Games as our father milks, crawling under / The [cow’s] belly like warriors, then springing up / At the other side” (Turner 10). Indeed the description of the village is as common as life with its domesticity. But with the same generalities the effects of the English’s presence has been described. Though the English arrive the speaker’s country as exploiters, in turn they appear to be teachers and saviors, as the speaker says: 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. (Turner 40) Indeed it is Turner who teaches the slaves the rudimentary English, as the speaker says, “Since Turner’s days I have learnt to count, / Weigh, measure, abstract, rationalise” (Turner 10). Turner has “crammed” the boys with “riches”, taught them language “selflessly”, stolen them away from their home and then exploited: “Five of us hold his hand, / Each takes a finger, like jenti cubs / Clinging to their mother’s teats, as he leads us / To the ship” (Turner 14). The slave speaker uses the name Turner to refer to all- “the captain, the slaver, and all English men” (), as he asserts, “All the fair men are Turner, I can tell” (Turner 14). In opposition, the slave identifies himself as a “Nigger” as “naming itself, naming the gods, / The earth and its globe of stars” (Turner 41). Here Turner appears to be personification of the whole English, rather than a person, the speaker is in search of the parenthood of “Niger identity” or simply he wants to forget it, as Dabydeen himself says that the narrator wants to “begin anew in the sea but he is too trapped by grievous memory to escape history.… The desire for transfiguration or newness or creative amnesia is frustrated” (Turner 7). Thus the poem “Turner” appears to be the poet’s search for cultural identity through the forgotten past. Works Cited Dabydeen, David. Turner: New and Selected Poems. Peepal Tree Press, 2002 Falk, Erik. Subject and History in Selected Works by Abdulrazak Gurnah, Yvonne Vera, and David Dabydeen. Karlstad University Studies, 2007 Read More