The Imagery Of Sea And Land In Fred D Aguiar S Feeding The Ghosts

Seminar paper from the year 2007 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 1,0, University of Hannover (Englisches Seminar), course: HS Caribbean Literature and Culture, language: English, abstract: (...) The novel belongs to the genre of the Caribbean novels, and, as a historical fiction about the slave trade, provocatively combines historical and imaginative elements. Thus, it can be subsumed under the term “revisionist historical novel”, which, according to Ansgar Nünning, denotes novels that maintain a positive tension between their status as literature and their status as history (cf. Thieme, 1121; Pichler, 6, 11). Feeding the Ghosts is based on the infamous “Zong Massacre” which took place in 1781. It was an incident in which 133 slaves were thrown overboard an English slave ship, leading to a civil action in the same year by the ship’s owners, who sued their insurers for compensation for the dead slaves. The publicity about the law suit and the concluding verdict, which confirmed the legal status of slaves as cargo, fostered abolitionist support and made them a landmark of the battle against British slave trade in the 18th century. Due to growing public indignation a parliamentary act was finally passed in 1790, which ruled out insurance claims resulting from slave mortality or the jettison of slaves on any account (cf. Low, 106 et seq.; Pichler, 6; Philp, 245; Baucom, 61 et seq., Frias 421, Schatteman, 234; James, 327). In order to recreate the trauma of the Middle Passage D’ Aguiar’s fictionalised treatment of the Zong Massacre and of the subsequent trial mainly focuses on the reconstruction of the events from a slave girl’s point of view, (cf. Schatteman, 234, Phil, 245; Carr, Pichler, 11). Since the most prominent feature of D’ Aguiar’s fiction is his poetic style, which is an object of acclaim as well as of critical reprimand (cf. Steward, 68; Figueredo, 211; Frias, 418; James, 327; Bovenschen; Low, 110; Schatteman, 234; Carr), the paper at hand chooses the novel’s imagery as its subject-matter and examines the principal dichotomy of sea and land. By elucidating their meanings the analysis will show that these images are multilayered metaphors which mutually influence each other, and explain other imagery they are connected to. Subsequently, sea and land will analysed in the light of the concept of writing back in Postcolonial Criticism in order to point out that they are part of a distinctive, reconciling approach, which aims at understanding history by personality and at recompense by remembrance

Seminar paper from the year 2007 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 1,0, University of Hannover (Englisches Seminar), course: HS Caribbean Literature and Culture, language: English, abstract: (...) The novel belongs to the genre of the Caribbean novels, and, as a historical fiction about the slave trade, provocatively combines historical and imaginative elements. Thus, it can be subsumed under the term "revisionist historical novel", which, according to Ansgar Nünning, denotes novels that maintain a positive tension between their status as literature and their status as history (cf. Thieme, 1121; Pichler, 6, 11). Feeding the Ghosts is based on the infamous "Zong Massacre" which took place in 1781. It was an incident in which 133 slaves were thrown overboard an English slave ship, leading to a civil action in the same year by the ship's owners, who sued their insurers for compensation for the dead slaves. The publicity about the law suit and the concluding verdict, which confirmed the legal status of slaves as cargo, fostered abolitionist support and made them a landmark of the battle against British slave trade in the 18th century. Due to growing public indignation a parliamentary act was finally passed in 1790, which ruled out insurance claims resulting from slave mortality or the jettison of slaves on any account (cf. Low, 106 et seq.; Pichler, 6; Philp, 245; Baucom, 61 et seq., Frias 421, Schatteman, 234; James, 327). In order to recreate the trauma of the Middle Passage D' Aguiar's fictionalised treatment of the Zong Massacre and of the subsequent trial mainly focuses on the reconstruction of the events from a slave girl's point of view, (cf. Schatteman, 234, Phil, 245; Carr, Pichler, 11). Since the most prominent feature of D' Aguiar's fiction is his poetic style, which is an object of acclaim as well as of critical reprimand (cf. Steward, 68; Figueredo, 211; Frias, 418; James, 327; Bovenschen; Low, 110; Schatteman, 23

A literary venture into the economic shadow that slavery cast, Feeding the Ghosts, based on a true story, lays bare the raw business of the slave trade. The Zong, a slave ship packed with captive African “stock,” is headed to the New World. When illness threatens to disable all on board and cut potential profits, the ship’s captain orders his crew to throw the sick into the ocean. After being hurled overboard, Mintah, a young female slave taken from a Danish mission, is able to climb back onto the ship. From her hiding place, she rouses the remaining slaves to rebel and stirs unease among the crew with a voice and conscience they seem unable to silence. Mintah’s courage and others’ reactions to it unfold in a suspenseful story of the struggle to live even when threatened by oblivion.

With Fred D'Aguiar and Caribbean Literature: Metaphor, Myth, Memory, Leo Courbot offers the first research monograph entirely dedicated to a comprehensive reading of the verse and prose works of Fred D'Aguiar, prized American author of Anglo-Guyanese origin. "Postcolonial" criticism, when related to the history of the African diaspora, regularly inscribes itself in the wake of Sartrean philosophy. However, Fred D'Aguiar's both typical and untypical Caribbean background, in addition to the singularity of his diction, call for a different approach, which Leo Courbot convincingly carries out by reading literature in the light of Jacques Derrida and Édouard Glissant's less conventional sense of the intrinsically metaphorical and cross-cultural nature of language.

Elizabeth DeLoughrey invokes the cyclical model of the continual movement and rhythm of the ocean (‘tidalectics’) to destabilize the national, ethnic, and even regional frameworks that have been the mainstays of literary study. The result is a privileging of alter/native epistemologies whereby island cultures are positioned where they should have been all along—at the forefront of the world historical process of transoceanic migration and landfall. The research, determination, and intellectual dexterity that infuse this nuanced and meticulous reading of Pacific and Caribbean literature invigorate and deepen our interest in and appreciation of island literature. —Vilsoni Hereniko, University of Hawai‘i "Elizabeth DeLoughrey brings contemporary hybridity, diaspora, and globalization theory to bear on ideas of indigeneity to show the complexities of ‘native’ identities and rights and their grounded opposition as ‘indigenous regionalism’ to free-floating globalized cosmopolitanism. Her models are instructive for all postcolonial readers in an age of transnational migrations." —Paul Sharrad, University of Wollongong, Australia Routes and Roots is the first comparative study of Caribbean and Pacific Island literatures and the first work to bring indigenous and diaspora literary studies together in a sustained dialogue. Taking the "tidalectic" between land and sea as a dynamic starting point, Elizabeth DeLoughrey foregrounds geography and history in her exploration of how island writers inscribe the complex relation between routes and roots. The first section looks at the sea as history in literatures of the Atlantic middle passage and Pacific Island voyaging, theorizing the transoceanic imaginary. The second section turns to the land to examine indigenous epistemologies in nation-building literatures. Both sections are particularly attentive to the ways in which the metaphors of routes and roots are gendered, exploring how masculine travelers are naturalized through their voyages across feminized lands and seas. This methodology of charting transoceanic migration and landfall helps elucidate how theories and people travel, positioning island cultures in the world historical process. In fact, DeLoughrey demonstrates how these tropical island cultures helped constitute the very metropoles that deemed them peripheral to modernity. Fresh in its ideas, original in its approach, Routes and Roots engages broadly with history, anthropology, and feminist, postcolonial, Caribbean, and Pacific literary and cultural studies. It productively traverses diaspora and indigenous studies in a way that will facilitate broader discussion between these often segregated disciplines.

Airy Hall – a collection of linked short stories and a new long poem – will confirm and enhance D'aguiar’s reputation: its bold mingling of public and private themes, its skilful counterpointing of Britain and Guyana, and its combination of graceful evocation with tough argument, engage to produce poems which are tightly-worked, generously inclusive and powerfully arresting.

Like no poetry you've ever known before, Fred D'Aguiar's novel-in-verse sweeps you up in the scintillating story of a young female slave who falls in love with the son of the plantation owner and runs away with him in search of a new life. En route they are rescued by an old man who has organised a secret underground railroad to help slaves escape, but they become separated from each other: Faith, the woman, is sold back into slavery and Christy, her lover, punished with forced labour. The novel is narrated by their son who is stuck in time until their story is told. Using the intricate rhyme-scheme of Byron's wonderfully picaresque Don Juan, D'Aguiar wittily plays with language to create poetry that is dazzling in its inventiveness whilst being utterly readable. Despite the seriousness of its subject matter, Bloodlines is full of humour, satire, experiment and, above all, life. Its characters are, like the language, brim-full of energy and very sympathetic as they struggle against vicissitude. Read this book fast like a novel, savour every word like a poem, do both, the choice is yours.

David Dabydeen's Turner is a long narrative poem written in response to JMW Turner's celebrated painting 'Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead & Dying'. Dabydeen's poem focuses on what is hidden in Turner's painting, the submerged head of the drowning African. In inventing a biography and the drowned man's unspoken desires, including the resisted temptation to fabricate an idyllic past, the poem brings into confrontation the wish for renewal and the inescapable stains of history, including the meaning of Turner's painting. Turner was described Caryl Phillips as "a major poem, full of lyricism and compassion, which gracefully shoulders the burden of history and introduces us to voices from the past whose voices we have all inherited", and by Hanif Kureishi as "Magnificent, vivid and original." In addition to the title poems, Turner contains selections from David Dabydeen's two earlier books, Slave Song (1984) and Coolie Odyssey. David Dabydeen was born in Guyana. He has published six acclaimed novels and three collections of poetry. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and Professor of Literary Studies at the University of Warwick.