| In "Sea of Bones: The Middle Passage in Contemporary Poetry of the Black Atlantic," I argue that poetry on the Middle Passage not only elegizes those who died on this treacherous voyage but provides symbolic expression of subjectivities buried amidst the enormous loss this history represents. In doing so, Middle Passage poems imaginatively counteract the anonymity that surrounds this voyage. The oceanic crossing that was the Middle Passage of the Atlantic slave trade is undoubtedly the inaugural moment in the history and formation of the African Diaspora: it is the moment that initiates diaspora, severing Africans from their culture and homes, scattering them on ships bound for the Americas, and irrevocably transforming their lives in inconceivable ways. Drawing attention to poets whose writing on this subject has received little critical attention, this study examines contemporary poetry of the black Atlantic in particular focusing on work by Kwame Dawes, David Dabydeen, Lucille Clifton, and Elizabeth Alexander. In exploring poetic treatment of the Middle Passage, primarily through the lyric, epic, and long poem, I identify four interrelated poetics that reveal the dynamism of this legacy: lamentation, retribution, rupture, and re-membering.;While critical analysis of texts that rewrite slave experiences has tended to focus on narrative, and that primarily on plantation slavery, "Sea of Bones" advocates attention to the way black Atlantic poetry renders the Middle Passage as a complicated and haunting personal heritage. The intensity of poetry's economical language allows writers to draw on the genre's unique characteristics to exorcise the ghost of the Middle Passage and in so doing articulate its legacy at the dawn of the twenty-first century, well over a century since the last slave ships sailed.;The first chapter, "The Poetics of Lamentation," addresses contemporary mourning for ancestors lost in what poet Robert Hayden described as the "[v]oyage through death." The chapter examines a collection of poems by Ghanaian-born Jamaican poet Kwame Dawes that explores this expression of grief over the dead of the Middle Passage and their descendents. The second chapter, "The Poetics of Rupture," addresses a long poem by David Dabydeen in which the Guyanese-born poet envisions the Passage as a geographic and cultural break with the past which still allows for the possibility of newness and rebirth---thus, he presents a similar duality to Hayden's wherein a death voyage has the potential to lead to "life upon these shores." Both literary artists - Dawes and Dabydeen - establish critical inter-textual dialogs with the work of visual artists in their respective texts to draw on the simultaneity of expression in visual art in order to expand their poetic enunciation of issues they have in common around this subject: namely, the problematics of representation, memory, and identity.;The third chapter, "The Poetics of Retribution," focuses on several Middle Passage poems by African American poet Lucille Clifton written over the course of her long career (the earliest published in 1969). The chapter investigates the move from a sorrowful response to one of anger arguing that the rage of retribution allows for a visceral response to the pain of the Middle Passage that is characteristic of the era of the Civil Rights movement in which most of the work was produced. While effusive in its expression, I argue that the tenor of this rage runs its course, most notably indicated in the brevity of Clifton's poems on the subject.;The fourth chapter, "The Poetics of Re-membering," comparatively pairs Hayden's important epic, "Middle Passage," with Elizabeth Alexander's "Amistad," written a generation later. "Re-membering" refers to the mode of assemblage of historical data that both poets use in mining the archives on the infamous Amistad voyage in ways that imaginatively reproduce the formal elements of these documents and appraise their language and authority. Where Hayden's work prominently engages in historical critique in its very form (that is, structurally, linguistically) by arguing with written history, I contend that Alexander's on the same subject interrogates the silent spaces that reveal alternate memories of this famed Middle Passage journey which allow her to explore the possibility of a collective black identity, both then (on board slave ships) and now (in the lives of the descendents). |
