Looking beyond ‘Turner’: William B. Patrick’s ‘The Slave Ship’

While Dabydeen’s ‘Turner’ is rightly established as a major achievement in the field of postcolonial Caribbean literature, the critical privileging of the text as the horizon for The Slave Ship ’s poetic legacy is not without its drawbacks. The most serious of these is that it has resulted in a certain blindness towards another long and complex ekphrastic poem on Turner’s masterpiece that emanates from an American rather than a Caribbean literary context and that was published in the same year as Dabydeen’s—William B. Patrick’s ‘The Slave Ship.’ It is not this chapter’s purpose to speculate on why ‘Turner,’ written by a black Caribbean author, has enjoyed such critical prestige while ‘The Slave Ship,’ written by an author who is a white American, has been rendered critically invisible, nor is the concern to adjudicate between the aesthetic merits of the two poems which appear to have been composed entirely independently of one another. The aim, rather, is to bring the transatlantic encounter between Patrick’s text and Turner’s painting into critical view for the first time, thus extending and enriching the current understanding of contemporary ekphrastic poetry that addresses the subjects of the Middle Passage and the Zong atrocity in particular.