“Words are all I have left of my eyes”: Blinded by the Past in J. M. W. Turner’s Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying and David Dabydeen’s “Turner”

Abstract

This article explores J. M. W. Turner’s painting Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying, Typhon Coming On (1840) in relation to David Dabydeen’s poem “Turner” (1994). The representation of drowning slaves in Turner’s painting has been the subject of much debate, both at the time of its first public display and in more recent years. I examine some of the contexts surrounding Turner’s work before moving on to critically assess Dabydeen’s own poetic reaction to, and representation of, the painting and artist. In so doing, I argue that Dabydeen’s characterization of Turner as both a slave-ship captain and paedophile is prompted by Turner’s attempts to deny black people an active role in nineteenth-century Britain. In privileging a textual expression of the past over a visual approach, “Turner” offers a different kind of remembering which does not involve gazing at the past of slavery.