David Dabydeen s Turner is a long narrative poem written in response to J. M. W. Turner s celebrated poem Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and 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, the poem brings into confrontation the wish for renewal and the inescapable stains of history, including the meaning of Turner s painting.
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