COUNTER-MEMORY AND THE ARCHIVAL TURN IN DOROTHEA SMARTT'S SHIP SHAPE

• Published in: Callaloo 2017-09, Vol.40 (4), p.94-112
• Main Author: Campa, Marta Fernández
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Aesthetics; African American literature; Archives & records; Authorship; Biographies; British history; Caribbean literature; Childrens literature; Colonialism; Creative process; Cultural heritage; Cultural history; Culture; Double consciousness; E-books; Ecofeminism; Epic literature; Erotica; Exegesis & hermeneutics; Feminism; Folklore; History; Homonyms; Intersectionality; Literary characters; Literary criticism; Literary influences; Memory; Multiculturalism & pluralism; Names; Poetry; Slave trade; Slavery; Smartt, Dorothea; Stops; Voicing; Womens literature; Writers
• ISSN: 0161-2492; 1080-6512; 1080-6512
• DOI: 10.1353/cal.2017.0137

Caribbean literature's longstanding tradition of historical representation has continued with strength through the contemporary moment. Many Caribbean literary texts of the 1990s and 2000s are characterized by a critical engagement with the memorialization of slavery in the Caribbean. From fiction, poetry, and essay writing, authors like Dionne Brand, M. NourbeSe Philip, Fred D'Aguiar, Maryse Condé, and Patrick Chamoiseau, among others, have re-imagined the experience of slavery as a counterpoint to the little that we know about the history of the slave trade from the perspective of the enslaved populations. Within this literary and critical focus, some authors have also opted to include and contextualize fragments from actual archival records that both document and obscure those histories. This turn to the archive as a locus of critical investigation manifests the ongoing necessity to situate history, and its knowledge, in conversation with the present moment. Here, I discuss Dorothea Smartt's poetry collection Ship Shape as a revisionist work that transforms a legacy of silencing into an exercise of counter-memory, engaging with and expanding its tradition in Caribbean arts. Smartt's configuration of a countermemory that writes back to the colonial archive is performed, to a great extent, through the gradual process of naming the enslaved African man buried in Sunderland point. Ship Shape exemplifies a productive entanglement between the written archival document, the visual, and the performative.