“The Slave Ship Imprint”: Representing the Body, Memory, and History in Contemporary African American and Black British Painting, Photography, and Installation Art

“That slave ship imprint is on all of us,” so Betye Saar declared in an interview over twenty years ago as she cut to the heart of the signifying practices and thematic force of her mixed-media installation, Diaspora, a work she described as concerned with “contemporary artists and how they reflect on their ancestry” and which formed part of her exhibition, With the Breath of our Ancestors, on view in the Barnsdall Gallery, Los Angeles, in 1992 (qtd. in Hewitt 19). Representing no hagiographic imagining of black ancestral histories or memories, Saar generated hard-hitting dramatic tension by layering the walls of her exhibition space with a black netted material consisting of abstract swirling forms that resonated with, but deliberately failed, to represent the mapped contours of geographical spaces: as such, she bore witness to the realities of black exposure to dislocation and dispossession in a diasporic no man’s land. As suspended against a white, blue, and red backdrop, Saar’s installation works less to evoke the color symbolism of the United States flag and more to imagine the traumatizing realities of the Middle Passage as a transatlantic phenomenon. However abstracted, fragmented, and partial, absent-present black silhouettes appear against an all-encompassing whiteness, an oceanic azure blue, and a blood red crimson to render the visual trace of racist violations and violences enacted against missing enslaved bodies metaphorically palpable. Revealingly, the sole human figure to appear in this installation is Saar herself. Writing of the “long and eerie shadow of the artist,” Lisa Farrington emphasizes that she is “silhouetted against an image of sunbaked earth,” thereby “linking Saar to both past and the future” (167). Any sense of ancestral tradition is immediately ruptured, however, by her decision to project her portrait against an “image of sunbaked earth” but as dominated by disconnected yet imprisoning brown lines significantly resembling tree roots and also by the fact that, as she emphasizes, an integral part of the installation was a “slave ship diagram painted in silver on the floor.” As Saar explains, “I thought it would be interesting to have it there for as long as it could be just to see how it would wear out.” Almost immediately, however, she was confronted with a stark realization: “It would never wear out, because that slave ship imprint is on all of us. It is there forever! And it is also on the imprint of white Americans, too” (qtd. in Hewitt 19). Surviving as an indelibly interwoven inheritance for black and white descendants of the “peculiar institution” alike, it is no less the case that the “slave ship diagram” will “never wear out” as far as Saar’s experimental bodies of work produced over the decades are concerned. Even a very cursory examination of her mixed-media installations, collages, altars, and multi-layered paintings betrays the powerful reality that this “diagram” continues to dominate her visual lexicon as a kaleidoscopically shifting lens through which she does justice not only to the physical and psychological atrocities of transatlantic slavery but of the contemporary social, political, and artistic legacies of the centuries’ long black holocaust. The fact that this symbol dominates her work can be no surprise to visitors of Saar’s studio as they are immediately confronted with an over ten foot tall artistic imaging of this slave ship diagram while equally compelling reproductions can be found among various drawers containing treasure troves of artistic materials, poised and ready for reuse, recycling, and reimaging to reimagine across her multilayered artworks.

Powerfully to the fore not only across Saar’s body of work in general but within this installation in particular is the extent to which the slave ship diagram assumes prominence as a signifier of black transatlantic histories, memories, and narratives. This highly charged symbol appears alongside a haunting poem—also titled “Diaspora”—in which she lends further ballast to her commitment to memorializing the “slave ship imprint” on a transatlantic stage: “Blue Illusions beckon and my spirits sail./ Some to Irish Seas...