Between the Whaler and Me

James Noel. Photo courtesy of Evan Jones.

During my life as a postgraduate, there was a question that I was continuously asked: Why Melville? Sometimes, a handful of fellow postgrads would ask me this question solely to discover if I had fallen for Melville's work in the same way that they had. Usually, when this happened, we would find ourselves, two hours later in a café near New Cross train station, taking turns to share magical moments in Melville's work that stayed with us and never left. Nonetheless, it was not only postgrads who asked this question. Family members, friends, and acquaintances whom I would run into at the leisure center would also inquire about my choice, often bewildered by my decision to spend so much time studying an American author who spent so many pages creating narratives that dealt with maritime life. "He wrote MobyDick" would usually be my reply if I could detect that someone was unsure who Melville was. More often than not, people would say "Oh, that guy." But sometimes they helplessly shrugged.

I am still not completely sure why I was asked the same question over and over again. Sometimes I think that many people who inquired were just as interested in why I, personally, chose Melville as they were in finding out about the quality of his works. Many struggled to understand why a Black British man who was born in Greenwich Hospital and grew up in Catford would have any business studying Melville. What did Arrowhead have in common with a town where the shopping center was christened with an oversized fiberglass cat that peered over the high street's pedestrians? Also, crucially for some, why would a black man spend so much time studying a white author—a nineteenth-century author at that—who had an appetite for maritime life? It was Melville's ambiguity that I fell in love with. His ambiguity enthralled me in a way that the work by some of his contemporaries—Hawthorne, Poe, Stowe—did not, in a way that others still have not. The prevalence of ambiguity in his work created and preserved a bridge for me that I loved returning to, that I could see in my everyday life. This fascination lay at the essence of every answer that I gave to that question. But, at times, and still, my love for Melville's work does not seem a sufficient answer to that question: "Why Melville?"

Starting on June 27, 2017, the Melville Society held their Eleventh International Conference in London at King's College. The conference was entitled "Melville's Crossings," a title prompting panelists to examine the transatlantic significance of Melville's publications, as well as Melville's personal experiences traversing the Atlantic. Although I had been well-aware of Melville's travels across the Atlantic, I was both excited and curious to see how scholars who were presenting at the conference would extend discussions about the transatlantic nature of Melville's life and work.

Leading up to the conference, I facilitated a workshop at the Black Cultural Archives in Brixton for attendees. The workshop focused on the ways that Caribbean migrants who came to Britain on the SS Empire Windrush in 1948 altered the British imagination. There were several crowning moments during the workshop. Aside from the obvious—the plantains, rice and peas, and jerk chicken provided by local and popular Caribbean restaurant Healthy Eaters—the workshop featured a walking tour lead by Brixton's very own expert on "all things Brixton": Kelly Foster. As we walked along Brixton's effervescent streets that warm June afternoon, we were reminded of the enduring legacy that the Windrush generation had left behind. Efforts have been, and are still being, made to preserve this legacy, and these efforts are evident in the Black Cultural Archives itself, a reclamation of a Georgian building to create a space to recognize Black Britain. Moreover, just days before the workshop, a memorial was erected in recognition of the African and Caribbean soldiers who fought in the First...