Counter-Memory and the Archival turn in Dorothea Smartt's Ship Shape

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. This blend and elasticity of forms reflect the nature of the repertoire. Diana Taylor defines the repertoire as an assemblage of mediums (written, visual, and oral) that document the memory of an experience in performative ways, thus emphasizing the connection between the past and the present moment in processes of memorialization. I identify Ship Shape as both text and performance where disembodied memory is given a space to manifest itself under a new light. Through a dynamic repertoire of counter-memory, Smartt engages in a process of mourning. By incorporating the name into the memory, calling attention toward what has been erased, the poet mourns that loss in an attempt to work through a legacy of historical amnesia while simultaneously highlighting another legacy: the history of survival and resistance in Caribbean and black British history.

One of the most critically productive aspects of the "repertoire" is that it juxtaposes discrepant experiences and relies on audiences and readers to think through their interconnection. Smartt's dissection and re-composition of archival material on one hand critiques the ways in which colonial documentation attempted to erase the memory of enslaved and colonized people. However, her work configures an alternative archiving of memory (in which fictionalized narratives are embedded), consequently facilitating a critical perspective of the past. Remembering, as Dorothea Smartt suggests through her poetry, is an act of revising forgotten and marginalized memories and placing them in contrast and conversation with official accounts of history where those memories were not present. Remembering functions as a sort of shipshaping; it imagines the lives of the enslaved, beyond the confines of the archive.

In her examination of the repertoire, Taylor questions the possibilities of re-thinking archival cultures, suggesting a consideration of artistic and other forms of knowing and knowledge:

Should we simply expand our notion of the archive to house the mnemonic and gestural practices and specialized knowledge transmitted live? Or get beyond the confines of the archive? . . . there is an advantage to thinking about a repertoire performed through dance, theatre, song, ritual, witnessing, healing practices, memory paths, and the many other forms of repeatable behaviors as something that cannot be housed or contained in the archive.

(The Archive and the Repertoire 37)

Smartt's Ship Shape embraces the possibilities that Taylor alludes to. The poet's performance of Ship Shape includes elements of ritual and elegy that, as I discuss later in the article, complement a performative element extended to, and reflected in, the text itself. This combination of embodied memory through a textual and oral performance communicates Smartt's mourning process, inviting readers and audiences alike to think through and participate in that process.

Dorothea Smartt was "commissioned by Lancaster Litfest...