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James A. Emanuel's "The Middle Passage Blues" (1999) and Robert Hayden's "Middle Passage" (1945) are two of a few remarkable poems about the transatlantic slave trade, and comparing them affords a unique opportunity to explore two very divergent and yet complementary perspectives-one memorial and the other historical-on the slave trade.1
Emanuel's poem serves as a prologue to Black Imagination and the Middle Passage (1999), a collection of essays originally presented at the inaugural conference of the Collegium for African American Research (CAAR) held in Tenerife in 1995. The "Transatlantic Passages" theme, the time of the conference, when claims for reparations were rising, and the location in the Canary Islands-a thriving center of the early slave trade-undoubtedly account for the visceral, even phylogenetic bond Emanuel establishes with his middle passage ancestors, urging us to consider the interplay of individual and collective memory.2 Emanuel's poem, by postulating an unbroken continuity between past and present and advocating devotion to the community, revives issues of identity formation and identity politics that say more about our present world than about our past.
Hayden's poem, unlike Emanuel's, was not commissioned. It grew out of the earlier Black Spear project and shows Hayden's determination to offer a fresh perspective on black history while refashioning the poetic canon in the process. Hayden takes a primarily historical interest in reconstructing the narrative of the middle passage, and although his poem is less demonstrative and more detached than Emanuel's, it remains equally harrowing and involved with the past. But Hayden, whose affected objectivity is candid and deliberate, addresses not only the revision of history but also the transcendence of racial and cultural schisms so as to foster universalist values. For Hayden, the middle passage is not a personal inheritance, a cause for mourning, resentment, or self-discovery as it is for Emanuel. It is a past for all implicated parties, a past not to be forgotten, and a lesson for the future.
"The Middle Passage Blues" and the Source of Memory
It is not given to man to make for himself another cradle. -Charles Péguy, Morceaux choisis (1928)
Ralph Waldo Emerson's "every man is a quotation from all his ancestors" (28) is an adage James A. Emanuel would not disavow, so much is his poem entrenched...