David Dabydeens Turner is a long narrative poem written in response to J. M. W. Turners celebrated poem "Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying." Dabydeens poem focuses on what is hidden in Turners painting, the submerged head of the drowning African. In inventing a biography and the drowned mans unspoken desires, the poem brings into confrontation the wish for renewal and the inescapable stains of history, including the meaning of Turners painting.
