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AUDIO TRANSCRIPT

Poetry Off the Shelf: Middle Passage

August 4, 2016

Robert Hayden:

(READS EXCERPT FROM “Middle Passage”)

Voyage through death

to life upon these shores

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Curtis Fox: This is Poetry Off the Shelf from the Poetry Foundation. I’m Curtis Fox. This week, Middle Passage. The numbers are appalling. An estimated two million Africans died in the voyage from Africa to the New World as part of the Atlantic Slave Trade. The Middle Passage, it’s called. And “Middle Passage” is also the title of a much-anthologized poem by Robert Hayden.

Robert Hayden: People have asked for it. And perhaps now it’s time for me to read this poem.

Curtis Fox: It was published in 1945, and Hayden read it in 1976 at the Library of Congress when he was the poetry consultant there. We now call it the poet laureate.

Robert Hayden: It’s long, and it has different voices in it. And I’m not always up to it. I think, though, that, I think I can get through it tonight.

Curtis Fox: Hayden was in his early 30s when he wrote “Middle Passage,” so it was an older poet reading the work of his younger self.

Robert Hayden: I wrote it oh, back in the ’40s, when there was very little interest in this kind of subject matter. I read for two or three years and had to work out a form for it, and I finally did.

Curtis Fox: Joining me to listen to this recording of Robert Hayden reading “Middle Passage” is Lavelle Porter, who has written an article about the poem and its reception for our website. Lavelle Porter is a writer and scholar of African American literature, and an assistant professor of English at the New York City College of Technology. Lavelle, we just heard Robert Hayden say that back in the 1940s, there was very little interest in this kind of subject matter. He didn’t just mean the Middle Passage, he meant the whole topic of slavery, didn’t he?

Lavelle Porter: Right.

Curtis Fox: Yeah. Tell us about what sort of, what was the world he was writing in? And this is in the early 1940s. What was the knowledge, what gave him the idea to do this?

Lavelle Porter: Well, it grew out of his research on the slave trade.

Curtis Fox: Yeah, he spent two years doing it.

Lavelle Porter: Yeah, probably more than that, you know, researching the background of the slave trade, and in particular, the Amistad case.

Curtis Fox: Uh-huh.

Lavelle Porter: You know, he spent some time in New York City at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.

Curtis Fox: Up in Harlem.

Lavelle Porter: Yeah. And some of that research ends up being incorporated into the poem.

Curtis Fox: Uh-huh. Steven Spielberg obviously hadn’t made his movie yet.

Lavelle Porter: Yeah.

Curtis Fox: There was very little known about the whole topic of it. And I understood that the poem was first published in W.E.B. Du Bois’s journal from out of Atlanta, I forgot the name of it.

Lavelle Porter: The Phylon. Yeah. And there was information known about it, but there were mostly Black scholars who were working on it, and working on it outside of the academy. So, I think that’s what he was referring to when saying there was little interest among the mainstream about the particulars of that history.

Curtis Fox: Mm-hmm.

Lavelle Porter: And there’s a lot of intentional amnesia about what the slave trade was and what it meant.

Curtis Fox: And here he is thinking, “I’m gonna write a poem about this,” which is kind of a crazy notion, because it’s like saying, “I want to write a poem about the Holocaust.” So it’s a huge, huge topic of massive, incredible suffering over hundreds of years, basically.

Lavelle Porter: Mm-hmm.

Curtis Fox: So as Hayden said, this poem is long. We’re going to listen to all of it, but it’s in three sections, and we’re going to talk between the sections, and interrupt Hayden on the fly, rudely. Listeners can read it and here the whole poem without interruption on the Poetry Foundation’s website. Lavelle, can you read for us how Hayden once introduced this first part?

Lavelle Porter: (READS Hayden’s introduction) In the opening section I describe the dreadful conditions aboard the slave ships, the brutal and inhuman treatment of the slaves. The scenes and incidents here are adapted from ships’ logs, eyewitness accounts by traders, depositions.

Curtis Fox: So there’s a medley of voices here, and the first thing we hear are the names of some of the slave ships. All right, so here we go.

Robert Hayden:

(READS POEM)

Middle Passage

Jesús, Estrella, Esperanza, Mercy:

Sails flashing to the wind like weapons,

sharks following the moans the fever and the dying;

horror the corposant and compass rose.

Curtis Fox: Let me just stop right there, because there’s two words I don’t understand: corposant and compass rose. What are those, nautical terms? What does that mean?

Lavelle Porter: Yeah, those are nautical terms. There’s a lot of nautical terms in the poem, and that refers to a visible electric discharge on the mast of the ship, also known as St. Elmo’s Fire.

Curtis Fox: And compass rose, do you know what that is?

Lavelle Porter: That’s the compass to find directions for the ship.

Curtis Fox: And hear comes the refrain.

Robert Hayden:

Middle Passage:

voyage through death

to life upon these shores.

Curtis Fox: And now, a quote begins.

Robert Hayden:

“10 April 1800—

Blacks rebellious. Crew uneasy. Our linguist says

their moaning is a prayer for death,

ours and their own. Some try to starve themselves.

Lost three this morning leaped with crazy laughter

to the waiting sharks, sang as they went under.”

Curtis Fox: Lavelle, is that a direct quote from something, or is this an invention?

Lavelle Porter: He adapted his material from actual ships’ logs that he read.

Curtis Fox: And then he goes on to some more names of some of the slave ships.

Robert Hayden:

Desire, Adventure, Tartar, Ann:

Standing to America, bringing home

black gold, black ivory, black seed.

Deep in the festering hold thy father lies,

of his bones New England pews are made,

those are altar lights that were his eyes.

Jesus Saviour Pilot Me

Over Life’s Tempestuous Sea

We pray that Thou wilt grant, O Lord,

safe passage to our vessels bringing

heathen souls unto Thy chastening.

Jesus Saviour

Curtis Fox: Now this is a bit of a shocker when you realize this is not the slaves in the hold that are saying these words, these are the ship’s crew. The people that are doing this incredible crime, asking for the deliverance of the Lord.

Lavelle Porter: Yeah, there’s a lot of irony in this poem. There’s the sort of irony of the way that they are deploying their theological beliefs, you know, praying for safe passage, even as there’s these horrible conditions happening.

Curtis Fox: Yeah.

Lavelle Porter: It’s a Modernist poem, so it’s intentionally allusive.

Curtis Fox: Mm-hmm.

Lavelle Porter: It also has the Modernistic devices of montage. So the way that the ships are presented, the way that there are different scenes in the poem.

Curtis Fox: Yeah, and let’s go to the next scene. It’s very collage-y, as you say. Here’s the next scene, it’s about a pestilence that is on board one particular slave ship. We don’t know which one.

Robert Hayden:

(CONTINUES READING)

“8 bells. I cannot sleep, for I am sick

with fear, but writing eases fear a little

since still my eyes can see these words take shape

upon the page & so I write, as one

would turn to exorcism. 4 days scudding,

but now the sea is calm again. Misfortune

follows in our wake like sharks (our grinning

tutelary gods). Which one of us

has killed an albatross? A plague among

our blacks—Ophthalmia: blindness—& we

have jettisoned the blind to no avail.

It spreads, the terrifying sickness spreads.

Its claws have scratched sight from the Capt.'s eyes

& there is blindness in the fo’c’sle

& we must sail 3 weeks before we come

to port.”

Curtis Fox: So that’s a terrifying scene as well.

Lavelle Porter: Right.

Curtis Fox: There’s some kind of bizarre disease that’s blinding people, including some of the crew. And as the people in the hull are blinded, they’re thrown overboard.

Lavelle Porter: Right.

Curtis Fox: And obviously, the sharks are eating them alive.

Lavelle Porter: And that’s absolutely taken from historical facts about slave ships. You know, it was the idea of they wanted to salvage whatever they could when there were illnesses of the sort that would infect their cargo. And so they would throw people overboard. They were expendable.

Curtis Fox: Yeah. And there’s an albatross in this, and I can’t help but think of Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner.”

Lavelle Porter: Very allusive poem, yeah.

Curtis Fox: Yeah. And the Albatross of course bodes ill for sailors, famously.

Lavelle Porter: Mm-hmm.

Curtis Fox: And then there’s a sudden switch.

Robert Hayden:

(CONTINUES READING)

What port awaits us, Davy Jones’

or home?

Curtis Fox: Davy Jones is death to a sailor, right?

Lavelle Porter: Right.

Robert Hayden:

(CONTINUES READING)

I’ve heard of slavers drifting, drifting,

playthings of wind and storm and chance, their crews

gone blind, the jungle hatred

crawling up on deck.

Curtis Fox: And “the jungle hatred” there meaning the hatred of the people they have imprisoned down below.

Lavelle Porter: Right.

Robert Hayden:

(CONTINUES READING)

Thou Who Walked On Galilee

Curtis Fox: And now there’s another part of this collage that’s thrown in about another ship. And it seems to be from a court case.

Robert Hayden:

(CONTINUES READING)

“Deponent further sayeth The Bella J

left the Guinea Coast

with cargo of five hundred blacks and odd

for the barracoons of Florida:

“That there was hardly room ’tween-decks for half

the sweltering cattle stowed spoon-fashion there;

that some went mad of thirst and tore their flesh

and sucked the blood:

“That Crew and Captain lusted with the comeliest

of the savage girls kept naked in the cabins;

that there was one they called The Guinea Rose

and they cast lots and fought to lie with her:

“That when the Bo’s’n piped all hands, the flames

spreading from starboard already were beyond

control, the negroes howling and their chains

entangled with the flames:

“That the burning blacks could not be reached,

that the Crew abandoned ship,

leaving their shrieking negresses behind,

that the Captain perished drunken with the wenches:

“Further Deponent sayeth not.”

Pilot Oh Pilot Me

Curtis Fox: So that’s the end of Part I, Lavelle, and it’s incredibly harrowing. And it’s especially harrowing knowing that these are drawn from actual accounts and court records and things like that. What do you make of this last section?

Lavelle Porter: Well it speaks to the routine sexual violence that the enslaved were subjected to. And you see that they’re again also just thinking of them as expendable property, so when a fire breaks out, you know, they just abandon ship. They just cut their losses.

Curtis Fox: Yeah.

Lavelle Porter: As it were, it wasn’t like they were losing human beings.

Curtis Fox: Right.

Lavelle Porter: In that section with, again with the quotation from the hymn,

Curtis Fox: Yes.

Lavelle Porter: just further plays up the irony.

Curtis Fox: Okay, let’s move on to Part II, which is quite a bit shorter. These are the reminiscences of an old slave trader to a younger man or boy, it’s unclear.

Robert Hayden:

(CONTINUES READING)

Aye, lad, and I have seen those factories,

Gambia, Rio Pongo, Calabar;

have watched the artful mongos setting traps

of war wherein the victor and the vanquished

Were caught as prizes for our barracoons.

Have seen the nigger kings whose vanity

and greed turned wild black hides of Fellatah,

Mandingo, Ibo, Kru to gold for us.

And there was one—King Anthracite we called him—

fetish face beneath French parasols

of brass and orange velvet, impudent mouth

whose cups were carven skulls of enemies:

He’d honor us with drum and feast and conjo

and palm-oil-glistening wenches skilled in love,

and for tin crowns that shone with paste,

red calico and German-silver trinkets

Would have the drums talk war and send

his warriors to burn the sleeping villages

and kill the sick and old and lead the young

in coffles to our barracoons.

Twenty years a trader, twenty years,

for there was wealth aplenty to be harvested

from those black fields, and I’d be trading still

but for the fevers melting down my bones.

Curtis Fox: I guess what’s significant about this section is that Hayden is saying the evil was not the exclusive property of white Europeans of the slave trade. Because these are African kings who are profiting from the slave trade as well.

Lavelle Porter: Yes, this is an interesting sort of moral challenge that he’s making here, by discussing the complicity of Africans in the slave trade. You know, even though the transatlantic slave trade itself was a different kind of enslavement that was racialized and hereditary in a way that these other forms of trading where people were trading those who they had conquered in war and things like that.

Curtis Fox: Yeah. You sell your enemy.

Lavelle Porter: Right, yeah.

Curtis Fox: Old as human history.

Lavelle Porter: That part is, but the idea of sort of establishing a legalized hereditary system of enslavement, that was what chattel slavery was.

Curtis Fox: Mm-hmm.

Lavelle Porter: There is a difference, you know. This is one of those things that’s often thrown back as a retort against slavery: “Well, you know, they participated in it, too.”

Curtis Fox: Right.

Lavelle Porter: And there’s no shortage of Black writers and scholars who are willing to and have acknowledged that in their writing.

Curtis Fox: Yeah.

Lavelle Porter: And this is an example of it happening here.

Curtis Fox: But it’s not necessarily, yeah, as you say, it’s probably not an equivalence of evil.

Lavelle Porter: No, no, absolutely not.

Curtis Fox: It’s definitely not an equivalence, it’s not a systematic, massive, multigenerational,

Lavelle Porter: That’s just factual, yeah. I mean, in terms of the length of it, and in terms of the legal structures of slavery, and particularly in the Americas. It was a different system.

Curtis Fox: Right. And the speaker here, he’s horrible in so many ways, but not least because he thinks he’s better than the African kings who profited like he did from the slave trade. But he appears to have caught malaria or some other tropical disease, and by saying so, Hayden somehow manages to humanize him, in some ways. Here’s—this guy is evil, but he’s sick and, not that we feel sympathy for him, but he’s a human being. He suffers like other people.

Lavelle Porter: There’s condescension in his tone

Curtis Fox: Yeah.

Lavelle Porter: towards Africans who he’s doing business with.

Curtis Fox: Right.

Lavelle Porter: But there’s also the idea that, you know, “Twenty years a trader,” he says, and I’d still be trading “but for the fevers melting down my bones.” He would still gladly be participating in it, just that he can’t anymore.

Curtis Fox: Yeah. He’s feeling he’s missing out on all that stuff. Let’s go to the last section. And Hayden later said about it, “The third section is climactic, the first two move toward it. It’s based on the accounts of the Amistad mutiny in 1839. It’s meant to recapitulate all the themes introduced earlier and focuses on the heroic resistance to slavery introduced at the very beginning.” So let’s listen to how this section begins.

Robert Hayden:

(CONTINUES READING)

III

Shuttles in the rocking loom of history,

the dark ships move, the dark ships move,

their bright ironical names

like jests of kindness on a murderer’s mouth;

plough through thrashing glister toward

fata morgana’s lucent melting shore,

weave toward New World littorals that are

mirage and myth and actual shore.

Voyage through death,

voyage whose chartings are unlove.

Curtis Fox: So here we have an image of the slave trade moving back and forth across the Atlantic like a loom weaving fabric. And it’s hard not to think of the cotton that so many of the slaves would be picking in North America, if they made it across. What do you make of this section?

Lavelle Porter: He’s talking about the role of the transatlantic slave trade in the making of the New World. You know, he uses this metaphor of weaving to describe the creation of the, you know, Atlantic world out of this trade.

Curtis Fox: And the wealth.

Lavelle Porter: Yeah.

Curtis Fox: Because I think their weaving is wealth.

Lavelle Porter: Mm-hmm.

Robert Hayden:

(CONTINUES READING)

A charnel stench, effluvium of living death

spreads outward from the hold,

where the living and the dead, the horribly dying,

lie interlocked, lie foul with blood and excrement.

Deep in the festering hold thy father lies,

the corpse of mercy rots with him,

rats eat love’s rotten gelid eyes.

But, oh, the living look at you

with human eyes whose suffering accuses you,

whose hatred reaches through the swill of dark

to strike you like a leper’s claw.

You cannot stare that hatred down

or chain the fear that stalks the watches

and breathes on you its fetid scorching breath;

cannot kill the deep immortal human wish,

the timeless will.

Curtis Fox: The image of a person or the speaker of the poem walking into the slave hold and looking at these people looking back at him with utter, utter hatred. In other words, something is being created here that is not going to go away very easily.

Lavelle Porter: Yeah, it’s a manifestation of the guilt of the enslavers, and the delusion that they really don’t believe that these are not human beings, that they sort of told themselves that.

Curtis Fox: Right.

Lavelle Porter: But they understand, they see it clearly,

Curtis Fox: But when they go down, and they look people in the eyes, and they see what’s looking back at them, the people looking, they see it.

Lavelle Porter: And when you consider that the threats of revolt that they had to deal with on these ships, they’ve clearly understood these were people who were not happy to be delivered into the arms of Christianity, but who were gonna fight them every step of the way.

Curtis Fox: Yeah. Okay so now onto the story of The Amistad where the Africans took advantage of a storm to attack their captors, killing some of them and forcing some of the others to sail the ship back to Africa. But these white sailors secretly steered the ship in the other direction and the ship was apprehended off the coast of Connecticut, I believe. The Africans were put on trial, and this purports to be the testimony of a Spanish sailor on The Amistad.

Robert Hayden:

(CONTINUES READING)

“But for the storm that flung up barriers

of wind and wave, The Amistad, señores,

would have reached the port of Príncipe in two,

three days at most; but for the storm we should

have been prepared for what befell.

Swift as the puma’s leap it came. There was

that interval of moonless calm filled only

with the water’s and the rigging’s usual sounds,

then sudden movement, blows and snarling cries

and they had fallen on us with machete

and marlinspike. It was as though the very

air, the night itself were striking us.

Exhausted by the rigors of the storm,

we were no match for them. Our men went down

before the murderous Africans. Our loyal

Celestino ran from below with gun

and lantern and I saw, before the cane-

knife’s blinding flash, Cinquez,

that surly brute who calls himself a prince,

directing, urging on the ghastly work.

He hacked the poor mulatto down, and then

he turned on me. The decks were slippery

when daylight finally came. It sickens me

to think of what I saw, of how these apes

threw overboard the butchered bodies of

our men, true Christians all, like so much jetsam.

Enough, enough. The rest is quickly told:

Cinquez was forced to spare the two of us

you see to steer the ship to Africa,

and we like phantoms doomed to rove the sea

voyaged east by day and west by night,

deceiving them, hoping for rescue,

prisoners on our own vessel, till

at length we drifted to the shores of this

your land, America, where we were freed

from our unspeakable misery. Now we

demand, good sirs, the extradition of

Cinquez and his accomplices to La

Havana. And it distresses us to know

there are so many here who seem inclined

to justify the mutiny of these blacks.

We find it paradoxical indeed

that you whose wealth, whose tree of liberty

are rooted in the labor of your slaves

should suffer the august John Quincy Adams

to speak with so much passion of the right

of slaves to kill their lawful masters

and with his Roman rhetoric weave a hero’s

garland for Cinquez. I tell you that

we are determined to return to Cuba

with our slaves and there see justice done. Cinquez—

or let us say ‘the Prince’—Cinquez shall die.”

The deep immortal human wish,

the timeless will:

Cinquez its deathless primaveral image,

life that transfigures many lives.

Voyage through death

to life upon these shores.

Curtis Fox: Now Lavelle, “life upon these shores,” that is us he’s talking about right there, we are now the life upon these shores. Am I right?

Lavelle Porter: Yeah, that’s definitely one interpretation, and it’s open to interpretations, but yes, the idea that the life on the other side was underwritten by this violence that he’s described.

Curtis Fox: Yeah. And he’s basically saying, this one area of history that’s been neglected, I’m writing the poem about it, this must be thought about. This is part of who we are. This is part of the life upon these shores, this history. So what happened to Cinquez? For those who haven’t seen the Steven Spielberg movie, what happened finally with this case?

Lavelle Porter: Well the long story short is that they were freed.

Curtis Fox: Yeah.

Lavelle Porter: After the case. After a long dispute over them, and who was the rightful owner of this property.

Curtis Fox: They were freed and then they go back to Africa?

Lavelle Porter: Yes, they did return back to the continent.

Curtis Fox: Okay. So this is a long, deep, and oppressive poem with a lot of history packed into it. What does it say to us right now? You know, the country is grappling with very life and death issues about how African Americans are treated, particularly by law enforcement. What does it say to us now?

Lavelle Porter: It says to all of us that we have to reckon with this history. You know, you think of what the protestors are doing in the streets, I also think about the student protests that are happening on these college campuses, where names of people who were slaveholders are being contested.

Curtis Fox: Uh-huh.

Lavelle Porter: And this is what they were involved in. You know, there’s an argument now about the Harvard Law School and its name, and

Curtis Fox: And even Thomas Jefferson is coming under fire down in Virginia for his slaveholding ways.

Lavelle Porter: Yeah. Absolutely.

Curtis Fox: Yeah.

Lavelle Porter: Absolutely. I mean, you know, there’s at Middle Tennessee State, Nathan Bedford Forrest, who was a founder of the Klan, you know. That’s a name on a building there, and they’re trying to get that changed. So that’s what you’re dealing with. And you have to really reckon with what this institution actually was. And Hayden tries to represent that in an artistic way, because there were historians who were doing this work, but he really wanted to create something more aesthetic in a kind of myth of what this whole system meant, try to come to terms with it.

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Curtis Fox: Lavelle Porter, thanks so much.

Lavelle Porter: All right, thank you.

Curtis Fox: You can read Lavelle Porter’s piece on “Middle Passage” and the poem itself, and listen to the poem without our interruptions on our website. Do let us know what you think of this podcast. Email us at podcast@poetryfoundation.org. The theme music for this program comes from The Claudia Quintet. For Poetry Off the Shelf, I’m Curtis Fox. Thanks for listening.

(MUSIC FADES OUT)

SPEAKER:
Thank you for having me here and I really mean it. I don't mean it like to be in Chicago but in the U.S in general. In 1995, I had to take away only what would fit in one suitcase and leave Iraq. In that suitcase that I carried with me there was a plastic bag full of pictures of my family, my friends and a picture of my fiancee with me at the College of Liberal Arts and the University of Baghdad. When I left, I didn't know if he was killed or alive. He was taken to the army after he graduated from the Department of Psychology and then he was called again to Kuwait for the second Gulf War. So he escaped the country. It seemed to me that he sent letters to me after some time that I didn't receive. First thing I changed my address and in Baghdad there was no such service of notifying a sender of a new address, the senders had to figure that out themselves. And then I left the country and he didn't of course, know that I also left. One day he found one of my poems published in a London-based Arabic newspaper and he sent them a letter asking about my address.

They referred him to somebody and then he was referred to somebody else and the letter traveled around the world until it reached my friend in Baghdad, Huda, who worked with me in the Baghdad Observer. I kept contact with her and she knew my correct address in Michigan. So, after ten years of our engagement, I received a letter from my fiancee. It was from Australia and now we are married and have a daughter.

(APPLAUSE)

About the theory of absence, I have a short form. The hypothesis, I am tense and so are you. We neither meet nor separate. The desired result, we meet in the absence, the proof. As tension turns people into arcs, we are two arcs, we neither meet nor separate the hypotheses so we must be parallel. If two parallel lines are bisected by a third line, in this case, the line of tension, their corresponding angles must be equal, a geometrical theorem. So, we are congruent because shapes are congruent when their angles are equal and we form a circle. Since the sum of two congruent arcs is a circle. Therefore, we meet in the absence since the circumference of a circle is the sum of contiguous points which can each be considered a point of contact.

(SPEAKS ARABIC).

The war works hard. How magnificent the war is. How eager and efficient. Early in the morning, it wakes up the sirens and dispatches ambulances to various places. Swings corpses through the air, rolls stretchers to the wounded, summons rain from the eyes of mothers. Digs into the earth, dislodging many things from under the ruins. Some are lifeless and glistening, others are pale and still throbbing. It produces the most questions in the minds of children, entertains the gods by shooting fireworks and missiles into the sky. Sows mines in the fields and reaps punctures and blisters. Urges families to emigrate, stands beside the clergyman as they curse the devil. Poor devil, he remains with one hand in the searing fire. The war continues working day and night. It inspires tyrants to deliver long speeches, awards medals to generals and themes to poets. It contributes to the industry of artificial limbs, provides food for flies, adds pages to the history books achieves equality between killer and killed.

Teaches lovers to write letters, accustoms young woman to waiting. Fills the newspapers with articles and pictures. Builds new houses for the orphans, invigorates the coffin makers, gives grave diggers a pat on the back and paints a smile on the reader's face. The war works with unparalleled diligence, yet no one gives it a word of praise. Thank you.

(APPLAUSE)

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