In late 1781, onboard the slave ship Zong, Captain Luke Collingwood, citing spreading illness and a shortage of supplies, ordered approximately 131 enslaved men, women, and children be cast overboard. Over the course of three days, this massacre occurred.Footnote ¹ Referenced in various literary texts,Footnote ² the Zong massacre has so far received most extensive literary treatment in David Dabydeen’s long poem “Turner” (1994), Fred D’Aguiar’s novel Feeding the Ghosts (1997), and most recently M. NourbeSe Philip’s experimental poetry Zong! (2008). Focussing particularly on “Turner,” this article extends discussions that cast this poem as a negotiation of cultural loss and renewal. It does so by viewing this poem’s representation of loss—its lament for being “Beadless in a foreign land,”Footnote ³ “barren of ancestral memory”Footnote ⁴—through its extensive development of a trope of eating and excreting. Because the perpetrators of this massacre sought to justify their actions largely on the basis of insufficient suppliesFootnote ⁵ and because the Atlantic slave trade in general persisted in part to satiate voracious desires for food stuffs, it is no wonder that acts of consumption figure predominantly in “Turner” as reflections of power (or the lack thereof).Footnote ⁶

In “Turner,” pursuits of personal or cultural recovery are manifested through a pursuit of nourishment, both in its literal and metaphorical forms. The speaker’s quest is for wholeness, a quest which manifests itself as a desire to consume, and provide for others, the nourishment that will fill the emptiness brought about by the slave trade. In its representation of the speaker’s attempt to regenerate himself and hisFootnote ⁷ culture through acts of eating/excreting, this poem affirms that “eating is never a ‘purely biological’ activity.”Footnote ⁸ Instead, as Kyla Wazana Tompkins argues, “acts of eating” help to “cultivate political subjects by fusing the social with the biological.”Footnote ⁹ For the speaker in “Turner,” acts of eating/excreting signify an attempt to fuse himself with both his lost past and his unrealized future. To ingest the past and nourish the future is to forge a continuum and heal the “ruptures”Footnote ¹⁰ caused by the slave trade. Nevertheless, as revealed by this poem, the devastations of colonialism and the slave trade persist, and whatever continuum between past, present, and future that can be forged proves destructively self-consumptive rather than self-nourishing.

* * *

As Maggie Kilgour has observed, “images of eating provide a model for the encounters between individuals.”Footnote ¹¹ The pursuit of nourishment may be a biological necessity, but it is one that “exposes the vulnerability of individual identity[,]” revealing “the need for exchanges, communion, and commerce with others.”Footnote ¹² Parama Roy similarly argues that “alimentation involves us in relationship [sic] with others, whether human, animal, or otherworldly.”Footnote ¹³ In essence, the act of eating puts the self in relationship with a consumable other, that which is deemed different enough from the self to be consumed, and with any people or processes that help to construct that other. The biological need for food renders one dependent on those relationships and resources, and yet, for those enjoying sufficient resources, awareness of this dependence is predominantly repressed. For the satiated who experience little threat of want, the act of eating becomes not a sign of one’s need or vulnerability, but instead of one’s power. As Bakhtin insists in Rabelais and His World, “Man’s encounter with the world in the act of eating is joyful, triumphant; he triumphs over the world, devours it without being devoured himself.”Footnote ¹⁴ Kilgour echoes these ideas by asserting that the eater “secures his own identity by absorbing the world outside himself.”Footnote ¹⁵ Consequently, in Kilgour’s view, to eat is an “assertion of power, as the self absorbs the other’s energy in its own interest.”Footnote ¹⁶ The “encounters between individuals” that she constructs the act of eating to signify are, thus, encounters of conquest. “[E]ven the most apparently benign acts of eating[,]” Kilgour asserts, “involve aggression.”Footnote ¹⁷ The consumption of food is, as Counihan and Van Esterik argue, “an index of power relations.”Footnote ¹⁸

Recent books like Roy’s Alimentary Tracts: Appetites, Aversion, and the Postcolonial (2010), Kyla Wazana Tompkins’s Racial Indigestion: Eating Bodies in the 19th Century (2012), and Valérie Loichot’s The Tropics Bite Back: Culinary Coups in Caribbean Literature (2013) have begun to conceive of how the discourses linking food consumption to power relations can illuminate our understanding of colonialist/racist systems. Focusing on a South Asian context, Roy asks, “How do appetites, hungers, compulsions, excesses, intoxications, aversions, and addictions help to institute, enact, or unsettle one’s sense of identities and histories in the colonial period and the postcolonial aftermath?”Footnote ¹⁹ Tompkins centers her discussion on representations of eating in nineteenth-century United States, looking to literary texts, advertisements, and even material objects like the Aunt Jemima syrup bottle and Jim Crow cookies to explore the treatment of black bodies as consumable. Loichot, who considers culinary tropes in Caribbean literature, contributes an acknowledgement of food’s expressive power, observing that “Slavery, colonization, and neocolonialism have indeed plagued the Caribbean with hunger”Footnote ²⁰ and yet food in the Caribbean becomes “a form of cultural expression, a form of political resistance, and a form of civilization.”Footnote ²¹ In their focus on food, cooking, or eating as representative of broader negotiations of oppressive systems, Roy, Tompkins, and Loichot demonstrate that food may be, to borrow Loichot’s words, a “site of lost power[,]” but it also can be a site of “empowerment, depending on its source and its use.”Footnote ²²

In the historical narrative of the Atlantic slave trade specifically, the act of incorporation figures prominently as a sign of the catastrophically consumptive nature of slavery. The acquisition of food stuffs may have been a key motivating factor behind European colonialism and the Atlantic slave trade, but in the minds of those under threat of capture and those newly enslaved, the possibility of the white culture’s cannibalism seemed a more believable scenario than their being captured for the purposes of labor. As Olaudah Equiano describes in his autobiographical narrative, his assumption was that he was to be used for food: “I asked them if we were not to be eaten by those white men with horrible looks, red faces, and loose hair.”Footnote ²³ Although Equiano reports being told that they were not to be eaten but rather to serve as laborers, scepticism regarding this explanation of the slave trade ran rampant. As William D. Piersen writes, “The tradition of insatiable white man–eaters explained why no one ever returned after being purchased on the coast.”Footnote ²⁴ Geneviève Fabre concurs: “The white man’s cannibalism explained his hunger for slaves and hence the trade.”Footnote ²⁵ This fear of cannibalism was so palpable that, as reported by Augustino, an African-born slave, “‘The young ones [. . .] had the right of coming on deck, but several of those jumped overboard, for fear they were being fattened to be eaten.’”Footnote ²⁶

Thinking they would spare themselves the fate of becoming someone else’s food, many enslaved men, women, and children would refuse to eat during the Middle Passage, a refusal that may have caused the weakening of their own bodies, but that by consequence frustrated their oppressors’ ability to profit from those bodies.Footnote ²⁷ For the enslaved, to eat or not eat represents a battle for bodily possession, hence for self-determination. Jessica B. Harris notes that many would “[drink] only salt water or simply refuse[] to eat, preferring to waste away and die rather than to face an uncertain future in an unknown destination.”Footnote ²⁸ In this way, the “refusal of food” becomes an assertion of power, a means through which the enslaved could “impose[] their personhood on the brutal system.”Footnote ²⁹ If it is in the slavers’ best interest to ensure the health and strength of the enslaved so as to best profit, in refusing food, the enslaved could prevent the achievement of this goal. By doing so, however, their actions were at once empowering and self-destructive.

In its portrayal of the aftermath of the Zong massacre, Dabydeen’s “Turner” is consistent with this historical narrative in which food/eating is a locus for negotiating relationships of power. The poetic speaker of “Turner” is the drowned slave whose shackled leg appears in the bottom right corner of J.M.W. Turner’s 1840 painting Slave Ship (Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying, Typhoon Coming On). From his watery grave, he narrates, or invents, a pastoral precolonial life where he and other children feed on the lessons offered by the elder Manu. This speaker narrates, too, the scene of his capture, a scene that features the ship’s captain, Turner, luring the children to come on board. In the water, the speaker encounters a drowned baby whom he seeks to nourish, hence to mother and lead toward a productive future, but, as Dabydeen describes in the poem’s introduction, “the child—[the speaker’s] unconscious and his origin—cannot bear the future and its inventions.”Footnote ³⁰ It cannot accept such nurturing and rejects it by naming the speaker—and by extension, “itself,” “the gods,” “[t]he earth and its globe of stars”Footnote ³¹—with the slur “Nigger.”Footnote ³² In the end, without this child to whom “to teach [. . .] / A redemptive song, fashion new descriptions / Of things[,]”Footnote ³³ the speaker is left only with a litany of things he does not have: “No savannah, moon, gods, magicians[,]” and the list continues.Footnote ³⁴

Throughout the speaker’s narrative, the division between the powerful and the oppressed is clearly demarcated along lines that distinguish those who are well nourished from those who are not. While Captain Turner and others benefitting from the slave trade are represented as gluttonously full, the enslaved are malnourished, even becoming largely the eaten rather than the eaters. Our first vision of the speaker’s invented preslavery past features characters engaged in the acquisition of food. Water by the house of the speaker’s mother is described as the site “Where small boys like I was hold sticks to the water / For fish.”Footnote ³⁵ The speaker and his two sisters are described playing around the cow “Whilst our father pulls the teats and wheezes / Milk into a pakreet shell.”Footnote ³⁶ The acquisition of food is the focus here, but the consumption of this food goes unrepresented. Instead, the children are merely engaged in a game with the cow, a game centering around a threat to their food supply, in fact. The children “wait in ambush / Under [the cow’s] belly for the English / To come from another village, who will plunder / The crops, burn the huts, stampede the goats, / Drag girls away by ropes.”Footnote ³⁷ The speaker’s imagining of the enemy involves threatened violence to homes and people, but also to agricultural production. As the speaker describes, a mother may have once “bid[] her famished children eat / Of their father’s labour, at tables laden / With meats, spices of odalan, nutmeg, / Cinnamon, and berries that multiply on vines, / Yams, jilips, achroes, blue aramantines / Picked lavishly from the soil which my father / Works in communion with other men[,]” but Turner and other foreign invaders destroy this possibility of abundance.Footnote ³⁸ The coming of colonialism and the slave trade is described by the speaker as creating “a ground stampeded / By herds of foreign men who swallow all its fruit[,]” leaving only “a trail of dung for flies / To colonise.”Footnote ³⁹

The binary naming the empowered as eaters and the enslaved as malnourished continues with the speaker’s observation that those seeking to purchase the enslaved in England have “fat hands.”Footnote ⁴⁰ Others, too, are pictured as having “A crusty loaf” in a “basket” and experiencing “The butcher’s shop hung with goose and pheasant.”Footnote ⁴¹ The speaker, however, cannot achieve such nourishment. He cannot even be seen in the reflection produced by the butcher’s window, “though it shines / With other faces.”Footnote ⁴² If the speaker’s face could be reflected in the window, the image would be one in which the sight of the goose and pheasant were overlaid with that of the speaker’s face. The impossibility of the speaker’s reflection suggests that the speaker cannot even be part of the same frame as these objects of nourishment. Like the motherless children Dabydeen describes as “Sucking the air for any nipple of moisture[,]” the speaker along with other enslaved men, women, and children are parched and starving, unable even to envision themselves as connected to sites of possible sustenance.Footnote ⁴³

In this representation of the enslaved as unnourished, the only opportunity for bodily growth or development is unnatural and non-life-sustaining. The sole possibility of fattening comes through death. For instance, the body of the baby that the speaker encounters is described as follows: “It plopped into the water and soon swelled / Like a brumplak seed that bursts buckshot / From its pod, [. . .] / [. . .] fattening.”Footnote ⁴⁴ The speaker similarly describes women he encounters during the Middle Passage as “not so ample as our women[,]” but “the sea bloats them.” Footnote ⁴⁵ Their fattening is mere decomposition.

With little opportunity to become productive eaters, the enslaved, as represented by this poem, become themselves edible prey. In his tyrannical control over the enslaved, Turner is the fisher catching his meal. He “fish[es] [them] patiently”Footnote ⁴⁶ and is described as having “an old seal’s mouth brooding in crevices / Of ice for fish.”Footnote ⁴⁷ Once they have drowned, the enslaved are meat to be consumed; their bodies are not the remains of once vital beings with human thoughts, feelings, histories, and relationships. The speaker and then the baby are described as “morsel[s]”;Footnote ⁴⁸ the baby is “mere food for sharks.”Footnote ⁴⁹ The bodies of the drowned experience “sea-quats [. . .] swallow[ing] their eyes”Footnote ⁵⁰ and “crabs [that] roost between their breasts / Feeding.”Footnote ⁵¹ Those who are conceived of as edible are, according to Kyla Wazana Tompkins, “not persons but things, and their thingness is a result of a system of social degradation.”Footnote ⁵² Tompkins asserts that “To be socially degraded, then, to be completely other with relation to the human, is one of the conditions of being edible.”Footnote ⁵³ Although Tompkins proceeds to argue that “the black body is always ‘sticky’ ” and can “push[] back at its devouring racial other” and cause a “choking,” this level of resistance is not available to the black bodies represented in “Turner.”Footnote ⁵⁴ They are not, after all, food to other humans and, therefore, cannot directly choke their oppressors; these bodies are mere “fish food,” consumed by creatures that may themselves become food to others.

Given these depictions of the enslaved as edible, the speaker’s eventual declaration that there will be “No men to plough” takes on multiple meanings.Footnote ⁵⁵ This declaration is listed as part of the speaker’s apocalyptic litany of all that will no longer be possible. There will be: “No savannah, moon, gods, magicians / To heal or curse, harvests, ceremonies, / No men to plough, corn to fatten their herds.”Footnote ⁵⁶ One reading might envision that there will be no men to plough the fields that would produce the corn, which reiterates that colonialism has destroyed the means of self-sufficient agricultural production. The positioning of the comma after “plough” severs “No men to plough” from the narrative of corn production, however. Therefore, “No men to plough” suggests the men themselves have been the crops ploughed, harvested, by another.

Colonialism and the slave trade have required a grotesque metamorphosis: peoples of Africa, who had been eaters capable of producing their own sustenance, have been turned into the eaten. Beyond compromising the production and consumption of literal food stuffs, colonialism and the slave trade, in the context of this poem, also threaten more metaphorical forms of nourishment like the passing on of histories through storytelling.

In the speaker’s vision of his precolonial past, Manu, an elder to whom the children are sent for their education, is the abundant provider both of literal and metaphorical sustenance. He is the “Fat manitou” who can “pour[] forth sweat / Enough to water all the animals / Herded in the savannah.”Footnote ⁵⁷ In other words, he can help sustain the herds that will in turn help to sustain the people. He likewise metaphorically feeds all of the children gathered around him through his stories:

This is an image that likens Manu, despite his lizard’s tongue, to a mother bird, prechewing the meal so as to ease digestion. This feeding is endless, the nourishment parceled out one grain at a time.

Most importantly, the nourishment envisioned is a generative one; the listeners consume the tale, and through its digestion, the tale persists on in the minds of hearers/eaters. This image thus recalls that eating is primarily an assimilative activity in which “the alien” becomes “familiar.”Footnote ⁵⁹ As Maggie Kilgour notes, the act of incorporation may depend on a binary separating what is outside of the body from what is inside, and yet incorporation simultaneously renders this division impossible.Footnote ⁶⁰ Tompkins expands on this idea by focusing on the function of food within the body. She asserts that “as a function of its basic mechanics, eating transcend[s] the gap between self and other, blurring the line between subject and object as food turn[s] into tissue, muscle, and nerve and then provide[s] the energy that drives them all.”Footnote ⁶¹ In the speaker’s depiction, Manu’s story has functioned similarly to literal food; it is something external that, through ingestion, becomes part of the body, fueling the unconscious and its generation of dreams.

Through storytelling, Manu is shown to be nourishing the future generations, thus enabling the persistence of cultural practices and histories. Through his edible stories, he becomes the site through which assimilation into a culture is made possible. Moreover, in the scene of Manu’s storytelling, he and the children are placed in circular relationship with one another. Manu expels the story as bodily excretion; the children ingest it, hence ingesting Manu and becoming one with him. The scene of the feeding/storytelling features the children “wait[ing] at his feet in dread of the word / That would spin suddenly from his throat, / Cartwheel towards us, making us want / To scatter, but we remained rooted / At his feet in stunned obedience.”Footnote ⁶² In this depiction, Manu’s voice—the cartwheeling word—manifests an uncertain threat. Nevertheless, at this precolonial stage, Manu is able to quell the possible menace; he can recapture the word and prechew it, turning its potential danger into nourishment.Footnote ⁶³ Manu’s excretion—his story—is assimilated into the next generation, becoming the nutrients of a collective unconscious.

This scene of precolonial consumption, however, is in stark contrast to the scene of consumption that comes with colonialism and the slave trade. As the speaker reveals, “wisdom,” like what Manu feeds them, is something that “our village elders passed down forever[,]” but only “(Until Turner came).”Footnote ⁶⁴ Turner, the captain of the ship and thus the synecdochic representation of the colonial oppressor, interrupts the cycle of nourishment, replacing Manu as the provider of food and offering destruction not nourishment. Although both Manu and Turner provide sustenance out of their bodily excretions and thereby are figured as mothers, this connection functions precisely to emphasize the contrast between their forms of mothering. The speaker recounts that Turner “g[ave] us sweets and a ladle from a barrel / Of shada juice.”Footnote ⁶⁵ In other words, Turner offers false nourishment, treats that manipulate and provoke compliance. After receiving these sweets and juice, the children “Each take[] a finger, like jenti cubs / Clinging to their mother’s teats, as he leads [them] to the ship.”Footnote ⁶⁶

Turner’s bodily excretions, of course, prove toxic. He passes on his own language as if breast feeding; the speaker sarcastically conveys that Turner “gave selflessly the nipple / Of his tongue.”Footnote ⁶⁷ This tongue “spurt[s] strange potions upon ours.”Footnote ⁶⁸ Turner does not offer the endless nourishing grain that Manu provides. Furthermore, whereas Manu’s nourishment allows the children to sleep, Turner’s nourishment leaves them “dazed”;Footnote ⁶⁹ whereas Manu’s nourishment allows the children to continue his story in their dreams, Turner’s nourishment “ma[kes] [them] forget / The very sound of [their] speech.”Footnote ⁷⁰ Both Manu and Turner feed the children a language, but while Manu’s story allows the children to create the continuing story, Turner’s language obliterates their agency. Turner causes them “to say profitably / In his own language, we desire you, we love / You, we forgive you.”Footnote ⁷¹ The speaker reveals, too, that “The more we struggled / Ungratefully, the more steadfast his resolve / To teach us words” until the point where they “repeated in a trance the words / That shuddered from him: blessed, angelic, / Sublime; words that seemed to flow endlessly / From him, filling our mouths and bellies / Endlessly.”Footnote ⁷² The repetition of “endlessly” is significant here. Not only do Turner’s words “flow endlessly,” but the words fill the children endlessly; they cannot escape this unwanted ingestion, an ingestion that leaves no room for other forms of nourishment.Footnote ⁷³

Turner’s filling of the mouths and bellies of the children takes on additional meaning when paralleled with Turner’s violence against Manu. Manu’s death is portrayed as follows:

Turner has conquered Manu by literally penetrating, hence invading and conquering, his stomach. With his mouth open and flies on his tongue, Manu’s loss of agency is the symbolic message. His mouth was once a site of power. With an open mouth, he could be a nourisher expelling a needed tale; he could be an eater, threatening the flies with destruction/ingestion. And yet, because of Turner’s violence, he cannot assert the agency of either of these roles. His mouth no longer breeds power. Instead, because flies achieve nourishment and a space to lay their eggs from a dead body, the flies are the ones with the agency that Manu lacks. They eat. Manu cannot. They have voices; they have a space in which to reproduce.Footnote ⁷⁶ Manu has neither.

Because Turner has both destroyed Manu, the original source of cultural nourishment, and force-fed the children a language that usurps their own, the speaker’s sense of self is consequently compromised. He remains at a loss over how to grieve and then rebirth his culture. The processes of mourning and melancholia, like that which the speaker experiences, have received vast scholarly attention in recent years, particularly in the field of trauma studies. Despite Freud’s pathologizing “melancholia” as a stalled and thereby unhealthy engagement with loss, recent critical discussions, particularly regarding the aftermath of the Atlantic slave trade, have theorized the possible effectiveness of melancholic engagement. As argued by such scholars as Nandini Dhar, Heike Härting, and Maureen Moynagh, prolonged grieving can, in fact, represent a more ethical and productive engagement with loss and its impact.Footnote ⁷⁷ The “working through,” hence the possibility of gaining closure, that Freud associates with mourning may not be desirable or socially responsible in situations where the impact of loss is ongoing. As Stef Craps has argued in an article that pairs “Turner” with D’Aguiar’s Feeding the Ghosts, a “continual working-over”—not a working through—“of a history which remains enigmatic and irreducibly other” is at times necessary.Footnote ⁷⁸ According to Craps, the Derridean concept of “mid-mourning,” which “unsettles”Footnote ⁷⁹ the dyad of mourning and melancholia, is, consequently, a more effective model for approaching such postcolonial traumas at the Middle Passage.

In developing this argument, Craps works to showcase the insufficiency of dichotomizing mourning and melancholia by addressing Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok’s work on the related concepts of introjection (mourning) and incorporation (melancholia). In Craps’s view, an effective model for grieving trauma requires a “hover[ing] between the introjection of successful [sic] resolved mourning and the incorporation of pathological grieving or melancholia.”Footnote ⁸⁰ I concur, but argue that the rooting of introjection and incorporation in metaphoric digestive processes is also vital to an interpretation of “Turner.”

According to Abraham and Torok, during the process of incorporation/melancholia, the lost love-object is ingested, but not digested and expelled; the lost love-object remains within the subject unassimilated, turning the subject into a crypt. In other words, “in order not to have to ‘swallow’ a loss, we fantasize swallowing (or having swallowed) that which has been lost, as if it were some kind of thing.”Footnote ⁸¹ This ingestion is a “refus[al] to mourn.”Footnote ⁸² During the process of introjection/mourning, however, the loss is digested and thereby processed and expelled. Introjection is “the successful replacement of the object’s presence with the self’s cognizance of its absence.”Footnote ⁸³ In Abraham and Torok’s description, this process of introjection begins with the infant’s experience of the mother as a food source. They write, “the early satisfactions of the mouth, as yet filled with the maternal object [the breast], are partially and gradually replaced by the novel satisfactions of a mouth now empty of that object but filled with words pertaining to the subject.”Footnote ⁸⁴ In other words, “language acts and makes up for absence by representing, by giving figurative shape to presence.”Footnote ⁸⁵

In “Turner,” the poetic speaker’s relationship with the stillborn baby manifests itself as an encounter with indigestible losses and thereby reveals the complexity of negotiating the grief of cultural loss. The speaker asks, “Shall I suckle / It on tales of resurrected folk, / Invent a sister, and another, as Manu would.”Footnote ⁸⁶ The speaker here queries whether he should provide the baby opportunity to ingest the past. Can he ensure that what the baby ingests is processed and expelled rather than remaining an unassimilated object of melancholic longing?

In this poem, the imagery of the attempted introjection of cultural loss proves even more complex because the loss is not just of the past; it is also of “the future” that “the child would not bear.”Footnote ⁸⁷ The speaker may seek to suckle the baby, but he seeks the baby as his food source as well. He “gather[s] [the baby] in with dead arms, like harvest-time[,]” an image that casts the baby as a consumable agricultural product.Footnote ⁸⁸ The baby is also fished by the speaker, although in the end it “loosen[s] from the hook / Of [the speaker’s] desire, drifting away.”Footnote ⁸⁹ The cyclical pursuit of nourishment whereby the speaker sees himself both as nourishing the baby and being nourished by it, ultimately speaks to the impossibility of their food chain. The speaker must eat the baby in order to form the story that is to nourish the baby; in other words, the baby must be eaten to be nourished. The baby’s existence is thus impossible, and if the baby cannot exist, then what can nourish, hence sustain, the speaker? Because of Turner’s interference, all processes of cultural ingestion—both of the past and of the future—are rendered impossible. The speaker cannot feed on the baby because it “loosen[s] from the hook[,]” and the baby cannot feed on the story of the past because that story cannot be spoken.Footnote ⁹⁰ Ultimately, both speaker and baby go hungry.

Within this poem, acts of cultural feeding thus are revealed to be threateningly self-consumptive rather than regenerative. Consider, for instance, the description of the speaker’s attempt to continue the cycle of cultural nourishment by becoming a mother himself:

The speaker’s memory of his mother letting him lick her fingers is an image of intimacy, symbolizing the mother’s body as a continuing source of nourishment.Footnote ⁹² But his own body cannot provide a similar intimacy nor nourishment. In fact, who is being fed and whether that nourishment is effectual remains unclear. The speaker surrenders his breasts to “my child-mouth,” but does this mean he is surrendering his breasts to his “child’s mouth” or to his own mouth? In this image, even if the child is interpreted to be the one suckling, this child still remains unnourished. The speaker’s hurt is, instead, what is fed. In other words, the child is left out of the cycle and the speaker feeds, and feeds upon, only himself.Footnote ⁹³

The final image that the speaker leaves of himself in the poem is likewise of destructive self-consumption. The “Wings of Turner brood[] over [his] body, / Stopping [his] mouth, drowning [him] in the yolk / Of [himself].”Footnote ⁹⁴Yolk figuratively can mean “center” or “core,” so at one level, the speaker describes himself simply as drowning in himself, more specifically, drowning in the parts of himself that have consumed Turner, his language, and his ideals.Footnote ⁹⁵ But yolk, too, is an edible food item. It can be consumed by humans, but more importantly, it is the part of an egg that “serv[es] as nourishment for the young before it is hatched.”Footnote ⁹⁶ By extension, in discourses of biology, the meaning of yolk is “extended to the corresponding part in any animal ovum, which serves for the nutrition of the embryo (nutritive or food-yolk), and to the protoplasmic substance from which the embryo is developed (formative or germ-yolk).”Footnote ⁹⁷ In other words, the yolk can be seen not just as that which nourishes the embryo, but as that which helps create the embryo.

But no such formation of an embryo is possible in this poem. No such generative path toward the future is realized. The speaker does not, in the end, achieve the agency of being either a nourisher or an eater. A yolk can be an edible object, but here it enters the speaker’s body by the wrong path. Inhaled rather than ingested, the yolk cannot fuel his body, nor form muscle, nor maintain bone. Instead, the yolk suffocates him, claiming his voice, breath, and life.

The preceding discussion has interpreted acts of eating in “Turner” as reflecting relationships of power. Acts of eating, too, have been shown to function in relation to the processes of cultural renewal. The speaker sees hope for his culture’s rebirth in the possibility of the baby feasting on him and the stories of ancestors. He also envisions the baby to be the nourishment to fuel his own regeneration. Nevertheless, the poem’s final words—“No mother”—capture the ultimate hopelessness of the speaker’s condition. The speaker can turn neither backward to the past nor forward to the future for comfort: he can neither have a mother, nor be a mother; neither achieve nourishment, nor offer it.