Committed to Memory: The Art of the Slave Ship Icon
by Cheryl Finley

Reviewed by Devon Clifton

Carving the space to think about a beauty which is bound to human pain is an endlessly intricate task. What art might do to life, and what the past might mean in the present; these enormous questions are unavoidable in such an undertaking. The choices we make in how to reckon, or how not to reckon, with art produced by, despite, and through collective suffering bear investigation, always. The current global political climate attests to the fact that this thinking is needed now as much as ever. 

In a society where the murder of unarmed black men, women, and children by law enforcement is routine, how do we think about a piece which literally casts the living in the role of the subjugated dead? Cash Crop, a 2010 installation by contemporary American artist Stephen Hayes, consists of life-sized concrete shackled and bound figures of men, women, children, and even a figure cast from Hayes’s own body. The figures represent the roughly 12.5 million enslaved African survivors of the middle passage. Hayes’s Cash Crop, and his decision to cast himself amongst his representation of the enslaved, are a prime example of the potential of art to tap into deep political, and historical fault lines. It is precisely this potential, and the “reverberations” such works unleash, which form the subject of Cheryl Finley’s Committed to Memory: The Art of the Slave Ship, a politically attuned chronicling of slave ship representations from the late 18^th to present century.

Cheryl Finley writes in a vein of scholarship often termed “afro-pessimism,” characterized by its reliance on concepts of black origin, archival retrieval, and continued empathetic identification with the past. The term “afro-pessimism” was first introduced by Congolese author Sony Lab’ou Tansi in a 1990 article. Frank Wilderson, American writer, filmmaker, and critic, elaborated on the newly minted concept in his 2008 Incognegro: A Memoir of Exile and Apartheid. Many others since have continued to think within this intellectual framework. 

With her painstaking mapping and analysis of the slave ship within art and its reception, Finley has broken new ground in the discipline of art history. Her core argument in Committed to Memory is that artists’ continued engagements with the image or “icon” of the slave ship is a practice she terms “mnemonic aesthetics.” A mnemonic device is defined by Merriam-Webster as “assisting or intended to assist memory,” and Finley understands mnemonics in artistic practice to be a “ritualized politics of remembering.” The slave ship as “icon” in art is classified as anything which depicts the ship or the experience of the Middle Passage. In this reading, the icon of the slave ship helps the beholder to “understand their relationship to the present” through the return to the past offered by the particular symbolism of such art work. Finley doesn’t analyze the experience of, or any artifacts created by, those who actually survived the Middle Passage. Instead, Finley studies representations; media intended to communicate, to make real the unfathomable reality of the transatlantic slave trade to all of us left living in its wake.

Shying away from lengthy critical analysis, the structure of Finley’s “visual genealogy of the slave ship icon” lends itself to the historical mode: introduction, three chronologically ordered sections of four chapters each, and an afterword. The arrangement of Finley’s discussion as timeline means that the evolution of slave ship representation between artists and over time is foregrounded over in-depth deconstruction of individual artworks themselves. Section one of the book, entitled “Sources/Roots,” opens with the first circulated print image of a slave ship commissioned by the British abolitionist movement of the 18^th century. The analytical starting point of the narrative is this image which shows the schematics of a slave ship hold, ubiquitous in its subsequent adaptation and reproduction: the 1788 Plan of an African Ship’s Lower Deck with Negroes in the Proportion of Only One to a Ton. The iconography of the slave ship from this first era is utilitarian in its strictly sentimental political appeals to end the slave trade.

In “Meanings/Routes,” the volume’s second section, Finley tackles the slave ship icon from 1900 to the present day, with a transnational focus. It opens with a discussion of the New Negro Arts Movement of the 1920s, characterized by notable figures such as Aaron Douglas, Langston Hughes, and Archibald Motley. Initially, Finley hypothesizes that black artists were still too historically near to slavery to utilize the terrifying specter of the middle passage. Amiri Baraka’s 1969 play Slave Ship is singled out as central to the development of slave ship iconography, for the way in which it innovated beyond “…the descriptive text of the eighteenth-century broadside to include the voices of the enslaved, their stories of pain and suffering, and their tactics of resistance and survival.” The trajectory of the icon in this section moves broadly from less to more overt, and overtly political uses of the symbology. 

In the volume’s third and last section, entitled “Rites/Reinventions,” Finley’s analysis concentrates on the years from 1990 to the present. Here the focus moves away from Europe to the “New World” of the Americas and Caribbean, and Finley’s analytical approach changes as well, with Finley offering more in depth interpretations of specific works. For example, Finley slows her pace to analyze the performance art and installations of Maria Magdalena Campos Pons. Of Pons’s The Seven Powers Come by Sea Finley says, “[Pons’s repetitive use of slave ship iconography] points to the magnitude of the slave trade by referencing the multiple human cargos stowed in ships that traveled the Middle Passage as well as the vast number of ships engaged in the industry.” Breaking down the different elements within Pons’s piece, Finley makes her case for recognizing the nautical motif as part of the “practice” of remembering the inhumanity of slavery via art. In her final analytical chapters, Finley takes a close eyed approach to link seemingly disparate artistic mediums and subjects back to the allusory power of a singular symbol- the slave ship. 

In an interesting, potentially intentional, omission, Finley doesn’t mention the work of black studies scholars whose works throw into question a “politics of remembrance” within the context of U.S. slavery  (i.e., the very ability of one to truly connect with the past at all). It is an important question within Black studies as a field, given the slave trade’s obvious interruption of existing kinship ties and subsequent ancestral record keeping. A well-known work that explores this question is Saidiya Hartman’s Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route (2006), a firsthand account of Hartman’s search for answers about both her own ancestors, and the collective past, along a historical slave route in Ghana. Indeed, Hartman problematizes the very idea of meaningful historic return or the knowability of one’s origins. It is curious that Finley makes no mention of this strain of scholarship given that she herself acknowledges the importance of this matter when she ends the chapter “Roots Tourism and the Slave Ship Icon” asking the very question which Hartman attempts to answer: “but is such a ‘return’ to an ancestral homeland that [black Americans] as individuals never before set foot on really possible?”

By way of afterword, Finley gives an elegant and simple meditation upon poet Elizabeth Alexander’s ekphrastic poem islands no. 4, inspired by Agnes Martin’s 1961 oil painting of the same name. Ekphrasis is a genre of literature devoted to a description of, or commentary on, a visual work of art. In her poem islands no. 4, Alexander contrasts Martin’s canvas, patterned with ovals on a grid, with a famous abolitionist broadside print: Description of a Slave Ship (1789).  Alexander’s islands no. 4 is, in its interaction with Martin’s visual expression, a representative example of Finley’s mnemonic aesthetics. So, of course, is the work Finley herself is doing in Committed to Memory. Through her exploration of the way others have creatively amplified and echoed the “icon” of the slave ship in their respective works, so Finley – via her valuable, clearly-written, well-researched, global aesthetic history of artistic protest, and explicitly black art – herself contributes to the project of studying the past to inform the present. Like a poem which sees the hull of a slave ship in ovals labelled “islands,” Finley gives language to that which itself explodes the actual –the historical reality of transatlantic slavery– into radical possibility.