“We’re always playing ghosts” A hauntological reading of Winsome Pinnock’s drama Rockets and Blue Lights Christoph Singer The Zong-massacre of 1781, when 133 enslaved women, men and children were thrown overboard a slave ship by British crewmembers, has turned into a central event in the discussion and commemoration of the slave trade. Literary texts from poems such as David Dabydeen’s Turner and NourbeSe Philip’s Zong! to novels like Fred D’Aguiar’s Feeding the Ghosts and Lawrence Scott’s Dangerous Freedom (2021) probe different ways of approaching the silences surrounding the crime as well as the ensuing court cases in which the slave ship’s owners demanded compensation for their ‘lost property,’ rather than facing charges of murder. In this article, I will discuss Winsome Pinnock’s Rockets and Blue Lights (2021), which not only revolves around the Zong-massacre but approaches the slave trade by employing discourses and images related to the theoretical concepts of hauntology. Pinnock deconstructs hegemonic historiographies of the slave trade and counters British postcolonial amnesia by means of, what I would like to call, spectral temporalities. These temporalities are presented as non-linear and a-chronological. Full of revenants of the past, in Jacques Derrida’s terms, the play’s trans-temporal plots address the gaps and silences in British Histories. Firstly, this article will outline the Zong massacre and its thematic resurgence in contemporary literature and culture. Secondly, I will read Pinnock’s play with theories of hauntology and spectral temporality. Thirdly, this article will discuss how Rockets and Blue Lights explicitly addresses and dramatizes this paradox double-nature of the presence of the past on the theatre-stage. AAA - Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik Agenda: Advancing Anglophone Studies Band 48 · Heft 1 Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen DOI 10.24053/ AAA-2023-0003 Christoph Singer 56 1. Introduction The British dramatist Winsome Pinnock discusses in a scholarly article entitled “The Spectre of the Slave Ship” (Pinnock 2018: online) the representation of traumatic historical events on stage, an interest that is translated into her work as a playwright. In this article Pinnock is especially interested in Caryl Philip’s dramatic adaptation of Simon Shama’s study Rough Crossings: Britain, the Slaves and the American Revolution (Philips 2008; Shama 2007). Both, Philip’s play and Shama’s study, were published to mark the bicentennial celebration of the abolition of the slave trade in Britain. Fourteen years later, in 2021, Pinnock published the play Rockets and Blue Lights, which, amongst other themes, discusses these very commemorations. Pinnock’s play is particularly interested in the question of how to remember the slave trade and its victims as well as British culpability with the trade, a question Pinnock approaches in theory and dramatical practice. Her approach counters a lack of historical testimonials, thus defying the ‘social death’ of the enslaved to refer to Orlando Patterson’s concept. To do so, Pinnock employs the concept of “hauntology, which suggests that the legacy of the past resonates within or haunts present day reality” (Pinnock 2018: online). In this article, I will discuss Pinnock’s play Rockets and Blue Lights (2021). The play deconstructs hegemonic historiographies of the slave trade with the help of discourses and images that are deeply related to theories of hauntology and by means of, what I would like to call, spectral temporalities. These temporalities are presented as non-linear and a-chronological. Full of revenants of the past, in Jacques Derrida’s terms, the play’s two trans-temporal plotlines counter the silences in British histories. These spectral temporalities support Marc Fisher’s argument that “[h]aunting can be seen as intrinsically resistant to the contraction and homogenization of time and space. It happens when a place is stained by time, or when a place becomes the site for an encounter with broken time” (Fisher 2012: 19). And in Rockets and Blue Lights, one such site is the Zong, particularly J.M.W. Turner’s rendition thereof. I will, firstly, outline the Zong massacre and its thematic resurgence in contemporary literature and culture. Secondly, I will link these plays to theories of hauntology and spectral temporality. Thirdly, this article will discuss how the play explicitly addresses and dramatizes the paradox of the past’s simultaneous absence/ presence on the theatre-stage. This theme links Pinnock’s play to Jacques Derrida’s introduction to hauntology in The Specters of Marx which is equally concerned with non-linear temporalities which Derrida framed with Hamlet’s statement that “The time is out of joint” (Derrida 1993: xxi). A hauntological reading of Pinnock’s Rockets and Blue Lights 57 2. The spectre of the Zong The theory of hauntology questions the limits of linearity and narrative emplotment of historiography. Hauntology also highlights the silences in historical archives and the very colonial logic and discursivity of these archives. As argued by Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin the emergence of history in European thought is coterminous with the rise of modern colonialism, which in its racial othering and violent annexation of the non-European world, found in history a prominent, if not the prominent instrument, for the control of subject peoples. (Ashcroft, Griffiths & Tiffin 1995: 317) To rewrite and amend these histories becomes an essential moment of undoing these processes of othering and of claiming a place within these historical discourses and their production. This need is also expressed by Lou, the protagonists of Rockets and Blue Lights: “You and I - the descendants of slaves - we’ve got a duty to tell that story” (Pinnock 2021: 37). The massacre of the Zong is predestined for such a reading, even though or because the account thereof is based on few, incomplete historical documents. The central aspects of the Zong massacre can be summarized as follows: in October 1780, the Gregson Syndicate dispatches a slaver called William. The William leaves Liverpool and anchors on the African Gold Coast from January to August 1781. Here the Gregson syndicate acquires another slaver, a Dutch ship called Zorg, which was taken into possession by the Royal Navy and renamed Zong. The crew of the William was then divided between both ships which lead, firstly, to the Zong being understaffed and, secondly, to the William’s surgeon Luke Collinwood being promoted to captain of the Zong. The unexperienced captain and his understaffed crew overcrowded the ship with enslaved Africans: 442 women, men and children were taken onboard. Under the Dolben-Act of 1788, which seven years later would have restricted the number of enslaved, the Zong would have been allowed to carry 175 enslaved (Kirkler 2012: 411). On the middle-passage from the island of St Thomas to Blackwater, Jamaica, the crew mistook Jamaica for Hispaniola which resulted in a detour of several weeks and a depleted stock of water. To ‘save’ - in the inhumane logic of the slave trade - their ‘chattels and goods’ (Hoare 1820: 239) the crew threw overboard 133 of the enslaved before Zong finally arriving in Jamaica on December 22, 1781. Two years later the Gregsons, the owners of Zong, sued the Gilbert insurance company, demanding they cover the prize of the murdered Africans. The historian James Walvin calls this court case, which was decidedly presented as matter of insurance not of murder, “[t]he most grotesquely bizarre of all slave cases heard in an English court” (Walvin 1992: 16). The fact that Judge Lord Mansfield presided not over a case of murder but one Christoph Singer 58 related to insurance claims garnered public attention and turned the proceedings into a major case for the abolitionist movement. Nonetheless, few historic documents remain. Here particularly noteworthy is Olaudah Equiano, who alerted the abolitionist Granville Sharpe. Granville Sharpe’s Memoirs (Hoare 1820) as well as Sharpe’s recently discovered letter to the Admiralty (Faubert 2017) as well as reports on the court cases (e.g. Roscoe 1853) are few of the archival sources, while others vanished. Michelle Faubert confirms: “very few primary sources on the Zong massacre exist. […] much of the paper trail connected to the Zong case, such as Captain Collingwood’s logbook, has conveniently disappeared” (Faubert 2017: 179). Despite and even maybe because of this lack of archival material, the Zong massacre has become a central site of trauma, contested historiographies and a fight for recognition and justice. Yet, the Zong’s central position in these debates, Srividhya Swaminathan argues, was not an immediate one: “Though this insurance case did have a profound influence among anti-slave trade organisers and became iconic in abolitionist literature, there was almost no immediate impact on the public consciousness” (Swaminathan 2010: 483). Central for the Zong’s current perception was a re-enactment organized in 2007 by the Centre for Contemporary Ministry. The historian Anita Rupprecht relates how the ministry, as part of the bicentennial celebrations, organized an event in which “the Zong sailed out of history, up the Thames and docked by the Tower of London.” (Rupprecht 2008: 266) Accompanied by the HMS Northumberland, the replica of the Zong hosted a Christian choir and both ships held exhibitions on the slave trade and its abolition. This event, alongside literary publications, firmly established the Zong in cultural memory. Today, the name Zong is a metonymical short-hand for the Zong massacre in 1789, the related court cases at Whitehall and Westminster and the dehumanizing discourses that justified the slave trade. While the Zong’s replica sailing on the Thames may have been an important event in the process of fixing the Zong in cultural memory, it was not the first. A number of (non-)literary texts deal with the challenge of commemorating the Zong-massacre in particular and the British involvement in the slave trade in general. In 1993, for example, Michelle Cliff published the novel Free Enterprise, which contains a discussion of the painting “The Slave Ship - Slavers Throwing overboard the Dead and Dying - Typhon coming on,” by the Victorian painter J.M.W. Turner, whose 1840-painting has often been approached either as a depiction of the Zong massacre, or of the continued ‘jettisoning’ of the enslaved after the slave trade and slavery itself were abolished. In David Dabydeen’s long poem “Turner” (1994) the painting is even more central to this lyrical discussion of the Zong massacre. Another text, which explicitly alludes to hauntology and the spectral is Fred D’Aguair’s 1997-novel Feeding the Ghosts. The novel imagines one survivor of the massacre, a woman called Minta, finding her A hauntological reading of Pinnock’s Rockets and Blue Lights 59 way back onto the slaver. The Caribbean-Canadian author NourbeSe Philip’s poem Zong! (2008) is equally concerned with the (im)possibility of depicting an historic event which is only documented in a few legal notices. Philips takes these texts, cuts them up and uses the words and phrases to create a poem that is indebted to hauntological thought. Philips states in an interview: I come - albeit slowly - to the understanding that Zong! is hauntological; it is a work of haunting, a wake of sorts, where the spectres of the undead make themselves present […] in the margins of the text, a sort of negative space. (Philip 2008: 201) The film Belle, from 2013, approaches the Zong massacre from yet another perspective. It depicts the life of Elizabeth d’Aviniere, daughter of Maria Belle, a formerly enslaved women and of John Lindsey, a British captain of the Royal Navy. Elizabeth is also the great-niece of the Lord Chief Justice Mansfield, the judge who, as mentioned above, presided over the Zong case. While the film focusses on the romantic side of the plot, the love-story does not completely overshadow the Zong case. Less interested in the romance but more concerned with the fragile freedom of Elizabeth and her children in pre-abolition England is Lawrence Scott’s novel Dangerous Freedom (Scott 2021). The novel focusses on Dido observing her uncle Lord Mansfield dealing with the Zong case as well as on her relationship with her absent mother. A final literary example, Mojisola Adebayo’s 2020-play Wind/ Rush Generation(s) is, broadly speaking, a history-play reconstructing British histories, as stated by the author’s note: “This is a play about the British Isles, its past and its present” (Adebayo 2020: 2). In Wind/ Rush Generation(s), a group of characters is related to the Zong. Their names combine the various discourses that justified the slave trade: economic trade is represented by Captain Luke Collingwood and first mate James Kelsall, the legal system by Lord Mansfield, and religious discourses are indicated by the sailors which are named after the twelve apostles of Jesus Christ, ranging from Matthew and Mark to Jude and Paul. In Adebayo’s play, similarly to Pinnock’s, different genres, various temporal planes and characters constantly merge to unsettle linear historiographies. In Wind/ Rush Generation(s) the ghost’s interaction with the teenagers is less an expression of trauma but a call for justice and reminiscent of Avery Gordon’s argument that the “ghost is different from trauma, for haunting, unlike trauma, is distinctive for producing a something-to-be-done” (Avery 2008: xvi). To give a non-literary example that will allow for a transition to Winsome Pinnock’s play, I would like to refer to an artwork by the U.S.-American artist Sondra Perry. The 2018-installation at London’s Serpentine Gallery was called “Typhoon Coming On” - an explicit reference to J.M.W. Turner’s painting. Perry’s installation employed digital media to transform Christoph Singer 60 Turner’s painting as well as the Serpentine Gallery into a space of traumatic haunting. Arabella Stranger reads the location itself in hauntological terms: “This building, so vitally a part of Perry’s seascape, holds in its walls the histories of British military power and pageantry. The architecture, though, is also haunted by the more specific imperial histories of Britain’s participation in the trading of Black lives” (Stranger 2019: 12). 3. History and hauntology It is no surprise that the Zong massacre and the ensuing legal case have turned into a focal point of (fictional) historiographies of the slave trade. Both exemplify the dehumanisation based on commercial interests and remind us that the victims remain voiceless. The aforementioned texts, however, do not merely fill these gaps and counter the silences. Rather they highlight how the suppressed past haunts the present, how absence becomes a spectral presence in contemporary discourses. They are deeply connected by their discursive strategies of approaching the slave trade as a topic. This connection between hauntology and the slave trade is not new, the trope and its notions of non-linear and traumatic historiography are central to Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved (1987) as well as to Fred D’Aguair’s Feeding the Ghosts, NourbeSe Philipp’s Zong! and Mojisola Adebayo’s Wind/ Rush Generation(s). Winsome Pinnock uses hauntological theories to tackle the challenges of dramatizing traumatic events and experiences. In her article on Caryl Philip’s dramatic adaptation of Rough Crossings, Pinnock argues: The representation onstage of traumatic historical events is met with various challenges: for example, the conventions of dramaturgy may humanize the perpetrators of wide-scale criminal acts through the requirement for complex characterization; there is a risk of misrepresentation when the fictional content diverges from reality. There is also the problem of archival silence around those who were the victims of atrocities such as the slave trade. (Pinnock 2018: online) Pinnock relates this notion of “archival silence” (ibid.) to the theme of postcolonial amnesia and the whitewashing of history. In Rockets and Blue Lights a character called Reuben, an African-American marine biologist, argues: “Our history, hidden in plain sight, the white abolitionists’ story squashing the story of the Africans who spoke up, who alerted the public to the massacre in the first place. […] I’m trying to hear those people whose stories have been erased” (Pinnock 2021: 44). This intra-textual critique of a self-congratulatory celebration of the abolition of the slave trade is expressed similarly by the English rapper and activist Akala. In Natives: Race A hauntological reading of Pinnock’s Rockets and Blue Lights 61 & Class in the Ruins of Empire, Akala expresses his dismay at a historiography which centres on white abolitionists, such as Granville Sharpe or William Wilberforce, at the expense of Black British abolitionists such as Quobna Ottobah Cugoano or Oloudah Equiano. Akala mockingly refers to this form of commemoration as “Wilberfest” (Akala 2018: 126). With Kojo Karam and Kerem Nisanciouglu one can place this overt focus on white abolitionists within a wider postcolonial amnesia. They identify a “pervasive collective amnesia, almost as if the country has forgotten - within a mere generation - of the existence of its imperial past” (Koram and Nisancioglu 2020: online). In Pinnock’s play the theme of postcolonial amnesia takes centre stage. The aforementioned Reuben states: “The thing is history tells you only so much. The real stories are lost in time” (Pinnock 2021: 14). And hauntology facilitates the deconstruction of these hegemonic historiographies. As quoted above, Pinnock argues that the theory of hauntology is useful to analyse the incomplete representation of the slave trade. Doing so is also a form of reaffirming the forgotten voices as historical subjects in their own right. These arguments are reminiscent of Avery Gordon’s statement that “any people who are not graciously permitted to amend the past, or control the often barely visible structuring forces of everyday life, or who do not even secure the moderate gains from the routine amnesia […] are bound to develop a sophisticated consciousness of ghostly haunts” (Gordon 2008: 151). Such an “official inquiry” is intended to achieve a societal recognition of actions of the past which in turn is intended to lead to a reckoning in the present. The theoretical figure of the spectre is helpful in this regard, which, as Guillermina de Ferrari argues is a hybrid between different temporalities, forms of perception and requires an engagement with the historical past (Guillermina De Ferrari 2018: 273). In Pinnock’s play this engagement is dramatized on stage. The theatre stage has been read as a spectral space par excellence, in Philip Schulte’s words: “Die unklare Ontologie des Gespenstes ist gleichzeitig die Ontologie des Theaters, das ebenfalls ist und nicht ist. Im Theater bedeutet Sein oder Nichtsein immer zugleich zu sein und nicht zu sein” (Schulte 2015: 91). [“The ambiguous ontology of the ghost is at the same time the ontology of the theatre, which similarly is and is not. In theatre to be or not to be always equals both states at the same time.] Pinnock argues similarly. Hauntology, she claims, “postulate[s] that the theatre space is haunted by apparitions, the meaning of whose presence is interpreted by the collective memory of the audience during performances” (Pinnock 2018: online). Additionally, this form of anti-hegemonic theatre allows Pinnock to carve out a stage of her own. Goddard argues that “Pinnock is well aware of the influence of trends in theatre production and berates the white, male, director-led trend setting for British theatre, which has led to the marginalisation of black women’s plays” (Goddard 2004: 25). Pinnock is deeply interested in the economic, philosophical, religious reasons of the slave trade as much as Christoph Singer 62 she is concerned with exposing the institutionalized levels of performing and commemorating these histories. 4. Rockets and Blue Lights The title of Winsome Pinnock’s play Rockets and Blue Lights is a reference to another painting completed by J.M.W. Turner in 1840, who himself is as a central character in the play. Whereas Turner’s painting “The Slave Ship” depicts the horrors of the slave trade, “Rockets and Blue Lights” shows sailors firing rockets as a distress signal as well as a warning for other ships. Pinnock reads this also as a practice of slavers that continued their trade despite being abolished, here the rockets are seen as a warning of the incoming Royal Navy. Simultaneously, according to the production notes, the painting’s blue colour-scheme is translated onto the stage, as it is “reminiscent of the feeling of being underwater - like the slaves who were thrown overboard” (National Theatre Collection 2021: 10). The play was first performed at the Royal Exchange Theatre in Manchester in March 2020 and can be read as an implementation of Pinnock’s hauntological considerations on how to perform a play on the atrocities of the slave trade. Rockets and Blue Lights interweaves two plotlines. This approach via spectral temporalities recalls De Ferrari’s argument on hauntology that “in the intersection between past and present narratives, there is a responsibility; the ghostly is about the obligation to choose from one’s inheritance” (Guillermina De Ferrari 2018: 271). The first plot is set in the year 2007 and follows Lou, a Black British actress, who is reasonably successful as a cast-member of a US-American science fiction TV-show. Her passion-project, however, is a film called The Ghost Ship, which revolves around J.M.W. Turner’s painting “The Slave Ship” and commemorates the horrors of the slave trade. The second plot is set in the year 1840 and follows a Black sailor called Thomas, who leaves his wife Lucy and his daughter Jess to work on a merchant’s ship called The Glory. Here he meets the elderly Turner who, under a disguise, also joined the crew. Both plots, at first sight, seem to follow a rather conventional structure in that the initial, integrated expositions are being followed by complications. In the case of Lou, the complication arises from her becoming increasingly critical of Trevor King - the film’s director - and his conceptual decisions, including the decreased presence of her character Olu, an enslaved woman. Lou deems these discursive devices too conventional and the depicted physical violence too close to ‘torture-porn’ to fit the complexity of the topic. The second plot, set after the British abolition of slavery, depicts a lecherous Turner looking for artistic inspiration on a merchant ship. This ship turns out to be a slave ship in disguise and as such - like the spectre of hauntology - represents the unclear ontological and legal status of Black A hauntological reading of Pinnock’s Rockets and Blue Lights 63 crewmembers like Thomas, who is both simultaneously: free and un-free, citizen and enslaved, human and commodity. Fighting against the enslavement of others Thomas is quickly apprehended and sold into slavery on a plantation. The two initially linear plotlines become entangled and intertwined in the course of the play. While at the beginning both plots are mainly connected by their respective themes - slave trade, agency, freedom, and the representation of traumatic histories - these thematic echoes are transformed into instances of a dramatic haunting: past and present merge, different characters become doubles of each other by means of being played by the same actress, and the linearity and teleology of historiography is upended. However, not only does the past haunt and impact the present. The present and its victims of (institutional) racism become a presence in the past. In the final scene, the enslaved Thomas works at gunpoint on a plantation in 1840. He asks his overseer, and the audience, to remember the victims of racism throughout history, but particularly those of the late 20 th and the early 21 st centuries, such as Yvonne Ruddock, David Oluwale, Kelso Cochrane and Stephen Lawrence (Pinnock 2021: 79). This straight line, from slavery to contemporary racism, and back, implies causality. Such an effect of the silenced past on the present is confirmed by historian Allyson Hobbs. Taking her cues from Turner’s painting the “Slave Ship” and its contemporary socio-economic background, Hobbs argues, however, within the context of US-American history and culture: “Today’s frightening levels of political corruption, economic inequality, racial terror, voter suppression, xenophobia, and misogyny hark back to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries” (Hobbs 2020: 264). Pinnock also relates to this inheritance and to the methods of communicating these histories and the images they have been producing. In line with hauntology as a dramatic reappearance of the past in the present, Rockets and Blue Lights avoids to offer a sense of an ending. The play also refuses closure for its characters, audiences and readers. This refusal to provide closure is indicated on the structural level, as the play consists of only two acts rather than the more conventional structure of three or five acts. Consequently, the play’s exposition and climax are neither followed by dénouement nor singular catastrophe. The fact that the sailor Thomas is enslaved once again is certainly catastrophic, but Pinnock’s play stresses that this event is not a singular crisis but a systemic and repetitive one. At the play’s very end, Thomas confirms this endlessly repetitive cycle: “I am not afraid of death. I have lived and died ten million times. And I will live and live again” (Pinnock 2021: 79). Still, it matters that Rockets and Blue Lights does begin in a conventional, dramatic way as it foregrounds the ensuing trans-temporal interruptions and stresses the connections between past and present. The play’s central scene, where past and present, and different plot-lines merge, happens on the film-set of The Ghost Ship. Here, Lou’s character and double, Olu, an Christoph Singer 64 enslaved African woman, is whipped mercilessly, which results in a complete, if short, merging of Lou and Olu and her striking back at her fellow actors turned slavers. This illustrates Brydie’s argument on the temporal effects of haunting: “The cyclical loop of past and present feeds evolving discourses of each, blurring temporalities into a Möbius strip that draws the past into the present, and projects the present back into the past” (Brydie 2020: 905). Past and present, fiction and reality merge, the two plot-lines and temporalities become one. 5. Against empathy - the spectres of identification Resulting from these interwoven temporal planes and plotlines, haunting and ghosts take on various shapes and forms in the play. Lou herself is increasingly frustrated with her role in the film as her character is literally turned into a ghost: “A ghost, for fuck’s sake. We’re always playing ghost in one way or another. We’re not seen as real functioning people” (Pinnock 2021: 37). Lou’s exasperation is reminiscent of Lawrence Hill’s The Book of Negroes. Here the protagonist, Aminata Diallo, similarly insists on writing her slave narrative by herself, refusing the intended interference of white abolitionists: “I have my life to tell, my own private ghost story” (Hill 2009: 7). In contrast to the play’s complex temporal structure and open ending, the film inside the play, the Ghost Ship, adheres to a conventional plot by offering the very sense of closure the play refuses. This closure is expressed by the clichéd appearance of a grateful ghost who can finally rest. Lou is expected to play this ghost of Olu, whose apparition thanks Turner for painting “The Slave Ship” with the following words: “You told my story - the story of the Zong massacre. And now I can be laid to rest” (Pinnock 2021: 35). Olu stresses “the unburied are restless” (Pinnock 2021: 35). Kosima argues: “The arrival of the spectre requires the haunted subject to address the unfinished business of the past that the ghost represents and remedy the problems that cause the ghost to be unable to move on” (Brydie 2020: 908). The ghost finding rest is reminiscent of Jacques Derrida’s argument on the importance of mourning and the hauntological, whereby mourning requires a fixed locale for the dead and a public and private reckoning with their lives and their passing. The play, however, makes clear that the victims of the slave trade are neither provided a site of mourning, nor are they recognized as individuals. Pinnock uses the theme of a pacified ghost to, firstly, criticize the belief that history can be laid to rest. Secondly, she addresses the problematic power-structure at hand: it is the white painter Turner who supposedly brings peace to the ghost of the enslaved Olu. While superficially the trauma seems to be healed, justice has not been served, which reflects Brydie’s argument on the reasons for the ghost’s appearance in the first A hauntological reading of Pinnock’s Rockets and Blue Lights 65 place. “The ghost appears when and where it is required in the present to demand justice in the future for the past” (Brydie 2020: 908). Additionally, the whipping-scene’s voyeuristic display of violence results in Lou falling out with Trevor, the film’s director and her erstwhile collaborator. Lou accuses Trevor of reverting to the tired and problematic tropes of cinematic slave narratives. She argues I took this job because I thought Trevor got away from the usual torture porn: A black body gets a whipping. Check. A black body is sold at auction. Check. White people getting off on the sentimental horror while every single lash of that whip sends home a subliminal message that to be white means to have never been a slave. (Pinnock 2021: 44) Lou criticizes the underlying sentimentalist discourses for pretending to create a sense of empathy of the audience with the beaten and subjugated characters. Actually, such portrayals, she argues, result in the white audience being confirmed in their identities and histories. As such, this scene alludes to the white audiences’ desire to have it both ways in this “abolition theme park” (Pinnock 2021: 10). They get to superficially pride themselves of their empathic and sentimentalist ‘understanding’ of the perceived realities of the slave trade, without being reminded of their own complicity in these actions. The affective politics of the Rockets and Blue Lights question the notion of creating empathy, if empathy becomes a form of voyeurism and reproduces problematic narratives. Hence it is no surprise that Pinnock repeatedly employs Brechtian interventions to counter any form of sentimentalism. Once again, Pinnock takes dramatic cues from her analysis of Philip’s Rough Crossings: “It is an alienation technique that invites the audience to engage critically with the performance” (Pinnock 2018: online). The filming of the whipping scene of the film is performed on stage, for the theatre audience to see. Lou’s subsequent critique of “[w]hite people getting off on sentimental horror” (Pinnock 2021: 44) is consequently directed at the audience itself, an accusation that is reminiscent of Brecht’s anti-sentimentalist estrangement-effect. 6. Intertextual haunting One central intertext that alludes to attempts of painting real events as a merely dramatic spectacle is Shakespeare’s The Tempest. In a central scene of Rockets and Blue Lights, Roy, a fellow actor of Lou, tries to console her after a fight, by quoting from Shakespeare’s tragicomedy: “Wipe thou thine eyes; have comfort” (Pinnock 2021: 72). Pinnock subverts cultural narratives and highlights how pre-existing intertexts shape and mis-shape what we see and how we see: “Therefore not only is the play haunted by the Christoph Singer 66 memory of other plays and performances, but it also could be said to haunt itself” (Pinnock 2018: online). Lou is aware that she is contributing, as an actress, to this discursive double-movement of, firstly, hiding the victim’s voices, while, secondly, further perpetuating problematic narrative structures and images of suppression. In conversation with her sister Vonnie, Lou remembers an episode of the science fiction TV-show where she plays a character called Captain Sola Andrews of the spaceship SS Rego. In this specific episode, Lou recalls that we transported these androids to the island of Phobos, but we didn’t realise that they had this malware, which made them go against the robotic code of servility. This gave them an instinct for rebellion. This is stupid […]” (Pinnock 2021: 58) This sci-fi allegory of the middle-passage and the slave trade equates her fictional character, Captain Andrews, with a slave trader. Important to note is Lou identification with the character she plays; her repeated use of the pronoun “we” indicates her identification with the character and his actions, which leads Lou to read the robots’ desire to be free as a “malware” (Pinnock 2021: 58). While this allegory of the slave trade presented as a sci-fi narrative is rather on the nose, the play uses this episode to highlight how ingrained certain narratives remain in cultural memory. On the one hand, one could read this as an example of the repressed past haunting the present. On the other hand, it could be approached as an attempt of hiding the black experience in the background of a sci-fi-narrative, a process that evokes Isiah Lavender III’s notion of the Blackground (Lavender III: 2011). Another central intertext is of course J.M.W. Turner’s painting “The Slave Ship,” which not only features prominently in the very first scene, but throughout the play. The first scene addresses the intermedial interplay and the problem of seemingly mimetic reproduction. The stage directions indicate that Essie, a Black teacher in her thirties, and Lou “stare at Turner’s painting The Slave Ship (which the audience can’t see) on the ‘fourth wall of a museum on board a ship, which is the reproduction of a slaver” (Pinnock 2021: 8). In the background, a group of schoolchildren are asked to perform a coffle-walk, that is a recreation of group of chained and enslaved people walking to their unknown destination. Standing on a replica of a slave ship and looking at Turner’s painting, Lou claims: “England is an abolition theme park right now, and I hate the way this painting contributes to the abolitionist narrative of white saviourism” (Pinnock 2021: 10). This statement sets the scene for the ensuing discussion of Lou’s and the audience’s complicity with this “abolition theme park.” Pinnock highlights these forms of complicity by means of various dimensions of hauntology, which are described by Tina Paphitis as follows “hauntings are also personal memories, collective histories, or physical remains” (Paphitis A hauntological reading of Pinnock’s Rockets and Blue Lights 67 2020: 342). In Pinnock’s play these hauntings range from Lou playing a ghost herself, to past and present increasingly merging. This set-up also highlights the thematic interplay of absence and presence. Whereas readers of the dramatic text will be immediately alerted to the painting’s identity by the stage-directions, a theatre audience must rely on Essie and Lou’s description thereof: “nightmare”, “feeding frenzy by the undertow,” “[a]mber, gold, chrome, the darkest sea” (Pinnock 2021: 8). Only later, Essie explicitly mentions the name “Turner.” The audience does not see a reproduction of the real work but Essie’s and Lou’s reactions to the painting and, consequently, a pre-mediated interpretation thereof. The different levels of removing the historical event from its artistic representation, however, do not diminish the painting’s disturbing effect. Lou wonders: “Why does he [Turner] make something so ugly beautiful? ” This scene’s intertextuality becomes problematic when Lou also alludes to John Ruskin, one of Turner’s supporters and friends: “I am not surprised that this painting drove Ruskin mad. It’s beginning to have the same effect on me” (Pinnock 2021: 12). Interestingly, Lou shares Ruskin’s reaction to the painting. Just like him she feels forced to focus on the representation rather than the represented. In 1843, John Ruskin’s book on Modern Painters relegates several pages to Turner’s painting, in which Ruskin expresses the oft-quoted sentiment: “I believe, if I were reduced to rest Turner’s immortality upon any single work, I should choose this” (Ruskin 1848: 377). The significance of Ruskin’s analysis of Turner’s artwork lies in his eliding of the depicted crime. While Ruskin does refer to the “guilty ship” (ibid.) he refers to the murder in a single footnote. Here he states: “She is a slaver, throwing her slaves overboard. The near sea is encumbered with corpses” (Ruskin 1848: 377). And while these two sentences reduce the enslaved to a passive group, Ruskin does personify the heaven and does humanize the sea as seen in “The Slave Ship: ” the “rain-clouds are moving” and “lose themselves; ” the ocean lifts “its bosom,” after the “torture of the storm” (Ruskin 1848: 376). The victim, for Ruskin, it seems, is the sea rather than the drowned. In Rockets and Blue Lights, Lou - despite being attuned to the atrocities of the slave trade - is similarly distracted by the painting’s beauty in contrast to the terrific events depicted: “I look at this painting and I don’t think about what’s just happened to those poor men, women, children. They’re invisible” (Pinnock 2021: 9). However, the play makes clear that the past literally speaks to the present. When Lou studies Turner’s painting, she feels haunted: “I thought I saw … That’s ridiculous. There! Look, she did it again. She pulled her head out of the water. She looked right at me” (Pinnock 2021: 12). This spectral presence depicted in the exposition recalls Derrida’s description thereof: “because this non-object, this non-present present, this being-there of an absent or departed one no longer belongs to knowledge. […] One does not know if it is living or if it is dead” (Derrida 1993: 5). Christoph Singer 68 Throughout the play, Lou becomes acutely aware of her own complicity with the abolition theme park she criticizes. The replica of the slave ship she is standing on, was, after all, the central set-piece of the film The Ghost Ship she starred in, and for which she is about to receive an award. She does so, knowing that the film itself neither lives up to her standards, nor is well-received by those interested in the topic. Essie, for example, cautiously states: “Yes, I’ve seen it. It has its moments, but …” (Pinnock 2021: 9) Lou is made to realize that the film’s message, regardless of her own political intentions, will ultimately be influenced by those providing the funding. The film’s director Trevor points out: “The conditions for the grant from the Abolition Legacy Foundation require that the film commemorates the bicentenary of the abolition” (Pinnock 2021: 36). The scene hints at the limitations of counter-hegemonic discourses within the very hegemonic structures that make them possible in the first place. This recalls Derrida’s statement “that hegemony still organizes the repression and thus the confirmation of a haunting. Haunting belongs to the structure of every hegemony” (Derrida 1993: 46). 7. Conclusion Winsome Pinnock’s play Rockets and Blue Lights is a play intent on telling a more inclusive as well as critical history of Britain, an approach that is evoked by Brydie’s following argument To remember the past in a certain way or with a certain intention presupposes an implicit assumption of what the future is or could be. The spectre and its ghostly companion memory represent a means of grappling with non-linear understandings of past, present, and future meanings, and thus demonstrate a mechanic for handling past and future temporalities in the pure present of postmodernity. (Brydie 2020: 907) What makes Pinnock’s implementation of hauntological thoughts so appealing is that they are not merely reduced to either a dramatical gimmick on the conceptual level or to a cheap way of creating suspension on the plot-level. The play not only manages to point out the silences and gaps in historiography and to dissect the discourses that keep select historical narratives in place. Pinnock presents a play that, on the one hand, stands in the neo-Brechtian tradition of playwrights like Edward Bond and Howard Brenton, a play that invites the audience to ask questions without necessarily providing the comfort of answers. This method is reminiscent of Pinnock’s own approach to J.M.W. Turner’s “Slave Ship.” In a comment, which was published on the Tate Gallery’s homepage, Pinnock states that “Turner’s work asks you to think, and to take action - something the Black A hauntological reading of Pinnock’s Rockets and Blue Lights 69 Lives Matter movement has suggested people have not been doing. Now, more than ever, it’s important that people see this painting, and think about what it is saying” (Pinnock 2020: online). This practice of seeing the hidden, of grappling with Turner’s beautiful rendition of a terrifying event and its place in cultural memory, to become aware of the hidden and the forgotten past in the cultural texts and behaviours of the present Pinnock adapts to and transforms for the stage, a place where interpretation and analysis becomes in Pinnock’s words a communal practice (Pinnock 2018: online). References Aguiar, Fred (1997). Feeding the Ghosts. London: Granta Publications. Adebayo, Mojisola (2020). Wind/ rush generation(s). 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West Indies vs. England in Winsome Pinnock’s migration narratives. Contemporary Theatre Review 14 (4): 23-33. Christoph Singer Department of English Innsbruck University