Dead Men Tell No Tales: Memory in Fred D'Aguiar's Feeding the Ghosts

The past does not belong to the dead. It never ends and it never rests. It is constantly told and retold and kept alive in the historical memory of man. The aim of this article is to provide an analysis of the role and function of memory, both within and outside the novel Feeding the Ghosts and to examine its significance within the tradition of the eighteenth-century Middle Passage slave trade. It will trace the politics and poetics of remembering and resistance, of forgetting and forgiving, and will look at the novel’s reconstruction of historical memory through fiction as a project of mourning through memorialization.