[In the following review of Feeding the Ghosts, Beck finds D'Aguiar's evocation of the slave trade interesting but unexceptional.]

In 1781 a fatal malady broke out on the slave ship Zong, killing seven crew members and many of the slaves. Fearing that sick slaves would lose all their value in Jamaica, Captain Cunningham commanded very ill slaves to be thrown overboard, in order to collect insurance on their deaths and to prevent the plague from spreading further on the ship. In a court trial in Liverpool, brought by the insurers against the investors, the judge sided with the investors, confirming once more the law that Africans are only “stock” to be bought and sold.

The main character in Fred D'Aguiar's latest novel is Mintah, a young African woman who had been taught English in a Danish Christian mission. When she is thrown overboard, for insubordination rather than for ill health, she almost miraculously climbs back on board, unnoticed, and, while in hiding, begins writing the story of her experience on the Zong. Based on a historical event, Feeding the Ghosts is a kind of documentary fiction, which re-creates one version of the Middle Passage. It may find its widest audience among young readers in schools, since its hero and heroine are young, its content is sensational without being salacious, and its style and structure are in the plain, straightforward mode.

Most of the book seems concerned with proving that Africans are human beings, not merely animals. The only white character who believes this is the homeless, blond cook's boy, who befriends Mintah in her hiding and presents the written account of her experience as evidence against the shipowners in the courtroom. Although the court in 1781 reaffirmed the slaves’ status as “livestock,” the book concludes with the victory of abolitionist sentiments in 1833, when the aged Mintah observes the celebrations for the end of slavery in Jamaica. Either because the story is perfunctorily told, or because such an issue is no longer high drama, this major part of the narrative is interesting but not compelling.

Part 3 builds upon the metaphor in the title, with “feeding the ghosts” referring to Mintah's attempts to keep alive and appease the spirits and memories of the 131 slaves cast overboard. She does so by helping twice that many slaves escape to freedom from Maryland to the North, by planting 131 trees, and by carving 131 figures out of wood, inspired by the African god of wood who also guided the hands of her wood-sculptor father in Africa. The novel itself both “feeds the ghosts” and, according to a universalizing voice in the epilogue, implicates all readers in the lives and deaths of the drowned slaves.

These metaphors, although apt, seem overwrought and come too late to raise the novel much above the ordinary. For the rich possibilities latent in Middle Passage narratives, one must still return to the allusive novel Middle Passage by Charles Johnson (1991; see WLT 65:4, p. 707) or to the fruitfully ambiguous long poem Turner by David Dabydeen (1994; see WLT 69:3, p. 629).