ABSTRACT
In ‘Middle Passage Anancy’, Andrew Salkey places Anancy the spiderman on a rock in the mid-Atlantic to witness the Dance of the Souls of the Dead Slaves. Before him rise the victims of the Middle Passage, dancing their fate to the beat of tribal drums, gunshots and the voices of Europe. Containing and releasing the souls of the ancestors, the ocean becomes a repository of both continuity and change, of history and transformation, at once eternal and infinitely mutable:
boiling up and bursting and letting go all the stories of pain and suffering and brutality and horrors it been hiding quiet mongst the stillness of shipwreck and planewreck and sargasso grass and submerge mountain and earthquake whispers.2
