“We’re always playing ghosts”. A hauntological reading of Winsome Pinnock’s drama Rockets and Blue Lights

Abstract

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.