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This article engages with several theoretical approaches to the Atlantic through its reading of Mireia Vancells’ historical novel Negra memòria (2013), which seems to call for a reckoning with Catalonia’s slave-trading past by presenting the reader with the diaries of a cook who, unintentionally, comes to work on a slaving ship. The novel’s depiction of the protagonist’s seafaring adventure resonates with the theories of Hester Blum and Nina Gerassi-Navarro, who understand the literary Atlantic as a space of individual freedom from the confines of the nation. The details of the labor and care of cooking, meanwhile, draw attention to the sea as a space of what Elizabeth DeLoughrey calls the Middle Passage’s “heavy waters,” in which the materiality of the slave trade produces a transnational modernity defined by violence, waste, and a spatial and temporal stasis. This article argues, however, that the temporal structures that frame the narrative, including the fact that the tale is a bildungsroman and that the diaries are supposedly found by a descendant in 2007, turn the mere act of telling the story into an absolution, one that ultimately suggests that Catalan society today need not engage with this past except as a curious artifact. Despite its attention to care, discourses of human rights, and its portrayal of the far-reaching, daily effects of the slave trade on everyday life in a wider Atlantic space, the novel perpetuates a logic of denial within Catalonia: by presuming to leave the effects of the slave trade in a past related only to a single, fictitious family, it allows both the family and the reader to elide recognition of their own implication in the vast systems of oppression the text claims to represent.
