M. NourbeSe Philip’s ZONG!

In November 1781, Captain Luke Collingwood of Slave Ship ‘Zong’ ordered that 150 African-Americans be murdered by drowning so that the Gregson slave-trading syndicate could collect insurance monies on lost cargo. A total of 121 were thrown overboard, whilst a further 10 committed suicide, knowing that they would be next. The case exemplified the horrors of the slave trade.

227 years later, in 2008, M. NourbeSe Philip undergoes an act of recuperation, in the form of a New Poetics. Her book of poetry, ZONG!, is a ‘haunting lifeline between archive and memory, law and poetry.’ With difficulty of pronunciation, she attempts an act of recovery: the recovery of lost narratives and under-represented history. She recuperates and mourns the forgotten with her memoir for the victims of the Zong massacre.

The sole document that remains from the Zong massacre is the legal document of the Gregson v Gilbert case. Within this, the ship-owners, Gregson, were claiming for the loss of their slaves, from their under-writers, Gilbert. NourbeSe Philip’s piece is composed entirely of fragments from this legal document. When writing, she doesn’t tell the story, but un-tells the story, reversing the White Narrative, and thus constructing an anti-narrative. This is her New Poetics, her avant-garde approach to poetry that haunts the spaces of memory and forgetting. This New Poetics relies on the aforementioned difficulty to tell, to write, to speak. And, conversely, the difficulty to read: the difficulty to absorb counter-narrative. The jargon of the legal document is communicated in the form of disintegrated phonemes on the page. The reader chokes, and drowns, on scattered words amongst the blank spaces for breath. The further we read, the more claustrophobic this becomes. In ‘Ebora,’ NourbeSe Philip over-writes her text with corrections, overlaps, and erasures. Fundamentally, ZONG! is an attempt to recuperate the un-recuperable. It is this failure to communicate, and to speak, which is so poignant, and, in fact, gives the text its power. It’s silence speaks loudly of issues of Race. This functions two-fold, both in terms of the poet’s experimental use of this legal document, as well as in her use of the space of the page, the space of the sea, and the space of the Slave Ship. The former allows for an exploration of issues of Afro-Pessimism and natal alienation, as will be discussed further.

Foremost, I will consider NourbeSe Philip’s use of the legal document as a word store in her poetry. The document is heavy with legal jargon that points towards the fungibility of the body in trade in the 1700’s. Despite efforts by Granville Sharp to bring murder charges into the trial, the case remained one of ‘chattel property.’ By means of systems of power and discourse, the victims of the Zong massacre are determined ‘possessions,’ ‘tangible, moveable assets.’ Economically, the people become fungible assets: commodities to which their individual units are essentially interchangeable. The poet portrays this most powerfully in Zong! #3. This begins, ‘the some of negroes.’ Here, she manipulates the English Language, particularly the English Language of the document, to provide a dual meaning. In one way, this phrase, particularly the determiner ‘some,’ communicates a collective. The collective of ‘slaves’ on the ship. However, when read aloud, as NourbeSe Philip intends of her poem, this determiner has the potential to be interpreted as the noun ‘sum.’ The mathematical and economical noun for an amount: an amount of money. The poet undercuts the words of the law, and her own words, with another narrative: the Other narrative, in which Black lives are utilised as currency.

Language thus functions within systems of control and power as a way of coding identity, and, ultimately, dehumanising the Black body. Word is a William Burroughs-esque Virus, infecting ZONG! and infiltrating the page, predetermining the lives of those at the heart of the historical Zong narrative. Within the legal text, there is no recorded speech nor any names used. The true identities and consciousness’ of the victims cannot be accessed, their voices are lost to the abyss of erasure and white-washing. This site of lack exemplifies the disservice of the literary and historical canons to work outside of dominant and corrupt systems of control and power.

With ZONG!, NourbeSe Philip attempts to represent this void as she bears witness to what is missing. She doesn’t imagine the victims for us: she doesn’t provide us with stories and constructed speech, but with unfeeling, disorder, and illogic. Using the text of the legal decision as a word store, the poet takes this only remaining document and tells the story that cannot be told, but must be told. Telling and un-telling Black history. The legal text is revealed in ZONG! in un-comprehensive fragments, constructing a commentary on the redundancy of the case. It is nonsensical. Take Zong #10 for instance, which reads, ‘should have / was reduced / retarded / rendered / could / found / given / sailed / bring to / occurred.’ Pieced together, these words and phrases are rendered void. The nonsense on the page is haunted by that which lies beneath it, within the para-text. Distinguished by a horizontal line in the Wesleyan University Press addition, NourbeSe Philip lists the names of the 131 lost lives of Zong underneath her primary text. Their silence haunts the text. The fact that these names are positioned below the standard poetic space of the page is highly significant: they are positioned under. They are under the sea level, below the seen and heard narrative. NourbeSe Philip’s chapter title’s confirm this, which include ‘Oz,’ and ‘Ebora,’ translated as bones, and underwater spirits. These haunting spirits are able to communicate on an alternative level to language: by means of music and poetry. The rhythm and the movement of the poetry becomes a valid language of communication as the body finds ways to understand and feel in more than just words. It seeks to work outside of the systems of discourse, control and power. Even just NourbeSe Philip’s repetition alone demonstrates the success of this project. In ‘Sal,’ the poet uses sibilance, most prevalent on page 63 — ‘save us os / salve / & save / our souls tone.’ The ‘Sal’ (salt) of the sea sits on the tongue, and repetition forces remembrance. Through the nonsense of the legal text, NourbeSe Philip un-tells. Through her silence, she ‘anchors’ ‘power,’ in a strictly Foucauldian sense.

The space of the sea dominates ZONG! It is the site of trauma, and is manifest in NourbeSe Philip’s work in the vast space of the page. D’Aguiar labels the work an ‘abyssal descent into the depths of the sea,’ as the poet fights to bring back bodies from the water. The lines of her poetry are waves on a sea-scape, and her words float, often alone, on the page. Zong #3’s use of enjambment confirms NourbeSe Philip’s intentions of a figurative visual and poetic narrative. ‘Over’ sits on the edge of the line, whilst ‘board’ falls, and is forced by the current to begin a new line at the opposite end of the page. This portrays the movement of going overboard. Within these two lines, NourbeSe Philip imagines the sea and the act of massacre.

Allan Sekula and Noël Burch allow for a further reading of the use of space in ZONG! with their discussion of the forgotten space of the sea in their film Forgotten Space. They bring light to the ‘Book of Genesis,’ in which watery expanses are utilised as a ‘symbol of the primordial undifferentiated flux, the substance that became created natures only by having form imposed upon or wedded to it.’ This identified ‘primordial undifferentiated flux’ is something that resonates with NourbeSe Philip’s text. Firstly, the term ‘flux’ suggests an action of passing, of flowing in and out, of continuous change. In episode 118 of PoemTalk, ‘Question Therefore the Age,’ Al Filreis identifies a space of limbo. However, he doesn’t relate this to the space of the sea, but, alternatively, to the space of the ship. He notices that ‘limbo’ represents both a recreational dance, often performed on Afro-Caribbean cruise ships, as well as the small space below deck. It is this former space that is important. It is a space in flux, a liminal space between ship and water. ZONG! sits here, in flux, and in memoriam of the people below deck. Further, the term ‘primordial’ suggests the beginning of time. It works in harmony and resistance to the aforementioned flux. The ship, the sea, and the page and the words, are primordial with regards to ZONG!.

The space of ZONG! is a primordial natal space, in which the subject-hood of Black lives are interrogated and fought for by NourbeSe Philip. The natal space is a space pre-birth, and thus on the threshold between object-hood and subject-hood. This functions in line with the previous discussion with regards to the dehumanisation of the Black body by means of language. With legal jargon, the Black body becomes an object: ‘property.’ They become an object within a space, rather than a subject that constructs space. Evidently, the law can alter what is, and what is not. The poet demonstrates an awareness of the boundaries of living and un-living in her work. Her repetitive use of the verb ‘to be’ in Zong! #21 exemplifies this. ‘To be’ denotes existence. With the disorder of this, and thus the disorder of grammar and the loss of language, NourbeSe Philip disrupts what is comfortable about language, what we trust of language, and the way in which language creates being. The poet performs language to disturb what it means to exist, whilst disturbing the materiality of the body and the materiality of the paper.

Orlando Patterson’s Slavery and Social Death furthers the metaphor of the natal space with his idea of natal alienation. Patterson illuminates the way in which Slaves are removed from their genealogical heritage. As an infant, they are removed from their mother’s care, and thus removed from the knowledge of language. He describes this as a ‘fundamental breach,’ which is un-recuperable. In his terms, the Slave community cannot fulfil the literal and metaphorical journey: both from object to subject, and across the Atlantic. They perform both a social death, and a real death, on their course. The becoming-object is effected by slavery, as ‘black existence [is] fundamentally marked by social death.’ They lack a stable or guaranteed social subjectivity. Thus, NourbeSe Philip’s ZONG! utilises the space of the ship, the sea, and the page, to demonstrate the attack against Black subjectivity that dominates the Zong massacre. She imagines a primordial state in which the Slave community exist in a lack: their existence is determined by the elite — their Captain’s and the lawyers, as well as the writers and erasers of narratives.

As the ‘Subaltern,’ the subjects of Zong ‘cannot appear without the thought of the elite.’ NourbeSe Philip cannot tell their story without the thought of the Gregson v Gilbert legal trial, and they remain mortal in the sea of her New Poetics. With this commentary, the poet uncovers issues of natal alienation, and Afro-Pessimism, whilst constructing a memoir for the 131 African-Americans that lost their lives in November 1781 at the hands of systems of control, discourse and power. She overcomes resistance and the difficulty of story-telling to recuperate the un-recuperable.