What happens when a lawyer turns to poetry and listens to legal documents to hear the voices of her enslaved ancestors? The answer is: Zong! M. NourbeSe Philip’s 182-page poem based on a legal document pertaining to an event in 1781, when the captain of the slave ship Zong murdered one hundred and fifty Africans by throwing them overboard, in order to collect insurance money by claiming them as lost property.
Zong! challenges ideas about legal rights and violence and personhood. The author listens for the voices of ancestors. Zong! is subtitled: As told to the author by Setaey Adamu Boateng. Who is Setaey Adamu Boateng? Philip writes, “Setaey Adamu Boateng is the voice of the ancestors revealing the submerged stories of all who were on board the Zong.”
Philip creates characters in the poem from the five-hundred words in the original document, the legal decision Gregson v. Gilbert. Most significantly, Philip creates “ruth”, a name with biblical resonances, coming from the word “truth” with the “t” erased. Philip makes use of white space on the page to point to the relentless erasure of people and voices. It is through erasure that she turns around and interrogates the source material used to construct the poem. While erasure is an experimental art form that many modern poets employ, Philip takes hers a step further. Of her process, she writes:
I murder the text, literally cut it into pieces, castrating verbs, suffocating adjectives, murdering nouns, throwing articles, prepositions, conjunctions overboard, jettisoning adverbs: I separate subject from verb, verb from object—create semantic mayhem, until my hands bloodied, from so much killing and cutting, reach into the stinking, eviscerated innards, and like some seer, sangoma, or prophet who, having sacrificed an animal for signs and portents of a new life, or simply life, reads the untold story that tells itself by not telling.
Since its initial publication, many experimental performances of this work have been created. One might think of these as translations or further iterations of Philip’s experiment. To my great delight, on September 25th, Greywolf Press released a fifteenth-anniversary edition of Zong! with two new essays by Saidiya Hartman and Katherine McKittrick that help frame and shape our understanding of this radical and brilliant poem. Read it!
Rena J. Mosteirin wrote Experiment 116 (Counterpath press, 2021), Half-Fabulous Whales (Little Dipper, 2019) and Nick Trail’s Thumb (Kore Press, 2008). She is the co-author of Moonbit (punctum books, 2019) an academic and poetic exploration of the Apollo 11 guidance computer code. Mosteirin is an editor at Bloodroot Literary Magazine, teaches creative writing workshops at Dartmouth College and owns Left Bank Books, a used bookstore in Hanover, New Hampshire.