On First Looking Into NourbeSe’s “Zong!”

On First Looking into NourbeSe’s Zong!

Published in paperplates, Volume 7, Number 3: http://www.paperplates.org/

 Zong!, the book  length poem, according to its author, M. NourbeSe Philip, is the story that must be told, that can’t be told, that can only be told in its untelling.  Zong, the slave ship, is to the history of slavery what a concentration camp is to the history of the Holocaust, except there are no survivors to provide witness.  In lieu of a story, we have only a brief account of a trial, in 1783, between a shipping company and an insurance company: Gregson v. Gilbert .  The Mssrs. Gregson, the owners of  Zong, claimed that they were owed insurance on the loss of their “cargo”: 150 slaves thrown overboard in order to preserve the rest of the “cargo” when faced with dwindling supplies.   The voyage, intended to last six weeks, had gone off course due to the inexperience of its captain, and had instead taken four months. “Sixty negroes died for want of water…and forty others…through thirst and frenzy…threw themselves into the sea and were drowned; and the master and mariners…were obliged to throw overboard 150 other negroes.”  The claim was successful, and the Mssrs. Gilbert were ordered to pay. They appealed, but there is no record of that trial.

Out of this dry account, Philip, one of Canada’s leading and internationally acclaimed poets, has fashioned almost 200 pages of “untelling”: fragmented phrases, fractured words, incantations – an anti-narrative, an anti-canonical text which subverts the canon of English literature and thus, paradoxically, earns a place in it.

For Philip, a language that can state “were obliged to throw overboard 150 other negroes” is a violent speech; language as a legal construct excludes the very being-ness, the humanity of the murdered slaves. Grammar, and particularly the grammar of the law, is a forcing of meaning, when to contemplate Zong is to fall into meaninglessness, into Mysterium Iniquitatis – the mystery of evil.  To imagine the state of the slaves ordered overboard – did they even understand the language in which the orders were given?—is to have one’s face pushed right into a blank, arbitrary, random and nonsensical universe.  In such nihilism the very self is annihilated–one risks madness.  Zong!, seven years in the making, is not only a magnificent literary feat, it is an act of extraordinary personal courage.

Zong! is a very visual poem – words float and tremble on the page, adrift on the sea. To read it is to feel yourself drowning, then you get a breath, then you go under again.  “My mind it slips/falls in be/tween alpha and beta”. The mind is a meaning- making machine,  and as you read, you put back the fragments, make words out of letters, strive for wholeness, until it all falls apart, or transmutes into pure incantation.  In addition to Greek and Latin, Philip employs many languages that may have been spoken on the ship – French, Spanish, Portuguese, Arabic, Fon, Shona, Twi, Yoruba and West African patois.  Words in one language are written the same in another but mean something else, as in “sang/le sang”.  Many words are anagrammed:  Slave/salve.    Letters are dropped, and the reader reconnects them.  The voice of, presumably, the captain of the ship, addresses his African lover and slave, t ruth.  We add the “g” to sin to get “sing”, the “s” to “kin” to get “skin” and so on.  It’s a linguistic tour de force, like watching someone dance on a high wire of language.

In some purely technical respects Philip works like the Language Poets, who strive to strip language from its referents, to play with words and sounds separate from any objective meaning.  Yet her project is entirely other – smashing words until only sound, the sounds of rage, of incomprehension, of sobbing, remain.  She intends to use a violently fragmented language to stare into the heart of un-meaning, of un-telling, until the meaning and the story emerge, somewhere beyond logic and reason. In the beginning, the earth was without form, and void.  And in the beginning was the Word.  And both things were true, and co-existed, and do so to this day.

Walter Benjamin believed that “God made things knowable in their names”, that “every human language is really a failed and garbled translation of a divine language that speaks in things.”  Or, as Margaret Avison would have it, language is “sense/and sound of the immense.”  If Philip takes this already “failed and garbled” speech and further garbles it, is she in some sense working her way back to some kind of divine essence of language, through chant and moan and prayer?  There can be no exhumation of bodies drowned at sea, yet I think finally her poem is an incantatory re-incarnation of those lost Africans, and even of their murderers, who, in annihilating them, murdered their own souls.

Grief is something that happens to us, it is a multiplicity of experiences – sorrow, rage, confusion, helplessness.  Mourning, on the other hand, is the expression of loss through shared social rituals, most of which this secular, globalized, de-cultured culture has lost.  Zong! compels us to participate in Philip’s act of mourning, to co- and re-create those souls whom murder – and the language of colonial law —  has obliterated.  In one of the last lines of the poem, she writes: “my name is you.”

The deep pleasure and astonishment Keats felt when first reading Chapman’s translation of Homer resulted in one of the iconic sonnets of our language, written in 1817, 34 years after the Zong trial.   He compares his sense of discovery first, with an astronomer finding a new planet, and then with Cortez “discovering” the Pacific ocean and the new world:

Then felt I like some watcher of the skies

When a new planet swims into his ken;

Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes

He star’d at the Pacific–and all his men

Look’d at each other with a wild surmise–

Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

This is an excellent example of what NourbeSe is critiquing – a colonial metaphor seemingly innocently embedded in a sonnet studied by high school students.  Bold adventure and “discovery” mask the brutality, pillaging and murder of the civilization being “discovered.   Although we know so little about the Zong case, it became a flashpoint in the struggle to abolish slavery which was finally achieved in 1838. Today there is a growing international movement to provide reparations to the descendants of the transatlantic slave trade.  This can only be done if slavery is judged a crime against humanity; otherwise the statue of limitations prevails.  Zong! the book, like Zong the ship, has a role to play for those of us who wish to join our voices in the great and ongoing struggle to make reparations for colonial crimes and to continue to work against racism itself.

Robin Pacific

November, 2009