Gregson V. Gilbert

How can we tell a “story that cannot be told” about human suffering aboard a transatlantic slave ship? M. NourbeSe Philip’s book-length poem Zong! (2011) seeks to accomplish this task in a manner that implicates the reader in acts of both injury and repair. In so doing, Zong! teaches us about past human rights abuses and the ways in which they continue to influence us in the present, particularly as we consider our ethical responsibility as readers.

The back pages of the poem detail the historical event from which Philip’s work arose: the 1781 voyage of a ship, the Zong, which originally carried 470 slaves from the West Coast of Africa toward Jamaica. The ship became the subject of a contentious insurance dispute in Liverpool, England after its return to Britain. The reason? Late in the voyage, after hundreds of slaves had already perished, the captain massacred all 150 of the still-living slaves on board. The ship had been delayed for months due to “navigational errors on the part of the captain.” As a result of that delay, many had already died “for want of water,” while others, “through thirst and frenzy…threw themselves into the sea and were drowned.” The captain believed that, if the remaining slaves died of natural causes, the “owners of the ship would have to bear the cost, but if they were thrown alive into the sea, it would be the loss of the underwriters.” By killing the slaves, the captain reasoned that the ship owners could collect insurance money for their property— the people enslaved on the vessel.

Prior to the publication of Zong!, the history of this massacre existed almost solely within the insurance dispute claim, Gregson v. Gilbert (1783). From the case law, Philip created a highly experimental poem, repurposing precise language from this centuries-old claim. The result is a work in which fragmented words, letters, and utterances fill unlikely and often-overlapping spaces on the book’s pages. Writing of her method, the poet explains:

My intent is to use the text of the legal decision as a word store; to lock myself into this particular and peculiar discursive landscape in the belief that the story of these African men, women, and children thrown overboard in an attempt to collect insurance monies, the story that can only be told by not telling, is locked in this text.

In creating Zong!, Philip tasked herself with rewriting and recovering a lost history. The poem’s force, however, does not lie in its connection to a straightforward historical narrative. Instead, the work challenges the readers to grapple with their place in this history and, on a larger scale, their role in documenting and repairing human rights violations.

In considering the relationship between histories of violence and present ethical responsibilities, Philip has emphasized how Zong! confirms the significance of eighteenth-century texts in twenty-first-century struggles: “Many of the tools we use today in struggles for human rights were forged during the abolitionist movement against the trade and the practice of slavery.” Writing language, she clarifies, “are processes that we are familiar with and still practice, albeit in different ways in this digital age as we advocate on behalf of the myriad of situations that still entail the abrogation of human rights.”

Philip welcomes us to her poem with three epigraphs drawn from distinct historical moments: one from Dylan Thomas’s “And Death Shall Have No Dominion” (1933), a second from Shakespeare’s Hamlet (c. 1600), and a third from Wallace Stevens: “The sea was not a mask” (1936). The reader enters the text on familiar ground—familiarity with the literary figures quoted and familiarity with the form. Yet the poem jeopardizes this familiarity as we move swiftly into the first section of the book, entitled “Os.”

Spoken aloud, the title sounds like “us.” From its start, Zong! links us—Philip’s readers— to the subjects of the poem. Yet just as we feel we are within a knowable literary space, blanketed by epigraphs from...