Body as Battleground: Acts of Ingestion in D’Aguiar’s Feeding the Ghosts and Philip’s Zong!

This article explores the trope of ingestion in two literary representations of the 1781 Zong massacre, Fred D’Aguiar’s novel Feeding the Ghosts (1997) and M. NourbeSe Philip’s book-length poem Zong! (2008). In drawing attention to acts of ingestion, I seek to expand scholarly discussion of these two texts, which has to date somewhat stalled around framing them as confrontations with the traumatic past. Grounded in scholarship that argues that ingestion forms “political subjects” by “fusing the social with the biological” (Tompkins 1), this article posits the act of ingestion as a navigation of socio-historical/political forces. In these two texts, ingestion functions within systems of power wherein those in privileged positions can be consumers while the enslaved are excreters, with bodies in states of dissolution. Those benefiting from the slave trade are critiqued in these texts for their dystopic overconsumption and cannibalistic voraciousness, while those enslaved are portrayed in terms of the impossibility of achieving nourishment even when able to eat or drink. Although common theoretical assumptions link ingestion with empowerment, my exploration of these texts reveals the insufficiency of such an assumption. Since to consume is also to confront one’s dependence on and vulnerability to outside matter, for the enslaved the act of ingestion can be an incorporation of—and hence surrender to—one’s enslavement.