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The South Atlantic Quarterly 100.1 (2001) 61-82



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Specters of the Atlantic

Ian Baucom


The sea is slavery. . . . Sea receives a body as if that body has come to rest on a cushion, one that gives way to the body’s weight and folds round it like an envelope. Over three days 131 such bodies, no, 132, are flung at this sea. Each lands with a sound that the sea absorbs and silences. . . . Those bodies have their lives written on salt water. The sea current turns pages of memory. One hundred and thirty one souls roam the Atlantic with countless others. When the wind is heard it is their breath, their speech. The sea is therefore home.

The Zong is on the high seas. Men, women and children are thrown overboard by the Captain and his crew. There is no fear or shame in this piece of information. There is only the fact of the Zong and its unending voyage and those deaths that cannot be undone. Where death has begun but remains unfinished because it recurs. Where there is only the record of the sea. . . . Those spirits feed on the story of themselves. The past is laid to rest when it is told.

—Fred D’Aguiar, Feeding the Ghosts

So begins and ends the Guyanese writer Fred D’Aguiar’s Feeding the Ghosts, a novelistic account of the 1781 massacre by drowning of 132 slaves aboard the slave ship Zong, a murder [End Page 61] ordered by the ship’s captain, Luke Collingwood, when he became aware that he had steered his ship off course, that his supplies of water and food were running out, that his “cargo” would perish before he could steer it to port, and that the only way for him to guarantee a profit to himself and the vessel’s Liverpool owners was to jettison all those sickly slaves who, by continuing to consume water, were “threatening” the welfare of their fellows and then to claim compensation for these jettisoned “goods” under the “salvage” clause of the Zong’s marine insurance policy. Collingwood ordered the murders, and on his return to London, when the insurers would not pay, he and the ship’s owners sued. A bizarre series of court cases followed. Collingwood died before the suit could reach court, but the owners pursued the case, whose successful outcome, from their point of view, depended on their need to prove that the slaves had indeed existed, that their agent had had them murdered, and that such a massacre was not only “necessary” but, under the operating laws of property, had conferred on each of the slave’s bodies a measurable and recoverable quantity of value—that, indeed, the only question of justice pertinent to this case was the question of the insurance company’s obligation to compensate the shipowners for their loss.1

On which point, let me pause for just a moment, for it is precisely with regard to questions of justice and value that the case of the Zong has a bearing upon that contemporary discourse of memory that I want to discuss, a discourse in which the theory of value upon which a politics of diasporic remembrance founds itself originates in a refusal to identify either value or justice with that law of exchange which was the true law governing the outcome of the Zong trials. For if it was a commercial triumph of the exchange principle that permitted the courts to find, as they did, that Collingwood had produced something of value in each of those moments in which a slave’s body hit the surface of the sea, that each such miniapocalypse was not only an apocalypse of death but an apocalypse of money, an apocalypse in which, through the metaphoric imagination of capital, death and the money form name one another as literal equivalents, then it was also a conceptualization of justice as exchange, the triumph of a classical thinking of justice codified for Enlightenment modernity in Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, that permitted what were to become a series of court...

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