POETRY of M. NourbeSe Philip
Zong!

Zong! is NourbeSe Philip's most recent book of poetry. Published by Weslyan University Press, and by The Mercury Press in Canada,  this extended poetry cycle is based on a legal decision, at the end of the eighteenth century, related to the murder of Africans on board a slave ship.

A haunting lifeline between archive and memory, law and poetry

In November, 1781, the captain of the slave ship Zong ordered that some 150 Africans be murdered by drowning so that the ship’s owners could collect insurance monies. Relying entirely on the words of the legal decision Gregson vs Gilbert—the only extant public document related to the massacre of these African slaves—Zong! tells the story that cannot be told yet must be told. Equal parts song, moan, shout, oath, ululation, curse, and chant, Zong! excavates the legal text. Memory, history, and law collide and metamorphose into the poetics of the fragment. Through the innovative use of fugal and counterpointed repetition, Zong! becomes an anti-narrative lament that stretches the boundaries of the poetic form, haunting the spaces of forgetting and mourning the forgotten.

“Those still confused about why poetry might fracture and splinter and stutter can find an answer in the work of M. NourbeSe Philip. In Zong! she delves into the trauma of the plantation economy and allows her language to be shaped by the conflicts between telling and not telling, between naming and not naming that define the horrifying story of the slave ship Zong! This book is exceptional and uniquely moving.”—Juliana Spahr, author of This Connection of Everyone with Lungs

“Zong! pushes its readers to understand the Zong incident in the complex contexts of both African spirituality, languages, and regions and the British (Western) slave trade and law, with its assumed racism yet sincerely attempted pursuit of justice. The poems work powerfully at the individual level and even more powerfully as a sequence to call attention to the scantiness of our knowledge of the history of African enslavement from any perspective but that of slave holders or legal documents and to question the assumptions about ‘fact’ and ‘value’ assumed by that perspective. Like reconstructed archaeological shards, Philip’s poems give us pieces combined in different orders and to different effects, building a story in such disjointed terms that it implies the tale cannot be simply known or told. As Philip herself says, she is finding ways ‘to “not-tell”’ the story of the Zong—just as Toni Morrison both relates Sethe’s story in Beloved and declares ‘This is not a story to pass on.’”—Cristanne Miller, Edward H. Butler Professor of Literature, University at Buffalo SUNY

While still unpublished, an early version of one poem was published  in Facture,  four poems, along with an introduction, were published in Fascicle and two poems were published in boundary 2. 

A dramatized reading of this new poem cycle, was workshoped and presented at Toronto Harbourfront as part of  "rock.paper.sistahz" in April 2006. 

This production was directed by Diane Roberts with actors Andrea Henry, Andy Marshall, Lili Francks and Xuan Fraser. Yvette Martin was the stage manager with Natalie Wood and Mark Prince as contributing artists.

Copy of event brochure below

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