Tobi Haslett
Out of a hateful vanishing and an untellable story, m. nourbeSe philip conjures language that gives form to a slave-ship massacre.
Zong! As told to the author by Setaey Adamu Boateng, by m. nourbeSe philip, Graywolf Press, 211 pages, $20
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Every catastrophe is different. Every man-made horror has its singular dimensions, its own special shape and depth. In Zong! As told to the author by Setaey Adamu Boateng, the book-length poem cycle first published in 2008 (and now republished in the US, after the UK’s Silver Press released a fifteenth-anniversary edition last year), m. nourbeSe philip gives form to a particular oblivion: the black lives lost in the Middle Passage. But not just the lives. The voracity of the plantations drove the plunder of specific places, each striped by local rituals, cultures, languages, and gods—a tightly woven matrix of belief and daily life. Slavery ravaged and debased that life, in the process cutting off captive Africans from a world of native meanings. philip’s cryptic text hints at the thickness of what was severed. The difficulty of these poems evokes the void—and its paradoxical plenitude.
This feat is achieved in part by philip’s fixation on a single court case. In 1781, over one hundred and fifty Africans were thrown into the Atlantic from the Zong, a slave ship bound for Jamaica. After errors in navigation led to a water shortage, which in turn led to the deaths of some “negroes” stowed onboard, the captain thought to exploit a peculiar contractual loophole. If the slaves were killed—not left to perish—then perhaps this forfeited “cargo” would be paid for by the ship’s insurers. A legal battle ensued. The jury sided with the captain. As far as the law was concerned, the massacre was either a slip-up or a permissible (shrewd) maneuver; the captain wasn’t charged with murder or censured in moral terms. The insurers appealed the decision, though there’s no record of a second trial. What we have is the original ruling, Gregson v. Gilbert, which is printed at the back of this book.
The document is just two pages, but it supplied philip with her “word store”—which is to say that Zong! abides by a protocol of loosening and shattering, retrieval and defacement, in order to voice the African presence in a sense extinguished twice: first assassinated on the open ocean, then effaced by British law. The only record of the black dead lies in the language of the official record. You can’t kill or injure an object, however, only damage or dispose of it, so in the legal case, the “negroes” are briskly inventoried as property: rows of fleshly (faceless) investments. Their slaughter is the trivial residue of the abstractions at stake in court. But philip longs to redeem the murdered. In the face of this hateful vanishing, she must narrate a non-event.
Zong!’s first section, “Os” (Latin for “bones”), is a suite of twenty-six poems composed entirely from words found in Gregson v. Gilbert. This is the start of “#20”:
this necessity of loss
this quantity of not
perils underwriters
insurers
of
the throw in circumstance
the instance in attempt
the attempt in voyage
the may in become
The case has been wrung—twisted—to release a suggestive lexical stream. You might hear, in “this quantity of not,” the slave trade’s vigorous splicing of accumulation and destruction; “the may in become” points to pure futurity—the risky, contingent unfurling that forms the basis of insurance itself.
But the point isn’t to solve every riddle. “There is no telling this story it must be told,” philip states in “Notanda,” the essay that follows the poems and gives an account of her research and writing—both a moving theory of her project, and (in an elegant irony) an unveiling of its final opacity. The line about telling the story recurs in various forms. “Only in not-telling can the story be told”; “The story that cannot be told must not-tell itself in a language already contaminated, possibly irrevocably and fatally.” By strapping herself to the legal text while also assaulting and inverting it, philip has made a language that screams from within its silences: not “non-meaning,” she insists, but “anti-meaning.”
The implications are vast—but precise. Sprung from Gregson v. Gilbert, each word becomes the Word. Which is to say that slashing the source to pieces exposes the metaphysical presuppositions of the law, of capital, of colonial power, in this case expressed in English and inflicted sadistically on blackness. And that trio of blasting forces is how “blackness” came to be: how disparate peoples and patterns of kinship were smelted into an abject status, one spited, essentialized “race.” Part of philip’s brilliance is that she finds a way to depict this. By holding fast to the moment of murder, staring deep into its pitilessness, she conjures the very plurality that the trade in slaves worked to eclipse. At some point in her writing, she elected to smudge her own formalist limits: she began to cut words from within the source words, producing novel, singing meanings and even the eruption of other languages. Some of them are West African: Yoruba, Twi, and Fon.
In the sections “Sal,” “Ventus,” “Ratio,” and “Ferrum” (in Latin, salt, wind, reason, iron), we see the fruit of this shift in process. New voices spring into view, as does a bloom of clashing allusions (Cain and Abel, Dido and Circe) as well as scraps of French, Spanish, Dutch—an incidental, stylized patois that is the flip side to the creole of philip’s native Tobago (mentioned in passing in the legal case). “The oba sobs”: the line is threaded through these later parts, both the pull of a disappeared world—oba is Yoruba for king—but also moaning, weeping, bellowing, groaning, the whole sensuous, vulnerable body that lies below and beyond mere “speech.” Hence the pages of unspooling letters, often forming words but sometimes hacked to subverbal hunks:
s s
o s
os
os
os
bone
Ripping the text up completely and then scattering the gnomic pieces wreaks havoc on another convention—the intact poetic line. This looseness is a form of density. The hundred-plus pages of spluttered type get more difficult to read, and (as you may have noticed) to quote. This strewing can look diagrammatic, like a delicate net of symbolic knots. But we’re also plunging through waves and wreckage: thrashing through absolute liquidity. (Ironic that pictorial poetry is sometimes called Concrete.)
Every catastrophe is different; so is every reading. This time, philip’s classicism throbbed more fiercely through my mind, as vast stretches of “Ventus,” “Ratio,” and “Ferrum” are shot through with explicit allusions to Homer and Virgil. The vanquishing of the eastern kingdom; the voyage across the sea; the ruthless, triumphant founding of a new empire in a new land: the un-tellable story of the Middle Passage is in fact a composite of blood-soaked epics, here elucidated by the delicate gesture of cutting “troy” from the word “destroyed.” (Gregson v. Gilbert: “the slaves were destroyed.”)
And streaming throughout these latter sections is the phrase “the poet of troy”—lifted not from the classics themselves, but from a now-famous statement by Mahmoud Darwish, referred to on occasion as the national poet of Palestine. When asked what use the modern era might find for the epic mode, he said, “There is no place for the Homeric poet, but there is a place for the poet of Troy. . . . I try to be the poet of Troy.”
The oba sobs: these words appear at the end of the poem. Every catastrophe is different, but the 2024 reader of Zong! may hear not only Priam, the king who weeps in the last book of the Iliad, but also his screaming present resonance in what Israel hopes will be a final conquest, a hypermodern Sack of Troy. Priam howls at the feet of his enemies for the body of his slaughtered child.
Tobi Haslett has written about art, film, and literature for n+1, Harper’s, and elsewhere.