Moving the Bones: Multilingual Plasticity in Marlene NourbeSe Philip's Zong!

Abstract

Marlene NourbeSe Philip’s book-length poem Zong! (2008) is inspired by the 1781 massacre aboard the British ship Zong, whose crew threw about 150 slaves overboard in an attempt to ensure a reimbursement for the loss of their human “cargo.” Approximately 100 more slaves died from illness, thirst, and mental distress. The subsequent legal battle between the ship owners and the insurers declared the captain and the crew at fault, and set in motion the abolitionist movement’s campaign for a ban on the transatlantic slave trade in Britain, which came to pass in 1807.... Translating the insurance case into the poems, she excavates the bones of those who had perished in the ocean and moves them into the space of writing converted into a sacralized space of ritual and commemoration. At the same time as she conjures the dead, Philip also reorients the juridical focus of the case, revealing that it pivots around the question of ontology, which in turn demands an ethical consideration: Were the slaves human or non-human (cargo)? Against the idea that the slaves existed only as bare death (the intensified exclusion even from Agamben’s “bare life”), with almost no material records of their lives, Philip unlocks their untold story from the legal report’s tombstone in language, bringing its fragments/traces forth from the colonial past into the neoliberal future.