The Archive and Affective Memory in M. Nourbese Philip's Zong!

Abstract

Trinidadian Canadian poet M. NourbeSe Philip fashions her poems from the only record of an infamous incident in which 142 African slaves were drowned at sea so that their owners might collect insurance. By fragmenting the language of maritime law, the book of poems, Zong! As Told to the Author by Setaey Adamu Boateng, exposes its silences as spaces of affect, which are extra-linguistic spaces that contain the humanity of the drowned slaves and also allow for a deep connection with a traumatic past. The disembodied sounds and voices a reader sees and hears in the poems – words that do not conform to the grammar of language and sounds that evoke an intuitive response rather than thought and contemplation – constitute a more visceral form of memory than storytelling. An affective memory may lack the materiality of archival memory or the solidity of reconstructed lives, but its appearance in Philip's poems exposes the violence of an archive in which a slave experience is immaterial.