Zong! As Told to the Author by Setaey Adamu Boateng, M. NourbeSe Philip, FifteenthAnniversary Edition
InvisiblePublishing, 2023
I write with a certain measure of doubt asto whether I have the ability to meaningfully add to the discussion around thisbook. Zong! opened possibilities forpoets and the visual aspects of its form (the methodical filling in of the fullspace of the page through gaps allowing each cluster of words to breathe) madeits way to me before I even read it. This book has been read out loud by somany voices to create as many echoes as possible for the voices the authorwanted to bring back to life; it deserved an anniversary edition so it could bediscovered anew, like new; it required a reedition and a restatement of itspurpose and being after it was flattened in an unauthorized translation.
I doubt myself, but I see Philip doubtingherself in the entries she shares from her writing journal. The weight of Zong!’s history and of the history itcarries, combined with the weight of the book itself, makes the paper even morebeautiful, the reading even more solemn. The new essays it contains, by Philipherself, Katherine McKittrick, and Saidiya Hartman, come to explore itssignificance, both at the time of writing and in relation to the scholarship onslavery and Black life. In every aspect of these poems and of the texts thatsupport them there is song, there is incantation, there is a singing of thedead to rest and a singing of those who lived to be slaves to another kind ofrest. To read it is to learn about the possibilities of reappearance of whatwas thought to be lost and to participate in bringing it back to the surface,to another kind of life.
I
Books only come through books, like voicesonly continue the speaking of earlier voices.
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This book comes announced, lauded, read,spoken. Reeditions are rare, anniversaries even more so. Its merit is alreadyestablished, it only needs to be discovered anew. Once opened and its pagesfelt, its chronology effaces itself, it propels itself, it finds its own wind.Yet having been talked about and around, mentioned, named, it remains moregrave, more solemn, its aims grander, wider – too wide for any two hands.
II
Voice is material. Carried onto paper,voice brushes against ideas, faces its flattening. Writing is an effort tomaintain a voice.
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The material is everywhere, the words areostentations, pointings, cries. The poems are told by a person who is fictionalbut entirely real in their standing in for others unnamed and unknown; told bythose who reported in cold legal prose on a mass killing; told by a person whocarries rather than author, molds rather than create, compose for an ensemblerather than paint. There is urgency in the timber, furious helplessness in thesilences and spaces; resignation in the inability to choose the voices heard;new meaning in the vibration of ink on the paper; creation and new life in thecapacity to tell, to rearrange, to refuse a linear telling.
III
The changing of verb tenses createsequivalence as well as difference. They who tell are out of time at the momentof telling, ahead of what is to be told, behind the arrival of their words.Those written, those writing, those receiving the words are entirely present toone another, fully alive – but not at the same time.
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Taking on someone else’s voice createsequivalence in spite of any difference in humanity, in treatment, in respect.Philip knows this and searches the entanglement of authority and justification– “the could.” She deflects her own authorship, deflects the authorship of thelegal documents, finds herself and places us at the moment of an act that canneither be authored, claimed, recognized, nor be justified. In “Zong! #19” shepermutates authorship and justification until they cease to bring any certainty– shows both as neither afloat nor grounded, perhaps only run aground, withouta reason. In “Zong! #9” lines on the right-hand side end with “in” until “in”moves to the left side at the end of the poem. She breaks the harmony ofrepetition, opposes her authorship to the author of the document and to theauthor of the action, even as she refuses to have the last word.
IV
Silence is not a gap; it is what up-holdsspeech.
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Permutation and erasure make us experiencethe bad faith in the speech of legal documents, the speech of declarations, thespeech of sales; they make us see the choice of words as well as the choice ofdeeds and the impossibility of their meeting. Murderers and underwriters, allthose who take part in the slavery that stops being ‘ordinary’ or ‘of thetime’, lose all their ties and positions, are left out to drift without ananchor or any recourse. The poet and the voices she carries choose their deeds asbelonging, as actions against their own dehumanization and deaths.
V
Not every text is within every text. Everytext can be turned into its opposite. Not everyone is capable of everything –or anything. Within the words we speak there is potential for fewer words. Weneed only speed up, chop up, to give life to what the text had prevented.
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The section titled “DICTA” is aboutpermutations and the hope that some version of the past might have led to adifferent reality. Words are aligned, each and none qualifying the reality theyattempted to slant, to distort. The tort is turned against them, then, becomesunspeakable harm, as the succession of events is both ascertained and affirmedand shown as possibly other, possibly fictitious, replaceable. Other eventscould have taken place, every murder of slaves disguised as loss of cargo couldhave been imagined, every person taken could have remained with their lovedones, carried on with their lives.
VI
There are always many people in eachvoice. Voices are not found, voices are composed.
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Philip sought out voices, and ensured thather own did not drown them again. There is attribution of a first telling to acollective voice, that of Setaey Adamu Boateng. Philip lets voices pass intohers, not through hers, does not make them a vehicle for her own (and here Isadly flatten the page onto a single line, marking distance with a >):
“tes moi> je am he / am at last > omi water / l eau > l eau” (84)
She does not delineate or distinguishvoices, nothing cuts through them. Slave owner and slave are at a distance butin tension through their bonds.
In other poems, she separates each ‘s’from the words it pluralizes, thus keeping the plural at a distance, keepingthe third person at a distance, maintaining the individuality not of eachdeath, but of each life. Plurality exists in distance on these pages, in acoming together Philip makes possible. And the coming together is clear: Philiplets us feel the proximity of words by separating them, but also by movingbetween languages. These poems are a microcosm of the rest of the book, wherethe same separation is performed upon words; this separation of the plural ‘s’reminds us of the aim of the book as a whole, the smallest distance being themost deeply felt.
VII
Experimental writing is writing that makesus learn to read again, writing that is exhausting because it does not rely onhabits, because it aims to break habits to make us hear what we could not hear,beautiful because we can feel what we are achieving by reading.
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The second last section is the mostchallenging to read. Most of the text is chopped up into small bits, coupletsof words. Reading requires so much effort in bridging the gaps between thewords. There is so much meaning to create, so much meaninglessness to overcome.
Similar clustering of parts of words canbe found throughout the book. The format of publication of this review limitswhat we can do, a picture from page 134 will serve as an example for those whohave not yet encountered the book:
Philip protested against a translationupon which there had been no agreement and, more importantly, which flattenedher poem. She was right to do so: no matter in which language, “we are outsideof time and out of time” would not read the same as
“ers we a > re out s > ide of timeand o /
>ut of ti > m dar” (144)
VIII
The law silences and ends speech. Evenwhere certain devices elicit speech and defenses and discourses and dissentingopinions, others come to stop it, destroy its movement. Under the rule of law,speech must be constantly kept in movement, and some poetry can accomplish thistask.
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In the poem there is a challenge to theauthors, to the men who share in the responsibility of the crime and the largerdehumanization, as they are forced to reckon with their actions as they writeto women (Claire, Ruth, many others) – and as they avoid this reckoning,reflection, or responsibility by falling from the us to ius, that is, law,right, what they have the right to do by law. Philip shows that the law is whatholds them together, what binds them to others, and what makes them able toenslave and murder others. The law becomes an alibi, a well of bad faith, apermission, a disappearance of the “I” into an unspecified but well enforced“us.”
“let us / claire / just / us > just /us / & / ius” (94)
“in this age > of gin rum / & gunsthis age > of los negros les / nègres ignore the age > the rage ofsane / men just > us ruth just / us just ius”(115)
IX
Poetry can breathe life into what we canno longer experience as it was.
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So much of the poem is about making itpossible to tell the story, its horror, its mundanity, without flatteninglives, that the act itself only rarely appears, and only appears in its fullstrength. We see mourning on page 110; the weight of truth on page 111; anadmission of guilt on pages 120-121. On pages 140-141, we understand that ifthe horror is seen as sin, it is lessened, because it becomes both inescapable(humans are sinners) and expiable, thus forgivable.
X
To allow a story to tell itself is toavoid throwing it overboard in exchange for some kind of compensation orcertainty.
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Philip’s own thesis is that there is amystery in the story of the slaves aboard the Zong, “the mystery of evil.” Philip’s own thesis in writing thestory is that “this story must be told by not telling” (190) so that themystery may be preserved.
A story that cannot be told other than bynot telling cannot be flattened, have its gaps filled, have its refusal ofstructure brought into the immediate access granted by prose, have its hopeturned into certainty. Philip gives us poetry at its most political, as itrearranges the elements of reality, of certainty, as it refuses the alibis ofauthorship and justification, as it refuses the underwriting that holds upthose who risk others, as it rejects balance sheets, tidy orderings, andplacement.
Post-Scriptum
Other theses would be about slavery and(in)humanity. To continue turning slaves back from objects, cargo, resources,into human beings.
Writing them is beyond my current capacity– not my role as a reviewer or critic, which very much includes the need todevelop the capacity to do so, but exactly that current capacity as ability,that knowledge of a lack of knowledge, that reflection that ends at the fact ofignorance, that presence on my bookshelf of works by Saidiya Hartman, ChristinaSharpe, and Rinaldo Walcott. That current capacity as leading into a futurepossibility.
Jérôme Melançon writes and teaches andwrites and lives in oskana kâ-asastêki / Regina, SK. His third chapbook, Bridges Under the Water (2023), follows Tomorrow’s Going to Be Bright (2022) andCoup (2020), all with above/groundpress, as well as his most recent poetry collection, En d’sous d’la langue (Prise de parole, 2021). He has alsopublished two books of poetry with Éditions des Plaines, De perdre tes pas (2011) and Quelquespas quelque part (2016), as well as one book of philosophy, La politique dans l’adversité(Metispresses, 2018). He has edited books and journal issues, and keepspublishing academic articles that have much to do with some of this. He’s onvarious social media under variations of @lethejerome.
