Zong! As Told to the Author by Setaey Adamu Boateng, M. NourbeSe Philip, Fifteenth
Anniversary Edition
Invisible
Publishing, 2023
I write with a certain measure of doubt as to whether I have the ability to meaningfully add to the discussion around this book. Zong! opened possibilities for poets and the visual aspects of its form (the methodical filling in of the full space of the page through gaps allowing each cluster of words to breathe) made its way to me before I even read it. This book has been read out loud by so many voices to create as many echoes as possible for the voices the author wanted to bring back to life; it deserved an anniversary edition so it could be discovered anew, like new; it required a reedition and a restatement of its purpose and being after it was flattened in an unauthorized translation.
I doubt myself, but I see Philip doubting herself in the entries she shares from her writing journal. The weight of Zong!’s history and of the history it carries, combined with the weight of the book itself, makes the paper even more beautiful, the reading even more solemn. The new essays it contains, by Philip herself, Katherine McKittrick, and Saidiya Hartman, come to explore its significance, both at the time of writing and in relation to the scholarship on slavery and Black life. In every aspect of these poems and of the texts that support them there is song, there is incantation, there is a singing of the dead to rest and a singing of those who lived to be slaves to another kind of rest. To read it is to learn about the possibilities of reappearance of what was 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 voices only continue the speaking of earlier voices.
.
This book comes announced, lauded, read, spoken. Reeditions are rare, anniversaries even more so. Its merit is already established, it only needs to be discovered anew. Once opened and its pages felt, its chronology effaces itself, it propels itself, it finds its own wind. Yet having been talked about and around, mentioned, named, it remains more grave, 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 to maintain a voice.
.
The material is everywhere, the words are ostentations, pointings, cries. The poems are told by a person who is fictional but entirely real in their standing in for others unnamed and unknown; told by those who reported in cold legal prose on a mass killing; told by a person who carries rather than author, molds rather than create, compose for an ensemble rather than paint. There is urgency in the timber, furious helplessness in the silences 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 the capacity to tell, to rearrange, to refuse a linear telling.
III
The changing of verb tenses creates equivalence as well as difference. They who tell are out of time at the moment of 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 to one another, fully alive – but not at the same time.
.
Taking on someone else’s voice creates equivalence 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 the legal documents, finds herself and places us at the moment of an act that can neither be authored, claimed, recognized, nor be justified. In “Zong! #19” she permutates authorship and justification until they cease to bring any certainty – shows both as neither afloat nor grounded, perhaps only run aground, without a 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 of repetition, opposes her authorship to the author of the document and to the author of the action, even as she refuses to have the last word.
IV
Silence is not a gap; it is what up-holds
speech.
.
Permutation and erasure make us experience the bad faith in the speech of legal documents, the speech of declarations, the speech of sales; they make us see the choice of words as well as the choice of deeds and the impossibility of their meeting. Murderers and underwriters, all those who take part in the slavery that stops being ‘ordinary’ or ‘of the time’, lose all their ties and positions, are left out to drift without an anchor or any recourse. The poet and the voices she carries choose their deeds as belonging, as actions against their own dehumanization and deaths.
V
Not every text is within every text. Every text 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. We need only speed up, chop up, to give life to what the text had prevented.
.
The section titled “DICTA” is about permutations and the hope that some version of the past might have led to a different reality. Words are aligned, each and none qualifying the reality they attempted to slant, to distort. The tort is turned against them, then, becomes unspeakable harm, as the succession of events is both ascertained and affirmed and shown as possibly other, possibly fictitious, replaceable. Other events could have taken place, every murder of slaves disguised as loss of cargo could have been imagined, every person taken could have remained with their loved ones, carried on with their lives.
VI
There are always many people in each voice. Voices are not found, voices are composed.
.
Philip sought out voices, and ensured that her own did not drown them again. There is attribution of a first telling to a collective voice, that of Setaey Adamu Boateng. Philip lets voices pass into hers, not through hers, does not make them a vehicle for her own (and here I sadly 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 distinguish voices, nothing cuts through them. Slave owner and slave are at a distance but in tension through their bonds.
In other poems, she separates each ‘s’ from the words it pluralizes, thus keeping the plural at a distance, keeping the third person at a distance, maintaining the individuality not of each death, but of each life. Plurality exists in distance on these pages, in a coming together Philip makes possible. And the coming together is clear: Philip lets us feel the proximity of words by separating them, but also by moving between languages. These poems are a microcosm of the rest of the book, where the 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 the most deeply felt.
VII
Experimental writing is writing that makes us learn to read again, writing that is exhausting because it does not rely on habits, 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.
.
The second last section is the most challenging to read. Most of the text is chopped up into small bits, couplets of words. Reading requires so much effort in bridging the gaps between the words. There is so much meaning to create, so much meaninglessness to overcome.
Similar clustering of parts of words can
be found throughout the book. The format of publication of this review limits
what we can do, a picture from page 134 will serve as an example for those who
have not yet encountered the book:
Philip protested against a translation upon which there had been no agreement and, more importantly, which flattened her poem. She was right to do so: no matter in which language, “we are outside of time and out of time” would not read the same as
“ers we a > re out s > ide of time
and o /
>ut of ti > m dar” (144)
VIII
The law silences and ends speech. Even where certain devices elicit speech and defenses and discourses and dissenting opinions, 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 this task.
.
In the poem there is a challenge to the authors, to the men who share in the responsibility of the crime and the larger dehumanization, as they are forced to reckon with their actions as they write to 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 what holds them together, what binds them to others, and what makes them able to enslave and murder others. The law becomes an alibi, a well of bad faith, a permission, 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 / & guns
this age > of los negros les / nègres ignore the age > the rage of
sane / men just > us ruth just / us just ius”
(115)
IX
Poetry can breathe life into what we can no longer experience as it was.
.
So much of the poem is about making it possible to tell the story, its horror, its mundanity, without flattening lives, that the act itself only rarely appears, and only appears in its full strength. We see mourning on page 110; the weight of truth on page 111; an admission of guilt on pages 120-121. On pages 140-141, we understand that if the 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 to
avoid throwing it overboard in exchange for some kind of compensation or
certainty.
.
Philip’s own thesis is that there is a mystery in the story of the slaves aboard the Zong, “the mystery of evil.” Philip’s own thesis in writing the story is that “this story must be told by not telling” (190) so that the mystery may be preserved.
A story that cannot be told other than by not telling cannot be flattened, have its gaps filled, have its refusal of structure brought into the immediate access granted by prose, have its hope turned into certainty. Philip gives us poetry at its most political, as it rearranges the elements of reality, of certainty, as it refuses the alibis of authorship and justification, as it refuses the underwriting that holds up those who risk others, as it rejects balance sheets, tidy orderings, and placement.
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 to develop 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 of ignorance, that presence on my bookshelf of works by Saidiya Hartman, Christina Sharpe, and Rinaldo Walcott. That current capacity as leading into a future possibility.
Jérôme Melançon writes and teaches and writes and lives in oskana kâ-asastêki / Regina, SK. His third chapbook, Bridges Under the Water (2023), follows Tomorrow’s Going to Be Bright (2022) and Coup (2020), all with above/ground press, as well as his most recent poetry collection, En d’sous d’la langue (Prise de parole, 2021). He has also published two books of poetry with Éditions des Plaines, De perdre tes pas (2011) and Quelques pas 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 keeps publishing academic articles that have much to do with some of this. He’s on various social media under variations of @lethejerome.
