A Capsule History of the English Slave Trade and the Events Leading to the Zong MassacreFootnote ¹¹

Historians estimate that 12.2 million Africans were loaded on European slave ships in the three and a half centuries before the practice ceased in 1866 and that 13 percent perished during the so-called middle passage, the second leg of the triangular route slave ships followed from Europe to Africa, Africa to the Americas, and the Americas to Europe.Footnote ¹² Although the Spanish and Portuguese controlled the European slave trade at its inception in the sixteenth century, the English had entered the market in earnest by the following century. By 1781, the year when the Zong set sail from Cape Coast to Jamaica, Britain had become “the world’s most prolific slave trading nation”; Liverpool, where the syndicate that owned the Zong was based, boasted the Atlantic world’s busiest slave port.Footnote ¹³ Moral concerns were subordinated to economic ones as commercial opportunities in the New World beckoned English entrepreneurs, and to declare that conditions aboard slave ships appall the conscience today is to understate the magnitude of the depravity that reigned there. Slave ships were paradigmatic “contact zones,”Footnote ¹⁴ and Walvin describes how “[o]ppressors and oppressed were inextricably linked in an infernal system” that could degenerate to “a cross between a neglected stable and a slaughterhouse” after storms and could be characterized as a “floating prison” otherwise.Footnote ¹⁵ European crew members on vessels like the Zong feared captives, who vastly outnumbered them (probably nineteen crew members including the captain and maybe the first mate on the Zong Footnote ¹⁶ to 440 slavesFootnote ¹⁷ ); and the crew often manacled slave men and raped slave women. Not only did slaves receive minimal nourishment from cauldrons, but because they were fed communally, forced to discharge feces where they lay, and packed in to maximize profit, diseases spread rapidly in the ship’s hold and frequently developed into epidemics inflicting mass fatalities.Footnote ¹⁸

Walvin argues that institutionalized rather than personal brutality fostered this culture of willful neglect and violence, and the slave trade was indeed a vital component of an intricate commercial system that the William Gregson syndicate reaped immense revenues from. The Zong was just one of 152 slave ships Gregson and his colleagues had a stake in,Footnote ¹⁹ part of a lucrative business that imploded with the English slave trade’s abolition, perhaps leading to the demise of the bank Gregson had cofounded and the suicide of his son, former Liverpool mayor John Gregson, in 1807.Footnote ²⁰ Yet more than a quarter of a century before their precipitous downfall, the Gregsons were members of a burgeoning English metropolis’s elite, having purchased the Zong following its impoundment off the African coast. A series of mishaps soon thereafter evidently resulted in the calamities killing more than half the slaves originally on the ship: an overloading of the vessel; an inept and ill captain, Luke Collingwood, who suspended first mate James Kelsall and relinquished command to an equally incompetent former colonial governor, Robert Stubbs; and, most crucially, insufficient provisions—food and water—for those aboard once the Zong overshot Jamaica.Footnote ²¹

Although, to quote Walvin, “it is impossible to be confident about what was happening on board the Zong in the last days of November 1781,”Footnote ²² the crew seemed to unanimously agree to mass murder the ship’s slaves over three nights. They first tossed fifty-four women and children, who would be less monetarily valuable,Footnote ²³ from cabin windows; then threw forty-two men overboard from the quarterdeck; and finally drowned a group of thirty-six slaves.Footnote ²⁴ One of those jettisoned by the crew survived,Footnote ²⁵ but ten more captives plunged into the sea of their own volitionFootnote ²⁶ after perhaps hearing their compatriots’ pleas for mercy callously dismissed. The crew would endeavor to eschew culpability for their conduct in subsequent litigation by citing the general average sacrifice principle, that is, sacrificing the few to save the many.Footnote ²⁷ They were, however, likely aware that their “cargo” had been insured for thirty pounds a head in what was then a routine transaction to allocate risks, particularly of insurrections and inclement weather, before a hazardous venture.Footnote ²⁸ The Zong massacre, then, only dramatically exposed the perverse consequences of a “perfectly prudent commercial ‘safety net.’ ”Footnote ²⁹ The crew’s exact motives, utilitarian, venal, or both, may remain immured in history, but their premeditated murders of innocent slaves undoubtedly catalyzed the abolitionist movement in England and generated a panoply of provocative nonfictional and fictional texts dating from the late eighteenth century to the present day with Zong!.

The Zong Tragedy’s Afterlife in Legal and Other Discourses

Referencing Barnor Hesse’s essay “Forgotten Like a Bad Dream: Atlantic Slavery and the Ethics of Postcolonial Memory,” Anita Rupprecht writes that “any historical narrative accounting for the facts of history cannot be easily separated from the factors underlining the form that the historical account takes.”Footnote ³⁰ An attunement to the forms in which early historical renditions of the Zong atrocity were composed discloses divergent perspectives toward what transpired on board the ship before it arrived in Jamaica with 420 gallons of water to spare.Footnote ³¹ A local newspaper at the time reported that the vessel had entered the port “in great distress” after jettisoning some 130 slaves; a subsequent advertisement offered the survivors, who were purchased for thirty-six pounds each on average, for sale.Footnote ³² Three months later, a London newspaper merely stated: “The following ships from Africa are arrived at Jamaica viz Zong, Collingwood, with 208 ditto [slaves].”Footnote ³³ These relatively meager accounts would prove inadequate to satiate the public frenzy for details that ensued when the Gregson syndicate filed a lawsuit against the Zong’s insurers in 1783, seeking to recover the monetary value of the slaves cast off the ship more than a year earlier.

Although the preliminary press reports of the Zong catastrophe and later legal narratives stemming from the incident differed in the depth of their depictions, both fixated on numbers, quantifying the slaves who were then commercially and legally regarded as property, “black ivory,” to quote the title to one of Walvin’s monographs about the transatlantic slave trade.Footnote ³⁴ Paradoxically, even as disclosures about the law’s substance increasingly dismayed the British public, the legal process of a trial and appeal was the means through which slavery’s treachery, papered over in this instance by a façade of technical language, was bared. In legal terms, Gregson v. Gilbert was framed as a dispute over a clause in an insurance contract, not a sweeping challenge to the legality of slavery or a criminal prosecution for murder. These two legal actions could have threatened to undermine highly profitable enterprises buttressed by principles enshrined in English commercial law by the nation’s highest-ranking judge, Lord Chief Justice Mansfield.Footnote ³⁵

No official records of the day-long civil Zong trial are extant, and of those aboard, only a passenger—the unreliable Robert Stubbs—was called to testify, with first mate James Kelsall providing a written account. The surviving slaves were overseas and obviously unavailable, even assuming their testimony would have been found credible. Crucially, the ship’s log, in which Kelsall should have been recording the Zong’s daily happenings, had disappeared by this time.Footnote ³⁶ A recently discovered sworn answer given by Kelsall after the case’s appeal reveals evidentiary discrepancies and recounts a disturbing exchange between Kelsall and one of the drowned slaves who spoke English, a few dozen words from a man who pleaded with futility for life on behalf of all the Zong’s slaves and promised to forego food or water for the duration of the journey, preferring starvation to drowning.Footnote ³⁷ Based on the scant evidence presented, though, a jury of the Gregsons’ peers ordered the insurers to compensate the syndicate for what was deemed destroyed cargo, a verdict expeditiously appealed to England’s highest court. Then, as today, appellate courts considered not only the impact of their rulings on the immediate parties, but the wider ramifications of their decisions.Footnote ³⁸ The procedural posture of a given case could thus give rise to the potential for conflict between justice on different scales and reveal the limits of law in satisfactorily rectifying injustices.

After a two-day hearing whose transcript remains, a Mansfield-led panel of judges on the Court of King’s Bench ruled that because the plaintiff—the Gregson syndicate was never explicitly named in the case report—had failed to present sufficient evidence to support the pleadings, a new trial was mandated. Interestingly, the formal record of the proceedings in Gregson v. Gilbert was published almost half a century after the case was decided and was based on shorthand notes, varying on occasion from earlier unofficial accounts.Footnote ³⁹ As Veronica Austen observes, Philip’s source text is “a summary that is inherently a mere distillation of the trial and the trial a mere distillation of the event,” the distancing removing the aura of facticity from the official legal narrative of the massacre.Footnote ⁴⁰ Given Zong!’s exclusive reliance on this document, my article will next scrutinize each of the report’s parts, which are reproduced in the appendix—the appellate and procedural summaries, a description of the lawyers’ arguments, and the judicial opinions.Footnote ⁴¹

Following a synopsis of the appellate decision, the report begins by crystallizing the issue, a common convention in legal opinions even today, transforming what is fundamentally a profound moral issue in the Zong litigation, what Zong! probes, into a seemingly simple legal one—“This was an action on a policy of insurance to recover the value of certain slaves thrown overboard for want of water.” The gist of the Gregson syndicate’s declaration is then reproduced; and three salient characteristics of the pleading, as stated here, include its emphasis on rationality, its linguistic entrenchment of racial hierarchies, and its omission of significant details. The phrases “by reason thereof” and “by reason whereof” suggest that one event logically, if unfortunately, led to another aboard the ship, culminating in the deaths of hundreds of slaves. The general average sacrifice principle is cited to justify the drownings in a sentence that values slave lives en masse only after those of the white captain and crew—“the master and mariners, for the preservation of their own lives, and the lives of the rest of the negroes . . . were obliged to throw overboard 150 other negroes.” Particularities about the atrocity—such as the killing spree occurring under the cover of night over three days, with the most vulnerable slaves (women and children) jettisoned first—are tellingly absent. This section of the text ends by framing the court’s holding on appeal, its resolution of the legal issue: “a sufficient necessity did not exist for throwing the negroes overboard” and “the loss was not within the terms of the policy.” Although the Zong’s policy has vanished into the ether, it was probably a standard maritime insurance contract providing coverage for losses arising from “perils of the seas.”Footnote ⁴² In Specters of the Atlantic, Baucom quotes a contemporaneous insurance law treatise that established a three-part test for invoking the necessity justification to obtain compensation for the disposal of cargo:

Attorneys for each party vociferously disagreed about whether sufficient legal necessity—as distinguished from ethical necessity, notes BaucomFootnote ⁴⁴ —existed. Lawyers for the insurers parsed the term necessity, distinguishing between “the last necessity” and “apprehended necessity.” Only the latter could justify the drownings, in their estimation, and they contended that insufficient evidence was presented at trial to establish absolute necessity. They also argued that the negligence or ignorance of the captain was a risk that was allocated to the Gregson syndicate, which they accused of insidiously trying to transfer losses from “a bad market” for slaves to the insurers. Concluding that no legal precedent supported an award for the plaintiff, the lawyers unintentionally demonstrated that another troubling precedent did exist—recovery for slave mortality arising from “perils of the seas and of enemies.”

Attorneys for the Gregson syndicate sought to refute each of these assertions, particularly the imputation of a mercenary motive for the crew’s actions, but what is of greater interest is their statement of the case, which dismissed the essential moral issue at the outset—“It has been decided, whether wisely or unwisely is not the question, that a portion of our fellow-creatures may become the subject of property. This, therefore, was a throwing overboard of goods, and of part to save the residue.” The lawyers evoked sympathy for the crew, who “suffered so severely, that seven out of seventeen died after their arrival in Jamaica.” They also suggested circumstances beyond the crew’s control led to the calamity on board the Zong, with “the apprehension of necessity under which the first negroes were thrown overboard” being “justified by the result.” Bizarrely, the lawyers for the Gregson group referenced the proverbial elephant in the room—the issue of murder—by analogizing their case to a murder indictment not requiring proof “of each circumstance.” Here, they averred in seeking to have the court construe the law flexibly, the loss being primarily, even if not completely, attributable to the perils of the seas was sufficient for recovery.

After considering each side’s arguments, Mansfield rendered his decision, euphemistically calling Gregson v. Gilbert “a very uncommon case”Footnote ⁴⁵ and emphasizing the insufficient evidence demonstrating necessity. Justice Buller concurred in his separate opinion, underscoring the unfairness of permitting the Gregson syndicate to recover on a basis not stated in the business’s declaration, an outcome that would engender legal instability and upset the delicate allocation of risk the nation’s economy relied upon. Buller also rejected the argument advanced by the Gregson syndicate’s attorneys comparing the laws applying to their case and the liberal rules governing murder indictments.

Despite the judges’ and attorneys’ dissimilar rationales for their positions, their reported remarks share some linguistic and substantive qualities that the article’s following sections will maintain Philip’s text subverts. Overall, the legal accounts notably use abstract, euphemistic, circuitous, and jargon-laden rhetoric. For example, none of the primary actors, such as the captain or crew members, is named, nor are any of the slaves, who are described in terms of numbers or other collectivities (“certain slaves”). Disembodied actors undertake vague actions—throwing the slaves overboard is said to be “such a measure” by the plaintiff’s attorneys. Moreover, blame for the massacre is couched by all in the most anodyne language—a mistake, negligence, or ignorance, as opposed to premeditated murder. The court’s decision apparently turns on a technical legal issue, but the true fulcrum of the case is the judges’ calculation of risk to preserve a complex commercial regime. This approach to the litigation is wholly oblivious to the interests of the slaves on board the Zong but consistent with a high court’s expansive social, political, and economic perspectives at the time. At the appellate hearing, Mansfield had disclosed his commercial allegiances in the words posterity may best remember him for: “The matter left to the jury, was whether it was from necessity: for they had no doubt (though it shocks one very much) that the case of slaves was the same as if horses had been thrown overboard. It is a very shocking case.”Footnote ⁴⁶ The judges’ failure to compellingly rationalize a decision that mortifies the mind—that is, the holding that an insurance policy may require compensation for the massacre of blameless slaves—is inadvertently demonstrated through Justice Buller’s apparently becoming tangled in his own wording, as in this sentence containing a string of multiple negatives occluding meaning: “It would be dangerous to suffer the plaintiff to recover on a peril not stated in the declaration, because it would not appear on the record not to have been within the policy, and the defendant would have no remedy.”

Abolitionist Granville Sharp, who attended the appellate proceedings and is said to have given “form to the facts insofar as they were first made public,” offering “the first interpretive representation of the Zong in relation to which subsequent re-narrations need to be read,”Footnote ⁴⁷ siphoned his outrage at the court’s decision into a passionate manuscript unsuccessfully demanding that the crew face murder charges.Footnote ⁴⁸ Yet even while Sharp’s tireless efforts to secure justice are to be commended, Anita Rupprecht’s argument that Sharp and his fellow abolitionists had their own property interest in slaves—in Baucom’s terms, as “affective property,”Footnote ⁴⁹ “generalized innocent victims” amenable to sentimental representations—also has force.Footnote ⁵⁰ The Zong’s appropriation as “a kind of open space for the inscription of abolitionist fantasies,”Footnote ⁵¹ with the central signifier (the dead slaves) being absent, may be less morally vexing than judicial decisions classifying slaves as goods under contract or property law. Nonetheless, abolitionist tracts in the Zong’s aftermath that deflected scenes of anguish through authoritative white eyewitness accounts and portrayed a stark binary between rapacious enslavers and their captives problematically consecrated white liberators and reduced “African cultural autonomy or personal agency . . . to the indescribable emotional suffering of the survivors.”Footnote ⁵² As Philip rhetorically asked in an interview with Patricia Saunders about Zong!, commenting on her discomfort with the idea of emancipation, what “we are, in fact commemorating you realize that it has more to do with Europeans finally understanding and accepting what we, African people, knew all along, that we are first and last Beings, and that we cannot be turned into things?”Footnote ⁵³ Philip’s poetry cycle is one of numerous recently published fictional and nonfictional texts striving to depict the Zong massacre with integrity, reverencing without propagandizing the victims through their carefully calibrated delineations of the incident.Footnote ⁵⁴ These contemporary authors’ accounts enable the perpetrators of the massacre who escaped with impunity from the courtroomFootnote ⁵⁵ to be linguistically convicted in absentia while mourning those whose lives have long gone unremarked by history.

Zong!’s Formally Iconoclastic Revisioning of History

Even before Zong!, her most formally innovative text, was published, Philip’s writings embodied her philosophy that “the form of a work is of particular importance . . . and often the form of work is as much the substance of it as the content is.”Footnote ⁵⁶ Zong! seeks to challenge “western, logical, linear” ways of readingFootnote ⁵⁷ and fundamentally thinking, which Philip believes have been complicit in the subjugation of Africans and their descendants in the New World.Footnote ⁵⁸ In Zong!’s “Notanda,” or afterword, Philip writes that “I deeply distrust this tool I work with—language. It is a distrust rooted in certain historical events that are all of a piece with the events that took place on the Zong. The language in which those events took place promulgated the nonbeing of African people, and I distrust its order, which hides its disorder; its logic hiding the illogic and its rationality, which is simultaneously irrational.”Footnote ⁵⁹ Philip has elsewhere expressed that English is a language she is psychically exiled from and must doubly translate. She conceives that every writer must translate, even in his or her mother tongue, and that she has to translate from a language she recognizes “at some subterranean level” not to be her own.Footnote ⁶⁰

Yet even while the compositional history of Zong!, which took Philip seven years to write, captures instances when despair stemming from her distraught relationship with English engulfs her,Footnote ⁶¹ these moments are counterbalanced by epiphanies when the code she is writing in becomes her own language.Footnote ⁶² Philip initially experienced guilt at fragmenting words, breaking-and-entering the language of the Zong case report, which she endeavored to lock herself within “in the same way men, women, and children were locked in the holds of the slave ship Zong.”Footnote ⁶³ However, she ultimately celebrated her linguistic breakthrough of devising a “dictionary” listing “‘mother’ words followed by the words contained within that particular word,”Footnote ⁶⁴ encrypting the text through a method that evokes Édouard Glissant’s theory about the development of Creole languages. Such languages were initially “a mode of communicating and sending messages at various levels that couldn’t be understood by the white colonizers,” to quote Kristin Mahlis’s synopsis of her interview with Philip.Footnote ⁶⁵ Barbadian poet Kamau Brathwaite, in seeking to develop a “nation language” including West Indian Creole, has also emphasized orality and “use[d] non-Standard English idioms, sounds, and syncopations” to “reclaim linguistic elements that survived the Middle Passage” while “transformative[ly] appropriati[ng] . . . the master’s tools.”Footnote ⁶⁶ Zong! reflects Philip’s deft manipulation of the ostensibly rational terms of a sordid case report; she inverts grammar and freely mangles the official language to reveal the irrationality underlying Gregson v. Gilbert and the perniciousness of the power structures, corporate, judicial, and otherwise, that would sustain British colonialism for almost two hundred years after the case was decided. Consequently, although Philip argues that the language she employs is “already contaminated, possibly irrevocably and fatally,”Footnote ⁶⁷ her anti-narrative text’s overall structure and micro-level formal techniques suggest that language also paradoxically offers a potent method of resistance to hegemonic narratives that have historically facilitated oppression.Footnote ⁶⁸

In writing Zong!, Philip struggled against what she has described as the instinctive human desire to impose meaning, “the generating impulse of, and towards, language.”Footnote ⁶⁹ Zong!’s form manifests this discomfort,Footnote ⁷⁰ starting with the book’s organization. After an acknowledgments section that only generally references the Zong massacre, “Os,” the first section of the poetry cycle, begins. Divided into twenty-six numbered poems containing embedded poemsFootnote ⁷¹ and a subsection entitled “Dicta” with several unnumbered poems, this section adheres closest to its originary text and is Zong!’s most conventionally poetic.Footnote ⁷² “Os” is followed by four sections, “Sal,” “Ventus,” “Ratio,” and “Ferrum,” featuring ever-longer poems that progressively disorient the reader, as opposed to narrative texts that build toward a resolution, such as the Gregson v. Gilbert appellate report ending with a succinct recitation of the judges’ decision. “Ferrum,” the section that may most perplex readers who approach Zong! with their standard toolkit of analytical techniques, is the one in which Philip felt that she had come closest to reproducing her aesthetic vision in language.Footnote ⁷³ The book’s next and final poetic section, “Ebora,” with its grayed wording, increasingly congested spacing, and terms layered atop one another, represents the quintessential antinarrative, “a space not so much of non-meaning as anti-meaning,” to quote from “Notanda.”Footnote ⁷⁴

Zong!’s very section titles may mystify readers unfamiliar with Yoruba and Latin (the “father tongue” whose terms still pervade English and American lawFootnote ⁷⁵ ), leading some perceptive ones to the glossary of words and phrases heard on board the Zong. This section following “Ebora” reveals that os, sal, ventus, ratio, ferrum, and ebora respectively mean bone, salt, wind, reason or legal rationale, iron, and underwater spirits (in Yoruba). Philip conceives that the “Os” poems fragmenting Gregson v. Gilbert’s text are the “bones” of Zong! whereas the book’s four subsequent sections enflesh the “bones.”Footnote ⁷⁶ Her description indicates the dual formal and substantive significance of the text’s terminology, with bones also referring to the literally unrecoverable remains of the dead slaves figuratively reclaimed by Zong!, salt referencing a key mineral to sustain human life, wind identifying the factor that apparently precipitated the massacre, reason ironically alluding to the Zong case record, and iron evoking the fetters slaves wore that Zong! seeks to rupture; “Ebora” then liberates the spirit of the slaves from the manacles that once restrained them to close the elegiac poetry collection. Closure may be an inapt term to describe how the reader experiences the text, however, because “Notanda,” in which Philip discusses the theoretical basis for her project, and the reproduced appellate report of Gregson v. Gilbert that ends the book, intimate that Zong! is a cyclical text that necessitates rereading. Traditional readers who perused the text linearly from beginning to end and so only discovered Philip’s code, her mode of deconstructing the official legal report, after finishing the book may be especially inclined to reread the work. Although giving the final word of Zong! to the judges and attorneys involved in the Zong litigation may appear incongruous with Philip’s intent to attack the legal system that conspired with English politicians and entrepreneurs to propagate slavery and other repressive regimes overseas, the book’s organization also reflects the reality “that there is no ‘outside the law,’ since it frames the social and political structures in which we exist.”Footnote ⁷⁷ Formally mounting a convincing challenge to the basis for these structures through Zong!’s prior two hundred plus pages, though, can be seen as a significant victory.

Within each of Zong!’s sections, Philip utilizes a multitude of formal techniques to destabilize the reader, who wrestles “ ‘to make sense’ of an event that eludes understanding, perhaps permanently,” for Philip.Footnote ⁷⁸ Sina Queyras’s unease that she was not the right reader for the book may express a sentiment felt by many readers approaching Zong! for the first, or even second or third plus, time.Footnote ⁷⁹ Much of this disquietude may derive from the poetry cycle’s convoluted optics, its application of Philip’s theory that language is paint she daubs on a canvas,Footnote ⁸⁰ recalling the fusion between modernist and post-modern poetry and other aesthetic forms. The visuality of Zong! resembles the fin de siècle aesthetics of French Symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé, whose experimentation with free verse included typographical innovations in poems like Un Coup de Dés Jamais N’Abolira Le Hasard (A Throw of the Dice Will Never Abolish Chance) (1897).Footnote ⁸¹ Although Western readers are trained to read standard narrative texts like Gregson v. Gilbert horizontally, tracing lines that meticulously fill the page, most of the poems in Zong! are fragmented and teeming with fissures, as opposed to words.

This approach, suitable for an elegiac work in which facts about the central figures’ lives are absent from the historical record, may initially perturb readers, but it also stimulates their creativityFootnote ⁸² to construe not only the language but the visual dimension of Philip’s text. Paradoxically, silence (e.g., in the form of visual lacunae) in Zong! “speaks” more powerfully than language itself. As Philip writes in “Notanda,” “within each silence is the poem, which is revealed only when the text is fragmented and mutilated, mirroring the fragmentation and mutilation that slavery perpetrated on Africans, their customs and ways of life.”Footnote ⁸³ Zong! continues exploring the aesthetic implications of a revelation Philip had while composing an earlier book, Looking for Livingstone, that “Silence [with a capital S] was its own language that one could read, interpret, and even speak.”Footnote ⁸⁴

Readers, then, must interpret both words and linguistic gaps and the relative placement of each of these on the page. Philip’s poetry cycle foregrounds linguistic signifiers, being amenable to a structuralist or deconstructionist analysis in which readers must remain keenly attuned “to syntax, spacing, intertextuality, sound, semantics, etymology, and even individual letters.”Footnote ⁸⁵ Philip’s “governing principle” in Zong! is relationality, with “every word or word cluster . . . seeking a space directly above within which to fit itself,” thus “fall[ing] into relation with others either above, below, or laterally.”Footnote ⁸⁶ “Zong! #1” in “Os,” the collection’s opening poem, for example, can be read horizontally and diagonally, the latter arrangement evoking the path of the slaves’ bodies as they were thrown from the Zong. Other poems may be perused in a scattershot or cyclical manner (“Zong! #5”) or vertically like a ledger (“Zong! #24”), a graphical allusion to a ship’s manifest listing the crew, passengers, and cargo.Footnote ⁸⁷ Philip mocks this form in Zong!’s own manifest enumerating items like African groups and languagesFootnote ⁸⁸ that would decidedly not be recorded in the official manifest.

Zong!’s deep sensory engagement is not only with sight, though, but with sound. The poetry cycle is inspired by longstanding oral traditions in African cultures, and it responds to the rhetorical question, recently posed by Paul Watkins in his introduction to an interview with Philip, “what is there but song when words risk enacting a second violence”Footnote ⁸⁹ ? Here, too, Zong! shares affinities with several of Mallarmé’s poems, in which recitation discloses meanings not evident from a silent perusal. In 2013, Philip performed Zong! non-linearly, “with over twenty readers improvising the poem’s multiple meanings in discordant unison,” according to Watkins,Footnote ⁹⁰ enacting modernist poetry’s splintering of the single lyrical voice. The exclamation point in the poetry cycle’s title signifies its being a “song of the untold story” for Philip.Footnote ⁹¹

I would thus dub Zong! an experiential text in that it is felt more readily than it is described linguistically, like many lamentations. The reader is often figuratively immersed under the flood of language in the text, only occasionally grasping a life-raft of meaning, and thus vicariously experiencing the dislocation of the slaves on board the Zong. Philip remains sensitive to the position of readers (and herself) as secondary witnesses to this traumatic event, though.Footnote ⁹² She ventured to Africa for “permission” to tell the untellable tale of the massacreFootnote ⁹³ and channeled an ancestral voice, Setaey Adamu Boateng, to reveal “the submerged stories of all who were on board the Zong.”Footnote ⁹⁴ By forsaking control over the text, Philip avoids the pitfalls of the appellate case report in Gregson v. Gilbert and abolitionist narratives about the Zong, individualizing the victims of the atrocity in her revisionary elegy.

Zong!: Deconstructing Law, Reconstructing Humanity through the (Anti-)Elegiac Form

Judith Butler’s observation that we perhaps “make a mistake if we take the definition of who we are, legally, to be adequate descriptions of what we are about”Footnote ⁹⁵ suggests legal language’s limits for identity formation and the importance of alternative discourses, including literary ones, to vivify personalities that have been officially marginalized. “Literature offers the opportunity to interrogate the premises, strategies, and conventions of language and to discern the ways in which ordinary language becomes irresponsible to its greater calling,” thereby permitting “ethical reflectiveness about the limits of our language.”Footnote ⁹⁶ The modern elegiac form appears primed to fulfill this objective, given that it “throw[s] into relief the inefficacy of language precisely when we need it most.”Footnote ⁹⁷ “[A] direct correlation [exists] between the textual body and the human body,”Footnote ⁹⁸ that is, the elegiac poem’s verbal insufficiency when faced with the lost “corporeal existence of the deceased.”Footnote ⁹⁹ A white sailor in Zong! references these dual disintegrations: “sift the dunes of / tunis for the bones the ruins of my / story their s & y ours.”Footnote ¹⁰⁰

Although elegies were once perceived to have a primarily consolatory function,Footnote ¹⁰¹ theorists of the modern elegy, such as Karen Weisman and Jahan Ramazani, argue that the genre’s manifestation today appropriates earlier generic norms but demonstrates modernism’s influence. It is now inflected with self-reflexivity and an “anti-elegiac” strain that “resist[s] the traditional psychology, structure, and imagery of the genre,” even at times devolving into the “anti-literary,”Footnote ¹⁰² as Zong!’s source text invites the poetry cycle to do. Stylistically, Zong! employs a panoply of modernist poetic techniques that transformed English poetry in the early twentieth century, including irregularities of meter and rhyme (if present at all), jarring juxtapositions, searing ironies, elisions, fragments, multiple languages and voices, and dense allusions (inherent in elegy’s generic lineage, as discussed below).Footnote ¹⁰³ The elegy has not only become more formally flexible, but it has substantively expanded in scope beyond loss of life, encompassing the death of “institutions, cultures, forms of authority, and ways of thinking.”Footnote ¹⁰⁴ The sobbing oba (Yoruba for “king” or “ruler”), a recurring motif in Zong!, accordingly mourns not only personal but cultural deaths, the latter alluded to when a crew member euphemistically speaks of “cur[ing] the / m [the slaves] of a frica” and the slaves “shed / tears / for ifá / ósun / & ógún / for / efun / for èsú,” which are Yoruba divinities.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Slavery is a site of collective or cultural trauma that disrupts an entire community’s consciousness, “destroying the possibility of a common frame of reference and calling into question our sense of being-in-common.”Footnote ¹⁰⁶ “Modern literatures of loss and mourning” like Zong! “have increasingly made their textual bodies out of expelled matter,”Footnote ¹⁰⁷ including people and cultural heritages. These works seek to recover—a term evoking the idea of “gain[ing] something by the judgment of a court”—the remains of that previously characterized as waste.Footnote ¹⁰⁸

Erin Fehskens notes the dilemma that arises from this endeavor, though, when she asks “[h]ow we can totalize the Zong, make the Zong into a metonymic totality of the long eighteenth century, as Ian Baucom would have it, while also fiercely attending the constitutive loss at the core of its meaning, the loss than remains lost rather than recovered.”Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Philip’s response in Zong! is an elegy that critiques the origins, motifs, and implications of the genre even while relying on elegiac conventions. Philip indicates that literary devices characterizing the often disparaged lamentation tradition may come closer to registering the horror of the drownings that her text compulsively replays in individual instances (“we have / thrown him over / board we pray then throw him pray / then throw them pray then / throw pray then / throw”Footnote ¹¹⁰ ) and across sections. The preceding quotation from the ironically titled “Ratio” is echoed in “Ferrum,” where severed words “reflect[] the degradation of language until at times we are only left with grunts and sounds,” according to PhilipFootnote ¹¹¹ : “to se cure our pro / fit we th row them to res cue our for / tunes we do mur t hey f / all to in sure our pr ofits ov / er & o ver a gain to sec / ure their re scue the y fall o / ver bo ard to pre serve our profit.”Footnote ¹¹² The non-syntactical lines and gap-laden typography here are indicative of the moral fissures and flaws in the crew’s reasoning. Additionally, the ampersand, although derived from Latin, can be suggestive of poetic experimentation, “a desire to tweak the sniffing nose of literary decorum,” in the vivid metaphor of Kevin Nance, creating a “cognitive blip” for some readers.Footnote ¹¹³ Yet Philip crucially foregrounds the incident the judicial opinion elides and outrightly assigns blame in her subversive elegy: “the case / is / murder.”Footnote ¹¹⁴

Although elegy has recently been described as a “mode of inquiry,”Footnote ¹¹⁵ much like lamentation is conceived of as a mode that imbues other genres,Footnote ¹¹⁶ elegies are seen as retaining distinctive generic qualities.Footnote ¹¹⁷ The elegy is a literary form dating to ancient GreeceFootnote ¹¹⁸ and steeped in precedent—“a poem made out of other poems”Footnote ¹¹⁹ —not so unlike the common law system in which Gregson v. Gilbert was decided. Indeed, both judicial opinions and elegies, which are said to “construct power,”Footnote ¹²⁰ may be susceptible to similar critiques of entrenching patriarchal ideologies. The “elegy is historically a form written by men and about men”Footnote ¹²¹ in which “the elegist asserts his own poetic skill and becomes part of a pre-existent tradition or lineage of similarly skilled poets”Footnote ¹²² while at times serving nationalist aims.Footnote ¹²³ Contrastingly, “the lamentation [is] composed by women and expressive of their experience,”Footnote ¹²⁴ enabling them to “play otherwise masculinized roles: they are revenge seekers, judges, bearers of authority, writers of history,” though outside of male-dominated institutions.Footnote ¹²⁵ Lamentations were traditionally communal oral rituals but now include “a range of utterances from shrieks and cries to improvised oral performances to formal written texts.”Footnote ¹²⁶ They often foreground the body and employ antithesis and repetition to articulate the incomprehensibility of corporeal loss and the inadequacy of language to fully palliate bereavement,Footnote ¹²⁷ ultimately representing the “return of a violence and chaos repressed by social order and law.”Footnote ¹²⁸ The lyrical voice’s cry in Kamau Brathwaite’s “Stone,” “lawwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwd,” upon his murder for clashing with activists supporting the ruling party in Jamaica,Footnote ¹²⁹ suggests the futility of appeals to religion (the Lord) and law when confronting grave injustices, a theme that also suffuses Zong!.Footnote ¹³⁰

Philip strikingly proclaims the Zong appellate case report as a “gravestone” that must be “shatter[ed]” to free the voices of the dead slaves,Footnote ¹³¹ and Zong! launches simultaneous attacks on the judicial decision and the Western literary tradition. The poetry cycle is permeated by references to pastoral elegy tropes, including conventional settings like the countryside and the sea. Although these spaces often proffer solace to the speakers in pastoral elegies, Philip criticizes this complacent attitude, using juxtaposition to suggest that idyllic pastoral spaces in England have resulted from the despoliation of such regions and their inhabitants elsewhere. A white crew member in Zong! obsessively reminisces about meeting his beloved, Ruth, in scenic locales, including a garden,Footnote ¹³² a “fen,”Footnote ¹³³ a “dal[e],”Footnote ¹³⁴ a “glen[],”Footnote ¹³⁵ a ferny expanse marked by a cairn,Footnote ¹³⁶ and “dow / ns.”Footnote ¹³⁷ He expects to receive “gr / ants of l and to gr / ow cane & g row ri ch”Footnote ¹³⁸ overseas while aspiring to cultivate grain in fields with Ruth upon his stateside return.Footnote ¹³⁹ In his leisure time, he envisages cavorting with Ruth in a veritable Noah’s ark of a garden replete with “stag /s boar s & / deer carp in / the river doves / there / will be dogs fish & / grouse owls & tit s pea hen s too” but “no pigs he / negroes &she / negroes”Footnote ¹⁴⁰ ; the sailor’s most ardent desire is to “b e with y ou i / dle in our e den.”Footnote ¹⁴¹

However, the dreaminess of these scenes of “ease”Footnote ¹⁴² is undercut by contrasting nightmarish ones in their immediate vicinity, text-wise; the crew member recalls lush pastures in England as Philip depicts a more ominous fate for the captives in general and one specific African couple, Wale and Sade, a husband and wife from a rural region who function as doppelgangers for the anonymous crew member and Ruth. For example, a passage portraying “visions of l / ace for a queen / my queen” in “Sal” soon degenerates into “dire visions” of hunted slaves, one of whose voices pierces the poem in the italicized text: “de men dem cam for mi / . . . / mi flee / the fields gun bam bam.”Footnote ¹⁴³ In Ferrum, a similar scene to the edenic ones above—“su ch a grand gard en with stag / s grouse and deer an e den” is followed by the chilling image “the lad la / y dead and a nother & anot / her they a ll lay d / ead.”Footnote ¹⁴⁴ This section also tells the fractured story of Wale and Sade (along with their son Ade), whose mutual affection is evident through their exchange of gifts in a touching chiasmus: “sad e makes a ree d mat for w / ale wale mak es a hut of ru / sh and reed for sa de.”Footnote ¹⁴⁵ But their humanity fails to immunize them from being pursued like “prey”Footnote ¹⁴⁶ across the fields they once freely traversed: “wa / le and sa de run from the / field the river t he raft.”Footnote ¹⁴⁷ Slave traders drive them into the woods before apprehending themFootnote ¹⁴⁸ —“i have / set a snare for wa le & sade / a trap for h / is feet a sna / re for hers”Footnote ¹⁴⁹ —and forcing them to walk on a trail of tears to “the fo / rt at the port o n the river.”Footnote ¹⁵⁰ From here, they and their fellow captives journey to the seaside (“the line of negroes wend s / its way to the coast”Footnote ¹⁵¹ ) and depart for the middle passage, during which “they suffer.”Footnote ¹⁵² As Zong! summarizes the dastardly pastoral exchange from the crew member’s perspective, “there was ga / in t heir loss,”Footnote ¹⁵³ namely in the form of seemingly pristine spaces where the sailor could savor products from the New World (e.g., tea, oranges, and sugary éclairsFootnote ¹⁵⁴ ) while lavishing luxuries like a “fur”Footnote ¹⁵⁵ on his cherished Ruth.Footnote ¹⁵⁶

Yet the sailor terrifyingly conceives he has become an “agent of satan” or “slav e[] to sin,” leading God to avenge the deaths he perpetrated and obliterate his splendid visions: “just u / s ruth you and m e in the g / arden our ed en will he / throw u s out as he / has be fore”?Footnote ¹⁵⁷ Divine retribution here substitutes for legal retribution,Footnote ¹⁵⁸ and the word throw recalls references to the slaves jettisoned from the Zong and connotes dual Falls/falls: “we / fall to our fate they / to the o cean their fate,” “their f / all our f / all.”Footnote ¹⁵⁹ Ferrum concludes with Wale’s asking a crew member to transcribe a poignant missive to Sade, which Wale consumes, before this passage of disturbing wordplay in which “weight” morphs into an eternal “wait” underwater: “he fa lls to the we / ight & wa it in w / ater i ca ll his na / me & f / all too.”Footnote ¹⁶⁰ Zong! elegizes even the white perpetrators who suffered bodily or psychological deaths, with one of them rhetorically questioning “what pro fit me if mon coeur non est”Footnote ¹⁶¹ (“my heart is not”), without the text’s necessarily implying equivalency between the slaves’ and crew members’ losses.Footnote ¹⁶² Philip felt compelled “to acknowledge the existence of those Europeans on board the Zong, those who like many Africans sickened and died, as well as those who were involved in the murder of the Africans, and thus in the murder of their own souls,”Footnote ¹⁶³ with the sections after “Os” often voiced by an odious white male sailor. Rationalizing this unusual inclusion, Philip has asserted that the character was necessary “to do justice to what had to be told,” with his suicide being “akin to the idea that Columbus must die—for the world to live, that spirit of conquest, destruction, and domination that Columbus represents has to die.”Footnote ¹⁶⁴

Zong! humanizes what this character and the judicial opinion dehumanized, transforming the more monodic “dessicated[] legal report into a cacophony of voices—wails, cries, moans, and shouts that had earlier been banned from the text.”Footnote ¹⁶⁵ These polyvocal lamentations “bear[] witness to the ‘resurfacing of the drowned and the oppressed,’ ”Footnote ¹⁶⁶ like the “she / negroes” who “sin / g sa / d songs”Footnote ¹⁶⁷ for the deceased, with an African chant dominating much of one of Ferrum’s closing pages.Footnote ¹⁶⁸ The sea where voices of the past resound is a conventional elegiac setting redolent with “the possibility of ‘a sea change’ into a ‘rich and strange’ consolatory apotheosis.”Footnote ¹⁶⁹ Yet it is also a “site of seemingly contradictory images and a site which is . . . significantly textual,” “a metaphorical blank page upon which the poet writes a history of trauma” and a space “that the poet interprets through his lyrical power.”Footnote ¹⁷⁰ The middle passage has rendered the sea a place fraught with significance—“the image of Empire and of engulfment and of memory”Footnote ¹⁷¹ —for Caribbean people, as encapsulated by several of Derek Walcott’s poems. “The Sea is History” shares Zong!’s castigation of the exploitation abroad that historically enabled Western culture to thrive but similarly ends with a tinge of hope “of History, really beginning.”Footnote ¹⁷² The sea’s fluidity, in contrast to the physically contained courtroom, suggests non-narrative and anti-narrative literary capabilities,Footnote ¹⁷³ as in Zong!. Also, unlike the law, the sea is traditionally coded maternal (life-giving) across languages: “the sea is ma / i is mère i s mer is / mar ema & mater i / s madre is ma is omi.”Footnote ¹⁷⁴ Zong! queries whether this maternal sea will “give up its de / ad its bo nes,” “be ar[ing] the t / ruth”Footnote ¹⁷⁵ along with the “s / ouls” of the deceased coerced into a cruel bargain: “they ask fo / r water we g ive them s / ea they as / k for bread we / give them se / a they ask for lif e we give them o / nly the sea .”Footnote ¹⁷⁶ Responding with a vociferous no to the white sailor’s ludicrous inquiry in cursive arising from—and intruding into—the print text, Philip’s poetry cycle figuratively seeks to “drown[] the law” that could potentially excuse murder and deem the “sin”Footnote ¹⁷⁷ a compensable offense.

Zong!, like many lamentations, refuses “this economic model of justice” premised on “[s]etting prices, determining values, contriving equivalences, exchanging” (of often disparate items), which “preoccupied the earliest thinking of man to so great an extent that in a certain sense [it] constitute[s] thinking as such.”Footnote ¹⁷⁸ Quoting Nietzsche, Rebecca Saunders argues that such a model of justice “ ‘treats violence and capricious acts on the part of individuals or entire groups as offenses against the law . . . and thus leads the feelings of its subjects away from the direct injury caused by such offenses.’ This is just the sort of sublimation, displacement, and abstraction that lamentation refuses.”Footnote ¹⁷⁹ Although the parties involved in the Zong litigation defended various commercial interests, Zong! “defend[s] the dead.”Footnote ¹⁸⁰ “Mourning depends on a hypothesis of defense, howsoever wishful,”Footnote ¹⁸¹ and a failure to mourn those denigrated in the past may have acute implications for the present; “acceptance of one’s own or the other’s death may develop into a cultural ideology that increases the practice and use of death as a cultural weapon.”Footnote ¹⁸² Butler has accordingly called for an “insurrection on the level of ontology,” underscoring how dehumanizing discourse can effect dehumanization in reality. She advocates scrutinizing the relationship between “violence and those lives considered as unreal,” asking “[w]ho counts as human? Whose lives count as lives? And, finally, What makes for a grievable life?”Footnote ¹⁸³

Zong! is an extended exploration of these questions that paradoxically asserts realization of our “common human vulnerability”Footnote ¹⁸⁴ may be our savior,, and it is apropos that Philip alludes to an English poetic progenitor, who often wrote in elegiac meter, to convey this urgent message. “Ratio” begins with a white crew member hearing “the / clarion [that] / sounds for / me,” and bells toll at the climax of “Ventus”: “ding ding / dong done.”Footnote ¹⁸⁵ These passages, with the pun in the second one, evoke the renowned “for whom the bell tolls” section from John Donne’s “Meditation XVII” (1624):

for the drowned slaves named below the text’s surface in Zong!,Footnote ¹⁸⁷ for the crew members on board the Zong whose appalling deeds cost them their names,Footnote ¹⁸⁸ and for all of us haunted by these ineffable losses today.

The Zong’s (and Zong!’s) Legacy

Zong!’s unflinching portrayal of an inexplicably evil event, reinforced by the text’s discombobulated form, demonstrates why the very name Zong “quickly entered the demonology of Atlantic slavery, and came to represent the depravity and heartless violence of the entire slave system.”Footnote ¹⁸⁹ The shameful enterprise was propped up by legal institutions that subconsciously, if not consciously, registered the heinousness of the practice without intervening to foreclose it. The appellate record in Gregson v. Gilbert thus memorializes a moment of miscarried justice, a decision with dire ramifications in the immediate term, but one that eventually instigated the crusade to abolish the English slave trade, a preliminary step for many in the West to recognize the humanity of African peoples. Yet for Philip and many other people of color, in the Caribbean and elsewhere, the struggle to retain their identities may persist. When Philip sought to publish her novel Harriet’s Daughter in 1988, she was informed that the text’s black characters rendered it unmarketable.Footnote ¹⁹⁰ Philip has also observed that the tourist industry’s expansion in Tobago has been accompanied by a resurgence of the word plantation, and “an old painting of a slave plantation” was even used to advertise a Hilton resort.Footnote ¹⁹¹ Moreover, disclosures that several of England’s—and indeed America’sFootnote ¹⁹² —most eminent insurance companies insured slaveownersFootnote ¹⁹³ suggest that the Zong’s traces may be discerned today. Reparations for slave exploitation remain a divisive issue,Footnote ¹⁹⁴ but a recent $10 million donation to help re-create two wooden buildings on Monticello’s Mulberry Row, where earth alone currently marks the place Thomas Jefferson’s slaves would have toiledFootnote ¹⁹⁵ (a sight not unlike the cavity in the center of a page of “Zong! #5”Footnote ¹⁹⁶ ) indicates that the public perceives value in excavating and rectifying the historical record. Although the “real” story of Monticello may be inaccessible, like the lives of the drowned slaves on board the Zong,Footnote ¹⁹⁷ imaginatively reconstructing untold histories that are part of our collective archive remains a vital endeavor, “an ode / to the ne / gro in me in you.”Footnote ¹⁹⁸