This week I wanted to share a piece of art from an author/lawyer/poet/and general bad ass: M. NourbSe Philip.  Her work, Zong!, is not easily categorized as any of the three major cadres of writing (fiction, creative non-fiction, poetry).   This text incorporates information from the legal pursuings of the ship Zong that transported slaves as a part of industry in the 18th century.  I was going to try and explain the text, but perhaps the back cover will do better justice than I:

“In November, 1781, the captain of the slave ship Zong ordered that some 150 Africans be murdered by drowning so that the ship’s owners could collect insurance monies.  Relying entirely on the words of the legal decision Gregon v. Gilbert—the only extant public document related to the massacre of these African slaves—Zong! tells the story that cannot be told yet must be told.  Equal parts song, moan, shot, oath, ululation, curse, and chant, Zong! excavates the legal text.  Memory, history, and law collide and metamorphose into the poetics of the fragment.  Through the innovative use of fugal and counterpointed repetition, Zong! becomes an anti-narrative lament that stretches the boundaries of the poetic form, haunting the spaces of forgetting and mourning the forgotten.”

The text—I can’t really think of any accurate description of the work—is remarkable in the way that language is used, and not used, to describe silence and a mutual language that we can all understand even though we cannot read it.  It’s quite a difficult text to sink your teeth into, but it is remarkable.

This text speaks at the level of discourse which addresses the issues we have surveyed earlier this semester in Poe and Johnson’s Pyms.  This legal precedent is also quite interesting, and complicates any discussions we could have on the morality of slavery and the potential autonomy of vessels at sea.

Also, if any one has any interest, M. NourbSe Philip will be skyping in during my creative writing non-fiction class.  Ask me for the details!!