M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong! (2008) is an impenetrable and impassable book-length poem about its own impenetrability and impassability. Philip assembled and compiled the poem using and rearranging the words in the Gregson vs. Gilbert decision—a legal proceeding after the captain of the British slave-trading ship the Zong threw more than 130 African people overboard to collect the insurance on their lives. Most documents of the case have been destroyed or lost; the two-page decision refusing payment of the claim is all that remains.
Philip’s first grouping of 26 poems is fragmented and disjointed—words are scattered around the page as if encouraging readers to scan side to side, up and down, through space, to find the trauma, or humanity, in the dry legalese—or to follow the path of the bodies sinking through water. “The fragmentation and mutilation of the text,” she explains in an afterwards, “force[s] the eye to track across the page in an attempt to wrest meaning from words gone astray.”
Zong #4
this is
not was
or
should be
this be
not
should be
this
should
not
be
is
These early lyrics still look more or less like you expect, and while they don’t cohere into sense, exactly, they do seem to be moving towards or struggling towards a reintegration of the document. The legal document tries to drown the unspeakable in a silent justice; Philip reaches beneath the surface to bring up what should not be, but is.
Later sections of the poem, though, become both more dense and more fragmented. Philip began to chop up the words in Gregson vs. Gilbert into syllables and individual letters, finding in them voices and counter-voices in a range of languages—English, Spanish, Latin (the language of legal proceedings), Shona, Twi. The spaces on the page now split up words, so that the abstracted narratives fall apart as soon as they start to form.
Those broken narratives include odd quasi-religious pleas (“w ho can bear t o hear the bo/nes of g od lie here”) snatches of life story (“in the fen it was/wet on the eve of the day I left/you me i name”), cargo manifests, memories of sexual assault, wandering multi-lingual puns (English song, French sang meaning “blood,” sango, a Yoruba deity). Trying to read the whole book straight through becomes an exercise in concentration and frustration as you lose your place in white space, lose meaning as the text drops words in languages you don’t know, lose track of which syllable and which letter is connected with which.
The feeling of slogging endlessly through nonsense and no sense, of being blocked and bored and adrift, of drowning with nothing to hold onto and no way up, isn’t entirely pleasant, and isn’t meant to be. As Philip says, Zong! is “a story that can’t be told but must be told.” By that she means that it’s impossible to speak about atrocity in words that convey its full import and truth. But she also means that this particular horror can’t be told because we lack the record and the voices that could tell us about it. Below early poems she lists names which stand in for the names of victims. But we don’t know the names of any of the enslaved and kidnapped people who were first forced onto, and then thrown off of, that ship. Philip tries to hear the voices and the language of those who died, but all she has to work with is a legal document which considers the dead entirely as property; the only crime considered is insurance fraud, not murder.
Constraint poems, like Christian Bök’s wonderful Eunoia, are often high-spirited, virtuoso displays—the goal is to see how much you can say using only words with the letter “e” or “a.” Limiting your language frees you to be ever more dazzling. You set yourself an obstacle course so you can astound the reader as you jump through the hoops.
Zong! is dazzling too, in its way. But it’s also about the way that constraints are sometimes actually constraining, and the way that limitations impose limits that are brutal, tragic, unhealable, impossible to overcome. In her afterward, Philip talks about the importance of exhuming the remains after genocides and atrocities, and the fact that those murdered at sea can’t be recovered. The bodies of those who were thrown overboard from the Zong will never surface. No matter how passionate, or skillful, or dedicated Philip is in her search through the text of Gregson vs. Gilbert, she’ll never raise them up. “There is no witness for the witness,” Paul Celan, a poet of the Holocaust, writes in an epigraph that Philip quotes. By definition, those who are silenced can’t be heard.
The final section of Zong! is composed of faded text, so light as to be barely readable. Some words are crossed out or typed over with other letters or marks. A few phrases or words are visible if you look closely—“the oba sobs again” “the cat got the rat” “is held him.” But parsing them becomes more and more difficult, bleaching out towards nothingness and garble, a white death. The people on the Zong sink away from light, away from language, away from history. What’s left is space, frustration, failure.
Zong! refuses to turn violence into narrative, lesson, or meaning. It’s a poem of gaps and sorrows which can’t be healed because they can’t be assimilated or spoken. “It cannot be told but must be told,” Philip says, “but only through its un-telling.”