Abstract
M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong!, published in 2008, is a book-length poem about the massacre of 150 enslaved Africans aboard the slave ship Zong. Based on the words of the report of the 1783 Gregson v. Gilbert case, the only surviving historical record of what happened aboard the ship, and which details its legal consequences, Zong! attempts to uncover the story and the voices of the victims of the massacre lost in the legal document. The poem thus presents a strong connection to the historical archive, to memory and to the silences of the history of slavery. Through an analysis of selected poems and texts, this paper aims to explore how Philip’s Zong! questions the authority of the historical archive to rescue the voices silenced by history, creating space for these to talk about the past in a present marred by the traumatic legacy of slavery. This analysis is supported by a theoretical framework provided by concepts such as cultural memory (Araújo, 2020), postmemory (Hirsch, 2012) and silence (Orlandi, 2007) to provide a tentative reinterpretation of Zong! as a poem that aims to remember and honour the victims of the massacre and to heal the trauma of the Middle Passage. By anchoring herself in the historical document, Philip composes a provocative poem that confronts history and its extant archives to listen to the voices of those who were silenced and can only speak through poetic imagination.
Presenters
Beatriz Marques GonçalvesStudent, PhD, Centro de Estudos Sociais da Universidade de Coimbra, Portugal
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
KEYWORDS
M. NourbeSe Philip, Zong, Memory, Archive, Poetry
