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Zong notes

Notes for the chapter Zong

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1 views

Zong notes

Notes for the chapter Zong

Uploaded by

akansha.kedia
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
Available Formats
Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Zong: similar to EE Cummings whose work had no rhyming scheme, no sense and abrupt

pauses in order to exhibit his sense of fragmentation - Even a Pencil has fear to
English is my foreign language not my mother language - Philip in Discourse on the logic of
language
The poem is made out of the words used from the famous Gregson vs Gilbert case
Obvious presentation of silences
The original name of the ship was Zorg which means care in Dutch, when it was repainted in
Ghana it became Zong
The overthrow of Africans was not seen as murder because these people were referred to as
cargo or things- dehumanisation
‘The Zong was a slave ship that set sail for Jamaica from the West Coast

of Africa in 1781 with a cargo of 470 slaves. Due to the captain’s naviga-
tional errors, a trip that should have taken six to nine weeks stretched to

four months. Some of the “cargo” were lost due to illness. Other parts of
the “cargo,” by order of the captain, were destroyed. As stated in the legal
decision, the captain was “obliged to throw overboard 150 negroes” . The captain’s rationale for
destroying his “cargo” was simple: if the
cargo perished of natural causes, he would be responsible, but if it they
were destroyed to save the rest of the ship and minimize further losses, he
will have acted in a responsible manner and hence, the cargo would be a
loss of the underwriters (Philip 189). But how does anyone tell a story so
horrifying? So unbelievable? So common? So rarely told?
There is only one choice and that is to tell the story that can’t be told through

its constraints. For nearly a decade, Philip would work to tell this story us-
ing only the words contained in the record of the Gregson vs. Gilbert decision

and eventually, with words and names created by breaking open the words
in this document.
Philip’s constraint-based poetic practice can be under-
stood as part of a long history.
Zong! is a text as deeply marked by its constraints as it is by their
breakage. At some point in the long and draining process of writing Zong!,
Philip chose to break her own constraints.
In the final section of Zong!, the text appears in gray scale and many of the
words are superimposed. Here, paradoxically, it is an excess of words rather
than their absence, an discursive explosion rather than a constraint, that
reproduces the silence that marks the historical and judicial conditions of
the Zong’s fatal passage.
Silence is, in short, not a product of an absence, not even an absence of freedom, but rather
silence appears as an unspeak-
able presence in the final section.
In Zong!, then, constraints are not necessarily the counterpoint to freedom
but neither is silence necessarily analogous with an absence of speech nor
even an absence of words or signs. That the final section of the text—the
section that marks a breaking of constraints—is also the section that remains
least speakable and thereby, least audible is significant. Again, as Philip
emphasizes, the story of the Zong! is ultimately a story that can only be told
by not telling. So even in the sea of words that fill up the final pages of
Zong!, the registers of silence that mark the text are resounding.
you can’t ever tell the entire story, and in the case of the Zong,
the log book was lost, so from the beginning there were lacunae in the
story, in the text, which becomes a metaphor for what I am talking
about the impossibility of telling the entire story, and the problematic
about the desire to do so.
In order to tell the story that has to be told without telling, Philip adopts a variety of techniques,
she mutilated the text, she castrasiesed verbs, separated subject from object and verb,
suffocated adjectives, interestingly, most of these actions are similar to the ones that was
employed on the blacks in African ship. She performed with figures of speech the same actions
that were inflicted on the ‘cargo’ of Zong.
Created semantic mayhem .

The sea in Zong! by M. NourbeSe Philip is a potent metaphor that serves to disrupt traditional
narratives and illuminate the horrors of transatlantic slavery. In this long-form poem, Philip
draws on the legal case surrounding the slave ship Zong, where enslaved Africans were thrown
overboard so the owners could claim insurance money. The sea is both a site of loss and
transformation—one that "breaks matter apart and then pieces it back together in new
configurations," reflecting how Philip fractures and reassembles language and history itself.

Through the poem’s structure and fragmented language, Philip resists the male-dominated,
linear histories that traditionally dictate narratives around slavery. Instead, the poem uses the
sea to symbolize fluidity and fragmentation, representing the disrupted lives of those who were
enslaved. Philip’s approach to language here is one of deconstruction and reassembly; by
breaking apart legal records and recombining them into poetic fragments, she allows silenced
perspectives and traumatic experiences to surface. This approach "decontaminates" the
language, making space for expressions of pain, resistance, and memory that are usually
erased in dominant historical records.

The sea’s role in Zong! thus becomes multifaceted: it is an eraser, a site of violence, and a
space of uncharted histories and reclamation. In challenging received history and male-centered
perspectives, Philip’s use of the sea as both setting and metaphor reshapes our understanding
of history, memory, and language itself.

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