Zong!'S “Should We?”: Questioning the Ethical Representation of Trauma

Zong!’s “Should we?”: Questioning the Ethical Representation of Trauma Veronica J. Austen St Jerome’s University

he 2008 publication of Zong! marks M. NourbeSe Philip’s first col- Tlection of poetry since the groundbreaking and award-winning She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks in 1988.1 In taking as its subject the 1781 massacre of slaves from the slave ship Zong, Philip’s text participates in a recent upsurge of interest in the massacre. Ian Baucom’s 2005 Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History, in its discussion of the rise of speculative finance, provides a detailed account of the Zong massacre and the court cases resulting from it. Furthermore, in 2006, City University (United Kingdom) hosted a small conference to discuss new archival material discovered by Martin Dockray. Work from this conference resulted in a 2007 issue of The Journal of Legal His- tory which offered not only a broadened view of maritime insurance laws pertaining to slavery but also an expanded view of the massacre based on Dockray’s discovery of written testimony by James Kelsall, the ship’s first mate.2 Beyond this collection of articles suggesting the exciting possibility 1 1991’s Looking for Livingstone: A Odyssey of Silence is a narrative mostly in prose, although it does include poetry as well. 2 More specifically, this newly discovered testimony was Kelsall’s sworn answer given as part of a parallel court hearing held in the equity side of the court of the

ESC 37.3–4 (September/December 2011): 61–81 of future scholarly archival work, one might even note a growing public interest in and awareness of the Zong massacre. The year 2007’s bicente- nary commemoration of the end of the British slave trade, for example, Veronica Austen is featured a replica of the Zong sailing down the Thames to the Tower of an Assistant Professor, London (Rupprecht 266). specializing in As the various written representations of the Zong massacre elaborate, Commonwealth and this event is notable not just for its dehumanization of slaves on board the Canadian literatures, at ship but also for the court system’s perpetuation of the injustice. The Zong St Jerome’s University in set sail from its last port of call, Sao Tomé off the West Coast of Africa, Waterloo. Her current for Jamaica on 6 September 1781, holding approximately 440 slaves.3 Cap- research focuses on tained by Luke Collingwood, a first-time captain and former ship’s surgeon, intersections between the the ship’s intended voyage to Jamaica was an arduous one where sickness visual arts and literature ravaged both those enslaved and the crew. On 27 November, Jamaica and demonstrates a was at last sighted, but Collingwood being an inexperienced captain (and particular interest in potentially incompetent due to illness), mistook it for Hispaniola and visually experimental turned to sail further west. Just two days later, claiming to be running short poetry by Caribbean and of water, Collingwood decided a jettison of cargo would be required to save Canadian writers. the majority of the ship’s passengers. The cargo? Live slaves. Approximately 132 in total, but the number of those thrown overboard is notably “slippery” (Philip, “Notanda” 208).4 With reportedly some, but obviously not enough, objection by the crew, this mass murder took place over three days. Not surprisingly, the perpetrators of this murder were never charged, although Granville Sharpe, noted British abolitionist, did try to motivate

Exchequer. As noted by Andrew Lewis, not uncommonly this parallel hearing would have been launched by the insurers to seek a stay of the other proceedings in which they were being sued. Failing this specific goal, the hearing in the equity court, at the very least, would have allowed for the early discovery of evidence to be used against them in the other case (Lewis 365). 3 The number of slaves according to the writers inThe Journal of Legal History is 442 (see Webster 289 and Lewis 368); Baucom refers to 440 (11); Philip uses the number 470 (“Notanda” 189), basing her numbers, it seems, off of Walvin’s account in Black Ivory: Slavery in the British Empire (14). 4 The reported number of those thrown overboard ranges from 130 to 150. A report in the Jamaican Cornwall Chronicle on 5 January 1782 announces the jettison of 130 slaves (while also advertising the sale of the survivors) (Lewis 364). The 1783 court case, however, suggests that there were 150 victims. M. NourbeSe Philip uses this number from the court case in her representation of the massacre. Other accounts suggest 131 victims, 122 having been thrown overboard, one having survived, and ten, anticipating their fates, choosing to jump (Walvin 15). Still others discount the existence of a survivor and/or suggest that the number of murdered slaves was 132 with ten additional slaves then choosing to jump (see Baucom 129, Lewis 364).

62 | Austen such a case, having been asked for help by Olaudah Equiano (Shyllon 187–89). Nevertheless, in 1783, this event was addressed in the courts when Gregson and Company, the owners of the Zong, sued the insurance company, Thomas Gilbert, for the insured valued of the jettisoned “cargo,” a value of £30 per lost slave. Under insurance law, the only pertinent fact was whether or not the jettison was deemed “necessary”; natural deaths due to illness would not be covered by insurance, but a necessary jettison of cargo, even if that cargo were living beings, would require compensation. Initially, on 5 March 1783, a jury did rule in favour of the ship owners, ordering Gilbert to honour the insurance claim. Regardless, Gilbert still refused to pay, arguing, of course, that one cannot bring about a loss pur- posely and expect to recover for that loss. The case returned to the courts in May, and on 22 May 1783, at the conclusion of a two-day hearing, Chief Justice Lord Mansfield, along with Justice Willes and Buller, ruled in favour of a new trial, citing a current insufficiency of proof that the jettison was necessary. Whether or not that new trial ever occurred and whether or not any compensation was ever paid to Gregson and his partners remains to this day unknown. One explanation assumes that because the second trial likely offered “no point of law” and was instead “decided on the facts” (Mackenzie-Grieve quoted in Shyllon 192), it was left unrecorded, if, of course, the trial even took place. M. NourbeSe Philip locates her poetic project at the site of this silence and mystery regarding the Zong massacre. The insufficiency of the historical record, both because of the paucity of archival information and even more because of the absence of the victims’ perspectives, offers a specific challenge to those wanting to acknowledge and honour the massacre through contemporary representations. Critics may suggest that literary accounts of historical events can “provid[e] insight […] by giving at least a plausible ‘feel’ for experience and emotion which may be difficult to arrive at through restricted documentary methods” (LaCapra 13). One may even argue that a “highly fictionalized form of history” may offer a previously denied opportunity “to claim authority over the narrative construction of the past” (Spaulding 2). Nevertheless, the ethical ramifications of assuming the right to imaginatively reconstruct a historical event should not easily be dismissed, not by those constructing historiographic accounts, nor by those creating literary depictions. As Philip questions, “What did, in fact, happen on the Zong? Can we, some two hundred years later, ever really know? Should we?” (“Notanda” 196). It is this “Should we?” that most emphatically informs Philip’s creative vision for Zong! and my discussion here. How can Philip, or anyone, ethi-

Zong’s “Should we?” | 63 cally represent the experience of the massacre’s victims when to construct a representation means to hold power over those victims and their legacy? Philip’s “Should we?” could, after all, be answered with a statement like that from Spiegelman’s Maus II: “ ‘Anyway, the victims who died can never tell their side of the story, so maybe it’s better not to have any more stories’ ” (quoted in Miller and Tougaw 8). Recognizing that she must negotiate an ethically fraught territory when choosing to speak of/for others who have not been able to speak for themselves, Philip sets up her project as an exercise in telling a story through “not-tell[ing]” it (“Notanda” 196). In fact, in naming the Zong massacre the “story that cannot and must be told” (“Notanda” 196), Philip grounds her project at the site of paradox, acknowledging both the necessity and impossibility of her task. Although Myriam Moïse positions Zong! as Philip’s attempt to “transcend her traumatic past and overcome silence to (re)map new horizons” (24), Philip’s Zong!, in fact, questions whether or not silence can, or even should, be overcome. Moïse may link Zong! with Philip’s earlier stated desire “to make the black hole (w)hole (Philip 1997, 101)” (24), but attention must be paid to Philip’s persistent questioning of wholeness. She desires to make the “black hole (w)hole” not “whole.” Hence, while yes, Philip’s poetry, which often tries to recover previously lost or maligned perspectives, is rooted in “mak[ing] silence speak” (Moïse 24), it too respects silence by acknowledging that someone with the power of voice cannot speak of or for the silenced without the ethics of such an endeavour remaining in question. Can Philip ethically assume the right to tell the story of the Zong? And by extension, how can readers be positioned to become secondary witnesses to the event, and thereby experience a heightening of their social conscience, yet all the while be positioned to respect the ultimate unknowability of the event? These are the questions Zong! asks. It subsequently suggests provisional answers to its own questions. As Zong! suggests, a so-called “difficult” poetic form, one that requires both the author and the reader to surrender, or at least persistently question, their control over the text may in part be the means through which to engage ethically with the traumatic past. As G. Matthew Jenkins argues, an “experimental” poetry that can foreground the indeterminacy of meaning “can be more ethical […] because it speaks with a language that does not try to control, judge, know, or totalize the Other” (xiii). It would be easy enough to conclude that the difficulty of Philip’s text is meant to cause disorientation from which readers cannot escape, a disorientation that signifies their distance from the massacre itself and their inability to ever really know about it. However, there is a danger in assuming that the difficulty of a text, its inaccessibility, is its

64 | Austen meaning. Such an assumption lets readers be passive, if not lazy. If readers accept their exclusion from the text with an assumption that “I’m not supposed to understand this; it’s enough just to experience it,” then does the silencing of the victims of the Zong not continue? As Philip’s own explanation of her writing process suggests, she knows that she cannot tell the story of the Zong, but that does not stop her from trying. Read- ers of Zong! are thus, by extension, also required to accept the massacre as unknowable but all the while honour their responsibility to pursue knowledge and understanding in the face of that unknowability. Difficult texts may in part be about the experience they create, an experience of being unsettled, disoriented, frustrated, angry, but they must also be about the work they demand of their audiences. Just as Sarah Dowling argues that Zong!’s frequent fragmentation of words into letters and/or syllables emphasizes “the body’s work in producing sound” (54 emphasis added), the overall “difficulty” ofZong! ’s poetic form demands a self-conscious awareness of the work one is doing when reading it and the ethics involved in the attempt to locate meaning. While there have been earlier literary treatments of the massacre— most notably David Dabydeen’s long poem “Turner” (1994) and Fred D’Aguiar’s novel Feeding the Ghosts (1997)—Philip’s depiction of the massacre is especially significant because it assaults language as a means of questioning of the ethics of representing past traumas. It in part achieves this self-conscious questioning through its method of construction and subsequently through the qualities of its poetic form. Choosing to construct her poems exclusively out of the materials from the two-page summary of the May 1783 hearing, Philip employs a method of constraint meant to compromise her authorial intentionality. She describes her creative process as involving a contemplation of the court case document and “certain words leap[ing] out at [her], asking [her] to choose them” (“Notanda” 195). Although especially in the latter sections of Zong!, Philip does allow the words of the document to “explode like a ‘grand boggle game’ ” (“Notanda” 200), she still casts the formation of her poetry as a product of some mystical happenstance, or even as an ancestral voice— Setaey Adamu Boateng—using her as a conduit. In Philip’s form of ethical reconstruction, she demands a “let[ing] go” (“Notanda” 195) so that she can “allow the language to lead [her] somewhere” (“Notanda” 191). Even though Zong! is not formed simply out of chance-operations and Philip does, therefore, exert some control over the text’s construction, in the mere attempt to surrender her control over the construction of her text she can remain constantly aware of the power she wields when tell-

Zong’s “Should we?” | 65 ing someone else’s story. In “Notanda,” Philip acknowledges that she, if not careful, can become like Captain Collingwood, exerting control over individuals and their representation. Comparing herself to Collingwood, she pictures herself “like Captain Collingwood […] now fully launched on a journey” (“Notanda” 190), her process of choosing words similar to Collingwood’s own “random picking of slaves” (“Notanda” 193). If she assumes the power to represent the massacre without remaining conscious of her questionable right to do so, her act of representation could likewise be a form of domination. Regardless, to surrender authorial control completely is an equally untenable position, one that she likens to being confined “in the same way men, women, and children were locked in the holds of the slave ship Zong” (“Notanda” 191). Although since the situations are unequal, the likening of one’s writing process to the experience of the slaves onboard the Zong is somewhat problematic. Philip’s comparison of herself to both Collingwood and those enslaved highlights the balancing act she must perform in order to represent the Zong massacre ethically. To honour the experiences of the victims of the massacre, she can neither surrender nor fully assert her power as storyteller. By extension, readers too must perform a balancing act, neither assuming that they can construct an authoritative reading of Zong!, nor surren- dering themselves to accepting incomprehension. In its multiplying of narrative pathways and other tendencies toward non-linear expression, Zong! persistently compromises a reader’s relationship with the text. Par- ticularly in the latter sections of the text, Philip offers readers a pseudo game of word search, in which readers must string together words across lines and spaces and thereby locate tangential resonances of meaning. Note, for example, how “all is mare all is sea” also becomes “all ill” (143) in the following passage from “Ferrum”:

Figure 1. M. NourbeSe Philip, Zong! 143. Reproduced with permission of the author.

Philip’s style may offer the possibility of linear progress—reading left to right, top to bottom, and piecing together fragmented words does reveal syntactical units, if not always full sentences—but the surfacing of alternate words and reading paths constructs a text with multiple layers

66 | Austen of significance. Furthermore, to hear Philip orally perform the text often reveals a preservation of the fragmentation; in Philip’s style of reading, “the y,” for instance, would not necessarily be “they,” but “the why.”5 For readers, the narrative revealed through linear reading is difficult enough, The subsequent infused as it is with multiple points of view and narrative directions. The subsequent creation of alternate pathways presents readers with a text creation of full of shifting and ephemeral meanings. As a result, Philip’s text sets up a contradictory necessity: readers are positioned at once to have to do alternate more work, thereby potentially to assert more power over the text and the historical event it represents and to have that position of power denied. pathways If to choose to tell and/or learn about the Zong massacre potentially involves a problematic act of hubris, but to not tell and/or learn about presents the Zong massacre fails to respect the victims, then what should one do at this meeting of a rock and a hard place? Philip’s project suggests self- readers with a consciousness regarding the necessary limits to one’s knowledge as the means through which past victims of trauma can be honoured yet their text full of alterity respected. As Marianne Hirsch argues, there must remain “an unbridgeable distance separating the participant from the one born after” shifting and (10). Alison Landsberg’s conception of prosthetic memory—the formation of a public cultural memory through the ability to metaphorically wear ephemeral the memories of others—similarly insists on “finding ways to inhabit other people’s memories as other people’s memories” (24). Dominick LaCapra’s meanings. “empathic unsettlement” likewise demands an “attentive secondary witness [who] does not entail this identity [of the victim]” (78) but who instead undergoes “a kind of virtual experience through which one puts oneself in the other’s position while recognizing the difference of that position and hence not taking the other’s place” (78). As Philip’s project suggests, recovering grievable subjects is simply too important to shy away from the challenge and responsibility of ethical secondary witnessing. As she observes, so often what is encouraged is “to forget and move on” (quoted in Saunders 77) from traumatic histories. Therefore, “the very act of remembering […] can be an act of subver- sion and resistance” (Philip quoted in Saunders 77). In “want[ing] the bones” (Philip, “Notanda” 201)—in other words, in wanting subjects to grieve—Philip positions her project in line with recent critical discourse that gives grief and mourning social and political import. In particular, building upon Agamben’s argument that only certain individuals enjoy

5 Audio clips of Zong! are available at PennSound: http://writing.upenn.edu/ pennsound/x/Philip.php.

Zong’s “Should we?” | 67 the rights of subjecthood, Judith Butler in Precarious Life emphasizes the importance of questioning whose lives and deaths have been considered mournable and whose have not. Arguing that grief can “return [one] to a sense of human vulnerability, to our collective responsibility for the physi- cal lives of one another” (30), Butler envisions an ability to “reimagin[e] the possibility of community on the basis of vulnerability and loss” (20). She writes, “without the capacity to mourn, we lose that keener sense of life we need in order to oppose violence” (xviii–xix). As such, despite the ethical complexities of secondary witnessing, it is precisely Zong!’s imagining of the victims into existence that allows Philip to create a site of mourning that can motivate a reconceptualization of past injustices and their continued legacies. Mourning, thus, can become a “form of labour for justice” (Härting 193)—a means of using “loss as a possibility of social change” (Härting 195). To create this site of mourning but all the while show respect for the victims whose perspectives cannot be known, Philip does in part use the “difficulty” of her poetry to disorient readers and make them feel their place as outsiders. Nevertheless, a closer reading, one that does not just accept Zong!’s indeterminacy as its sole point, reveals that the complexity of Zong!’s expression is not the only means through which a contemplation of secondary witnessing occurs. The relationship between Philip’s poetry in Zong! and its source text—the two-page court case summary—in fact also speaks to the ethics of approaching the trauma of others. This commentary is created both through an emphasis on the insufficiency of the source text as a representation of the massacre and through the strategic use of first-person pronouns such as “me” and “our,” which can be seen as a contemplation of the responsibilities of present-day secondary witnesses to the Zong massacre. The opening section “Os,” in which Philip sticks most closely to the original words from the court case summary, offers some telling points of comparison. For instance, from where in the source text does Philip’s imperative “defend the dead” (26) come? This statement, which appears in “Zong! #15” and repeatedly in “Notanda,” describes Philip’s main purpose in creating Zong!, yet Philip’s formation of “defend the dead” relies on an important resignification of words available in the source text. “Dead” appears just once in the source text: “thirty” other slaves are “lying dead” (Gregson v. Gilbert 211) upon arrival in Jamaica. “Dead,” in this case an adjective, describes a state of being. In order for the victims of the Zong to become the noun in “defend the dead” (emphasis added), the adjective “dead” must be substantivized (the transformation of an adjective into a

68 | Austen noun). This linguistic shift thus creates a personhood for the victims of the massacre that did not exist in the source text’s use of “dead.” In the source document the enslaved men, women, and children are “lying dead,” but they cannot be “the dead” because they are merely “goods.” In Philip’s poetry, however, they can take on the agency of being “the dead,” their passing now honoured as a loss in need of memorializing. Philip’s imperative “defend” is similarly created through a necessary manipulation of the source text. The only presence of “defend” in the court case summary is as “defendant,” in other words, the underwriters. To form “defend,” the “defendant”—a noun—must have its subject status removed through a verbification of “defendant” into “defend.” In order for Philip’s desired defence of the dead to occur, “defendant” must undergo this linguistic violence. In fashioning this action out of “defendant,” Philip thereby calls attention to the ironic nature of the defendant’s—the insurer’s—position; the insurance company may be the more ethical side in the argument in that they have refused to pay for the killing of slaves, but morality, of course, was not their primary motivation or purpose. Their key concern was, instead, the confirmation that a claimant could not be the cause of a claim and still expect compensation. As such, a comparative reading also emphasizes the absence from the source text of anyone willing to fight for those murdered. Summarizing as it does a case that had nothing to do with seeking justice for those murdered, the court case summary cannot possibly be an adequate defence of the dead. Even those who are on the “good” side, fighting so that the slavers cannot profit from murder, are not primarily concerned with the victims of the massacre. Philip must therefore unbury—or to use her ter- minology, “ex-aqua” (201)—a perspective more aware of and empathetic toward the victims of the Zong. Looking at “Zong! #9” reveals one such critique of slavery (see the next two pages; M. NourbeSe Philip, Zong! 17–18. Reproduced with permission of the author):

Zong’s “Should we?” | 69 70 | Austen Zong’s “Should we?” | 71 If the opening syntax can be used as a frame for the rest of the poem’s lines, then this poem’s discussion offers a portrayal of all that the enslaved men, women, and children became “slaves / to” (17). To paraphrase, they became slaves, for example, to the assumed order that could be achieved There are, through their destruction, to the fact that their subjecthood equates them with being “creature[s]” and “property,” and even to history’s focus on the however, underwriter’s potential financial loss rather than the slaves’ own loss of life. Beyond what the poem’s content expresses, another layer of signifi- notable cance becomes apparent when one notes that the words from this poem come almost exclusively from the contra side of the court case, in other manipulations words the side arguing against a new trial and in favour of the owners receiving their compensation. For example, “the order in / destroyed” of the source comes from “the slaves were destroyed in order to throw the loss on the underwriters” (Gregson v. Gilbert 211), as does “the loss in underwriter,” text apparent in while “the sustenance in want” comes from “the negroes died for want of sustenance, &c.” (Gregson v. Gilbert 211). this poem. There are, however, notable manipulations of the source text apparent in this poem. Three words appear in the poem that are not present in that one contra side paragraph: “provisions,” “weight,” and “me.” “Me,” as will soon be developed further, is present in the source text only as part of other words, while “provisions” and “weight” appear respectively in the argument supporting a new trial and in Lord Mansfield’s ruling, paragraphs that immediately precede and follow the contra side paragraph. As well, there are three other alterations: “creatures,” “underwriters,” and “negroes” are rendered by Philip in the singular rather than the plural. These simi- larities to and differences from the source text offer a means for further interpreting this poem beyond its overt content. The insertion of “weight” and “provisions,” for instance, into the company of words made up of the contra side of the argument suggests in part a lack of distinction between the sides; words from predominantly the contra side form what these individuals were “slaves to,” but what they are slaves to is also a part of the side supporting the need for a new trial and to Lord Mansfield’s ruling itself. Even in these arguments that question the rightfulness of Captain Collingwood’s actions, there is nothing that questions the morality of slavery itself; hence, even in these points of view, the men, women, and children on the Zong remain “slaves to” the ideology of their time and place. As well, Philip’s rendering singular what is plural in the source text serves as a commentary on the source text’s inability to view individuals as separate from their groups. The source text in fact obscures the iden-

72 | Austen tity and individuality of both the perpetrators and those victimized. Not surprisingly, no mention is made of individual slaves from the ship, but even Captain Collingwood becomes merely “the captain” or “master” in this document. First Mate Kelsall receives no direct mention either, his presence merely assumed amidst references to “the mariners” or “the crew.” This lack of specificity in the court case summary masks the human agency involved in the massacre. Of more dire consequence, though, is the lack of singularity offered by the source text to those enslaved on theZong . These men, women, and children are only ever referred to in the source text as “slaves” and “negroes,” the plurality of these labels emphasizing that an individual is never distinguished from the collective identity. Philip’s strategic use of the singular “negro” must then be read in terms of its context within the source text. “Creatures” and “underwriters” may never appear as singular in the source text, but “negro” importantly does. “The negro slaves on board” (Gregson v. Gilbert 210) appears in the court case summary’s introductory paragraph. Although the word “negro” is present in the source document for Philip’s use, it remains significant that this word is found outside of the contra argument from which most of “Zong! #9” is formed. The singularized enslaved man, woman, or child is shown to have no place in that side of the court case; he/she is exiled from that space. As well, one must also note that even though “negro” appears once in the source document, it appears as an adjective describ- ing the plural “slaves.” It thus functions only within the description of a collective identity. In order to recover the individual, man, woman, or child from the group distinction “slaves,” Philip has had to dismiss the original context of “negro” and resignify it as a noun. Even though to a contemporary audience, the use of “negro” to refer to an individual is most often considered offensive, its use here, in fact, reflects an attempt to grant subject status, a singularity, to those enslaved. In the source document “fellow” is paired with “creatures”—“our fellow-creatures” (Gregson v. Gilbert 211); in Philip’s poem “fellow” is paired with “negro”—“the fellow in negro” (17). This alteration, thereby, at the very least implies a humanization of the reference to those enslaved. Nevertheless, Philip cannot fully correct the anonymity implied by the term “negro.” As it is used in the poem, “negro” could refer to any one enslaved person; there is no specific individuality granted. Hence, the movement toward humanization suggested by this poem’s use of “negro” is not complete because “negro” still bears the traces of the ideologies present in the source text, ideologies that deny individuality and humanity to those enslaved. Philip cannot rescue the

Zong’s “Should we?” | 73 term enough, even using it in the singular, to fully grant personhood to the victims of the Zong. She must, consequently, construct this personhood by other means. For Philip, the deconstruction of the category of “slaves,” must begin by imagining names for the victims of the Zong: The Africans on board the Zong must be named. They will be ghostly footnotes floating below the text—“underwater … a place of consequence” Idea at the heart of the footnotes in general is acknowledge- ment—someone else was here before—in Zong! footnote equals the footprint. Footprints of the African on board the Zong. (“Notanda” 200)

These footprints appear at the bottom of each page of the “Os” section, appearing in a significantly smaller font and seemingly drowning beneath the linear demarcation of the footnote section. This offering of names, even though it relies on a fictionalization of the historical event, rescues 228 individuals from the anonymity of the court case summary and the ship’s manifest itself.6 Even if the manifest of the Zong had survived (it went missing even before the hearings), the only identification of slaves on board the Zong would have been in the form of “ ‘negroe man’ [sic], ‘negroe woman,’ or more frequently, ‘ditto man,’ ditto woman’ ” (“Notanda” 194). Philip offering of distinctive identity through naming cannot, however, be supported by the language of the court case summary. In fact, this decision to offer names to those slaves onboard theZong requires Philip to violate her poetic constraint. Unlike her other alterations of the source text, these names cannot be said to be a product of her “grand boggle game” (“Notanda” 200). They are not formed out of the words of the court case summary, and, hence, they instead represent a complete break with the rules of her project. In this way, the traditions of the English language itself, namely what letters are most commonly combined to form English words, are shown to be inadequate for the representation of the humanity of these African men, women, and children. From what English word could an African name like Ibunkunle come? or Mowunmi? or Wamukota? In this necessary violation of her constraint, Philip can be said to be expanding a question from her earlier “Meditations on the Declension of Beauty by the Girl with the Flying Cheek-bones.” In it she asks,

6 Twenty-two other names appear at the conclusion of “Ferrum,” six of which are names that appeared in the “Os” section footnotes.

74 | Austen If not in yours In whose In whose language Am I If not in yours Beautiful (lines 44–49) In Zong! the question can be phrased “If not in yours, in whose language can the enslaved even exist and be?” Of course, the somewhat elusive and provisional answer must be that the slaves of the Zong can only achieve their right to individuality through the outright destruction—as Philip says, “murder” (“Notanda” 193)—of the discourses like the court case summary that have denied them their humanity. Beyond this emphasis on the failures of the court case summary as a representation of the massacre, Philip’s use of the document also serves to highlight a contemporary audience’s questionable relationship with this past event. The “difficulty” of Philip’s expression may offer readers a vicarious experience of the disorientation and trauma of being on board the Zong, but the question remains, is such a simulation an ethical means of engaging with the past? Largely embodying what Umberto Eco classed an “open-text”—a text representing “ ‘a field of oriented possibili- ties’ ” (Eco quoted in Hejinian 272) rather than a determinate or singular meaning—Philip’s text can motivate what Lyn Hejinian argues is central to the reception of open-texts, an “experience of feeling overwhelmed by undifferentiated material.[… Of] feel[ing] panicky, closed in” (271). This mimicking of the symptoms of trauma is something that Anne Whitehead argues is central to the genre of trauma fiction (3). However, such imitation of trauma becomes ethically questionable since readers are often impelled to too closely identify themselves with those who suffered the initial trauma. For example, in response to Zong!, Rebekah Dawn speaks of the experience of “drowning with the names, the images, the facts, the justice, […] the people” (np). For Sina Queyras, the experience of Zong! includes her imaginative transportation to the “creak- ing of wood, the salty air” (np) of the ship. As Alison Landsberg argues, this kind of experiential learning can allow secondary witnesses to establish prosthetic memories of the traumatic event, prosthetic memories that will enhance social consciousness; nevertheless, the ethics of this “transmis- sion of memories to people who have no ‘natural’ or biological claims to them” (18) relies entirely on the secondary witness’s ability to preserve a sense of his/her distinction from the actual victims of trauma. A reader of

Zong’s “Should we?” | 75 Zong! may be placed in a space of disorientation similar to that experienced by the victims of the Zong, but this reader must remain aware that his/her incomprehension cannot possibly have the same violent consequences as those suffered by theZong victims. Although readers may have the conscience to ask, as Sina Queyras ultimately does, “What right do I have to be witnessing this?” (np), it is a closer reading of the relationship between Philip’s poetry and its source text that can communicate the contemporary audience’s inherent distance from the event. Philip’s very choice of a source text, for example, suggests an unbridgeable separation from the event. For Philip, “the text of Gregson v. Gilbert [may] appear so modest, so fragile, so ‘meagre’ ” (“Notanda” 194), but it is “the tombstone, the one public marker of the murder of those Africans on board the Zong” (“Notanda” 194). Nevertheless, as she herself acknowledges, there are other archival accounts of the Zong massacre, so one might note that this case is not in fact the “one public marker” she describes, but as a court case summary it is a public marker that once would have been thought to have the authority of being objective. As well, it is perhaps the most easily accessible marker since someone in proximity to a law library can readily access the case book; there is no need to seek permission to enter an archive to gain access to this type of document (Philip, Message np). Then, in choosing the court case summary, instead of, for instance, an anonymous letter published in The Morning Chronicle (18 March 1783) or any of Granville Sharp’s accounts,7 Philip sets up her project in the context of resistance to the official record, an official record that clearly represents the court case’s mis-signification of the term “victim.” The victims here are either the ship’s owners or the insurance company, depending upon which side one falls; the slaves themselves are not part of these considerations. As such, in choosing this specific document, Philip sets herself up to find her way out of the facade of orderliness and completeness that the document represents. She must locate the presence of the Zong victims amidst their unrecognized absence. Philip’s choice, however, not only showcases the absence of the victims from consideration, but also positions her own poetry as part of a continuum of representations of the massacre, none of which come close

7 Chapter 8 of Prince Hoare’s compilation of The Memoirs of Granville Sharp (1820) offers documents regarding Sharp’s attempt to seek justice on behalf of the Zong victims including letters Sharp sent in his pursuit. As well, appendix 8 features Sharp’s own four-and-a-half page account of the massacre and subsequent court case that he included in his 2 July 1783 letter to the Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty.

76 | Austen to embodying the event itself. Philip’s choice is not, for instance, to use a verbatim transcript of the court’s proceedings but, rather, a two-page summary, a summary that is inherently a mere distillation of the trial and the trial a mere distillation of the event.8 As well, one should note that There is, in fact, this particular case summary did not appear in print until 1831, forty-eight years after the case itself (Oldham 310). James Oldham, in fact, notes no “me” in the that the third and fourth volumes of Sylvester Douglas’s Reports—the Zong case appearing in volume three—were published posthumously, put historical together “from notes by Douglas and others, edited by Henry Roscoe” (310). Philip, thus, has constructed a narrative of the Zong massacre based document. on a representation of a representation of a hearing which is itself also distanced from the occurrence of the massacre. She has thereby positioned Zong! within a chain of portrayals which, in the end, can only suggest the ultimate distance from which she and, subsequently, her readers must encounter the historical event. As a result, Philip can also motivate a self-awareness of one’s place as a secondary witness through her sparse use of the first person in “Os.” Throughout “Os,” the first person is present a mere three times, twice as the plural “our” and once as “me.” In that these pronouns can be taken to signify a contemporary subject position—“me” suggesting the writer/speaker and “our” suggesting the group to which the “me” belongs—Philip’s use of these pronouns speaks to a contemplation of the secondary witness’s rights and responsibilities to the past. Importantly, the presence of “me” in the poetry represents a key alteration of the source text. There is, in fact, no “me” in the historical document. Philip’s lines “the me in / become” (18) are made possible only through her location of “me” within other words in the summary. On one level then, if one takes the “me” in Philip’s poem as reflective of a contemporary writer/speaker of the poem, a hint of a lyrical subject per se, then part of the significance of Philip’s use of “me” is precisely the lack of space the contemporary witness has within the historical document. The document itself cannot anticipate or include that latter presence directly, although the “me” does pervade the historical document when sought through the make-up of other words. In fact, where the “me” is present in the document’s other words also becomes significant. As Philip specifies, “me” is in the document’s “become,” and in other neutral words like “measure” or “made,” but “me” can also be found in the document’s more negative language. Words like “market,” “payment,” “enemies,”

8 A manuscript copy of the shorthand reporter’s verbatim minutes of the case is available at the National Maritime Museum, London, nmm rec/19 (Oldham 311).

Zong’s “Should we?” | 77 “crime,” and even “murder” also house the makings of “me.” Consequently, through comparison with the historical document, the “me” of the poetry becomes implicated in the source of traumatic suffering. “Our” in the “Os” poems represents a similarly precarious position. It appears in “Zong! #1,” the visual display of the words either suggesting “our” to be a word on its own or part of a fragmented “sour”:

Figure 2: M. NourbeSe Philip. Zong! 3. Reproduced with permission of the author.

“Our” also appears in “Zong! #8”: “fellow / creatures / become / our portion / of / mortality” (16). This “our” in the “Os” poems represents a complicated sense of collectivity, particularly when seen in relationship with the court case summary. Although “our” can be found in more neutral words like “through” and “grounds,” in the two instances where it appears as a full word in the source text—“sour water” (Gregson v. Gilbert 210) and “our fellow-creatures” (Gregson v. Gilbert 211)—“our” reveals itself to be a undesirable position. In particular, the “our” of “our fellow- creatures” appears in the contra side of the case and therefore refers to those arguing for the insurance money to be paid to the ship’s owners; namely, this is an “our” composed of those who accept the rightfulness of collecting insurance money on murdered humans beings. This “our” may acknowledge that the decision rendering “a portion of our fellow- creatures […] the subject of property” (Gregson v. Gilbert 211) was made either “wisely or unwisely” (Gregson v. Gilbert 211, emphasis added), but this “our” also quickly dismisses this concern stating that it “is not now the question” (Gregson v. Gilbert 211). Consequently, the “our” of the court case summary reflects a possessiveness and condescension toward its “fellow-creatures” (emphasis added). It is an “our” implicated in racist ideologies. Because of this context for the source document’s “our,” the “our” in “Os” comes to bear this trace of questionable morality. Despite it seeming to signify an empathetic group in “Zong! #8” who looks toward

78 | Austen the Zong victims as representing “our portion / of / mortality” (16), the altruism of this “our” is rendered suspect. Philip’s text succeeds in its ethical representation of the past precisely by motivating this self-awareness of one’s relationship with the traumatic pasts of others. In that Philip’s constrained poetics creates a complex poetic form that compromises not only her own control over the text but her readers’ control as well, Philip is able to emphasize that the trauma of another cannot be fully known. As Judith Butler suggests, “For representation to convey the human”—the alterity of someone else’s trauma—“then representation must not only fail, but it must show its failure” (144). In other words, as Diana Brydon argues, difficult subjects—traumatic ones, undocumented ones—require “difficult forms of knowing” (np). The disorientation that a difficult poetic form causes, however, cannot be a text’s sole significance. Instead, to continue with Judith Butler’s argument, an ethical negotiation of representing trauma must acknowledge that “There is something unrepresentable that we nevertheless seek to represent, and that paradox must be retained in the representation we give” (144). If readers of Zong! assume that their only job is to experience the text as unsettling and incomprehensible, then the two sides of the paradox have not survived; we instead assume merely that the Zong massacre cannot be represented and thereby give ourselves permission to abandon our work in pursuing some level of understanding. TheZong massacre may be the “story that cannot be told,” but that does not mean that the story should not be told, and heard, and grappled with. A difficult text still demands close reading and an audience willing to assume that challenge. It is only through doing the work involved in reading a text like Zong! that one can become aware of his/her role in eulogizing past losses and further understand the ethics of engaging with the past and its continued legacy.

Works Cited

Baucom, Ian. Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History. Durham: Duke up, 2005. Brydon, Diana. “ ‘Difficult Forms of Knowing’: Enquiry, Injury and Trans- located Relations of Postcolonial Responsibility.” Postcolonial Trans- locations: 20th Annual GNEL/ANSEL Conference. 24 May 2009. Key Note Address. http://myuminfo.umanitoba.ca/Documents/2696/Dif- ficultKnowing.pdf. 17 June 2010.

Zong’s “Should we?” | 79 Butler, Judith. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. Lon- don: Verso, 2004 Dawn, Rebekah. “M. NourbeSe Philip.” Weblog. Rebekahisms: A People’s Blog. 20 January 2010. Web. 1 August 2010. Dowling, Sarah. “Persons and Voices: Sounding Impossible Bodies in M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong!” Canadian Literature 210/211 (2011): 43–58. Gregson v. Gilbert. 3 Dougl. 233. 1783. Reprinted in Zong! by Philip. Toronto: Mercury, 2008. 210–11. Härting, Heike. “The Poetics of Vulnerability: Diaspora, Race, and Global Citizenship in A. M. Klein’s The Second Scroll and Dionne Brand’s Thirsty.” Studies in Canadian Literature 32.2 (2007): 177–99. Erudit. Web. 23 June 2011. Hejinian, Lyn. “The Rejection of Closure.”Writing/Talks . Ed. Bob Perelman. Carbondale: Southern Illinois up, 1985. 270–91. Hirsch, Marianne. “Surviving Images: Holocaust Photographs and the Work of Postmemory.” The Yale Journal of Criticism 14.1 (2001): 5–37. Project Muse. Web. 27 May 2010. Jenkins, G. Matthew. Poetic Obligation: Ethics in Experimental American Poetry After 1945. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2008. LaCapra, Dominick. Writing History, Writing Trauma. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins up, 2001. Landsberg, Alison. Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture. New York: Columbia up, 2004. Lewis, Andrew. “Martin Dockay and the Zong: A Tribute in the Form of a Chronology.” The Journal of Legal History 28.3 (2007): 357–70. Infor- maworld. Web. 15 May 2010. Miller, Nancy K., and Jason Tougaw. “Introduction: Extremities.” Extrem- ities: Trauma, Testimony, and Community. Eds. Nancy K. Miller and Jason Tougaw. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002. 1–21. Moïse, Myriam. “Grasping the Ungraspable in M. Nourbese Philip’s Poetry.” Commonwealth Essays and Studies 33. 1 (2010): 23–33. Literature Online. Web. 16 July 2012. Oldham, James. “Insurance Litigation Involving the Zong and Other Brit- ish Slave Ships, 1780–1807.” The Journal of Legal History 28.3 (2007): 299–318. Informaworld. Web. 15 May 2010.

80 | Austen Philip, M. NourbeSe. Message to the author. 24 July 2012. Email. ———. “Notanda.” Zong! Toronto: Mercury, 2008. 189–209. ——— . Zong! Toronto: Mercury, 2008. Philip, Marlene Nourbese. “Meditations on the Declension of Beauty by the Girl with the Flying Cheek-bones.” She Tries her Tongue her Silence Softly Breaks. Charlottetown: Ragweed, 1989. 52–53. Queyras, Sina. “On Encountering Zong!.” Influency Salon 1 (2010): np. Web. 22 May 2010. Rupprecht, Anita. “ ‘A Limited Sort of Property’: History, Memory, and the Slave Ship Zong.” Slavery and Abolition 29.2 (2008): 265–77. Infor- maworld. Web. 23 May 2010. Saunders, Patricia. “Defending the Dead, Confronting the Archive: A Con- versation with M. NourbeSe Philip. Small Axe 26 (2008): 63–79. Project Muse. Web. 20 May 2010. Shyllon, F. O. Black Slaves in Britain. London: Oxford, 1974. Spaulding, A. Timothy. Re-Forming the Past: History, The Fantastic, and the Postmodern Slave Narrative. Columbus: Ohio State up, 2005. Walvin, James. Black Ivory: Slavery in the British Empire. 2nd ed. Oxford: Blackwell, 2001. Webster, Jane. “The Zong in the Context of the Eighteenth-Century Slave Trade.” The Journal of Legal History 28.3 (2007): 285–98. Informaworld. Web. 15 May 2010. Whitehead, Anne. Trauma Fiction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh up, 2004.

Zong’s “Should we?” | 81