Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-fscjk Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-26T07:53:01.928Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Poetic Justice: Slavery, Law, and the (Anti-)Elegiac Form in M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong!

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 December 2014

Almas Khan
Almas Khan*
Affiliation:
University of Virginia
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

James Walvin has called the Zong case stemming from a 1781 incident in which the crew of an English slave ship willfully “destroyed” more than one-third of the “cargo” (i.e., slaves) aboard the vessel “[t]he most grotesquely bizarre of all slave cases heard in an English court.” While the judges locked themselves within the discourse of maritime law in evaluating the case’s merits, M. NourbeSe Philip unlocks the legal language in Zong! (2008), which limits itself to the words included in the official narrative but contrastingly uses experimental poetry to suggest a poignant counter-narrative. My article concentrates on the complex interplay between Zong! and its source, the appellate record in the Zong case; by comparing and contrasting the rhetorical and generic conventions in the two texts, I reveal how Philip’s poetry cycle testifies that language’s complicity with violence is an association elided at our peril.

Keywords

Zong case (legal basis of slavery)law and literaturetrauma studies
Type
Articles
Information
Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry , Volume 2 , Special Issue 1: Special Issue: Literature and Law , March 2015 , pp. 5 - 32
Copyright
© Cambridge University Press 2014 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

Almas Khan is a PhD candidate in the English department at the University of Virginia. Her interests include contemporary Anglophone literature, poetry, and law and literature. She has a JD from the University of Chicago Law School, an MA from the University of California–Irvine, and a BA from Stanford University.

1

I wish to thank Professor Mrinalini Chakravorty for her incisive feedback on the numerous iterations of this article, which is written in remembrance of Tehziba Ansari and Seemin Mohammed, my grandmother and sister in spirit.

References

2 Walvin, James, The Zong (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011), 209 Google Scholar.

3 Philip, M. NourbeSe, Zong! (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2008), 208 Google Scholar.

4 Walvin, James, Black Ivory: A History of British Slavery 1e (London: HarperCollins, 1992), 16 Google Scholar.

5 Philip, , Zong!, 207 Google Scholar.

6 Walvin, , The Zong, 208 Google Scholar.

7 Baucom, Ian, Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 311 (citing Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, trans. Betsy Wing [Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997]).

8 Ibid., 313.

9 Moise, Myriam, “Grasping the Ungraspable in M. NourbeSe Philip’s Poetry,” Commonwealth Essays and Studies 33.1 (2010): 23–33 Google Scholar, 26.

10 See Rupprecht’s, Anita “‘A Limited Sort of Property’: History, Memory, and the Slave Ship Zong ,” Slavery & Abolition: A Journal of Slave and Post-Slave Studies 29.2 (2008): 265–277 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Austen’s, Veronica J. “ Zong!’s ‘Should We?’: Questioning the Ethical Representation of Trauma,” English Studies in Canada 37.3–4 (2011): 61–81 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Queyras’s, Sina “On Encountering Zong! ,” Influency Salon 1 (2010)Google Scholar. Web; Moise’s, Myriam “Grasping the Ungraspable in M. NourbeSe Philip’s Poetry”; Kate Eichorn’s “Multiple Registers of Silence in M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong! ,” XCP: Cross-Cultural Poetics 23.1 (2010): 33–39 Google Scholar; Fehskens’s, Erin McMullen “Accounts Unpaid, Accounts Untold: M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong! and the Catalogue,” Callaloo 35.2 (2012): 407–424 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Dowling’s, Sarah “Persons and Voices: Sounding Impossible Bodies in M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong!,” Canadian Literature 210/211 (2011): 43–58Google Scholar.

11 This section synthesizes several of the seminal historical narratives about the English slave trade and the Zong incident. Because discrepancies about the incident, particularly the number of slaves aboard the ship and the number thrown overboard, permeate the historical record, it bears note that the cited sources at times vary markedly in their figures; accordingly, the statistics referenced here should not be considered definitive. See Fehskens, “Accounts Unpaid, Accounts Untold,” 407.

12 Lachance, Paul, ed. “The Transatlantic Slave Trade Database,” Voyages (2009)Google Scholar. Emory University. Web; Webster, Jane, “The Zong in the Context of the Eighteenth-Century Slave Trade.” Journal of Legal History 28.3 (2007): 285–298 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 286, 289.

13 Webster, , “The Zong,” 286–287 Google Scholar.

14 “[S]ocial spaces where disparate cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in highly asymmetrical relations of domination and subordination.” Pratt, Mary Louise, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992), 4 Google Scholar.

15 Walvin, , The Zong, 47 Google Scholar, 74.

16 Oldham, James, “Insurance Litigation Involving the Zong and Other British Slave Ships, 1780–1807,” Journal of Legal History 29.3 (2007): 299–318 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 299.

17 Walvin, , The Zong, 27 Google Scholar.

18 Walvin, , The Zong, 34–48 Google Scholar.

19 Walvin, , The Zong, 57 Google Scholar.

20 Baucom, , Specters of the Atlantic, 169 Google Scholar.

21 Walvin, , The Zong, 69–97 Google Scholar.

22 Ibid., 96.

23 Philip, , Zong!, 208 Google Scholar.

24 Lewis, Andrew, “Martin Dockray and the Zong: A Tribute in the Form of a Chronology,” Journal of Legal History 28.3 (2007): 357–370 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 364.

25 Weisbord, Robert, “The Case of the Slave Ship Zong,” History Today 19 (1969): 561–567 Google Scholar, 562.

26 Lewis, , “Martin Dockray and the Zong,” 364 Google Scholar.

27 Lewis, , “Martin Dockray and the Zong,” 351–352 Google Scholar.

28 Oldham, , “Insurance Litigation,” 300–310 Google Scholar.

29 Rupprecht, Anita, “ ‘A Very Uncommon Case’: Representations of the Zong and the British Campaign to Abolish the Slave Trade,” Journal of Legal History 28.3 (2007): 329–346 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 334.

30 Ibid., 332. See Hesse, Barnor, “Forgotten Like a Bad Dream: Atlantic Slavery and the Ethics of Postcolonial Memory,” in Relocating Postcolonialism, eds. D. T. Goldberg and Ato Quayson (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), 143–173 Google Scholar.

31 Fehskens, , “Accounts Unpaid,” 409 Google Scholar.

32 Lewis, , “Martin Dockray and the Zong,” 364–365 Google Scholar.

33 Walvin, , The Zong, 102 Google Scholar.

34 Black Ivory: Slavery in the British Empire, 2e (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001).

35 Walvin, , The Zong, 124 Google Scholar, 167.

36 Walvin, , The Zong, 140–143 Google Scholar.

37 Walvin, , The Zong, 157–158 Google Scholar.

38 Policy (as opposed to legal) arguments frequently increase in significance as cases are appealed to higher level courts. Looper, Donna C. and Kuney, George W., Mastering Appellate Advocacy and Process (Durham: Carolina Academic Press, 2011), 206 Google Scholar.

39 Oldham, , “Insurance Litigation,” 310–312 Google Scholar. Mansfield had presided at the earlier trial.

40 Austen, , “Zong!’s ‘Should We?,’ ” 77 Google Scholar.

41 To promote readability, citations to the appellate case report have been excluded from the discussion below, but as noted, the appendix contains the full text of Gregson v. Gilbert on appeal.

42 Oldham, , “Insurance Litigation,” 302 Google Scholar.

43 Ibid., 137.

44 Ibid., 136.

45 Cf. Zong!’s reference to Wale, one of the captured slaves, as an “un / common negro.” Ibid., 88.

46 Walvin, , The Zong, 153 Google Scholar.

47 Rupprecht, , “A Very Uncommon Case,” 332–333 Google Scholar.

48 Baucom, , Specters of the Atlantic, 3–4 Google Scholar.

49 Ibid., 203.

50 Ibid., 341.

51 Rupprecht, , “A Very Uncommon Case,” 341 Google Scholar.

52 Rupprecht, , “A Very Uncommon Case,” 341 Google Scholar.

53 Saunders, Patricia Joan, “Defending the Dead, Confronting the Archive: A Conversation with M. NourbeSe Philip,” Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism 26 (2008): 63–79 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 67–68.

54 Unsworth’s, Barry, Sacred Hunger (New York: Doubleday, 1992)Google Scholar; Cliff’s, Michelle Free Enterprise (New York: Dutton, 1993)Google Scholar; and D’Aguiar’s, Fred, Feeding the Ghosts (Hopewell: Ecco, 1997)Google Scholar are three novels rewriting the incident. More recently, a 2007 symposium sponsored by the Journal of Legal History explored the legal, social, and historical dimensions of Gregson v. Gilbert; see Symposium—The Zong: Legal, Social, and Historical Dimensions, Journal of Legal History 28.3 (2007): 283–370. Baucom’s, Ian Specters of the Atlantic (2005)Google Scholar and Walvin’s, James The Zong (2011)Google Scholar, which both focus mainly on the Zong, have analyzed the incident from nonfictional literary and historical perspectives, respectively. The recently released film Belle (director Amma Asante, Fox Searchlight Pictures, 2014) narrates the fictionalized biography of Dido Elizabeth Belle Lindsay, a mixed-race niece who lived with Lord Mansfield and her white cousin Elizabeth Murray. Dido’s father, Captain John Lindsay, apparently fathered a daughter with an African woman on board a Spanish slave ship he had captured, and the film interweaves the reconstructed story of Dido’s life with the Zong litigation. The movie represents Gregson v. Gilbert melodramatically, with Chief Justice Mansfield’s decision depicted more glowingly than in the case report. Philip learned about Dido’s life while perusing Simon Schamas’s Rough Crossings. Philip, Zong!, 206.

55 Rupprecht, , “‘A Very Uncommon Case,”’ 332 Google Scholar.

56 Saunders, Patricia Joan, “Trying Tongues, E-Raced Identities, and the Possibilities of Be/Longing: Conversations with NourbeSe Philip,” Journal of West Indian Literature 14.1–2 (2005): 202–219 Google Scholar, 214.

57 Mahlis, Kristen, “A Poet of Place: An Interview with M. NourbeSe Philip,” Callaloo 27.3 (2004): 682–697 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 687.

58 Thomas, H. Nigel, “Caliban’s Voice: Marlene Nourbese Philip’s Poetic Response to Western Hegemonic Discourse,” Studies in the Literary Imagination 26.2 (1993): 63–76 Google Scholar, 68. The “idea of the modern” has been “deeply implicated from its beginnings with a project of domination over those seen to lack th[e] capacity for reflective reasoning,” that is, anyone not “European, bourgeois, and male.” Saunders, Rebecca, Lamentation and Modernity in Literature, Philosophy, and Culture (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 5 (quoting Rita Felski, The Gender of Modernity [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995], 4). William Watkin argues that “[t]he twentieth century has, if you like, being [sic] one long funeral procession for the Enlightenment project of legislative and transparent meaning, and post-modernism one great, irreverent wake.” Watkin, William, On Mourning: Theories of Loss in Modern Literature (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004), 85 Google Scholar.

59 Philip, , Zong!, 197 Google Scholar.

60 Mahlis, , “A Poet of Place,” 692 Google Scholar. Philip’s oft-cited “Discourse on the Logic of Language” reflects “anguish” at her estrangement from both her “father tongue” and “mother tongue.” See Philip, M. NourbeSe, “Discourse on the Logic of Language,” in Prismatic Publics: Innovative Canadian Women’s Poetry and Poetics, eds. Kate Eichorn and Heather Milne (Toronto: Coach House Books, 2009), 149–152 Google Scholar.

61 Philip, , Zong!, xi, 199 Google Scholar.

62 Philip, , Zong!, 205 Google Scholar.

63 Philip, , Zong!, 191 Google Scholar.

64 Philip, , Zong!, 200 Google Scholar.

65 Mahlis, , “A Poet of Place,” 694 Google Scholar.

66 Brathwaite has asserted that “[i]t was in language that the slave was perhaps most successfully imprisoned by this master, and it was in his (mis-)use of it that he perhaps most effectively rebelled.” Quoted in Chamberlin, J. Edward, Come Back to Me My Language (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993), 67 Google Scholar. Although T. S. Eliot’s aesthetics have profoundly influenced Brathwaite’s poetics, innovations with African antecedents more deeply imbue Brathwaite’s poetry, which promotes Caribbean identity. Jahan Ramazani et al., “Kamau Brathwaite,” The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry. Vol. 2: Contemporary Poetry, Introduction, eds. Jahan Ramazani, et al. (New York: Norton, 2003), 542–44.

67 Philip, , Zong!, 199 Google Scholar.

68 “As Gramsci has pointed out, a major aspect of hegemony is control over ‘common sense,’ i.e., that body of doxa that regulates what passes for sense in any public sphere . . . ‘The more powerful the perpetrator, the greater is his prerogative to name and define reality, and the more completely his arguments prevail.’” David Lloyd, “Colonial Trauma/Postcolonial Recovery?,” Interventions 2.2 (2000): 212–28, 214 (quoting Antonio Gramsci, “The Study of Philosophy,” Selections from the Prison Notebooks, eds. Quintin Hoare and Geofrey Nowell Smith [New York: International Publishers, 1971], 323–43), and Herman, Judith, Trauma and Recovery (New York: Basic Books, 1992), 28 Google Scholar. Lloyd thus avers the necessity of postcolonial writers making “sense of the traumatizing event outside the terms that constitute the common sense of hegemony,” as of the state, “in order for the conditions for a recovery from trauma to exist.” Ibid., 214–15.

69 Philip, , Zong!, 194 Google Scholar.

70 Saunders, , “Defending the Dead,” 68 Google Scholar.

71 Philip, , Zong!, 192 Google Scholar.

72 Queyras, “On Encountering Zong!.”

73 Philip, , Zong!, 205 Google Scholar.

74 Ibid., 201.

75 Philip, , Zong!, 209 Google Scholar.

76 Philip, , Zong!, 200 Google Scholar.

77 Saunders, , “Defending the Dead,” 67 Google Scholar.

78 Philip, , Zong!, 198 Google Scholar.

79 Ibid.

80 Mahlis, , “A Poet of Place,” 693 Google Scholar.

81 I thank Professor Cristina S. Martinez at the University of Ottawa for this insight.

82 Moise, , “Grasping the Ungraspable,” 31 Google Scholar.

83 Philip, , Zong!, 195 Google Scholar.

84 Philip, , Zong!, 195 Google Scholar.

85 See Johnson, Barbara, “Translator’s Note,” Stéphane Mallarmé, Divagations, trans. Barbara Johnson (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007), 299–302 Google Scholar, 301.

86 Philip, , Zong!, 203 Google Scholar.

87 The appendix reproduces selections from all poems referenced here.

88 Philip, , Zong!, 185 Google Scholar.

89 Paul Watkins, “We Can Never Tell the Entire Story of Slavery: In Conversation with M. NourbeSe Philip,” The Toronto Review of Books, 30 April 2014. Web.

90 Philip has also performed selections of the poetry cycle in a jazz improvisation style with musicians. November 29, 2013, marked the anniversary of the 1781 massacre, for which the complete cycle was performed in a marathon event lasting until 5:00 AM. Watkins, “In Conversation with M. NourbeSe Philip.”

91 Philip, , Zong!, 207 Google Scholar.

92 Austen, “Zong!’s ‘Should We?,’ ” 64.

93 Philip, , Zong!, 202 Google Scholar.

94 Ibid.

95 Butler, Judith, “Violence, Mourning, Politics,” in Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (New York: Verso, 2004), 19–49 Google Scholar, 25.

96 Spargo, R. Clifton, The Ethics of Mourning: Grief and Responsibility in Elegiac Literature (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), 10 Google Scholar.

97 Weisman, Karen, “Introduction,” The Oxford Handbook of the Elegy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 1–12 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 1.

98 Watkin, , On Mourning, 86 Google Scholar.

99 Kennedy, David, Elegy (New York: Routledge, 2007), 23 Google Scholar.

100 Ibid., 116–17.

101 Paradigmatic elegies preceding the modern period had “typically shaped and ordered grief . . . usually follow[ing] an affective course that led from anger and despair to consolation.” Ramazani, Jahan, Poetry of Mourning: The Modern Elegy from Hardy to Heaney (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 18 Google Scholar.

102 Ibid., 1–2.

103 See Jahan Ramazani, et al., “Introduction,” The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry. Vol. 1: Modern Poetry, eds. Jahan Ramazani, et al. (New York: Norton, 2003), xxxxvii–lxiii.

104 Vickery, John B., The Modern Elegiac Temper (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006), 1–2 Google Scholar.

105 Ibid., 82, 134.

106 Durrant, Sam, Postcolonial Narrative and the Work of Mourning: J. M. Coetzee, Wilson Harris, and Toni Morrison (Albany: SUNY Press, 2004), 4 Google Scholar.

107 Watkin, , On Mourning, 148 Google Scholar.

108 See Saunders, , Lamentation and Modernity, 16 Google Scholar. The slaves in Zong! are associated with the abject (e.g., “t hey eat th / ey shit”). Ibid., 143.

109 Ibid., 412.

110 Ibid., 118.

111 Watkins, “In Conversation with M. NourbeSe Philip.”

112 Ibid., 140.

113 Nance, Kevin, “Poets & Ampersands,” Poets & Writers Magazine 40.1 (2012): 12–14 Google Scholar.

114 Ibid., 41.

115 Kennedy, , Elegy, 5 Google Scholar.

116 Saunders, , Lamentation and Modernity, 171 Google Scholar.

117 They treat the topics of loss or death through the speech act of lament; their mode is primarily lyric and includes certain generic markers like “apostrophe, exclamation, allusion, and epitaph”; and their “indigenous moods are sorrow, shock, rage, melancholy, and resolution—often in quick succession.” “Elegy,” The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry & Poetics 4e, eds. Roland Greene, et al. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012), 397–99, 398.

118 Watkin, , On Mourning, 3 Google Scholar.

119 Kennedy, Elegy, 5. Zong!, an elegy derived from an appellate case report, reflects Kennedy’s insight that “[d]eath and mourning are too painful to be confronted directly and can only be approached through the words of others, through pre-existing stories,” Kennedy, Elegy, 15, even while the poetry cycle follows in the line of other postcolonial works challenging official narratives, Durrant, Postcolonial Narrative, 6.

120 Kennedy, Elegy, 103 (quoting Louise O. Fradenburg, “ ‘Voice Memorial’: Loss and Reparation in Chaucer’s Poetry,” Exemplaria 2.1 (1990): 169–202, 184).

121 Saunders, , Lamentation and Modernity, 51 Google Scholar. John Milton’s “Lycidas” (mourning the poet’s friend’s death) is often considered the definitive pastoral elegy. Other acclaimed pastoral elegies mourning fellow poets include Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Adonais” (for John Keats) and Matthew Arnold’s “Thrysis” (for Arthur Hugh Clough).

122 Kennedy, , Elegy, 13 Google Scholar.

123 “[W]e have to see how great and memorable elegiac poetry has a history of covering things over, how much it depends on covering over social violence, or how it plays upon the victories of conquest and war.” Helle, Anita, “Women’s Elegies: 1834–Present: Female Authorship and the Affective Politics of Grief,” in The Oxford Handbook of the Elegy, ed. Karen Weisman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 463–480 Google Scholar, 474.

124 Kennedy, , Elegy, 13 Google Scholar.

125 Saunders, Lamentation and Modernity, xiii.

126 Saunders, Lamentation and Modernity, xiii.

127 Saunders, , Lamentation and Modernity, 61 Google Scholar, 63. “[M]ourning without end . . . is perhaps the female elegist’s most characteristic subversion of the masculine elegiac.” Schenck, Celeste M., “Feminism and Deconstruction: Re-Constructing the Elegy,” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 5.1 (1986): 13–27 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 24.

128 Saunders, Lamentation and Modernity, xvi. According to Plutarch, in ancient Rome during civil conflicts, women were forbidden to mourn, with mothers’ tears “likened to a crime of conspiracy against the empire and . . . punishable with death.” Saunders, Lamentation and Modernity, 57. Even today, lamentation is geographically and temporally marginalized and susceptible to legal prohibitions or manipulation by religious or political authorities, given its association with female hysteria (versus masculine logic) and regression to a pre-Enlightenment world. Saunders, , Lamentation and Modernity, 46–56 Google Scholar.

129 Kamau Brathwaite, “Stone,” in The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry. Vol. 2: Contemporary Poetry, eds. Jahan Ramazani, et al. (New York: Norton, 2003), 551–53, 553.

130 Philip’s major verbal conjunction in a predominantly disjunctive poetry cycle is a series of numbers that attests to quantitative inadequacy more than precision in the poem’s context, appearing in the section entitled Dicta (that which is not essential to a judge’s decision in a specific case, and accordingly not binding law): “150sixtyfortytwoandahalfeleventhreesevenfiftythirtyseveneighteenseventeenonesix.” Ibid., 51.

131 Saunders, , “Defending the Dead,” 69 Google Scholar.

132 Ibid., 103.

133 Ibid., 121, 148.

134 Ibid., 127, 140.

135 Ibid., 127.

136 Ibid., 107.

137 Ibid., 172.

138 Ibid., 155.

139 Ibid., 84, 133.

140 Ibid., 103. Exemplifying Walvin’s description of slave ships, the Zong “appears a pig sty,” with the captives characterized as pigs by a crew member (“to trap a fat pig / a fat nig”) in Philip’s text. Ibid., 67, 115.

141 Ibid., 154.

142 Ibid., 166.

143 Ibid., 65–66.

144 Ibid., 161.

145 Ibid., 130.

146 Ibid., 165.

147 Ibid., 159.

148 Ibid., 165.

149 Ibid., 171.

150 Ibid., 160.

151 Ibid., 109.

152 Ibid., 129.

153 Ibid., 139. The captured “wal e and s sde have no hut.” Ibid., 146.

154 Ibid., 130, 166.

155 Ibid., 86.

156 The sailor is morally conflicted, though; he alternately “lust[s] for / tin for / gold” and disavows this craving, claiming “i se ek no g / old no r tin no sap / tin sap phire no / r rub / y nor the o re of the i ndies m / y eden is y ou r / uth only y ou.” Ibid., 102, 146.

157 Ibid., 115, 163, 162.

158 “[G]od ch arge s us w ith their we / ll be ing will he c / harge us with a c rime”? Ibid., 148.

159 Ibid., 130, 144.

160 Ibid., 172.

161 Ibid., 152. The ominous raven possesses his heart and soul. Ibid., 122.

162 “The concept of loss is imbricated in a complex web of interrelationships—with, for example, notions of mourning, trauma, crisis, negativity, absence, lack, memory, and death.” Saunders, Lamentation and Modernity, xii. Zong!, a “po / em of loss,” ibid., 153, considers the manifold denotations and connotations of the word loss for different parties, ranging from the pecuniary to the personal, ibid., 17, 21, 24. The text also demonstrates how “[l]oss always threatens in potentia and against the demands of utilitarian, pragmatic, or contractual realisms to create a competing reality,” Spargo, The Ethics of Mourning, 21.

163 Ibid., 203. Ruth’s lover requests that she “come strum the lute some / more for my late / soul.” Ibid., 117.

164 Saunders, , “Defending the Dead,” 75 Google Scholar. Columbus’s voyage coincided with the Spanish Crown’s linguistic consolidation to promote Castilian nationalist values. Moise, “Grasping the Ungraspable,” 26.

165 Ibid., 203.

166 Ibid., 203. Zong! opens with an epigraph from Dylan Thomas’s “And Death Shall Have No Dominion”: “Though they go mad, they shall be sane, / Though they sink through the sea they shall rise again.”

167 Ibid., 161.

168 Ibid., 168. The captives share a common human response to tragedy, singing, praying, hugging, and shedding tears. Ibid., 142, 146–47, 153.

169 Kennedy, Elegy, 6 (quoting The Tempest).

170 Carpio, Glenda R., “Postcolonial Fictions of Slavery,” in The Cambridge History of Postcolonial Literature, Vol. 1, ed. Ato Quayson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012)Google Scholar, 41 (discussing Walcott).

171 Fehskens, “Accounts Unpaid,” 409 (quoting Marina Warner, “Indigo: Mapping the Waters,” in Études Britannique Contemporaines [Montpellier: Presses Universitaires de Montpellier, 1994], 1–12, 12). Zong! also portrays the sea as a perverse pastoral space populated by the drowned slaves: “we [the crew] plant the stems of neg / groes in the seas,” where “weeds feed / on bodie s.” Ibid., 114, 119.

172 Walcott, Derek, “The Sea Is History,” in Collected Poems: 1948–1984 (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1986), 364–367 Google Scholar, 367.

173 Fehskens, , “Accounts Unpaid,” 409 Google Scholar.

174 Philip, , Zong!, 169 Google Scholar. For example, mer and mère are French for sea and mother, respectively.

175 Ibid., 153, 155.

176 Ibid., 156, 170. The crew member is “argu[ing] my case / to you” (Ruth). Ibid., 70.

177 Ibid., 33, 87 (“the questions can / we / sin within / the law / can the / law / sin”).

178 Saunders, , Lamentation and Modernity, 33 Google Scholar (quoting Frederich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, trans. Walter Kaufmann [New York: Modern Library, 1968], 437–600, 506).

179 Ibid., 33 (quoting Nietzsche, Genealogy, 512).

180 Ibid., 25.

181 Spargo, , The Ethics of Mourning, 37 Google Scholar.

182 Spargo, , The Ethics of Mourning, 20 Google Scholar.

183 Ibid., 20, 33.

184 Butler, , “Violence, Mourning, Politics,” 30 Google Scholar.

185 Ibid., 98, 102.

186 John Donne, “Meditation XVII,” in Devotions upon Emergent Occasions and Death’s Duel (New York: Vintage Spiritual Classics, 1999), 102–04, 102–03. Cf. the Gregson syndicate attorneys’ amoral assumption that “[i]t has been decided, whether wisely or unwisely is not the question, that a portion of our fellow-creatures may become the subject of property.” Ibid., 211. “Zong! #8” manipulates this language into “fellow / creatures / become / our portion / of mortality,” and reflects on the arbitrariness of the slaves’ and crew members’ fates: “why / th em not u / s why u s why no t them.” Ibid., 16, 160.

187 “[L]anguage’s assumed magical power of naming, and thus of giving or of extending life, is called upon in the service of intense grief . . . ‘People may die and be remembered; but they only disappear when they are completely forgotten, when no one ever uses their name.’” Watkin, On Mourning, 4, 9 (quoting Adam Phillips, Darwin’s Worms: On Life Stories and Death Stories [London: Faber and Faber, 1999], 125). The deceased slaves’ names at “Ferrum’s” denouement are notably closer to the text’s main body and in a larger, more distinctive cursive font as compared with the lower (underwater) placement and smaller generic print in “Os.” Ibid., 3, 173.

188 Ibid., 121.

189 Walvin, , The Zong, 2 Google Scholar.

190 Saunders, , “Trying Tongues,” 208 Google Scholar. The novel was subsequently published and won a Canadian Library Association prize for children’s literature in 1989, in addition to several other accolades.

191 Mahlis, , “A Poet of Place,” 695 Google Scholar.

192 “Slavery Era Insurance Registry Report to the California Legislature,” California Department of Insurance, California Department of Insurance, May 2002. Web.

193 Rupprecht, , “A Very Uncommon Case,” 346 Google Scholar.

194 Armstrong, Tim, “Catastrophe and Trauma: A Response to Anita Rupprecht,” Journal of Legal History 29.3 (2007): 347–356 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 353.

195 Evans, K. Burnell, “10 Million Gift to Help Tell the Story of Slavery, Improve Infrastructure at Monticello,” The Daily Progress, 20 April 2013 Google Scholar. Web.

196 Ibid., 11 (reproduced in appendix).

197 Symbolized by Wale’s ingestion of the love letter to his beloved Sade before perishing. Ibid., 172–73.

198 Ibid., 110.