m. nourbeSe philip, _Zong! As told to the author by Setaey Adamu Boateng_

 THE HISTORY BEHIND this book-length poem: navigation went so badly awry on the Zong, a slavery ship, part of the triangular Africa-America-England trade in the 18th century, that the captain of the Zong decided the only way to make a profit on the voyage was to drown the captive Africans on board and collect the insurance money. Under the circumstances, the insurers did not want to pay, leading to the court case Gregson v. Gilbert, the conclusions of which are included as an appendix to the poem.

It's a story with a lot of resonance, obviously. It highlights not only a fatal flaw in human relations--the ease with which we can see the Other as a means to an end, an object, even a commodity--and a fatal flaw in capitalism--its tendency to put profit above all other priorities.

philip does not present the story in a direct, straightforward way, however. To a large extent, the reader has to already know the story before he or she can discern it in the poem. The poem relies on strategies that reminded me of Gertrude Stein, H.D., Pound, Zukofsky, Charles Olson--disjunction, fragmentation, parataxis--and thus demands a high degree of readerly engagement. This is most marked in the section titled "Ferrum," from which the following is taken:

 [...] circe how                                          ls des

                           troys a riot                                       a circ

                  us of mur                        der she who cre

ates & des              troy s is no mo                              re give us this

                  day our ne                       groes our profits

The reader has to slow down and concentrate a little to see "circe howls / destroys a riot / a circus of murder / she who creates & destroys is no more / give us this day our negroes our profits."

Not a quick read, then, but you can see what philip is getting at: this is a story that immediately tried  to occlude itself, did not want to be known, that scarcely knows how to be  told...so the poem is almost unreadable, but not quite, not really...the truth is right there under the surface if you keep looking, although part of you does not want to look.

I read the new (well, 2023) fifteenth anniversary edition of the poem, which includes new essays by Katherine McKittrick and Saidiya Hartman as well as a new foreword by philip herself, much of which is about how the work has been performed (excerpts of some performances can be found on YouTube).