Contemporary Poetry

politics and poetics 87

ceeded, no clue to the General’s state of mind at the time. Just

the bald facts: 20 , 000 dead over a word.^67

The General’s morbid fascination with the death of his mother
becomes a way of entering his deluded psyche. While Dove’s poem
certainly does not aim to fi ll all the holes in the historical narrative,
the perspectives enforce the portrait megalomaniac who surrounds
himself with those who echo his words. In his palace is a parrot
‘practicing spring’ since even the parrot we are told ‘can roll an R’
(p. 135 ). Dove’s narrative frames the horrifying ventriloquism that
the General demands from his subjects and interrogates the barba-
rism of Trujillo’s actions by performing the madness of his ques-
tioning ‘Who can I kill today’ for ‘a single, beautiful word’ (p. 135 ).

CONCLUSION: READING THE ARCHIVE – M. NOURBESE
PHILIP’S ZONG!

For Caribbean-Canadian poet M. NourbeSe Philip, an ethical
dilemma is created in how to form material, to perform what the
poet describes as ‘This story that must be told; that can only be
told by not telling.’^68 This pressure upon authorial responsibility
is echoed in the citation from German language poet Paul Celan in
the fourth book of Zong! The citation states simply ‘No one bears
witness for the witness.’^69 As with Dove’s ‘Parsley’, NourbeSe
Philip’s Zong! is based on a case of horrifi c historical cruelty. In
1781 a slave ship, the Zong, sailed from the coast of West Africa
for Jamaica, captained by Luke Collingwood. Due to navigational
errors the journey, which normally took six to nine weeks, lasted
four months. The ship’s cargo was fully insured, and in this case
the ‘cargo’ consisted of 470 slaves. Collingwood’s navigational
blunder meant that water was scarce and the slaves began to die.
NourbeSe Philip cites the documents in her account:

‘Sixty negroes died for want of water... and forty others

... through thirst and frenzy... threw themselves into the
sea and were drowned; and the master and mariners...
were obliged to throw overboard 150 other negroes.’ Captain