Contemporary Poetry

88 contemporary poetry

Collingwood believed that if the African slaves died a natural

death, the owners of the ship would have to bear the cost, but

if they were ‘thrown alive into the sea, it would be the loss

of the underwriters.’ In other words, murdering the African

slaves would prove more fi nancially advantageous to the

owners of the ship and its cargo.

The owners, the Messrs Gregson, being fully insured,

make an unsuccessful claim against the insurers for the

destroyed cargo. The ship’s owners are successful in their

legal action against their insurers to recover their loss. The

insurers appeal this judgment and a new trial ordered:

Gregson v. Gilbert is the formal name of this reported decision

which is more colloquially known as the Zong case.^70

Zong! is an attempt to retrace the history but not in a chronological
narrative. NourbeSe Philip uses the court case documentation as a
loose framework for the work as a ‘word-hoard’ since the original
text of the Gregson v. Gilbert case comes to a mere 500 words. The
material is dispersed, scattered, fractured violently and assiduously
mangled:

Fragmenting and mutilating the text mirror the fragmenta-

tion and mutilation that slavery perpetrated on Africans and

African customs and life. In deliberately changing the story

of the legal text, I engage in a similar duplicity that the actors

in the Zong case engaged in to convince themselves that it

was perfectly allowable to murder Africans in order to collect

insurance monies.^71

Rather than attempt to reconstruct the narrative into a coherent
whole, NourbeSe Philip marks the range of competing voices
in the text: lacunae, erasures and silences all constitute part of
the narrative. The poet is suspicious of telling the stories ‘in the
traditional way, or the Western way of narrative – in terms of a
beginning, a middle, and end’.^72 Importantly, NourbeSe Philip
adds that ‘I think part of the challenge, certainly for me, was to
fi nd a form that could bear this “not telling.” I think this is what
Zong! is attempting: to fi nd a form to bear this story which can’t