politics and poetics 89be told, which must be told, but through not telling.’^73 A glossary
at the close of Zong! points the reader towards the intervening
languages in the text which include Arabic, Dutch, Fon, French,
Greek, Hebrew, Italian, Latin, Portuguese, Spanish, Shona, Twi
and Yoruba. NourbeSe Philip comments that ‘Zong! bears witness
to the “resurfacing of the drowned and the oppressed’” and trans-
forms the desiccated, legal report into a cacophony of voices: ‘wails
cries, moans that had earlier been banned from the text’.^74
The fugue’s musical form provided an inspiration for the work,
providing a form of imitative counterpoint which helped the poet
approach her material. Zong! returns repeatedly to evocations of
the chained slaves being thrown overboard. One of the voices used
in the volume is that of a white European male, and the visual dis-
array and displacement of his perspective is made evident in the
following extract from the ‘Sal’ section of the book:
there is
creed there is
fate there is
oh oh oracle
there are
oh oh
ashes
over
ifá
ifá
ifá i
fá
fa
fa fall
ing over
&
over the crew
touching there is fate
there is
creed
there is
oh