Epic poem Zong! that gives voice to victims of a slave ship massacre ...

Since 2008, m. nourbeSe philip's Zong! has haunted readers with the submerged stories of a massacre on an 18th-century slave ship.

Now 15 years later, an anniversary edition was published on Oct. 11,  featuring a new introduction by philip and essays by writers and academics Saidiya Hartman and Katherine McKittrick.

 Zong! is a fragmented and evocative retelling of the forced drowning of some 150 enslaved Africans in November 1781 on the slave ship Zong. This atrocity was committed so the ship's owners could collect money for insurance. Exploring the intersection of law and poetry, Zong! excavates the legal text of Gregson v. Gilbert, the only public record of this brutality, to tell the story that cannot be told, yet must be. 

The book-long poem has become one of the most studied and written-about works of contemporary Canadian literature. 

"The temporality of Zong! is intractable; this is why, perhaps, the stars are forever, and why the story in front of us is an ineffable and heartbreaking and incalculable gift," wrote McKittrick in her essay Stars, Actually, included at the start of the new edition. 

"I think that Zong! is an enormous work," said Christina Sharpe, professor of humanities at York University, told CBC Radio's IDEAS. "philip provides what the legal document will not, cannot. She gives us names and breath and thought and care." 

And with time, even philip herself has gained new understandings of the text. 

"I think the most important thing I've come to understand happening in Zong! is not the words but the silences," said philip in a recent interview with CBC Books. "And I'm not even sure I quite understand what I mean by that… yet. But I do know that. Because I feel like it's the silences which are part of a larger silence that shape the words."

She recounted a moment when a colleague approached her after a lecture and pointed out that there's a strand of Hebrew theology that focuses on reading the blank space. That excites her, she said, because even though Zong! is about a very specific incident, its specificity resonates with other aspects of thought. 

"The only chance you have of achieving a kind of universality, or approaching the universe is to be very specific," she said, stressing however, that she herself is not interested in universality.

philip is a renowned writer and scholar born in Tobago and currently living in Toronto. She has won numerous awards, including the 2021 Canada Council for the Arts' lifetime achievement award, the Molson Prize, and the 2020 PEN/Nabokov Award for International Literature, which recognizes a writer's entire body of work.

The question of timing

The new introduction is titled Preface, or Late But on Time, "late but on time" being a refrain that repeats a few times throughout.

The concept first came to philip when she went to attend an event. She planned to get a few hours before it began, but she hadn't realized that it was called for earlier than she thought. Despite this, she made it there right when it started, so even though she was late for arriving early, she still got there on time.

This concept fascinated philip and she began to apply it to a different scale. "I think there's also a larger question of timing," she said. 

"I'm thinking of people who had been enslaved, for instance, and ruptured from their own time, and now they're put into another time for which they are seen as being late. But perhaps we're right on time."

The phrase, "late but on time," is also somewhat coded, philip said. There's both an anniversary Canadian and U.K. edition, published by Invisible Publishing and Silver Press respectively. A new Silver Press edition was supposed to come out a few years ago, but it fell through, said philip. 

While the republication is technically later than it should be, now it coincides with the 15th anniversary, so it ends up being right on time, she said. 

LlSTEN | M. NourbeSe Philip's epic poem Zong! gives voice to slave ship victims: 

Featured VideoIn November 1721, a massacre began on the Zong slave ship. The tragedy inspired the Canadian poem Zong! by M. NourbeSe Philip. She reflects on the mass murder, the bizarre court case, and the work of art still rising from its depths. *This episode originally aired on November 29, 2021.On 'getting' the poem

Zong! spans six sections, each one playing more and more with form to become almost completely discombobulating.

Because of this ever-shifting from, philip has been told by some readers that they "don't get" the piece. But in a sense, she explains, that's the point she's trying to make.

When we confront certain atrocities, events, are we supposed to understand it? Is understanding then making a place for it somewhere?- m. nourbeSe philip

"Not getting it is actually, in a way, getting it. You're not supposed to get it," she said. "When we confront certain atrocities, events, are we supposed to understand it? Is understanding then making a place for it somewhere?"

"There is something I think the text is trying to say and do, which is that it wants to resist meaning. It wants to stay outside of meaning, although the driving force for me was to try and make meaning of what this case was all about [...]. So there's a way in which the work itself resisted my question."

The importance of both collective reading and print

In the new introduction, philip writes that one of the most crucial parts of her 15-year journey with Zong! was learning how to read it aloud.

"While I always understood that there was significance to the spaces within the text, I did not understand how to honour them with a reading," she wrote.  

In 2012, she organized the first durational reading of the text, which then became an annual tradition, taking place in different locations around the world on the anniversary of the massacre, during which a group of people read aloud together until the early hours of the morning. 

I think it's an offering and a way of remembering something, but it's something that's shared.- m. nourbeSe philip

"I think it's an offering and a way of remembering something, but it's something that's shared. So from that perspective, I think it's a very different engagement [than a written text]," she said.

philip also expressed the importance of the work remaining in print. 

"When you have the text, the actual product, and you can hold it and read it and stop and put it aside and think about it, I think it gives you an opportunity to immerse yourself in the way that we can become immersed in books and in that particular way that we become immersed in poetry, which is, I think, different than fiction."