Working In and Beyond the Wake: Reclamation, Redress and Resilience in M. NourbeSe Philip's ​Zong!

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2020
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Haverford College. Department of English
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Award
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eng
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Tri-College users only
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Abstract
M. Nourbese Philip's book of abstract poetry Zong! tells the story of the murder of more than 100 African slaves aboard the historical slave ship Zong in 1781. Subsequent court cases culminated in an appeal document which is the only existing record of the incident and is the text which Philip grounds her retelling of the story in. Through her deconstruction, manipulation, and reorganization of language she subverts colonial ownership of the archival history of Zong and the lives of the murdered Africans. Her reconstruction of language and its meaning lie at the crux of her work and mirrors her simultaneous frustration and questioning of the African American archive as it exists today. Philip's work is hauntological, invoking the voices and spirits of the murdered African ancestors aboard Zong and more generally from African American history, to perform what critic Christina Sharpe terms "wake work." Such work seeks redress by understanding Blackness as an identity and state of being within the context of violent African American histories. Alongside critics including Saidiya Hartman, Avery Gordon, Fred Moten, Frederick Douglass, and W.E.B. Du Bois, we can understand how Zong! fits within two seemingly incompatible historical traditions of discussing Black suffering on quotidian and spectacular levels. Through four close analyses of excerpts from the book, I show how Philip memorializes the murdered Africans aboard Zong by humanizing them and rendering them alive. By exploring how Black suffering and Black resilience are written into the poetry, we can recognize how Philip implicates all of us readers as witnesses and participants in violent racial histories and realizes our responsibility as agents in truth telling.
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