Candidate Number: 1052619

Dissertation

Aestheticizing the Zong massacre; the poetics of violence in

M.NourbeSe Philip’s Zong! and David Dabydeen’s Turner
Word Count: 7987
In 1840, J.M.W Turner introduced his painting, Slavers Throwing the Dead and Dying Typhoon
Coming On, or Slave Ship (Figure 1), to The Royal Academy. In the foreground of the painting,
people in chains are pictured drowning. Fish and gulls tear at the severed bodies, and in the centre of
the lower part of the painting, hands reach out of the surface, gasping and grasping for life. In the
background, a ship lingers in the mist and shadow of the waves. The painting is presumed to be a
depiction of the slave ship Zong, in the aftermath of its infamous jettisoning of enslaved Africans into
the Atlantic in 1781 by Captain Collingwood and his crew. The exact number of Africans drowned is
unknown, but the figure is suggested to be between 130-150 people. The painting was intended to
portray the horrors of slavery in conjunction with the abolitionist movement. J.M.W Turner’s
exhibition of the painting coincided with the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society Convention,
also taking place in London the same year, and the painting was presented with an extract from a
poem written by J.M.W Turner, titled Fallacies of Hope1. Slave Ship incites discourse on the ethics of
aestheticizing violence, and the relationship between art and politics. This discourse is continued in
David Dabydeen’s 1995 long poem, Turner, and M. NourbeSe Philip’s 2008 book, Zong!. In both
texts, the aftermath, affect, and perpetuation of violence is at the forefront of their poetics. I find the
opposing poetics of Dabydeen’s prosopopoeia and Philip’s “exaqua” complicates questions about how
historical violences are told, whether they should be told, and if so, by whom. I do not suggest that
Turner and Zong! are exemplars of representing violence of transatlantic slavery of ethically. In
conjunction with Christina Sharpe and Saadiya Hartman’s critical frameworks, I demonstrate that the
paradoxes, negations, and contradictions that arise from attempts to depict and moralise violence.

A slave ship, Slave Ship, Turner, and Zong!

Once the Zong returned to Liverpool after its prolonged and adverse voyage across the Atlantic, the
ship owners, the Messrs Gregson, filed an insurance claim from their insuring company, the Messrs
Gilbert, at approximately £30 for each African drowned (Burnard, 2019). The ship owners made the
claim on the grounds of “the destroyed cargo” (Philip, 2008: 189), claiming that the crew of the Zong
was forced to drown the enslaved Africans because of a lack of safe water on board. Under
contemporary maritime laws, this was an entirely legal prerogative of the ship owners. The insurance
company however disputed the necessity of the jettisoning (Fryer, 1984) and refused to pay the sum.
The ship owners took the claim to court, and a jury trial took place on 5th March 1783, at the Guildhall
Buildings in London. The jury decided in favour of the Messrs Gregson, ordering the insurance
company to comply with the insurance claim. Solicitor-General John Lee presided over the case, and
determined, “the case is the same as if horses had been thrown overboard” (Colin Bobb-Semple, 2012:
22, in Manderson, 2019). Referring to the discomfort felt by attendees of the hearing at the fact of the

1
"J.M.W. Turner | Artist | Royal Academy of Arts." https://www.royalacademy.org.uk/art-
artists/name/j-m-w-turner-ra. Accessed 18 Mar. 2023.
case, Lee remarked, “What is this claim that human people gave been thrown overboard? […] it is
madness to accuse these well serving honourable men of murder” (Colin Bobb-Semple, 2012: 22, in
Manderson, 2019). The statement here reflects the dehumanisation and objectification of black people
in captivity as their lives are made synonymous with livestock. The insurance company appealed this
decision to the Court of the King’s Bench and a second hearing took place on 22nd May 1783, presided
over by the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Mansfield.

Mansfield was known for his role in the Somerset case, which determined that no enslaved individual
could be forcibly removed from Britian (Brady, 2021), and his guardianship over Dido Elizabeth Belle,
his nephew’s illegitimate daughter with an enslaved woman. After a two-day hearing, Mansfield
determined that there was insufficient evidence to support the jettisoning of the Africans aboard the
Zong as an act of necessity, concluding that a new trial on the insurance claim should be held. There is
no evidence to show if a new trial was held, or if the insurance company ever compensated the ship
owners, and Captain Collingwood had died shortly before the first trial (Philip, 2008). This case became
known as the Gregson vs. Gilbert case. Philip’s Zong! is formed from the two-page 1783 document
detailing the decision of the second and final hearing of the Gregson v. Gilbert case. An attendee at the
first hearing in Guildhall wrote an anonymous letter to the Morning Chronicle, which was read by
Olaudah Equiano, who would go onto write the popular slave narrative, The Interesting Narrative of
the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, The African. Equiano alerted the abolitionist,
Granville Sharp, on the matter. Sharp began a campaign for the Zong’s crew members to be tried for
murder. Although this campaign was unsuccessful, Sharp had commissioned his own transcript of the
Gregson v. Gilbert case. Other accounts of the case by prominent figures such as Thomas Clarkson and
Sylvester Douglas spread knowledge of the Gregson v. Gilbert case in Britain.

As an already controversial figure for his abstract methods of painting (Frost, 2010), contemporary
appraisal was divided on J.M.W Turner’s painting. In a review for Frazer’s Magazine, William
Thackeray ponders whether the painting is “sublime or ridiculous” (Thackeray, 1843, in Brace, 2020:
448), and John Ruskin, arguably J.M.W Turner’s most consistent and prolific admirer and
contemporary, writes about children laughing at the exposed female leg in the foreground of the painting
(in Brace, 2020). Whereas Thackeray questions the power and effect of Slave Ship, Ruskin adamantly
defends the painting as “sublime” (1987: 160) in the first volume of his 1843 book, Modern Painters,
arguing that the painting is a testament of the artist’s “immortality” (1987: 160). Ruskin admired Slave
Ship so much that his father gifted him the painting, which he owned until 1872, when it was sold to an
American buyer (Frost, 2010). The “burning clouds”, “treacherous spaces of level and whirling water”,
“the power, majesty, and deathfulness of the open, deep, illimitable sea” (1987: 159) produces a thrilling
combination of amazement and circumspection for Ruskin, leading him to write that Turner’s depiction
of the Zong to is “the purest truth” and “as accurate as fearless” (1987: 160). Absorbed by the beauty
of J.M.W Turner’s seascape, the context of the Zong massacre and the legal proceedings that followed
it are almost completely overlooked. Modern Painters relegates the context of Zong massacre in a
footnote; “She is a Slaver, throwing her slaves overboard. The near Sea is encumbered with corpses”
(Ruskin, 1987: 160). The verb “throwing” also appears in John Lee’s judicial decision, and again in
Mansfield’s, where the phrase “thrown overboard” (Philip, 2008: 210-11) is used as a collocation. The
term suggests an air of ambivalence that abates the extreme violence committed by the crew. Similarly,
Ruskin’s use of “encumbered”, connoting a distraction or a nuisance, presents the drowning Africans
as an obstruction to the beauty he identifies within the painting.

Criticism on Slave Ship and Modern Painters remains contentious. In his 2010 article, Mark Frost
countered contemporary interpretations and critique of Ruskin and J.M.W Turner to argue in favour of
their iteration of the Zong massacre. For example, Frost highlights that Ruskin’s use of the phrase,
“incarnadines the multitudinous sea” (Ruskin, 1843, in 2010: 385) is a metatextual reference to
Shakespeare’s line, “My hand will rather the multitudinous seas incarnadine” in Act II Scene II of
Macbeth. Frost suggests that Ruskin is reproving the crimes of the Zong’s crew by comparing them to
Macbeth’s guilt in the aftermath of his act of murder. Frost also defends Ruskin’s footnote by arguing
it was the sufficient way to convey the subject matter of Slave Ship to Ruskin’s “middle-class provincial
readers” (2010: 386). Frost continues to analyse Modern Painters to suggest Ruskin’s understanding of
the moral sentiment of the painting. The weakness of Frost’s reading is its conviction that J.M.W
Turner’s painting champions a revolutionary sentiment to challenge the regimental oppression of black
people, suggesting that “Turner is responding to horrors that were not past, but continuing, and not
British, but global” (2010: 376). Recent critique of Slave Ship and Modern Painters by Laura Brace and
Desmond Manderson highlight the depiction of blackness in Slave Ship as pejorative. Manderson
interprets Slave Ship as a “Jetztzeit” - a portmanteau comprised of the German words for ‘now’ and
‘time’ from Walter Benjamin’s Theses on the Philosophy of History - to suggest that the painting incites
urgent need for action against hegemonic regimes. Manderson rejects the exaltation of Slave Ship as an
instrument for freedom, and instead posits J.M.W Turner as an actor in colonial violence by referring
to Slave Ship as a product of the “colonial gaze” (2019: 116). Similarly, Brace argues that the moral
sentiments created around Slave Ship only served the “white, indignant, forward-looking" (Brace, 2020)
abolitionists’ desire for “recovery and recuperation” (Brace, 2020), in which the horrors of slavery could
be overcome, and eventually forgotten.

For both Dabydeen and Philip, Ruskin’s footnote is a marker of the ways that violence against the
captives aboard the Zong has persisted in aesthetic renditions of the Zong. This is shown in Dabydeen’s
preface to Turner; “The footnote reads like an afterthought, something tossed overboard” (1995: 7).
This presents Ruskin’s footnote as a re-enactment of the violence perpetrated by the Zong crew. To
remedy this insult, Turner is narrated from the perspective of a drowning African in the foreground of
Slave Ship. Residing within the Atlantic - treated as lieu de mémoire (French for ‘site of memory’) in
both Zong! and Turner - of J.M.W Turner’s painting, the narrator imagines their past in Africa and
aboard the Zong. To differentiate between Turner the artist and Dabydeen’s Turners, I refer to the artist
as J.M.W Turner throughout this essay. Immortalised in J.M.W Turner’s Atlantic, the narrator comes
across a foetus “Stillborn from all the signs” (Dabydeen, 1995: 9) jettisoned from a passing slave ship.
The narrator names both the foetus and the captain of the slave ship ‘Turner’. The poem is highly
metatextual; the recurring mention of the colours “blues” and “vermilions” (Dabydeen, 1995: 19)
emphasise the location of the poem within Turner’s painting itself, and Dabydeen’s use of ‘Turner’ as
a metonym for the slaver and the enslaved makes the artist of the Slave Ship complicit in the violence
of the Zong.

Finding that the Africans aboard the Zong have been “drowned in Turner’s (and other artists’) sea for
centuries” (Dabydeen, 1995: 7), Dabydeen fashions a new aesthetic space in which the reader is forced
to view the Zong massacre from the perspective of the drowned Africans as opposed to J.M.W Turner’s
“colonial gaze”. The poet gives release to the drowned voices through prosopopoeia, a rhetorical device
used to give authority and agency to an object or image. Christian Benne defines prosopopoeia as “The
adoption of other voices by way of personifying them allows the orator or author to develop their agenda
or their aesthetics in new contexts” (Benne, 2016: 281-2). This understanding of prosopopoeia is useful
for understanding Dabydeen's “agenda” of polemic and metatextual critique of Turner’s representation
of the Zong massacre. However, whereas Benne interprets prosopopoeia as an “adoption of other
voices”, Dabydeen constructs an entirely new narrative voice against J.M.W Turner and Ruskin’s
representations of the Zong massacre, in which all agency of the Africans is overlooked. Dabydeen
rebukes J.M.W Turner’s depiction of the Africans as, “exotic and sublime victims”, and Ruskin’s
designation of the context of the painting to “a brief footnote” (Dabydeen, 1984: 8). Benne’s use of
“other” here can be considered in light of the phenomenological concept of the ‘other’ as often used in
postcolonial theory. Instead of the “imitat[ion]” (Benne, 2016: 281) prescribed by Benne, Dabydeen
reconfigures the Slave Ship to present the otherising portrayal of blackness by J.M.W Turner.

This othering effect of the Ruskin’s footnote is also explored by Philip in Notanda, an accompanying
essay to Zong!. Whereas Dabydeen problematises the treatment of the Africans in Modern Painters,
Philip appropriates the footnote and its symbolic oppression to make the victims of Zong hauntological.
Throughout the first section, Os, translating to ‘Bone’ in Latin (Philip, 2008: 183), lists of names such
as “Kesi Modele Mtudu Ibunkunle Adeyemi” (Philip, 2008: 18) appear beneath a black vertical line,
separating the poem from the names. The names are compacted together to resemble the “hold” of a
slave ship. The format of names resembles the linearity of Thomas Clarkson’s drawing of the slave ship
Brookes (Figure 2). In replicating the confinement of the enslaved individuals on the slave ship and
fashioning a hold that is as real as the hold of a slave ship, Philip wants to achieve her task of re-creating
the violence of the Zong without re-writing it - to “not tell the tale that must be told” (2008: 193). Philip
struggles to define her process of crafting a narrative from an existing text. She writes, “I find words
like resurrect and subaquatic but not ‘exaqua’” (Philip, 2008: 201). Exaqua is a portmanteau consisting
of the words ‘excavate’ and ‘aqua’. Through “exaqua”, Philip resurrects the Africans that have been
buried in literature and art. Born in Tobago and Guyana respectively, Philip and Dabydeen are
antithetical to the “White, indignant, forward-looking" aestheticians, as they utilise their cultural and
racial identities to engage with the Zong massacre.

However, as iterated by Sharpe in her book, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, it is reductive to
assume that Philip and Dabydeen’s rendition of the Zong massacre is merely a product of the cultural
and historical significance of transatlantic slavery. Sharpe suggests black scholars’ engagement with
slavery induces a moral paradox as the epistemological work on “Black being” is formed by an
understanding of their everyday experience, and therefore must “enact epistemic violence that we know
to be violence against others and ourselves” (2016: 12-13). Sharpe uses Dionne Brand’s analogy of
“sitting in the room with history” (Brand, 2002 in Sharpe, 2016: 12-13) to suggest that the tendency to
expect or glorify personal insight into the lives of those affected by migration, diaspora, and ancestral
traumas is incongruous with the individual’s identity. Sharpe uses the notion of the titular “Wake”, as
both the trace of the ship across the surface of the water and the funeral processions that have become
common occurrence in black lives, and the “hold”, as the literal hold of a slave ship, to compare the
everyday violences experiences by black people as a result of transatlantic slavery to being in the
confines of the initial place of abjection itself. Sharpe, and Hartman, use the word “quotidian” (2016:
20-1; 2022:66) when referring to the everyday forms of violence. The term denotes the repeated and
routine violences that have persisted from slavery.

Sharpe also perceives blackness as “anagrammatical” (2016: 76) . For instance, words such as ‘boy’
and ‘girl’ can connote blackness depending on the context in which they are spoken without any further
suggestion of race. Hartman presents a similar sociolinguistic concept in her discourse on blackness as
a performance constructed from “the tortured body of the enslaved” (2022: 96). Hartman highlights the
dangers of perpetuating such “corporeal malediction” against black bodies rather than recognising such
schemas as performative constructions designed to present “black bodies as phobogenic objects” (2022:
96). When Dabydeen writes that “Neither [the narrator and the child] can describe themselves anew but
are indelibly stained by Turner’s language and imagery” (1995: 8), he is alluding to Turner’s rendering
of the Africans as phobogenic. In her essay, Venus In Two Acts, Hartman insists all literary and artistic
treatments of transatlantic slavery must exercise “narrative restraint” against the temptations to “fill in
the gaps and provide closure where there is none” (2008: 12). It is imperative for Hartman to preserve
the absences of the Africans’ agency in archives; and refrains from re-telling a graphic account of
physical abuse in Frederick Douglass’ slave narrative in Scenes of Subjection.

Philip seems to agree with Hartman as she also interprets graphic depictions of violence as recirculating
and reinitiating the trauma of the initial point of violence (Philip, 2008). However, there are noticeable
contradictions in both Hartman and Philip’s approaches to representing violence. Hartman suggests that
writers must commit to “labouring to paint as full a picture of the lives of the captives as possible”
(2008:12), and Philip approaches her writing “the way a painter approaches her, or a sculptor his
marble” (Philip, 2017: 56). Similarly, Dabydeen asserts that he “tried to as lavish […] with words, as
Turner is with paint” (Eckstein, 2001: 28). The analogy of the writer as a painter or sculptor emphasises
the significance of creating new narratives, agencies and ontologies in Dabydeen and Philip’s poetics.
In the afterword to her poetry collection, ‘She tries her tongue, her Silence Softly Breaks’, Philip
proposes the concept of the “i-mage” (2015: 78). By separating the ‘i’ from the word ‘image’, Philip
suggests that the function of the writer, poet or artist is to create abstractions and forms, “that speak to
the essential being of the people among whom and for whom the artist creates” (2015: 78). Similar to
Manderson’s use of the term, “Jetztzeit” for Slave Ship, Philip proposes a symbiotic relationship
between the artist and her spatiotemporal surroundings.

The difference between Philip and Dabydeen however is that Philip imagines her creation as separate
from her – hence a sculptor – whereas Dabydeen is interested in the richness of language and the writer’s
mastery of it, in creating something beautiful, even when depicting suffering. In her acknowledgment
to Zong!, Philip refers to her act of writing the book a “responsibility” (2008: Xii), and she shares credit
for the book with Setaey Adamu Boateng, an ancestral presence that guides Philip’s composition of the
Zong. In comparison, for Dabydeen, the only “responsibility” that a writer has, “is to write beautifully”,
and “to use words in a way that startle, and disturb, and move people” (in Eckstein, 2006: 157).
Dabydeen’s depictions of sexual violence in Turner, his 1999 novel, A Harlot’s Progress, and the 2008
novel, Molly and the Muslim Stick are embedded with a fascination with the “erotic undercurrent”
(Dabydeen, in Eckstein, 2001:32) of empire. In the same interview with Eckstein, Dabydeen furthers
this comment with, “when I write about slavery, it arouses me, it must arouse me, that’s the fact why I
bother to write.” (2001: 32). The crucial difference between Dabydeen and Philip’s poetics is that Philip
wants to present the story of the Zong without the use of the “master’s tools” (in Saunders, 2008: 70).
The metonym, “the master’s tools” is from Audre Lorde’s 1984 essay, ‘The Master's Tools Will Never
Dismantle the Master's House’. The term refers to the impossibility of deconstructing oppressive
regimes using the remnants created by the regimes. Recognising the language she is forced to use as
the “master’s tools”, Philip restricts herself to inverting the Gregson v. Gilbert text, as opposed to
animating narratives as Dabydeen does through prosopopoeia.

‘Phil-ip’ and ‘Phil-omela’

Philip’s work engages with her Caribbean identity and the residues of colonial violence in conjunction
with an interest in law and identity politics. In particular, Philip grapples with the English language as
the vessel through which racial alterity and negation has been enacted and perpetuated. Philip writes
about language as the most significant “sites of struggle” (2015: 81) between empires and their colonies
and perceives the result of this conflict as an “absolute destruction and obliteration of African
languages” (2015: 81). Language, and the freedom to use it without memories of violence associated
with it, is a constant struggle for Philip. In her poem, Testimony Stoops to Mother Tongue, from the
1988 collection of poetry, She tried her tongue, her silent softly breaks, Philip expresses her frustration
at the linguistic “obliteration” of languages that has left her with the language of the colonisers to think,
speak and write in: “this/ fuck-mother motherfuckin language of the colonizer” (Philip, 2015: 53). This
anger towards the indentation of colonialism in the phenomenological experiences of individuals still
affected by it through various forms of racism results in Philip’s own “obliteration” of the English
language in Zong!. In her essay, Interview with Empire, from Bla_k: Essays and Interviews, Philip
writes that in order to “write about the rupture that Africa and the Caribbean”, “one has to acknowledge
the silence, because what happens demands silence. As a form of respect” (2017: 63-4). The blank,
white spaces encompassing the black letters in Zong! symbolises the overwhelming presence of the
“colonizer” against the meagre agency of the Africans’ voice in archives, historiography, and aesthetic
representations. The vast emptiness of the text, a representation of the silencing of the Africans’ voices,
is only broken with word clusters comprised of the 1783 Gregson v. Gilbert.

For example, Philip makes explicit references to the paradox of an unjust legal system that permits the
killing of humans. Throughout the appeal report, there is little mention of the particulars of the massacre
itself. The case only briefly acknowledges the extremity of the massacre through obiter dicta (comments
made by the judge that are not relevant to the proceedings);

“It has been decided, whether wisely or unwisely is not now the question, that a portion of our
fellow-creatures may become the subject of property. This therefore, was a throwing overboard
of goods, and of part the save the residue” (in Philip, 2008: 211)

The appeal is adamant on restricting all examination of the Zong to the dispute between the ship
“owners” and the “underwriters” (in Philip, 2008: 210), and the pervading issue of enslavement is
brushed aside. For Sharpe, the language of the case would seem to suffer from “dysgraphia” (2016: 21),
as it fails to express the lived experiences of black people. The term refers to an aspect of a neurological
condition or learning disability which affects an individual’s ability to write coherently. Sharpe uses
“dysgraphia” in reference to insensitive remarks made by Barack Obama and David Cameron in their
political addresses. However, the analogy of “dysgraphia” is problematic for two reasons; considering
“dysgraphia” in its context of disability and impairment 2, using the term to criticise harmful language
further stigmatises disabilities. Secondly, the term suggests that derogatory and ignorant language is
involuntary, whereas Philip alludes to the intentional violence of the slave trade and questions why
“now” is not the time or place to discuss captivity. Philip critiques and rebukes the ratio operandi (the
reason for the legal dispute) of the text by deeming rationality and logic in appraisal of the Zong
massacre as components of the “master’s tools”. For example, Zong! #15 begins with the lines “defend
the dead”, and concludes with, “where etc tunes justice / and the ratio of murder / is / the usual in
occurred” (2008: 25). Philip’s use of “etc” here refers to the ambivalence towards global and everyday
violence that Gregson v. Gilbert demonstrates. The adverb “etc” is repeated in the different sections of
the book, appearing in isolation in the bottom of the page in Zong!#3 (Figure 3). Philip uses the term to
denote the explicit neglect and perpetuation of violence in depictions of the Zong that fail to give the

2"dysgraphia,
n." OED Online, Oxford University Press, March 2023, www.oed.com/view/Entry/58881.
Accessed 18 March 2023.
victims of the ship appropriate, and sensitive treatment. “Etc” becomes a symbol for everything unsaid,
ignored, and forgotten, in the Gregson v. Gilbert.

In the eponymous poem, She tries her tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks, the line, “Might I... like
Philomela...sing” (Philip, 2015) emphasises the role of silence, and the absence of authorial agency as
a result, in Zong! as these lines are repeated in Notanda. The myth of the Greek Philomela is most
famously presented in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. In the text, Philomela’s brother-in-law, Tereus, rapes
her and removes her tongue to prevent her from speaking about his crimes. Unable to communicate
through speech, Philomela weaves a tapestry depicting Tereus’ crimes. With the help of her sister,
Procne, Philomela exacts revenge on her rapist by feeding him food made with the body of his son, Itys,
and presenting his severed head to him after the cannibalism has been committed. By “mutilating”
(Philip, 2008: 193) the language of Gregson v. Gilbert for “exaqua” of the enslaved and murdered
Africans, Philip is exacting a cannibalistic treatment of legalese. As lasting artefacts of the Zong case,
the language and logic of slavery are “obliterated” as “revenge” (Philip, 2008: 205) on the institutions
that participated in the Middle Passage. Although Philip does not use not prosopopoeia, her use of
“exaqua” also has an agenda; to enact revenge by setting up a self-destruction of Gregson v. Gilbert,
leaving on the “bones” (2008: 126) of the Africans submerged in the text.

Note the etymological link between ‘Phil-ips’ and ‘Phil-omela; the first syllable in both names is derived
from the Greek for ‘love’. By situating herself as Philomela, Philip suggests that she must navigate
history through images, as her classical counterpart does. Censored by the violence exacted by the
colonisers through the spread of English, inhabiting English becomes a kind of glossectomy for the
subject of colonial alterity. The “revenge” that Philips writes about is exacted through subverting the
English language, its grammar, syntax, and regulations, to fashion her own tapestry in the form of
concrete poetry. After exacting revenge on Tereus, Philomela escapes his rage by transforming into a
nightingale. Parallels again may be made between Philomela’s transformation into a nightingale, known
for their distinctive song, and Philip’s efforts to engage with Caribbean oral traditions in Zong!. In
Notanda, Philip notes that “‘Zong! is chant! Shout! And ululation! Zong! is moan! Mutter! Howl! And
shriek!” (2008: 207). In her ‘Interview with An Empire’, Philip reveals that she “distrust[s]” beautifully
written “fictional works” in which “the horror is also beautifully managed” (2017: 63-4). Unable to
communicate the actual “shrieks” and “moans” from Gregson v. Gilbert, Philip’s fragmented
onomatopoeia physicalises the distress of the Africans instead. For example, the opening of the first
section presents the letters of the noun, ‘water’ scattered across the page (Figure. 3). By beginning the
book with the repetition of the aspirated consonant “w”, Philip “exaqua[s]” the Africans from the depths
of the ocean. The aspirated consonants “t” and “d” indicate irregular and struggled breathing, adding to
the idea of the drowned victims of the Zong in the act of a cathartic resurrection on the page. Philip
substitutes “verbs”, “prepositions”, “conjunctions”, and “adverbs” (2008: 193) for signifiers of breath
and life. Philip’s use of “dey” here resembles the pronoun “dem” (2008: 68) used to differentiate
between the voices of the Africans from the rest of the text.
Philip has frequently performed Zong! for audiences, as well as in collective groups, where audiences
participate in a collective oration of the poems. Andrea Brady writes about organising a reading of
Zong! in 2015 at Queen Mary University of London. A recording of Philip’s performance can be found
on Andrea Brady’s YouTube channel. The performance begins by Philip entering from the side of the
audience and walking towards the stage. A soundscape of indistinguishable voices is played, as Philip
begins by performing Zong! #15. As indicated by Brady, Philip turns “the ‘ave to justice’ into a slow,
tired groan, crossing an arm across her chest and bowing, as if before the gods or the law” (2021: 202).
One the one hand, Brady argues the performance “felt like a ritual reclamation of the space”, and on
the other, Brady describes the performance as a “failure” as it “did not” and “could not” reclaim the
“people exiled and wounded and murdered by slavery” (2021: 202). Brady’s perception that the
performance ‘fails’ suggests that she perceives Zong! as a literal book for contact with the dead.
Certainly, Philip’s attempts to perform Zong! in the presence of the ‘In the Heart of Africa’ exhibition
at the Royal Ontario Museum indicates that Philip wants her performances to serve as “spiritual
communication” (2008: 197).

However, in the essay Museums Could have avoided a culture clash, where Philip recounts this incident,
Philip reveals that she feels a “deep, anguished sense of loss” for having “to ask per- mission of John-
from-Sussex to bring together the stolen legacy of Africa and the lost voices of the Ancestors” (2017:
131). Similar to Dabydeen’s use of “Turner” in his poem, Philip is using “John-from-Sussex" as a
metonym for white and male authority. Philip recounts feeling otherised from the process of seeking
permission to perform Zong! in the presence of the objects (Philip, 2017). This shows that Zong!
symbolises the contemporary violences that have persisted from institution of transatlantic slavery as
well as a form of mourning for the drowned Africans. The “failure” at reclaiming the space through
Philip’s “i-mage” arises when the artist is reminded of her alterity – not when the performance fails to
make sense or affect the audience. In 2013, Philip performed Zong! at a wake for Trayvon Martin, a
teenager who was fatally shot in 2012, while the perpetrator, George Zimmerman, was acquitted of
murder charges in 2013. The wake took place at Naropa University, USA, a week following the acquittal
of the killer (Blackmon et al, 2019). Whereas Brady considers Zong! as a text merely responding to
historical violences, the performance for Trayvon Martin’s wake suggests that relaying the Zong
massacre is symbolic of violences that have persisted from the Middle Passage.

Anne Quema further highlights the performance aspect of Zong!. For Quema, “human beings who were
murdered are made manifest through sounds, languages, ululation, and moans throughout the poem”
(2016, 95). Quema’s use of “manifest” here alludes to the section ‘Manifest’ in Zong!, in which Philip
lists the “African Groups & Languages”, “Animals”, “Body Parts”, “Crew”, “Food & Drink”, “Nature”,
and “Women Who Wait” (2008: 185-6) that are present in the text. On the previous page, Philip includes
a Glossary of the non-English words used throughout the text, accompanied with English translations
of the words from languages such as Yoruba, Latin, Spanish, and Shona. The section ‘Manifest’ is
reminiscent of a character list in manuscripts of plays (Figure 4). The headings, such as, “African
Groups and Languages”, resembles the title of a Chorus or ensemble, and the list consisting of “Bantu”
“Edo” and “Ewe” (Philip, 2008: 185), amongst others, resembles the name of the individual actor or
character. This proximity of the publication to the manuscript of the play elevates the significance of
performance in the aesthetics of Zong!. The word clusters in the text become individual components
that collectively stage a “tale” that Philip repeats, “cannot, yet must, be told” (2008: 199). Quema
suggests that Philip succeeds in this anti-narrative that seeks to preserve the impossibility of its
relatability by organising the vocabulary of ‘Manifest’ to create a “mise en scène through a mise on
page” (Quema, 2016: 97). This theatrical metaphor referring to the formation of a scene suggests that
Philip achieves her task of “not tell[ing] the tale that must be told” by treating language as “objects” to
stage the Zong massacre as opposed to the language of the coloniser. Treating Gregson v. Gilbert as a
correlation of objects allows Philip to cleanse the text of the “master”s presence.

However, as important as the vocality and cacophony of Zong! is to Philip’s poetics, the book’s structure
and appearance are also quintessential to the form. For instance, the concept of the “palimpsest” is
frequently used to describe the forms of the text. A palimpsest is a material, such as a manuscript, on
which writing has been “superimposed”, or “effaced”3 through time with additions and changes to the
original material. Both Anthony Reed and Nicole Gervasio describe the last section of the book,
‘Ebora’, as “palimpsestic” (see 2014: 56 and 2019: 18), and Prathista Bhattarai applies Gayatri Spivak’s
phrase, “palimpsestic narrative of imperialism” (Spivak, in Bhattarai, 2022: 6) to Zong!. Similarly, Fred
Moten refers to Zong! as a “pli”4, the French noun for ‘fold’. The analogy of the “palimpsest” places
emphasis on the original archive from which Philip creates Zong! - thus placing Zong! at the end of a
timeline beginning from Gregson v. Gilbert. This undermines the text’s aversion to the existing methods
of communicating the violence of the Zong massacre. Quema’s reading of the text as a “mise en page”
can be used to further the notion Philip of as a Philomela figure creating a tapestry that traces the
trajectory of the Zong as opposed to being a revision or adaptation of the archive as each section of
Zong! takes on a different shape to form a tapestry that bears witness to crimes along the Middle
Passage.

This is furthered by the notion that the six sections of Zong! have a distinct physical appearance that
visually communicates the journey of the Zong. The first section, Os, consists of twenty-six poems, and
hints towards the events of the Zong massacre and the subsequent justification of the incident by the
law. The words and phrases are structured in distinct stanzas that allow for linear readings. In the second
section, Sal (‘salt’ in Latin), the linearity is substituted for stanzas in the shape of what resembles
archipelagos, as on page 52 (Figure 5). In Sal, the constraints on the language seem to lift. This is shown
in the lines, “There is an art / To murder” (Philip, 2008: 68). Philip’s explicit labelling of the massacre

3"palimpsest, n. and adj." OED Online, Oxford University Press, March 2023,
www.oed.com/view/Entry/136319. Accessed 18 March 2023.
4"Blackness and Poetry | Literature, the Humanities, & the World." 1 Jul. 2015,
https://arcade.stanford.edu/content/blackness-and-poetry-0. Accessed 15 Mar. 2023.
as a murder in clear terms is a liberation from language as a corrupt social and political institution.
Philip also adds sequences alluding to the arrival of the slave traders in Africa and capture of the natives
here. For example, the lines “dem men / dem cam fo mi” (Philip, 2008: 68) are from the perspectives
of the natives. The dialect used here differentiates Anglophonic English from the idiosyncratic
interjection of an African’s voice. This serves as a metaphorical testimony of the voices and bodies
submerged by the Zong case and the retellings that followed it. In the third section, Ventus, meaning
‘wind’ in Latin, the text becomes displaced, and Philip introduces non-English words in the text, such
as “oba” translating to “King” or “ruler”, and “ifá”, a Yoruba deity of intellect and wisdom (2008: 184).
The section begins with the solitary lines “water parts/ the oba sobs” (2008: 60), before the whole text
seems to take on the shape of ripples, through which “ifá” is repeated to indicate the “shrieks” of the
Africans as they are ‘”fall/ing” (Philip, 2008: 60) from the ship. In Ratio, (Latin for ‘reason’) and
Ferrum (Latin for ‘Iron’), the text remains fragmented, consisting of the ripple-like spatial placement
of the words. Through these two sections however, Philip gives hints of the narratives buried in the sea
– one of which is of a husband and wife, “Wale” and “Sade”, captured from Africa. In the final passage,
Ebora, Yoruba for “underwater spirits” (Philip, 2008: 184) the text is faded and compressed. The
appearance of the section is reminiscent of Dabydeen’s narrator’s comment on the bleaching effect of
the sea; “my skin long since / Washed clean of the colour of sin” (Dabydeen, 1995: 21). Through Os,
Dicta, Sal, Ventus, Ferrum, and Ebora, Philip amalgamates the visual, oral, and the aural to fulfil her
“responsibility” of conveying the violence of the Zong without the use of “the master’s tools”.

An “Imaginative adventure” aboard the slave ship

In an interview with Rajiv Mohabir, Dabydeen suggests that “giving voice and biography to the
marginal black figures” in eighteenth and nineteenth century British artworks is an “imaginative
adventure”5. This opposes Hartman and Philip’s practice of “narrative restraint”. Dabydeen endeavours
to highlight the violences of enslavement that Slave Ship’s perspective does not show. Historical and
archival accuracy is subverted in Dabydeen’s poetics for a treatment of Turner in the “i-mage” of his
cultural and racial identity. Eckstein argues that Turner is constructed through “Amerindian notions of
time and space”, which “contradicts the Afro-Caribbean search for specific roots and origins” (2006:
145). This suggests that whilst Zong! and Turner are confronting the same subject matter, their poetics
cannot be examined through a singular framework of the ethics of representation. Eckstein’s essay
suggests that Hartman’s advocation for “narrative restraint” is not applicable to the philosophy through
which Dabydeen constructs Turner.

Throughout Turner, sequences of Turner’s sexual abuse and paedophilia are intertwined in the narration
to suggest the continuation of trauma in the “wake” of the Zong massacre. In section IV, the narrator
recounts the arrival of slave traders, and the pillaging, capturing, and enslavement of the villagers that

5"David Dabydeen on Coolitude - Jacket2." 31 Oct. 2017, https://jacket2.org/commentary/david-dabydeen-

coolitude. Accessed 15 Mar. 2023.
ensues. The narration here places the reader in the perspective of the narrator as a child experiencing
the violence of the slave traders. The colonisers are described here as “the ones / with golden hair” and
with “blue eyes” (Dabydeen, 1995: 13). The use of “golden” here alludes to the stark white source of
light in Slave Ship. The slave traders’ likeness to the harsh of ‘gold’ in J.M.W Turner’s painting presents
their aspirations to be as ubiquitous and powerful as the sun. The slave traders’ actions are physically
and emotionally possessive of the narrator’s society; “Turner”, “gives”, “leads”, “forbid[s]”, and
“promises” (Dabydeen, 1995: 14). Amidst the pillaging, the narrator ponders, “Why is my mother
screaming”, “Where is my father?”, and “why are all the elders in chains?” (Dabydeen, 1995: 14). The
rhetorical questions here show the narrator’s memory of confusion amidst the arrival of the slave
traders. Dabydeen provides insinuations of violence through “anagrammatical” language; the reader
must infer the context of the slave traders’ colonising from the proximity of the verb “screaming”, to
the nouns “chains” and “ships” (Dabydeen, 1995: 14). The run-on-lines in this passage create dramatic
irony. For example, “Why is my mother screaming” is immediately followed by the half-line “Like a
harch” which places the emphasis on the simile as opposed to the scene of violence being detailed.
“Harch” is a neologism used to refer to an animal imagined by the narrator. The cacophonic sound of
the word and attention to it suggests that he narrator perceives his surroundings as unusual and ‘harsh’
but remains nescient to the terrors being inflicted.

The narration discards all notions of objectivity, logic and linearity as sequences of the slave ship, the
narrator’s imagined childhood, and the interactions with the foetus are blurred together. At one point in
the passage, the slave trader blurs into characterisation of the narrator’s mother. The narrator recalls
hold[ing] [Turner’s] hand”, “like jenti cubs / Clinging to their mother’s teats” (Dabydeen, 1995: 14).
This parallels the simile in the lines, “My mother/ Watches over me, eyes big like our cow’s / But full
of sadness” (Dabydeen, 1995: 12) in the previous section. The narrator naively perceives the slave
traders as nurturing. Turner’s use of “Shada juice” (Dabydeen, 1995: 14) to entice the children of the
village resembles the narrator reminiscing about his mother treating him to “one load of licks with a
tamarind/ Stick” (Dabydeen, 1995: 12). Dabydeen uses the fictitious “Shada juice” and “jenti” against
the real “tamarind” and “cow” to juxtapose the tangible affections of childhood with the slave traders’
feigned benevolence. For example, in his observation of Turner’s “black leather boots”, the narrator
adds; “which he lets us [the children]/ Polish, till we can see our faces” (Dabydeen, 1995: 14). The fact
that the narrator is made to believe that serving the slavers is a privilege (“he lets us/ Polish”, emphasis
mine) highlights the magnitude of subjugation exercised by the slavers. The frequency of Turner’s
mistreatment has made the enslaved child ambivalent to his mistreatment – to the extent that the
violence of the slave ship is seldom the focal point in the structure of the poem. The children are
groomed by Turner’s facade of guardianship (“Five of us hold his hand, / Each takes a finger, like jenti
cubs / Clinging to their mother’s teats”) promises of material objects (“the black leather boots”), and
alien appearance (“golden hair” and “blue eyes”), and the fact that the enslaved are occupied in labour
“till [they] can see [their] faces” symbolises the erosion of the Africans’ identity in enslavement as their
blackness is conflated with the slave trader’s property. The image of the Africans lowered in stature by
the act of polishing Turner’s boots resembles J.M.W Turner’s positioning of the Africans at the bottom
of his painting, and Ruskin’s relegation of the massacre to a footnote. By placing the black body close
to the ground, Dabydeen demonstrates the racist hierarchies aboard the slave ship.

Dabydeen further engages with J.M.W Turner’s representation of the b;ack body through the narrator’s
interactions with the foetus. In section IX, blackness is conflated with, “the colour of sin, scab, smudge,
/ Pestilence, death, rats that carry plague, / Darkness” (Dabydeen, 1995: 21). The racial slurs that
constitute the foetus’ speech throughout the passage adds to the pejorative depiction of blackness in the
text. The foetus is distraught as “it” becomes aware of its colour in passage XVIII; “It cries, sensing its
deformity” (Dabydeen, 1995: 21). The use of the pronoun “it” used for the foetus, and the narrator’s
own blurred sense of gender in poem, shows the negating effect of the Atlantic for all the Africans
“tossed” (Dabydeen, 1995: 7) by the slave ship. Dabydeen’s use of the noun “deformity” to refer to the
racialisation of the foetus presents blackness “phobogenic”. Whereas Hartman highlights such
pejorative perceptions of blackness as “coerced and cultivated” (2022: 96), Dabydeen presents the black
body in a perpetual state of “natal alienation” (2022: 94). Hartman is arguing that the conceptualisation
of race is intrinsic to colonial and imperial violences and highlights the dangers of rationalising such
racialisation as social and biological certainties. At first glance, this would suggest that Dabydeen’s
presentation of blackness in Turner perpetuates the racist notion of blackness as “phobogenic”. For
example, in section XVIII, the foetus views “its” blackness as a “deformity” (Dabydeen, 1995: 31). In
section IV however, the lines “It plopped into the water from a passing ship / Like a lime-seed spat from
the scurvied mouth / Of a sailor” (Dabydeen, 1995: 13) approximates Dabydeen’s presentation of
blackness to Hartman’s critique of blackness as a “corporeal malediction”. Similarly, by comparing the
slave ship to a “scurvied mouth”, Dabydeen is emphasising that the perceptions of the black body as
‘deformed’ are “cultivated” by the colonisers as opposed to it being an intrinsic component of the black
body. The fact that the foetus repeatedly refers to the narrator through racial slurs, characteristic of a
slave trader’s speech, positions Dabydeen’s depiction of the foetus’ self-denial and shame as a product
of the environment aboard the slave ship, as a metaphor for racism as socially, rather than genetically,
constructed.

The narrator desires to “shape” the foetus’ “bone and cell and word beyond / Memory of obscene human
form” (Dabydeen, 1995: 31). It is imperative for the narrator, and the poet, to shed the foetus of all
markers of slavery. These lines parallel, “since Turner’s days I have learnt to count, / Weigh, measure,
abstract, rationalise” (Dabydeen, 1995: 10) in the second section of the poem. The terms “count”,
“weigh”, and “measure” are all economic terms evocative of the slave auction. Similarly, in section
XXIV, the narrator presents the slave traders’ language and indoctrination as a constant “flow” into the
“mouths and bellies” (Dabydeen, 1995: 40) of the enslaved. Dabydeen portrays the slave traders’
transference of and mannerisms as a kind of rape. The narrator wishes to impress a language (“word”)
onto the foetus that would tether “it” from such “memory” of violence (“obscene human form”). The
narrator continues its efforts to “shape” their representation away from the “phobogenic” portrayal of
blackness in Slave Ship. This is suggested in the line, “I wanted to teach it / A redemptive song, fashion
new descriptions” (Dabydeen, 1995: 41). The narrator follows this with a yearning for “new colours”
(Dabydeen, 1995: 41). The narrator’s desire for “new colours”, and “new descriptions” alludes to
J.M.W Turner’s painting, and Ruskin’s ekphrasis, respectively. The narrator aspires to elude the
immortalisation of its violence in art and aesthetics, and the reference to “song” relates the poem to
Caribbean oral traditions. Dabydeen vocalises the anguish and entrapment represented by Turner’s
seascape, and the perpetuation of violence as a result of the “colonial gaze”.

The foetus’ yearning for escape intensifies, as it begins “drifting away” from the narrator and “tries to
die” (Dabydeen, 1995: 41). The description of the narrator’s “hook” in the final section resembles the
slave trader’s violence towards the enslaved children; “Breathless with pain, wanting to remove his
hook/ Implanted in our flesh” (Dabydeen, 1995: 40). Similarly, Dabydeen uses the verb, “curl” to
describe Turner coercing the enslaved Africans “warmly to his bed” (Dabydeen, 1995: 18), and then
also in section XVIII as the narrator details how the foetus “curled at my breast” (Dabydeen, 1995: 31).
Dabydeen’s amalgamation of the language used to refer to the narrator and slave trader emphasises the
long-lasting effect of the “hold” on the lives of the enslaved. The narrator is aware of lasting effect of
Turner’s violence. The narrator expresses concern at being, “nothing/ And a slave to nothingness, to
the white enfolding / Wings of Turner brooding over my body” (Dabydeen, 1995: 31). The “white
wings” here again allude to the harsh white light dominating J.M.W Turner’s painting. The light creates
an eschatological atmosphere in the painting. Dabydeen appropriates this quality of the painting by
characterising the slave traders as a similarly apocalyptic presence.

For Hartman, recovery and recuperation from the abjection produced by transatlantic slavery can only
be achieved through “an event of epic and revolutionary proportions” (2022: 130). This revolution is
imagined through materialist terms, such as “the abolition of property” and “recompense of stolen life
and land” (Hartman, 2022: 130). For Philip however, revolution need not be such as act of grand
proportions. The work of telling a story like Zong begins imagining a hauntological ontology within
the archives that survive. The construction of Zong!, and its capacity to subvert the instruments of
language, “the master’s tools” is revolutionary for Philip. Zong! contends that it is the law and English
itself that must be “obliterated” to restore humanity to the victims of the Middle Passage. Dabydeen
may not assume such political and moral responsibility, but the very act of animating a marginalised
figure in ‘Turner’ incites discourse on the ethics of representing violence. Prosopopoeia and “exaqua”
allude to the possibilities of literature in confronting the present disguised as the past. Today, Slave Ship
is housed at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, adjacent to the Atlantic. It is impossible to view the
painting without acknowledging the violence it represents, and in its current spatial position, reflects.
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 Appendix

Figure 1.

Slave Ship (Slavers Throwing the Dead and Dying, Typhoon Coming On) by J.M.W Turner. Housed at
the Museum of Fine Arts Boston.

Figure 2.
 Drawing of the slave ship 'Brookes'. From: Thomas Clarkson, 'The history of the rise, progress, and
accomplishment of the abolition of the African slave-trade by the British Parliament' (London:
Longman & Co., 1808)

Figure 3.
Page 6 of Zong! by M.NourbeSe Philip As told to the author by Setaey Adamu Boateng

Figure 4.
Page 3 of Zong! by M.NourbeSe Philip As told to the author by Setaey Adamu Boateng

Figure 5.
Page 186 in Zong! by M.NourbeSe Philip As told to the author by Setaey Adamu Boateng

Figure 6.
Page 52 in Zong! by M.NourbeSe Philip As told to the author by Setaey Adamu Boateng