Zong!: As Told to the Author by Setaey Adamu Boateng - Hardcover

Philip, M. Nourbese

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1551281368 ISBN 13: 9781551281360

Publisher: Mercury Pr, 2008

Synopsis

In November, 1781, the captain of the slave ship Zong ordered that some 150 Africans be murdered by drowning so that the ship's owners could collect insurance monies. Relying entirely on the words of the legal decision Gregson vs Gilbert (the only extant public document related to the massacre of these African slaves), Zong! tells the story that cannot be told yet must be told. Equal parts song, moan, shout, oath, ululation, curse, and chant, Zong! excavates the legal text. Memory, history and law collide and metamorphose into the poetics of the fragment. Through the innovative use of fugal and counterpointed repetition, Zong! becomes an anti-narrative lament that stretches the boundaries of the poetic form, haunting the spaces of forgetting and mourning the forgotten.

About this title

Review:

."..as Philip emphasizes, the story of the Zong is ultimately a story that can only be told by not telling. So even in the sea of words that fill up the final pages of Zong!, the registers of silence that mark the text are resounding." --Kate Eichorn, XCP: Cross Cultural Poetics

Poetry Project Newsletter"

XCP: Cross Cultural Poetics"

African American Review"

At times I m uncomfortable with both poetry and history, but then a book like Zong! comes along and reminds me how the lyric can shake up history s limited logics and history can shake up poetry s occasional evasive sheen. Jill Magi, Poetry Project Newsletter"

" as Philip emphasizes, the story of the Zong is ultimately a story that can only be told by not telling. So even in the sea of words that fill up the final pages of Zong!, the registers of silence that mark the text are resounding." Kate Eichorn, XCP: Cross Cultural Poetics"

Nourbese-Philip cannot not create a story, even against her own intentions to merely document. " she treats each page as a field, a canvas more accurately, the sea. The visual effect of viewing so many de-worded letters, de-sentenced words is astonishing; one seems to be looking at bodies in the ocean, their cries mere noise, sounds that only occasionally coalesce into words, phrases, sentences." Tyrone Williams, African American Review"

"M. NourbeSe Philip writes a poetry whose innovation--her spells of silence, her stuttering syntax--is not an abstract experiment but a form of mourning for African words prohibited by 'the ceremony of White... in the elsewhere of time.'"--Zinzi Clemmons, Literary Hub

"At times I'm uncomfortable with both poetry and history, but then a book like Zong! comes along and reminds me how the lyric can shake up history's limited logics and history can shake up poetry's occasional evasive sheen."--Jill Magi "Poetry Project Newsletter" (2/1/2010 12:00:00 AM)

..".as Philip emphasizes, the story of the Zong is ultimately a story that can only be told by not telling. So even in the sea of words that fill up the final pages of Zong!, the registers of silence that mark the text are resounding."--Kate Eichorn "XCP: Cross Cultural Poetics" (9/1/2010 12:00:00 AM)

About the Author:

M. NOURBESE PHILIP is a poet, writer, and lawyer whose previous collections of poetry include She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks (1989). Born in Tobago, she now resides in Toronto, Ontario. SETAEY ADAMU BOATENG is the voice of the ancestors revealing the submerged stories of all who were on board the Zong.

About this edition

• Publisher: Mercury Pr
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 1551281368
• ISBN 13: 9781551281360
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 211