“Sing the Bones Home”: Material Memory and the Project of Freedom in M. NourbeSe Philip’s <i>Zong!</i>

• Main Author: Lisa Fink
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: MDPI AG 2020-02-01
• Series: Humanities
• Subjects: geomodernisms; modernist poetics; caribbean poetry; zong!; m. nourbese philip; black poetry; critical ocean studies; multispecies; materiality; ecocriticism
• Online Access: https://www.mdpi.com/2076-0787/9/1/22

<b> </b>M. NourbeSe Philip&#8217;s 2008 book-length poem <i>Zong! </i>represents maritime materialities below the sea&#8217;s surface in relation to aesthetic geographies of the sea in the aftermath of slavery as an abyss of loss, thereby extending modernist aesthetics while offering a strategic and revisionary response to male-centered modernist writing. Keen attention into the sea as an innovating and renewing source reveals that the poem imagines the sea as a literal, formal, and thematic agent for the &#8220;decontamination&#8221; of language&#8212;which, Philip maintains, is contaminated by imperialism&#8212;and of the received history about slavery. The poem focuses its investigation on the case of the 1781 <i>Zong</i> massacre and the <i>Gregson v. Gilbert</i> maritime insurance case that arose in its wake. <i>Zong!</i> mourns the massacre of 150 Africans who were thrown overboard so that owners of the slave ship could collect insurance money on lost &#8220;cargo&#8221;. In conversation with Caribbean poets and thinkers, such as Grace Nichols, and African oral traditions, the poem explores forms of memory that go beyond the non-history officially afforded to the enslaved and their descendants. Throughout the poem, the sea is a site of decontamination through which <i>Zong!</i> stages its attempt to recover the unrecoverable. While many scholars have understandably focused on the events aboard the ship, a small number of ecocritical readings have highlighted the poem&#8217;s engagement with the materiality of the sea. Drawing on postcolonial ecocriticism and black feminist theories of the human, this article will discuss the sea as a material geography, going deeper to investigate the poem&#8217;s rarely discussed focus on biological and chemical materiality as juxtaposed to representations of black women&#8217;s flesh, arguing that it functions as a feminist provocation to both human exceptionalism and the racial boundaries of the human.