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Zong! (2008)

by M. Nourbese Philip(Favorite Author)

4.02 of 5 Votes: 4

ISBN

0819568767 (ISBN13: 9780819568762)

languge

English

genre

Poetry

publisher

Wesleyan University Press

review 1: Philip sets out to capture in poetry the "story that cannot be told" of the massacre of at least 150 Africans aboard a Dutch slave trader called the "Zorg" (mistakenly recast as the "Zong" later on) in 1781. When the captain of the ship started losing slaves to illness and dehydration after navigational errors caused long delays in the passage from Africa, he decided to throw the slaves overboard, since his insurance policy would not cover losses due to natural causes. The insurers predictably declined to pay out on the policy, and the ship's owners sued. A jury found the insurers liable, but the insurers then appealed to the Court of King's Bench. The text of _Zong!_ is constituted from words found in the report of the decision on the case, which ordered a new trial.A law... moreyer herself, Philip is interested here in performing a radical deconstruction of legal language, in showing that any attempts to apply "reason" and "justice" as standards to a crime so horrific must be resisted. The most moving portion of the book is the long section "Ferrum," spoken from the point of view of one of the sailors. The words break apart into smaller fragments that reveal alternative, often surprising meanings, and Philip uses lineation and white space to give the poems a sense of always approaching the edge of rationality before backing away (or perhaps better said, falling off).
review 2: This is an important book. But I still don't know how successful it is . . . I know that some find the closing notes "problematic"--they don't bother me as much. More, it is a question of form somehow and how that is (re)working the history herein engaged/(re)documented/encountered. It is useful to read this alongside Ian Baucom's SPECTERS OF THE ATLANTIC (Duke UP 2005), which is also considers the Zong incident. less

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