In Zong!, M. NourbeSe Philip brings awareness to the lives once lost on a ship with the use of a unique style of writing. In 1781, a ship called the Zong set sail from Africa to Jamaica. This insured ship carried 470 slaves. The Zong’s captain, Luke Collingwood, is responsible for the tragic death of many of these slaves. These slaves were thrown overboard from the ship in order for the owners to get more money from insurance. Due to insurance disagreements, this case was taken to court. This case inspired Philip to write her poems to remember the tragic loss of these Africans. In the beginning of the text, Philip includes a quote written by Dylan Thomas that says, “Though they sink through the sea they shall rise again.” This quote is a great representation of the meaning behind Philips’ poems. Although these lives were tragically lost in the sea, they shall be remembered. Philip spreads awareness of these deaths through her poetry. She started out by researching all about the history of the ship and its court case. Philip began writing down information from the court case, and would take out some words and phrases while leaving the rest of what was written. Philip writes, “I murder the text, literally cut it into pieces, castrating verbs, suffocating adjectives, murdering nouns, throwing articles, prepositions, conjunctions overboard, jettisoning adverbs: I separate subject from verb, verb from object–create semantic mayhem, until my hands bloodied, from so much killing and cutting, reach into the stinking, eviscerated innards, and like some seer, sangoma, or prophet who, having sacrificed an animal for signs and portents of new life, or simply life, reads the untold story that tells itself by not telling” (193-194). The use of the word murder compares what she does to the text to what the Captain of Zong did to the slaves. She rips away all of the different parts of certain words, just like how so many Africans’ lives were ripped away from them. Philip throws conjunctions overboard, exactly like they threw all of the slaves overboard. She brings awareness to the horrors the slaves faced by just putting it into a different context.
This separation that Philip refers to causes there to be words and phrases randomly placed on each page. At first, this seems very confusing. There seems to be no meaning behind the words Philip has written down. However, that was exactly her intention while writing these poems. Philip explains, “When I start spacing out the words, there is something happening in the eye tracking the words across the page, working to pull the page and larger “meaning” together– the eye trying to order what cannot be ordered, trying to “make sense” of something, which is what it must have been like trying to understand what was happening on board the Zong–meantime there are smaller individual poems to be found in different places on the page as the lines are juxtaposed and work together” (192). Philip spaced out the words in her poems to have an emotional effect on readers. She is bringing awareness to how the people on the ship must have felt as those around them were being thrown overboard and killed for no good reason. As you read the random consonants, vowels, words, or phrases on the page in each poem, it is difficult to make sense of what Philip means. At first her intentions were very unclear to me. That is how it must have felt as an African on the ship. They were taken from their homeland against their own will just to be thrown overboard. Those Africans could never make sense of what was done to them. Philip illustrates that same effect by writing poems that do not make sense grammatically or logically.
Even though Philip’s intentions are to bring awareness to the Zong tragedy, one will never be able to fully make sense of it all. There are many times throughout the Notanda section of the text where Philip repeats that this is not a story to be told. One example of this is Philip writing, “And only in not-telling can the story be told; only in the space where it’s not told – literally in the margins of the text, a sort of negative space, a space not so much of non-meaning as anti-meaning” (201). This quote is another great representation of why Philip uses this style of writing to bring awareness to the Zong tragedy. By cutting out different words from the text, it creates a lot of blank space on the page. This space represents the negativity and horror that is unspeakable. There are no words to explain the devastation of these deaths. These spaces also represent the unknown names of these Africans. Although unknown and sunken into the sea, these lives lost shall be recognized and rise again.
Discussion Questions:
- What was your interpretation of the repetition of Philip saying this is not a story to be told, but one that will tell itself?
- Was Philip’s style of writing an effective technique to illustrate the raw emotions of the Zong tragedy?
Work Cited
Philip, NourbeSe M. Zong!. Middletown, Connecticut, Wesleyan University Press, 2008.
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Hi Mackenzie! I really enjoyed reading your blog post. I like how in your second paragraph you talked about how Phillip uses words and phrases randomly placed on each page. This stood out to me the most because I was confused at first what the message was that the author was trying to share with us. I was able to better understand the message when Phillip said “When I start spacing out the words there is something happening in the eye tracking the words across the page, working to pull the page and larger “meaning” together- the eye trying to order what cannot be ordered, trying to “make sense” of something, which is what it must have been like trying to understand what was happening on board the Zong-meantime there are smaller individual poems to be found in different places on the page as the lines are juxtaposed and work together.” (192). This quote made me realize that Philip was trying to show the reader what it is like to not be able to make sense of what is going on just like the slaves felt when they were on the Zong seeing other slaves being thrown overboard for no reason. I was also able to better under the message when Phillip says “One approach was literally to cut up the text and just pick words randomly, then I would write them down but nothing seemed to yield- this was most similar to the activity of the random picking of African slaves- selected randomly then thrown together, hoping that something would come of it-that they would produce something.” (192, 193). This quote shows us that Phillip was picking random words to put down on a page hoping it would maybe make sense, just like how on the Zong they were randomly picking slaves to throw overboard hoping that it would maybe make sense.
To answer your second question, I do believe that Phillip’s style of writing was an effective technique to illustrate the raw emotions of the Zong tragedy. The use of words and phrases randomly placed on each page helps the reader to better understand the confusion that the slaves felt while on the Zong.
Hey Mackenzie, I really enjoyed your blog post. To answer your second question, I think when Philip says, “this is not a story to be told, but one that will tell itself”, speaks to how she went about writing the book. By throwing words onto the paper randomly, she prompted the reader to not just read the story but bring a greater feeling and experience to the reader. She did not need to tell a story, she just had to provide some of the words from the legal case. When discussing poems, the text reads, “some poems just seem to offer themselves up” (Philip 196). I believe what she meant by this is that the legal text used to make the poem was a poem itself. She did not need to add anything new or different, in fact she was able to take away words and make the story have more emotion.
Hi Makenzie, I loved your blog comment and commend you on your use of details, I thought this book was a little harder to understand with the type of illustration. To answer your second discussion question, I think Philip’s style of writing was an effective technique to illustrate the raw emotions of the Zong tragedy because it shows the facts of this terrible memory from the people that were left with a resolution or justified outcome. For example, Philip’s “Zong! # 7” states “first: the when, the which, the who, the were, the throwing, overboard, the be, come apprehended, exist did not” (p 15). This “Zong” makes you think of the date this event happened, the slaves that lost their lives, Captain Luke Collingwood who controlled the situation, and the unjust perception that Americans had about slaves to make them feel like they don’t exist.
Hi Mackenzie! Great blog post! I love how you mentioned the authors heavy usage of details within the poems that add up to larger overarching theme. I found the first couple of poems we read to be extremely confusing, as it seems most of us did based on your replies so far, but I think your interpretation helped me further understand what the author is trying to help us understand. One quote I found that I think helps further the theme of the dehumanizing treatment of slaves was, “But I who am bound by law – to tell the story – of the vessel – am cast adrift – in the sea of memory – sea of forgetfulness – sea of dreams – my mouth gagged
my voice silent” (Phillip 3). This quote shows the treatment these human beings had to go through and how painful and awful it really was. Philip doesn’t hold our hand through any of this and makes the reader sit through uncomfortable vocabulary to drive home his point. To answer your first question, I think the repetition of that phrase is to drive home the point of how flawed the logic of racism is, and how obvious it should be in the minds of any rational human being that this is not ok, and will never be ok.
Really good post, your use of close reading was really evident when exploring the spacing or format the way the poem was written and how it relates to the overall meaning of the poem. I saw myself doing the eye tracking topic you mentioned and trying to make it all make sense, and to answer your first question I think it means that as the story progresses it will begin to paint a picture in your mind detailing the meaning behind it, the way the story is written, said and thought about will piece everything together similar to how the eye tracking does. It’s like the words of the poems are pieces of a puzzle separated from another, and once completed and put together it will tell a bigger story. An example of this could be when Philip leaves the pages blank, she wants us to lay out the pieces gathered from reading that poem and coordinate them. To answer your second question, I feel as though its effective only if the readers are advanced enough to recognize and see what they are meant to do. If not, it could be jarring for them to try and read and scare them away.
Good Afternoon Makenzie, I really liked your post, It was really interesting. I liked how you showed evidence by close reading, in this book it’s important to do close really to fully understand what is being said. Another interesting thing that I read was how the spacing was in the poem, I feel like there is a meaning behind the spacing and I really want to understand why. To answer your First question I think it was an important message to say because I think the message behind it will show itself will come out and no one needs to know it, it will just happen to them if ever does. I think another quote that showed me an important message was “And this story must be told by not telling- there is a mystery here- the mystery. I like the message that it portrays to us, maybe it’s staying some stories aren’t able to talk about but maybe be shown to us. Can’t wait to talk more about this book.
Hey Mackenzie, this is a great blog post and a great interpretation of Zong!. Your thoughts and ideas were backed by great evidence. The way I interpret the speaker repeating, this is not a story to be told, but one that will tell itself, is that Phillips doesn’t want people to just blankly know about it or read about the tragedy and eventually forget or lose interest, this story needs justice, and needs to speak for itself, not have other people tell their story about what happened. This story is not just a story, it is a tragic event that happened a long time ago and was forgotten about. You can’t just read this story, or tell this story, you have to understand what truly happened, and Phillips does this by using peoples words and works and connects them in a way that tells the story, without having anything really said. Phillips didn’t want this to be just a novel, or something you read, because that requires “too much telling”, she says “I begin reading a novel about it, but am uncomfortable. “a novel requires too much telling,” I write, “and this story must be told by not telling – there is a mystery here – the mystery of evil” (mysterium iniquitatis to quote Ivan Illich)” (204). ¬Phillips again reestablishes this idea that this story will tell itself. It also explains why she doesn’t want it to be told. She compares it to a novel, in which a novel requires too much telling. She doesn’t want the readers to be told this story through a novel, she wants this story to tell itself. It is up for interpretation and you the reader goes on this journey that these people did and as you are in it, you are told the story, therefore the story will tell itself.
Hey Mackenzie! Great post. You have some really interesting ideas here. I too was a little confused at first by the repetition in the story. Phillips writing style uses repetition in the first few poems. Repetition is used often to convey meaning, or point out there is more meaning to what’s being repeated. In this case, it is to emphasize meaning. The author repeats certain phrases. “ of water rains and dead, the more of, the more of, n*****, of water and weeks(three less than) rain.” ( Philip 21) I believe the author emphasizes the more of that convey how many lives were needlessly lost. I think the author also repeats phrases that stand out to make us take a second look at the phrase or the belief in hand. He wants us to look at our pointless and thoughtless acts of racism and really see if any of it was really worth it.
Hi Mackenzie! I really enjoyed reading your blog comment, it was very interesting and insightful. I also really enjoyed the quotes you chose to use. I would like to answer your second question, “Was Philip’s style of writing an effective technique to illustrate the raw emotions of the Zong tragedy?” I think that this writing style is incredibly effective at showcasing Philip’s feelings towards the Zong tragedy. This is exemplified well in Zong #4 when it states, “this is / not was / or / should be / this be / not / should be / this / should / not / be / is” (Philip 7). I interpret this poem as to say that racism isn’t something that happened, it’s something that’s happening still. I also think it’s mourning the lives lost and saying that this massacre is not something that should have ever occurred, but it did and people are still reaping its effects today. I think that the line breaks and spacing aid well in understanding this message in the poem.
Hi Mackenzie! I really enjoyed reading your blog post. I thought you brought up a lot of key points and I loved reading about your insights. I will be answering your first question. I think the reason why Philips continued the repetition of “this is not a story to be told, but one that will tell itself” is because as the reader you won’t get specifics of the story. The more you read the more you unravel. It is kind of like a guessing game, where you are trying to guess what happened. The story itself will reveal everything. The meaning behind this is that you cant just tell the story, the story has a stronger meaning and message that the reader will eventually identify.
Hi Mackenzie, I really liked your blog post.I liked how you said that “Philip spaced out the words in her poems to have an emotional effect on readers. She is bringing awareness to how the people on the ship must have felt as those around them were being thrown overboard and killed.” As a Jamaican myself the book really hit close to home. I can’t help thinking that maybe one of my ancestors was in that boat and got thrown overboard. The slaves were already ripped from their homes and put on the “Zong” only to be thrown overboard because the slave owners wanted to save money on insurance. Phillip wanted this book to connect with the reader’s emotional side. She removes the conjunctions out of the book which to me tells the story of the slaves being ripped from their homes. She also has power over the words that are left, almost like the slave holder having power over the slaves. Phillip is able to manipulate the words into what she wants her book to portray. She uses her book to portray how the slave owners dehumanize the slaves “But I who am bound by law – to tell the story – of the vessel – am cast adrift – in the sea of memory – sea of forgetfulness – sea of dreams – my mouth gagged
my voice silent” (Phillip, 3)
Really good post, your use of close reading was really evident when exploring the spacing or format the way the poem was written and how it relates to the overall meaning of the poem. I saw myself doing the eye tracking topic you mentioned and trying to make it all make sense, and to answer your first question I think it means that as the story progresses it will begin to paint a picture in your mind detailing the meaning behind it, the way the story is written, said and thought about will piece everything together similar to how the eye tracking does. It’s like the words of the poems are pieces of a puzzle separated from another, and once completed and put together it will tell a bigger story. Two examples of this occur when first she states, “They ask for water we give them sea, they ask for bread we give them sea, they ask for life we give them only the sea”. The way this is formatted has you read each line as a piece of the puzzle and when you read that all together it forms a bigger picture. This also occurs when she leaves the pages blank, she wants us to lay out the pieces gathered from reading that poem and coordinate them. To answer your second question, I feel as though its effective only if the readers are advanced enough to recognize and see what they are meant to do. If not, it could be jarring for them to try and read and scare them away.