RT Article
T1 Zong!, Throwing the Bones of Ezekiel’s Vision and Singing Them Home
JF Political theology
VO 25
IS 6
SP 618
OP 635
A1 Raz, Yosefa
LA English
YR 2024
UL https://ixtheo.de/Record/1907407863
AB M. NourbeSe Philip's book-length poem, Zong!, while seemingly focused on a particular catastrophe which occurred in 1781 aboard the slave ship Zong, is also a metonymy for the entirety of the trans-Atlantic slave trade and its legacy. Philip's book (written with the guidance of the voice of the ancestors Setaey Adamu Boateng) is an attempt to retrieve the voices of the drowned, unnamed slaves. It makes its difficult – almost impossible – poems from out of the words of the court case between the owners and the insurers of the ship. Through Zong!, a poem which remembers and grieves the unnamed African victims of the Zong, Philip asks if and how it is possible to make meaning of the suffering of the past, and even to heal. In tracing and retracing these questions, the poem goes beyond grief to become a work of prophetic annunciation, both joining and disjointing “the visionary company.”
K1 Circe
K1 visionary poetics
K1 Zong
K1 M. NourbeSe Philip
K1 Ezekiel
K1 slave-trade
K1 Prophecy
DO 10.1080/1462317X.2023.2247896