ZONG
From the ICA Website: Philip’s acclaimed book-length poem composed entirely from the words of Gregson vs Gilbert—the only extant document related to the massacre, is published for the first time in the UK with contributions from Hartman and Katherine McKittrick.
Equal parts song, moan, shout, oath, ululation, curse, and chant, Zong! excavates the legal text to tell the story that cannot be told yet must be told. 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".
From M. NourBese Philip's website:
"Over a period of ten days, beginning on November 30th, 2020, readers from around the world will participate in reading the entire text of Zong!. This year’s shared and collective reading grounds itself in the 2015 UN declaration of the International Decade for People of African Descent whose theme is “recognition, justice and development,” and commemorates those who lost their lives on board the Zong. 2020’s reading will take place within the still-present context of the worldwide uprising against anti-Black racism sparked by the lynching of George Floyd on May 25th, 2020. While this act of remembrance resides in the particularity of anti-Black racism, it also embraces the words of Civil Rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer that until all are free none is free. With that in mind the Zong! 2020 reading acknowledges and honours the Indigenous peoples of the Americas and the Caribbean—those who first walked this land in love, respect and wisdom and who continue to face the depredations of anti-Indigenous racism. As such Zong! Global 2020 bears witness to the collective grief we bear and witness in the face of the ongoing destruction of the earth, our only home".
☞ Click here for 2019: Zong! by M. NourbeSe Philip: A Collective Reading with LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs, Sean D. Henry-Smith, Erica Hunt, and Rosamond S. King
Forensic Listening: NourbeSe Philip’s Zong!, Caroline Bergvall’s Drift, and the Contemporary Long Poem
"The technique these poets use to tell what cannot be told is a rich, dense, and sustained attentiveness to sound that we might call forensic listening."
Thinking of forensic listening in relation to therapeutic practice and the infinity of the unsaid.
Imagining a therapy that drinks all embodied racialised trauma into love.
What hard season have you been going through?
....'keep speaking the years from their hiding places'...
speaking your years into view - to be heard and seen and witnessed
What kind of work is this poem for you? What kind of witnessing?
What kind of recognition?
From Salt by Nayyirah Waheed