The massacre on the Zong in 1781, during which slavers threw 132 captive Africans overboard, and the historical ramifications of such a horrendous event have exerted a genuine fascination on the authors of the anglophone Caribbean diaspora for quite a while. The best-known example of such a literary phenomenon might be Zong!, a long poem based on one of the very few official archival records of this tragedy, namely, the report of the court case that took place in 1783 around the notorious slave ship and her owners’ insurance claims for their jettisoned “cargo.” Written by Canadian-Tobagonian Marlene m. nourbeSe philip and published in 2008, this formally daring poetic work has been performed multiple times in different venues. It has gained notoriety as a text that, in the words of its author, “move[s] beyond representation of what the New World experience was” (philip 2008, 197) while mirroring, through...
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