Trans*Atlantic Archives: Singing the Dead in M. NourbeSe Philip’s Sangoma Poetics

In her 2008 experimental poetry collection, Zong!, M. NourbeSe Philip untells the “story that cannot be told” of the 1781 massacre on the slave ship, Zong (190). At first glance, the pages of the collection are visually bewildering—stray syllables, words, even letters litter the page in wave and current patterns, resisting fluid pronunciation. Vertical and diagonal clusters of words pull the eye from linear modes of reading. The poem seems to defy sense-making and skew the commemorative potential of narrative; indeed, Philip insists that the collection is meant to be performed aloud as a series of stammers, slurs, and silences. Yet amidst these visual cuts and ripples, Zong! sounds out the cacophonous afterlife of Transatlantic slavery. In my paper, I explore Philip’s counterintuitive “sangoma,” or healing, poetics that unspell the brutal erasures of the Middle Passage archive. As she mutilates and mines the single documentary trace of the Zong massacre (the verbal archive of her poem), Philip assaults the deadly logics of racial capitalism in a ritual invocation of the dead. She performs, I claim, what Christina Sharpe calls “Trans*Atlantic” Blackness, calling on African diasporic ritual practices to unsettle the sexual economies underwriting Black abjection. 

The archive Philip draws on is slim: a single court case, Gregson vs. Gilbert, is the only documentary testimony of the massacre. As Philip explains in the book’s concluding prose essay, several facts emerge amidst the “logical” arguments of the case: in 1781, the slave ship, Zong, left the coast of Africa, headed for Jamaica, but due to a navigational error, the trip that should have lasted seven weeks lasted four months. The captain eventually ordered that at least one hundred and fifty Africans be thrown overboard, believing that “cargo” lost to “perils of the sea” rather than by “natural death,” could be compensated by insurance. When the ship returned to Liverpool, the insurers refused to pay, and the ship owners sued. English maritime law, in other words, created and naturalized its own magic trick, in which humans are transformed into insurable property. For Philip, English language and law, order and reason, are driven insane by the gaping silence of the bodies they’ve consumed; they’re deranged by the bodiness of Black bodies. In an act that Philip describes as a violent, sorcerous, yet healing attack, she composes her poem by excerpting, tearing apart, and rearranging the words of the resulting court case. Her homeopathic magic sacrifices language in search of the bodies who were excised from it: 

I murder the text, literally cut it into pieces, castrating verbs, suffocating adjectives, murdering nouns, throwing articles, prepositions, conjunctions overboard, jettisoning adverbs…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 a new life, or simply life, reads the untold story that tells itself by not telling (193-4).

I show how, in this ritual scene, Philip enters a history of violent dismemberment, linguistically performing the racializing/ungendering inscription that Hortense Spillers describes as “hieroglyphics of the flesh.” These hieroglyphics, or physical wounds, expose the “zero degree of social conceptualization” onto which gender, sexuality, and Blackness are written as fungible in the name of property (Spillers, “Mama’s Baby,” 67). I connect this, in turn, to Christina Sharpe’s theorization of the “Trans*Atlantic,” a burst container for everything Blackness is made to signify (Sharpe, 2016). The “asterisk” signals the ways that whiteness  breaks open bodily integrity and compels the trans*mutability of Black life, constructed as it is around inherent “riskability.” Philip’s acts of unmaking expose the brutal exchangeability of Black bodies marked by the incantations of European law. This white magic, for Philip, bends the material world and its bodies into consumable commodities. But by describing herself with the Zulu word “sangoma,” or a “healer of both physical and spiritual ailments,” Philip re-immerses herself in the ritual traditions of the African diaspora, in which authorship is never singular (208). Throughout her compositional process, she opens herself to her ancestor, Setaey Adamu Boateng, whom she credits as the co-authoring “voice of the ancestors revealing the submerged stories of all who were on board the Zong” (Zong!, author bio, back cover). In this consensual, ancestral possession, Philip opens a channel for Black magic in which the dead, though stammering, sing. 

My paper examines two sections of the collection: “Zong! #18” and a selection from the “Ratio” chapter near the end of the book. In “Zong! #18,” words are stacked in neat parallel columns, visually evoking bodies stacked in the hold. The poem demonstrates the fungibility of linguistic meaning and material reality in the circulation of capital: “[lacuna] means / truth / means overboard / means / sufficient / means support / means / foul…” (31). The string of supposed equivalences continues, but by the end of the poem, its undercurrents suggest a “story that cannot be told” under the linguistic obfuscations: “market / means / slaves / means / more / means / dead…” (32). The “trans*formation” of words along supposed axes of equivalence betrays the deadly erasures of market-driven “logics.” In the “Ratio” chapter, I trace amidst its apparently plotless chaos the fragmentary confessions of a European sailor. As I show, the sailor’s “rational” fantasies of the “e / den of / our gar/ den” plush with consumable animals rely on the creation of “she / negroes” who exist as sexual property. Interrupting and exposing these compositional fantasies, however, emerge the impossible whispers of those deemed cargo. 

As a sangoma poet, I conclude, Philip un-spells racializing and gendering logics and ultimately, through the hunger of grief, queers the demarcations between living and dead. Her poetic method is inseparable from her archival practice and her ritual connection with her ancestors. Physically entangling, even contaminating herself in the language that writes Blackness with death, Philip offers a way of listening for the voices that cannot be heard in the stories that cannot be told.