Zong!: As Told to the Author by Setaey Adamu Boateng

By M Nourbese Philip and Marlene NourbeSe Philip

Book Overview

A new and expanded edition of one of the essential works of twenty-first-century literature

Zong is a haunting lifeline between archive and memory, law and poetry.

In November 1781, the captain of the slave ship Zong ordered that some 150 Africans be murdered by drowning so that the ship's owners could collect insurance monies. Relying entirely on the words of the legal decision Gregson v. Gilbert--the only extant public document related to the massacre--Zong tells the story that cannot be told yet must be told. Equal parts song, moan, shout, oath, ululation, curse, and chant, Zong excavates the legal text. 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.

This fifteenth-anniversary edition features a new preface by the author and new essays by Saidiya Hartman and Katherine McKittrick. Widely regarded as one of the most influential and revered works of twenty-first-century literature, this new edition of Zong will ensure this staggering work's enduring legacy.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1644453045
• ISBN13: 9781644453049
• Release Date: September 2024
• Publisher: Graywolf Press
• Length: 240 Pages
• Weight: 1.10 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 6.8" x 8.9"

Customer Reviews

One of the most important poetry books I've ever read

Zong! is a heavy-hitter. It fights for "the untold story that tells itself by not telling." M. NourbeSe Philip is brilliant, and I cannot express my awe of her work enough. This is a masterpiece of erasure poetry, and it's a must-read for any reader or writer concerned with erasure, ancestors lost to empire-building and the crime of slavery, and the soul. My life is divided into the time before I read Zong! and the time after I read Zong!