ABSTRACT
Caribbean-Canadian poet M. NourbeSe Philip's book of poetry, Zong! , also mines the known facts of the Zong legal case, moving from the archive to the creation of a poetic text. Zong! is a global, transnational, allusional book of poetry that links “women who wait” with slaves and slave sellers, with king, flag, and nation, with captain and crew. If the Zong incident can be perceived at all as one event, in Philip's poetry it is an event enmeshed in the global web of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. 1 Her poems are followed by a glossary of words from the poems in Arabic, Dutch, Fon, French, Greek, Hebrew, Italian, Latin, Portuguese, Spanish, Shona, Twi, West African Patois, and Yoruba. The multilingual quality of this text is all the more remarkable given the fact that Philip limited her writing, her very choice of words, to the short legal document, Gregson v. Gilbert. Though this British legal document purports to represent the case, Philip's poetic explosion of this archival text reminds us that the nation-state may only house, but cannot contain, the archive. Within the very archives preserved and catalogued by the nation-state are global and multilingual stories.
