No Illusions

Growing up​ in Liverpool we knew about mass violence. The Blitz had left bombsites that were thickest around the docks. The cenotaph in front of St George’s Hall told us what had happened to the men who enlisted there. Surrounded by Murphys and Rooneys you could hardly forget the Great Famine that pushed waves of Irish immigrants into Liverpool cellars and court housing. Before the Second World War, thirty thousand people still lived in such conditions, enduring the slow violence of poverty. Slum clearance during my childhood made a difference, but to walk into the centre of the city was to pass through terraced streets in which the old patterns were still to be seen.

There was a deeper substrate of violence. Between St George’s Hall and the waterfront is a commercial district that, in the postwar decades, stood high and mighty on the profits of maritime trade. At its heart lies the neoclassical town hall completed in 1754, better known as the Exchange because of the business that was done in and around it. A frieze along its east wall depicts an African and a Native American woman with an elephant, a camel and other animals, signalling the importance of West Africa and the New World to the city’s prosperity. According to Eric Williams, the historian and first prime minister of Trinidad and Tobago, who investigated the city eighty years ago in Capitalism and Slavery, Liverpool went from having a single slave ship in 1709 to more than a hundred six decades later. By 1795 it controlled almost half of the European slave trade. Ships left the port carrying guns, brandy and textiles that were exchanged on the Guinea coast for gold, ivory, pepper and people. About 1.5 million Africans were carried across the Atlantic in Liverpool ships and more than 200,000 of them died on the voyage.

Of all the violent phases in the history of the city, the slave trade was the most vicious, yet it was barely acknowledged until recently. A Transatlantic Slavery Gallery opened in the basement of the Maritime Museum in 1994. Before then, if you were looking for a memorial to the atrocities figured on the town hall, you might have turned to the nearby Nelson monument. Erected in 1813, this group of bronze statues shows the dying hero swathed in flags while Death extends its bony fingers towards his heart and Victory hovers above, dropping crowns onto his sword. Around the base crouch four chained figures representing the major battles Nelson won against the French: Cape St Vincent, the Nile, Copenhagen and Trafalgar. The figures do not look like Africans, but they are black, they are manacled and I was not the only child in Liverpool who took them to be slaves.

This mistake was actually an insight, because the monument registers the bad conscience of the city and of Nelson himself. As Williams pointed out, Nelson married into a Caribbean planter family and declared, in a letter written in 1805, two years before Parliament voted to abolish the slave trade, that he was a ‘friend of our present colonial system’. ‘I was bred,’ he went on,

in the good old school, and taught to appreciate the value of our West Indian possessions, and neither in the field nor the Senate shall their just rights be infringed, while I have an arm to fight in their defence, or a tongue to launch my voice against the damnable cruel doctrine of Wilberforce and his hypocritical allies.

This would have been music to the ears of the West India Association, a Liverpool-based group of plantation owners and merchants who contributed to the building of the monument.

Some extenuation is possible. Nelson was writing to a planter, assuring him of support in the face of French threats in the Caribbean, and the phrase ‘just rights’ qualifies the encouragement it offers. Nelson would not condone, for example, as some naval officers did, illegal trade between the sugar islands and the United States to the detriment of the colonial system. When he calls abolitionism cruel, he is remembering the massacre of both settlers and slaves on Saint-Domingue (Haiti), which was widely believed to show what emancipation would bring, and this is the reason he adds that the hypocrites who oppose slavery while enjoying the fruits of empire would ‘cause the murder of all our friends and fellow subjects in the colonies’. In the end, though, Nelson doubles down on his sympathies in a way that is more emphatic because he half-apologises for what he says: ‘I did not intend to have gone so far but the sentiments are full in my breast and the pen would write them.’ It is hard to read this as other than supportive of slavery – if not in principle then as an existing institution – which means that the black figures shackled to his monument can the more aptly be regarded as slaves.

This was certainly the response of Herman Melville, who visited Liverpool in 1839 and wrote about the monument a decade later in his autobiographical novel Redburn: ‘I never could look at their swarthy limbs and manacles, without being involuntarily reminded of four African slaves in the marketplace. And my thoughts would revert to Virginia and Carolina.’ By this date, the Atlantic slave trade had been abolished in both the US and the British Empire (it persisted much longer in Brazil), but Britain was ahead in emancipation, having voted, in 1833, to abolish slavery in most of its colonies. It was the unevenness of this history that led Melville, still thinking about the monument, to recall ‘that the African slave trade once constituted the principal commerce of Liverpool; and that the prosperity of the town was once supposed to have been indissolubly linked to its prosecution’. His own father ‘had often spoken to gentlemen visiting our house in New York, of the unhappiness that the discussion of the abolition of this trade had occasioned in Liverpool’. Melville wants the Southern states to overcome their reluctance to free the enslaved and to be reassured by the ongoing prosperity of Liverpool. He highlights not only the continuity of debate across the Atlantic but the extent to which Liverpool, usually regarded as a bastion of pro-slavery sentiment, was riven by argument in the run-up to abolition.

The rights and wrongs of this debate were complicated by philanthropy. As Williams noted, with a historian’s eye for inconvenient truths, the slave traders of Liverpool were ‘among the leading humanitarians of their age’. Bryan Blundell was a supporter of a school for poor children which is still open today, while Thomas Leyland, as mayor, ‘was a terror to evil doers’. Leyland also became a partner in a bank jointly run by the Liverpool abolitionist William Roscoe, whom Melville singled out as ‘good and great’. Lawyer, art collector, botanist and public benefactor, Roscoe was elected MP for the city, after the usual round of bribery, in 1806, just in time to make himself unpopular by voting for abolition. His banking enterprise with Leyland shows how interwoven members of the elite were, whichever side they took in the slavery argument.

In addition to his other talents, Roscoe was a poet, and his brief epic, The Wrongs of Africa (1787-88), is a pioneering piece of anti-slavery literature. He describes a ‘stately vessel’ moored off the coast of Benin – a favoured destination of Liverpool merchants – on which two Africans are tricked into slavery when one tries to sell the other. There is kidnapping, too, of the sort that Olaudah Equiano said, in his Interesting Narrative (1789), had swept him into enslavement: ‘In the lone path,’ Roscoe writes, ‘the sable ruffian lurk’d/Watchful to seize and sell for useless toys,/His weaker fellow.’ With Liverpool slavers eager to tell him that Africans were willing participants in the trade and would barter men and women for ‘shells, and beads, and rings’, Roscoe could not succumb to the insipidity of imagining that all Africans were victims. What he stresses, rather, is the way Europeans provoke ‘unnatural war’ to produce captives ready for enslavement and incite raids on villages so that ‘trembling’ and ‘weeping’ people can be ‘chain’d in long array’ and taken to the coast to be sold.

The most controversial of Williams’s claims in Capitalism and Slavery is that ‘the “horrors” of the Middle Passage have been exaggerated.’ By this he meant that the voyage across the Atlantic for white indentured servants was almost as brutal as it was for Africans; racial difference was not decisive. He quotes a ‘Lady of Quality’ who sailed with bonded servants from Scotland to the West Indies. ‘It is hardly possible,’ she wrote, ‘to believe that human nature could be so depraved, as to treat fellow creatures in such a manner for so little gain.’ Up to a point, Williams is right: the Atlantic was a ghastly place for many people – for the white children snatched off the streets, the press-ganged sailors whipped by the cat-o’-nine-tails, those transported for petty crimes or forced out by the Highland Clearances, the tattered, half-starved Irish who went to America in ‘coffin ships’. But Roscoe, who was aware of the varieties of human misery loaded into Liverpool vessels, takes care to focus on the abuses that made the Middle Passage particularly grim.

Adopting the syntax of Milton and James Thomson, language associated at this date with ideas of liberty, he entangles the reader with the ‘groans, and loud laments’ heard on slave ships and reports that

                                            female shrieks,
At intervals, in dreadful concert heard,
To wild distraction manly sorrow turn’d;
And ineffectual, o’er their heedless limbs,
Was wav’d the wiry whip, that dropp’d with blood.

The menacing and rape of African women by sailors would have been licentiously discussed in Liverpool long before their plight became part of the discourse of abolition. Talk around the port would equally have backed up Roscoe’s acknowledgment that ‘the wiry whip’ does not long curb the rebelliousness it sharpens. Slavers knew that pent-up rage could explode, prompting captives to rush ‘upon th’ unsparing steel’ of the seamen, before being shot down by volleys of gunfire from behind the barrier erected in anticipation of such showdowns.

After passages laced with romance, Roscoe returns to the wretched routines of the slave ship, explaining that survivors of a massacre are allowed to exercise in small groups, chained together, on deck. Nothing but passivity, it seems, is expected from those who ‘sit/Close rang’d, and link’d’, but they suddenly rush to the prow and ‘headlong plunge/Amidst the ocean’. Suicidal leaps, driven by despair or defiance, were commonplace. Since such actions endangered the profitability of the trade, sailors were alert to them: Equiano remembers that he ‘would have jumped over the side’ had he not been thwarted by netting. ‘One day,’ he later tells us, ‘two of my wearied countrymen who were chained together … somehow made through the nettings and jumped into the sea: immediately another quite dejected fellow, who, on account of his illness, was suffered to be out of irons, also followed their example.’ He was hauled out of the water and flogged. The leaping slaves in Roscoe ‘raise/Their arms’ in a magnificent gesture, ‘abhorrent of the chains they bear;/And sink indignant midst the rolling waves’.

So Melville was correct. There was anti-slavery sentiment in Liverpool. But there were more Leylands than Roscoes, and not just because, as David Eltis reminds us in his deeply researched new book, slavery was accepted across most of the early modern world. No one wanted to be a slave, except when the alternative was being executed after a battle, or made a human sacrifice, but the institution was taken for granted until the growth of abolitionism in the later 18th century. Liverpool could hardly be an exception when the slave trade was so embedded in its economy. Skills such as ship-fitting and rope-making supported families. By 1790, one in eight Liverpool households were dependent on the trade. As one witness wrote in 1795, ‘almost every man in Liverpool is a merchant, and he who cannot send a bale [of goods to Africa, to be bartered for slaves] will send a bandbox … almost every order of people is interested in a Guinea cargo.’

The urban myths of my childhood spoke of Africans held in cellars or chained to big iron rings near the docks before being shipped to the Caribbean. One location often mentioned was the Goree Piazza near the Pier Head, which was partly destroyed during the Blitz and demolished in the late 1940s. The association made sense given that it was named after an island off Senegal that was a transit point for slaves, but evidence that Africans were held at the piazza has not yet been found. Beyond the legends, however, there are facts. Slave auctions were held in the city, the largest involving the sale of eleven people at the Exchange Coffee House in 1766. Among those baptised in St James’s Church in the 1790s were ‘James Thomas, a negro … with the consent and approbation of his master’ and ‘Samuel Baron, son of the African King, Oaramby, alias Johnson’. Two sides of the African presence are revealed here. First, there was a subculture of slave ownership by white masters, although this was illegal under the common law. Newspapers often printed ‘for sale’ or ‘wanted’ advertisements, or asked for runaway slaves to be returned. Second, there were well-connected Africans and their sons living openly in the city. By the end of the century, dozens of African children were being educated in Liverpool every year.

Many people​ want to believe that slavery was imposed on West Africa by European colonialism, but historians describe a situation that is more complex and compatible with what we know of Liverpool’s involvement. When Equiano writes of his childhood in Benin, ‘My father, besides many slaves, had a numerous family,’ the casual reference to enslavement is as revealing as the plurality of ‘many’. Slavery was widespread in West Africa before European traders arrived, partly because traditional restrictions on land ownership meant that acquiring slaves was an obvious way to accumulate capital and prestige. Some slaves were integrated into households or put to work in conditions no worse than those of serfs in Europe. They could acquire property and free themselves. Others were sent down mines, or into battle, and had no more control over their lives than the chattel slaves bought by the English and worked to death on West Indian plantations.

In the early years of contact, as Ana Lucia Araujo notes in her informative, Iberian-angled book, the Portuguese sought a foothold on the West African coast while seizing slaves, but then access to the trade rather than possession of territory became the priority. By the 18th century, Europeans were bartering in a market in which Africans sold other Africans along with copper bracelets and spices. Slaves had for centuries been marched across the Sahara into the Islamic world, and when Liverpool traders set themselves up in Bonny and Calabar on the Niger delta they were able to draw on a network of Aro traders who brought captives down to the coast. Those who follow Williams in regarding the slave trade as the engine of capitalist modernity remind us that it depended on credit, between manufacturers in Lancashire who provided textiles and metal goods for trading and the slavers who took these to Africa, and then between the slavers and those who bought people from them in the Caribbean and North America. This does explain the centrality of banking and insurance to the slaving enterprises of Liverpool (and Bristol and London), but the trade was equally based on credit in Africa between European slavers and local merchants. In the polyglot, intermarrying, mixed towns along the coast, trust was built through hospitality and neighbourliness.

In these places, European slavers could not impose their will economically or militarily but had to adapt to West African social structures and customs. In Bonny, for example, power was held by an elective but absolute ruler who regulated exchange and credit transfers and guaranteed debts between native and foreign traders. In Old Calabar, human ‘pawns’ – free people – could be confiscated and sold if slaves or other purchased goods were not delivered. This was a development of African methods of debt management that were increasingly abused, with ‘pawns’ being sold for minor infractions of debt conditions or panyarred (i.e. kidnapped) in dubious circumstances.

The Guyanese historian and activist Walter Rodney, in some respects the successor to Williams, not only refused to accept that slavery existed as a mode of production before the arrival of the Portuguese, but made the influential argument in the 1970s that ‘the African ruling class’ but not their subjects profited from the slave trade. Captives were exchanged for beads, mirrors and other pacotilles, contributing to the underdevelopment of Africa, while the trade boosted European wealth. As Eltis explains, later research hasn’t backed up this argument. In West Africa, as in Liverpool, many of those active in the trade were small-time participants, and although ‘useless toys’, as Roscoe puts it, were bartered, because they had value in the West African gift economy or could be traded inland, African merchants knew the worth of what they were acquiring: they looked for high quality European products, complained when they were cheated and imposed sanctions accordingly. They were operating in a well-provided economy that was, until the industrial revolution, as technologically advanced as that of Europe. Goods acquired through the slave trade supplemented African production rather than disabling it.

Guns were an exception, and Liverpool ships supplied them. It was a common saying, as Williams notes, that ‘the price of a Negro was one Birmingham gun,’ but how far, and how deliberately, this cycle enlarged the supply of captive Africans is unclear. As early as 1705 a Dutch observer said that ‘the Gold Coast has changed into a complete Slave Coast’ because ‘the natives no longer occupy themselves with the search for gold, but rather make war on each other to furnish slaves.’ We know that parts of this pattern existed beyond the middle of the 19th century because of the testimony given by one of the last Africans to be carried across the Atlantic (illegally) to the US. Cudjo Lewis, interviewed by Zora Neale Hurston in the 1920s, described his village in Benin being attacked by women soldiers who seized slaves for the king of Dahomey to sell to merchants in the Brazilian trade. ‘When a trader wants slaves,’ Equiano wrote, ‘he applies to a chief for them, and tempts him with his wares.’

Because slaves were a measure of wealth, the taking of captives in battle, or the extortion of them as the price for not attacking, was a routine war aim, and selling them on to Europeans a lucrative spin-off. The expansion of the Asante kingdom in what is now Ghana, which increased the supply of slaves to Liverpool traders through Accra after 1742, was driven by dynamics independent of the trade itself. The Asante king Osei Bonsu, who fought the Fante Confederacy, which held land along the coast, in the early 1800s, told a visitor: ‘I cannot make war to catch slaves in the bush like a thief. My ancestors never did so.’ He fought for land, but when he was victorious, he said, he acquired the enemy’s gold and slaves, and added that ‘the people are mine too,’ to be taken into slavery. It has been estimated that, by the later 18th century, when Roscoe was writing The Wrongs of Africa, the Asante were selling between five and eight thousand captives every year into the Atlantic slave trade.

Williams​ is excoriating in Capitalism and Slavery about the profits that flowed to Britain after 1807. He shows that the liberal ideology that informed the secular wing of abolitionism led not just to a belief in the economic superiority of free labour over slave labour (since the former incentivised workers) but to support for trading on the open market for goods produced by the enslaved, such as Brazilian sugar and cotton from the Southern states. It blots the reputation of such liberals as Henry Brougham and Macaulay that they argued for a free trade that effectively maintained slavery, even though it was bound to be harder to abolish slavery globally than to repurpose Liverpool’s slave ships when market forces made the processing of slave-grown materials lucrative.

Palm oil is a case in point. Widely produced in West Africa, it was used before abolition to feed captives on the slave ships. Boiled up with flour, water and pepper, it could be ladled out as slabber-sauce. After 1807, its versatility as an ingredient in food, fuel and soap made it a welcome contributor to a coastal economy that was increasingly prevented from exporting slaves. Yet the ‘red gold’ was still caught up in slavery, because it was grown on West African plantations by African-owned slaves (its production and export depend to this day on forced and destitute labour). Liverpool retained its dominance in the processing of palm oil until after the Second World War. Both my grandfathers, unloading it on the docks along with other West African products such as timber, cocoa and rubber, were engaged in a tainted trade that went back to the slave ships.

That between twenty and forty million people still live in conditions of slavery in Africa and beyond makes it meaningless to ask when Liverpool broke free from the profits of enslavement. However, the anti-abolition riots of 1775 were probably the high point of pro-slavery sentiment in the city. The ringleaders were given a taste of what they supported when they were chained in the holds of ships and transported to the Americas. A similar turning-point came with the Toxteth Riots of 1981, when black residents of the inner-city district led nine days of violence against the police. The community had existed in Liverpool since at least the Victorian period, when many black sailors worked out of the port. Some families claim descent from the enslaved Africans who were in Liverpool in the late 18th century. The riots were triggered by heavy-handed policing but driven by unemployment and poor educational provision. What was new was a sharpened awareness of the way such racialised disadvantage had come down from the time of the slave trade. There was solidarity with Brixton, Handsworth and other insurgent black neighbourhoods, and a growth of Pan-African and Rastafarian consciousness.

The effects can be felt in the work of Levi Tafari, a griot or poet-agitator of Jamaican parentage born and brought up in Liverpool. The title poem of his collection Liverpool Experience, released on vinyl by Zulu Records in 1984, declares:

Come mek I
tell yuh a little
of its history
the main event
it was slavery
them did keep
we inna captivity
to build up their society

Thinking about the stories told by Roscoe, but from a Black British perspective, Tafari adds, in ‘Who Was Prosecuted’:

This land that
I live in
is rigged with rapist
Murders
Muggers and thieves,
that went to Africa.
Raped I great grand mother.
Stole away I forefather,
also gold and silver
tek them
away younder
far across the boarder
to distroy their culture.

Tafari’s focus on cultural theft was a sign of changing times. After the riots, people looked for the legacy of slavery in institutions and the arts. African gold and silver, clearly valuable, was displayed in museums, but why not homespun textiles or portraits by black artists? In Liverpool this led to gradual changes at the Walker Art Gallery, whose collection includes about three dozen Renaissance paintings once owned by Roscoe. The International Slavery Museum, which opened in 2007, lent the gallery Lost Soul VI by Zak Ové, a carnival-costumed black child from his Moko Jumbie series. Conversations, an exhibition shown last winter, highlighted work by black women artists. Equally significant was the acquisition of Stitching Souls, a throng of 132 brightly coloured, fabric-covered heads on stalks created by the British-Trinidadian artist Karen McLean with the help of amateur seamstresses. These mannequins, overlooked by replica portraits of the Liverpool slave traders George Case and John Gladstone (father of the prime minister), as well as by empty gilded frames signifying their moral vacuity, commemorate the Zong Massacre of 1781.

When the installation was first displayed, the circumstances of this atrocity were set out on a panel:

The slaving vessel Zong was financed by a group of Liverpool businessmen. The ship made navigational errors during its voyage from the west coast of Africa to Black River, Jamaica. The crew claimed to be running low on water supplies and threw 133 enslaved African people overboard to reduce demand. Of those, 54 are thought to have been women and children. One person is believed to have survived. Enslaved people were routinely insured at sea as ‘cargo’ and treated as non-human objects. Liverpool merchants attempted to claim compensation for their loss of ‘cargo’. In the case of the Zong, the definition was used to legally justify the murder of 132 enslaved African people.

This captures the essentials of the story recounted by abolitionists from Equiano to Wilberforce, but is influenced by the British-Guyanese writer Fred D’Aguiar’s novel Feeding the Ghosts (1997). He looks at the massacre partly from the point of view of the slave who may have survived being thrown overboard: in the novel, a young woman clambers back onto the ship and haunts the remainder of the voyage. In McLean’s installation, this figure, Mintah, walking behind three spirit guides whose heads are swathed in cloth dyed with African earth, leads the disembodied slaves back to their homeland.

McLean said in a video played at the gallery that she ‘mummified’ the heads of the slaves with cotton and padded them with quilting: there was a trade in slave-grown cotton between Liverpool and the American South before and during the civil war and quilting is a creative, sociable practice in African American tradition. ‘A lot of care has been taken,’ she said, ‘and the suturing, the stitching, it’s … a reparative act.’ The name of the Zong before it was seized from Dutch slavers as a war prize off the coast of West Africa was Zorg, which means ‘care’ – not only as in ‘being careful, taking pains’ but as ‘tribulation, fear’. When the name Zorg was painted over or mistranscribed, the conflicting senses of the word were obscured but not expunged. In Stitching Souls, the care taken in the sewing aims to ease the care felt by the slaves.

McLean gave her installation the subtitle ‘Threads of Silence’ because ‘this story was not ever told in Liverpool’ and ‘it needed to be told.’ The Zong was largely forgotten in many places after abolition, but it has been coming back into view. Much of the credit for this lies with James Walvin, whose step-changing study of the slave trade, Black Ivory (1992), includes a searching account of the atrocity, which he developed in The Zong (2011). The Zorg by Siddharth Kara, a scholar of modern slavery and sex trafficking, is a worthwhile successor, but for all its documentary resourcefulness it too often blurs fact into faction. More profound has been the impact of m. nourbeSe philip’s long poem Zong!, first published in 2008 and now released in a corrected edition with a substantial new preface. philip wrote in the first edition that she learned about the Zong from Black Ivory, but her treatment of the subject is not that of a historian. In the ‘Notanda’ that ends both editions, she also tells us that she read, early in the creative process, a novel that we can deduce was D’Aguiar’s. But while McLean was inspired by Feeding the Ghosts, philip gave up reading it because she came to feel that ‘a novel requires too much telling, and this story must be told by not telling.’

Zong! rejects conventional plotting. As philip explained to an interviewer, ‘we can’t tell these stories in … the Western way … in terms of a beginning, a middle and end.’ Instead of a narrative arc, she gives us six sections that move from formality to fragmentation, with micro-stories surfacing in scrambled scraps of text. To tell this ‘story that in not telling must tell itself’, she redeploys then explodes ‘the language of the only publicly extant document directly bearing on these events’. Everything at the start of the book is taken from the words of a legal report produced by the Court of the King’s Bench concerning the appeal of the insurers of the Zong against a judgment that George Case and other Liverpool investors should be compensated for the Africans thrown overboard. philip calls Gregson v. Gilbert, which she reprints as an appendix, both a ‘word store’ and a ‘tombstone’, and her writing is correspondingly torn between plenitude and opacity. English cascades into French, Latin, Shona and Twi (among other tongues), and eventually into grunts and howls. Not just reading for the plot but reading of any sort is frustrated when the final chapter presents a spectral, palimpsestic text, inspired by a malfunctioning computer printer.

Zong! is a long cry of loss but also a reconnection with the ancestors. philip quotes as an epigraph St Augustine’s ‘The past is ever present,’ and she is so aware of the legacy of slavery that she has spoken, in an interview, of her own ‘chattel status’. Born in 1947 as a child of the British Empire, philip spent her earliest years in Tobago. This island is part of the Zong story, because it was, according to Gregson v. Gilbert, a place where the ship could have picked up water, and avoided murdering the enslaved Africans, had its inexperienced captain, Luke Collingwood, not sailed straight past. At eight, philip moved to Trinidad, where she was at school during independence and Williams’s premiership. She thus belongs to a transitional, postcolonial generation that was animated by the history of slavery, and her awareness of ‘African roots and continuities’ was heightened by the racism she encountered in Canada, where she went in 1968 to study law and politics. In Zong! she draws on her experience as a lawyer as well as her exactitude as a poet to bring back the ancestors.

The first section is called ‘Os’ to conjure up the bones of the Africans thrown off the slave ship. Its structured yet disruptive analytical layout exposes the necropolitics that put them on the ocean bed. In ‘Zong! #2’, a column of text reads ‘the loss/ … /the that fact/the it was/the were’ and ends ‘the after rains’, but this is broken into by a chilling phrase to the left, ‘the order in destroy’, and then, further to the left (and literally marginalised), the article-less, undifferentiated ‘negroes’. When philip wrote to Walvin, asking how she could find out the names of those flung overboard, he explained that when Africans were sold they were stripped of their names. This was confirmed when she was sent a copy of a sales book compiled by one of the agents in Jamaica who did business with the Liverpool dealers who used the Zong. Africans are reduced in this catalogue to ‘negroe man’ and ‘negroe woman’, to ‘ditto man’ and ‘Negroe girl (meagre)’. At the foot of every page in ‘Os’, under a horizontal line that represents the surface of the Atlantic, philip adds a list of names. ‘Zong! #2’ has: ‘Wafor Yao Siyolo Bolade Kibibi Kamau’.

Though not in the documentary record, these names are not invented; they are real names given to the drowned, which is a different matter. They bring the ancestors into view, and begin to tell their story. Yet untelling remains the means. The lists disappear from the next section (‘Dicta’), though the horizontal line remains to remind us of their absence. At the end of ‘Ferrum’, much later, African names are listed in the mock 18th-century handwriting that increasingly figures in Zong!, as though they are written into a book that replaces the sales book. This is consistent with Zong! itself being attributed on its title page not to Marlene Philip (the name under which the author first published), or to M. NourbeSe Philip, the name she adopted, or even to the lower-case m. nourbeSe philip, the name she assumes in the new edition, the better to renounce her ego. Instead, Zong! is credited to an imputed ancestor with West African names in capitals: ‘As told to the author by Setaey Adamu Boateng’.

As​ Zong! took shape, philip flew to Ghana to ask the Ewe people for ‘permission’ to write about their forebears who had been thrown overboard. She also went to Liverpool, ‘home of the Gregsons, Gilberts and, not to mention, the good Captain Luke Collingwood’. For half a page, Zong! becomes a book about the city, as philip describes going to the waterfront and pouring ‘a libation of spirits for the lost souls on board the Zong’ – not just the Africans but the white sailors who sickened and died and who murdered their own souls by raping and killing. In a rare moment of comedy, she says that on the way back from this ceremony she lost her footing on the ‘mossy and slippery’ harbour front and fell ‘flat on my ass. I am embarrassed, wondering if anyone has seen me fall and whether the fall means … pleasure or displeasure on the part of the Ancestors.’

philip says that the Zong ‘set sail from that very port’ and writes of its ‘return to Liverpool’ although the history books are clear that it sailed to Jamaica from West Africa after it was seized off that coast from the Dutch. Consciously or not, she wants its voyage to connect all three corners of what, in her new preface, she calls ‘the Triangular Trade, more commonly known as the transatlantic trade in African slaves’. This is vital to her poetics because, throughout the central chapters of Zong!, letter or word clusters are arranged in triangular groups. By countering the triangular trade with its own resilient structure the book acquires the ‘formal strength and rigour’, philip said in 2022, ‘to meet the ferocity of the cataclysm’ that transported millions of Africans.

The triangles also enable breath. In a 1791 treatise, the former slave Ottobah Cugoano tells us that Africans on the Zong ‘were tied two and two together when they were thrown into the sea, lest some of them might swim a little for the last gasp of air, and, with the animation of their approaching exit, breathe their souls away to the gracious Father of spirits’. philip does not cite this passage, but it shows the intuitive reach of her understanding of the massacre that, by her own account, her triangular structures create breathing spaces for the victims. The section called ‘Ventus’ (wind) gaspingly starts ‘sh h’, with ‘not so’ hanging over ‘loud did nt the’ to the left and ‘bell ring oh’ to the right. As she elucidates in her new preface, ‘in abutting lines each letter, word, phrase or fragment thereof positions itself so that it breathes into the space above … thus forming a triangular relationship.’ philip fought tooth and nail to protect this patterning when Zong! was translated into Italian, and she has developed her account of it conceptually by insisting that ‘the text must breathe and live in the breaths of those who died … In our reading of the text … we are carrying out the act of breathing on behalf of those who could not breathe at an earlier time.’

This will seem less extravagant after we take into account that group readings of Zong!, including music and dance-like movement, made philip realise its utterable and audible qualities. ‘I came to a better and deeper understanding,’ she writes in the new preface, ‘of the inherently improvisatory nature of Zong!, its complete (in)completeness, its unfinished (in)finitude riffing in and on the gap in the ga(s)p.’ This vatic, indecisive idiom, having it both ways or more, is not unusual in the added material, but does not reduce its value, especially in alerting us to philip’s enhanced awareness of the poem’s links with African and Caribbean culture. She claims, for example, that the fragmentary nature of Zong! makes it resemble a Yoruba praise song (oríkì). Similarly, when she performs the poem, ‘or rather when Zong! performs me’, she is like an Obeah woman practising Caribbean medicine and magic, a Shouter or Spiritual Baptist, or an Asante Okyeame (a linguist in a royal retinue who enables communication between the ancestors, the king and his people).

As with Black Mountain poetry, another kind of breath-driven modernism, the improvisatory qualities of Zong! cannot rest on a loosely organised script but require precision in layout. The first edition, co-published by Mercury Press in Toronto and Wesleyan University Press, was respectful of philip’s need for gaps, but this has become yet more crucial: ‘I have come to understand that the most important activity happening on the page in Zong! is happening in the space, the white space between – between word and syllable, word and word, word and phrase … between the ga(s)p, and the gap it embraces.’ The Silver Press edition is not just meticulous in spacing, it has corrected a number of typos. That is creatively significant because philip’s fragmentation of text is always alert to the way the smallest word changes can create large shifts in meaning and the same group of letters can speak differently in other languages. In her Notanda, she cites ‘ague and ague – the first English, the second Yoruba. The former meaning bodily shaking in illness, the latter, to fast. Take a letter away and a new word in a different language is born. Add a letter and the word loses meaning.’ Put another way: for ‘Zorg’ read ‘Zong’. This literal, which is explicated in the first footnote of the Notanda, underwrites all the slippages that are expressive in the text: from ‘Zong!’ to ‘Song!’ and from both to ‘sang’ (blood), much as ‘gore’ is found in ‘Gorée’ – ‘fish sup/on the g/ore in goré e.’ As philip has said in more than one recent interview, echoing McLean on needlework, writing requires care: ‘Caring for the lowly comma. Caring whether you split this word here.’

Breaking up the signifier is routine in Language poetry, but the splitting of words in Zong! has a different aetiology and edge. Early in the creative process, presumably while drafting ‘Os’, philip wrote in her journal that grammar is ‘a violent and necessary ordering’. She found a painful analogy between making slaves work together and ‘having words work together’, shackled by grammar: she was interested ‘in them not working together – resisting that order and desire or impulse to meaning’. If Zong! was to refuse what Katherine McKittrick calls, in her foreword to the new edition, ‘the maximisation of profits by extracting humanity from black people’, there had to be a breaking up of English, which was to enslaved Africans, as philip knows, ‘a language of commands, orders, punishments’. She decided to ravage it, ‘as if I am getting my revenge on “this/fuck-mother motherfuckin language” of the coloniser’. Saidiya Hartman writes in her introduction that ‘Zong! mutilates language and murders the imposed tongue. It revels in the tumult of words and perpetrates a joyous destruction.’

Yet English remains an integument. Towards the end of ‘Ferrum’, an African man, Wale, asks one of the brutal sailors to write a letter to his wife, Sade, who has been separated from him on the ship: ‘me i s/ay you writ e on pap er i wri/te de ar sade you b/e my queen e ver me i mi ss you.’ Wale then eats the letter and jumps overboard. This bizarre event springs from the statement in Gregson v. Gilbert that, before the massacre, forty Africans ‘threw themselves into the sea and were drowned’. Whether they did this out of ‘thirst and frenzy’, as the report says, or in an act of suicidal defiance of the sort described by Roscoe and Equiano, we shall never know, though since it was easier to claim insurance against killings that suppressed a rebellion than deaths associated with poor water management, it is likely that, if the King’s Bench case had come to a second hearing, Gregson and his associates would have cited the suicide of men like Wale as insurrection. This is not quite the end of ‘Ferrum’, however, because after Wale jumps the white sailor also throws himself over the side, out of guilt and to create, as philip describes it, ‘an opening to some possibility of a more just kind of existence’.

The double dénouement is powerful, but just as striking, given philip’s hostility, is Wale’s use of English. Why does he not call Sade his queen in one of the African languages that flit and morph through ‘Ferrum’? philip has said she was devastated when she read the abolitionist Granville Sharp asking how many of the Africans on the Zong ‘would have even understood the language being spoken to them, when they were being told to jump overboard’. Mutual incomprehensibility was a feature of the North Atlantic trade, though it was less common on voyages to Brazil, where many of the crew were African.

Wale’s grasp of English is surprising, but it might be symptomatic, yet again, of philip’s ability to see beyond the facts available to her. While Zong! was being completed, a researcher discovered, and took steps to publish, a witness statement made by the first mate, James Kelsall, who said that

amongst those who were thrown overboard … there was one Man who spoke English … and told this Defendant that the Slaves were murmuring on Account of the Fate of those who had been drowned and understanding that it was on Account of the Want of sufficient Water that they begged they might be suffered to live and they would not ask for either Meat or Water but could live without either till they arrived at their destined Port.

This is heartbreaking evidence that at least one of the Africans did have some English, and was able helplessly to interpret between the crew and those in the hold.

Zong! is not a work of scholarship, and it should not be judged for accuracy against the latest research, but it does deal with a much discussed event to which historical responsibility is owed, and the framework of understanding that is set out in the prose parts of the book presents us with assumptions that inform the body of the text. Briefly put, it is grounded in a particular moment of Pan-Africanism. Even its triangular obsession has been overtaken by the evidence, now available on slavevoyages.org, that the North Atlantic trade cannot be taken as paradigmatic because, as Eltis and Araujo stress, so many (probably most) voyages went bilaterally between the Americas and Africa. More important is philip’s discounting of African agency in the slave trade, an active involvement that was set out in Walvin’s Black Ivory and that is capably explored by Araujo and foregrounded by Eltis. philip’s awareness of African participation is evident in her essay collection Blank (2017), where she damns by association Kwame Anthony Appiah’s liberal cosmopolitanism by pointing out that ‘his hometown, Kumasi, was an important slave-trading area and the Asante, his father’s ethnic group, were deeply implicated in this trade.’

In the same book she writes about being pressed to give up her seat on a bus in Morocco to make room for a couple of white girls. philip is wary of Moroccans because she thinks they placed themselves above black Africans in the racial hierarchy promulgated by Europeans and as a result associated themselves with an Arab slave trade that continued long after voyages across the Atlantic ended. She is right about the time span. Kara explains that, at the time of the Zong atrocity, Arabs in the Sahel sold captives to Hausa traders in the markets of Bolgatanga (in what is now north-east Ghana) for marching to the coast in coffles. Though resentment justly persists in West Africa about the cruelty of the European trade and the social dislocation that resulted from it, there can be sharper hostility towards Arabs, whose kidnappings reach almost into living memory. This lies behind those moments in Zong! where we hear about ‘de man in de fez’ and where the scope of the trade extends far beyond Accra to the northern coast of Africa: ‘we ate dates with rose water the man/in the red fez and i to/the east the sun the dunes/& gold/tunis it is.’

When it comes to African agency in the trade, Zong! inclines to denial. We are encouraged, for example, to see Englishmen raiding a village to help stock the ship, when, as Roscoe knew, such attacks were not the practice. We do hear about an oba (a king or ruler) being paid for slaves: ‘the oba smiles/he has owó/guineas/cedis too i have/guinea negroes.’ According to the word lists at the back of the book, owó means ‘money’ in Yoruba, while cedis in Twi is a ‘unit of currency in Ghana’. So Zong! does show us that people acquired a price-tag when they were sold by Africans, not just when insured by Liverpool traders. Having sold those in his power, this oba ‘sobs’. Yet the obas who did nicely out of the slave trade had no illusions about it.