Unhousing the Archives Around the<i>Zong</i>, Again

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 its impressively creative dismembering of the legal document, “the fragmentation and mutilation that slavery perpetrated on Africans” (195).For all her formal and conceptual innovativeness, m. nourbeSe philip was not the first nor the only West Indian artist to zoom in on this historical episode that shockingly encapsulates the extreme dehumanization inherent in the transatlantic slave trade. In the preceding decades, at least three writers of Caribbean descent had already addressed the Zong tragedy, sometimes in relation to its alleged representation by J. M. W. Turner in his 1840 painting The Slave Ship (Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying, Typhon Coming On). One of them is Jamaican Michelle Cliff, who includes a brief reference to the Zong massacre at the end of her first fiction, Abeng (1984), and devotes one chapter of her 1993 novel Free Enterprise to the contrasting effect that the troubling canvas by the famous English painter can have on Black and white people in nineteenth-century America. In a letter to the white American owner of The Slave Ship, Cliff's Black protagonist makes this striking declaration: “While you focus on the background of the Turner painting, I cannot tear my eyes from the foreground” (80). Guyanese David Dabydeen, too, engages with the infamous slave ship in different ways. His 1999 novel A Harlot's Progress, mostly set in eighteenth-century London, contains numerous allusions to the Zong affair and gives an idea of how it fits in with the mercantile society of the time. But it is probably Dabydeen's long poem “Turner” (1994, 1–40) that best conveys his almost obsessive preoccupation with the story of the Zong and its representation in The Slave Ship. As he writes in the preface to the collection in which “Turner” is included, his narrative “focuses on the submerged head of the African in the foreground of Turner's painting. It has been drowned in Turner's (and other artists’) sea for centuries” (1994, ix). Finally, Anglo-Guyanese Fred D'Aguiar, in his novel Feeding the Ghosts (1997), provides a lyrical fictionalization of the events around the Zong, including the legal proceedings that came in their wake, without, however, directly mentioning the painting alleged to have represented it. Obviously, the aim of these four Caribbean authors was, in spite of their different generic and stylistic choices, to denounce the general amnesia around the slave trade and slavery. To different degrees, they also meant to give a voice to the victims of this abominable, yet iconic, episode of British colonial history and thereby compensate for the abstract character of the sparse legal or visual archives that have come to us (Baucom 2005, 275).1The haunting quality of the events that took place on and around the Zong undoubtedly explains the pervasive and recurring presence of this slave ship in the field of anglophone Caribbean letters—not only on the creative level but on the critical one as well. This ubiquity testifies to an understandably compulsive need to rehearse such traumatic memories, or to borrow m. nourbeSe philip's words, “to go over the same material time and time again, trying to find answers, trying to come up with different understandings of what this experience has been all about” (quoted in Lambert 2016, 118). This imperative to repeatedly deal with this episode of British history, the better to heal the wounds of the past but also understand the present, is corroborated by the publication in 2020 of two fictional literary texts covering related grounds: Anglo-Jamaican Winsome Pinnock's play Rockets and Blue Lights and Trinidadian Lawrence Scott's novel Dangerous Freedom. Pinnock's teeming and dense dramatic text is built around the making of a film entitled The Ghost Ship and brings side by side the ghost of a slave who was aboard the Zong, J. M. W. Turner, and a Black family in Victorian England, as well as the twenty-first-century cast of the movie. This play problematizes the artistic representations of the slave trade, while demonstrating again and again that past and present are inseparable. Though less openly political, Scott's biographical fiction addresses similar issues via its imaginary dramatization of the life of Elizabeth D'Aviniere, also known as Dido Belle, the mixed-race great-niece of Lord Chief Justice Mansfield, who judged the Zong case.These recent narratives by Pinnock and Scott certainly remind us of how crucial it is to “unhouse” the archives around the Zong (again), to borrow a formula used by Steven Blevins in Living Cargo (2016), by which he means opening them up and drawing history out (1), a performance that he views as “necessarily provisional” (7–8). Pinnock's and Scott's texts simultaneously raise the question already posed by historian Jeremy Krikler in 2007: “Given the already formidable corpus of writings on the Zong, one might ask if anything more can be learned about it” (30). What I want to show in this essay is that beyond their many differences in tone, scope, and genre, Pinnock's and Scott's books, coming as they do in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement (which started in 2013) and the Windrush scandal (which was revealed in 2018), display epistemological commonalities that are bound to the time of their release, at least in the way they can be read by contemporary readers. Like the fictionalizations of the Zong that came before them, Pinnock's and Scott's works contribute to the understanding of the British implication in the slave trade and slavery by staging historical and visual archives. They also demonstrate the centrality of such documents in any attempt to draw a nuanced picture of the history of the nation, as fragmentary as these archives might be. However, these recent texts establish more forcefully than their predecessors that the story of the Zong “[maintains] a resonance right down to the present day” (Walvin 2011, 10). And they do so through enhanced references to the contemporary moment, which are explicit in Rockets and Blue Lights but remain implicit in Dangerous Freedom.This is not to say that the novels and poems by Cliff, Dabydeen, D'Aguiar, and philip already mentioned have nothing to do with the present and focus only on the past. Quite the contrary. As Ian Baucom has shown in his meaningfully entitled monograph Specters of the Atlantic, “it is not the status of the past that is at issue” in what he calls “these ghost stories” but “the nature, the extent, the elasticity, the scope, the very existence of the present” (2005, 324). Clearly, as Stef Craps also points out, “Instead of clearing away the dead, [these Zong narratives] permit this traumatic history to live on as a haunting, troubling, foreign element within the present” (2010, 469). Or to use the very concise formula that can be found in philip's Zong!, also quoted by Baucom (2005, 332), “This is, not was.” Still, it is easy for narratives set in the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries to be read literally as stories exclusively belonging to the past. It is probably to avoid such problematic misunderstanding that Cliff in Free Enterprise makes her narrator tell the readers, in a sudden projection into the present, that the (in)famous Turner painting now hangs in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and that they should “Go see it. Take the kids” (1995, 180). Likewise, in the epilogue to Feeding the Ghosts, D'Aguiar has a spectral voice, perhaps that of one of the Zong victims, say “I am in your community, in a cottage or apartment or cardboard box, tucked away in a quiet corner, ruminating over these very things” (1997, 229), as if to shake the readers into realizing that the traumatic story that has just been told is still very much part of the world in which they live. Nevertheless, one can wonder in view of recent events—such as the forced removal from the United Kingdom of members of the Windrush generation in 2018, the murders of George Floyd in 2020 and of countless others in the last decades, and the treatment meted out to Black migrants during the Ukraine crisis in 2022—whether the message linking slavery and the slave trade to ongoing anti-Black racism does not need to be more plainly delivered, which is exactly what Pinnock's and Scott's texts do. In a 1996 text entitled “The Last Essay about Slavery,” D'Aguiar writes that “Each generation inherits an anxiety about slavery, but the more problematic the present, the higher the anxiety and the more urgent their need to attend to the past” (132)—and, one might the more urgent the need to that the past in the a to be about the past and present is one of the of Pinnock in Rockets and Blue In a 2020 that this slave as it was much a play about times as it a historical I to be past and present” with the of British A The two a up of a narrative that on a of time which its extreme in past and present and into at Rockets and Blue Lights its readers from 1781, the Zong massacre through Turner The Slave Ship, to and the film The Ghost Ship is and the is a is also the the of the end of the slave trade was in a time of to had in a the message by I the us not only a to say how the slave trade its existence and who for its but also to that it have and at the better times live to this and the play provides countless that the of the past do into the present” for as one of the nineteenth-century Black “The past is all over my which literally to the that was a her should also be read to to her which her Like all Black people in is as who to the Windrush this on his how many are these to that people are as They used to have the slave and now they have a is is a Black is in 1840 on a ship The that to in the ship the other Black and on and and has around his His is not quite to one he is the British the ship in of slave find again in the very last of the now an on a in slavery is still in the way what is that he is as a of in a long of Black people victims of he at the very end of the play and His David and murders in in and the of Black people over “I the slave at the Zong and I was it. I the of New and in through all this I I have and And I live and live His is only by an of the past and how it again and again in the and now is also through the to be an of the slave from the Zong who in the film as a haunting The of the two that nothing much has in more than two to the and her eighteenth-century for is a in the film during which is and by white of a sudden the and by the her is the as a one that has literally the is to play to the that on her which makes her that just history, but it Likewise, with the of the that the material about life before was has from the to the for the from the reference to the way and white Black in the the focus has been to and the at the of the in other words, to the that is with representations of slavery. is now just an in Turner's which in makes a ghost two and this in the and in one way or not as it is only in a place in a that can a as the of a that and them to an of the transatlantic slave is only a of the numerous that Pinnock's and to what calls in her to the play “the ongoing of the slave This but is also in the but in a more Rockets and Blue Lights is a painting by J. M. W. Turner that, The Slave Ship, is by Pinnock as an for her play to the on the of The Rockets and Blue Lights is now the canvas a in with in the to to the of “the use of a of the it have been as a to The Slave the and of the contrasting with the of the The As Baucom in 1840 at the in such a way as to in other words, to the traumatic that is only an for and the dead, of the slave that the might live on by these of the Pinnock Rockets and Blue Lights as the of her play is for it to the to the of the times live to use words, than historical The play does not away from through the story of an African in was by her owner had to the so that he slavery. However, the painting Rockets and Blue Lights might have Turner with a from such As “I found in that on had to from the of his in with the of Pinnock's is an to the idea that Rockets and Blue and the of from the of the slave trade. in the of what to The the ship on which for his last in one that the found out that the ship on they up their and a of are in the which to the overboard, yet past and present are less in Scott's Dangerous Pinnock's is set in the past and contains a narrative the fictional story of Elizabeth a British historical who has in spite of been with her Elizabeth by David in his painting and represented in Belle, a film by and an novel published in by of and an African slave Belle, Elizabeth was in her slave to Scott's and in in London, had of her Scott's biographical novel the narrative present, the very of the nineteenth the protagonist with her Black and her in and her obsessive of her and her traumatic in the of her Lord was known as Dido Belle, a that encapsulates her African via the famous of and the that Black have been as that is, as Elizabeth this that is of the slave status from her and that means that is just or a that is to her about the Zong affair in her drawing its in the historical and narrative in that with more recent events and the the of transatlantic slavery and contemporary in its more recent As a Elizabeth from in to with her and the of her in via the is of the of the migrants from the Windrush Like of them, the is at first by the and by the and the treatment that her to that in the was and in Elizabeth is from her Black to be up by her white for her that of the or on mixed-race in many colonial or in the But of as a of her Elizabeth is with of to her and all the of her a as a of is not to with the members of Lord but has to in the by or with the also has a in the a with the of the white in and And in spite of genuine with Lord Mansfield, is not her in his which that is is probably the with her Elizabeth that in Scott's novel the that in the way the mixed-race is with by her The two are in by their and at an are of have a foreign in have an at to very much Lord Mansfield, who took to of his he in from the As a white is in all a a status that her Black can to of her is in and out, one nor the family and not of the are of my to the of the had her these the by Caribbean migrants to England, who to that they not to the story as told by Scott that have not the Zong, as also more by the forced that members of the Windrush generation with in and that in it is to draw this recent scandal and the pervasive presence in Dangerous of slave who Black people in England, or and them to slave This and of also in Rockets and Blue Lights via life as a and as an as is of and for the of her one of to from the of a these the the of the Zong and the words of that the trade is which is also in the different legal by Lord and Blue Lights and Dangerous establish that what long with the Zong is to borrow words in Scott's This the need for as has that for people such as the and be or as the of Scott's novel makes However, these two recent texts do not to the Zong affair and demonstrating the of also in their via their of that and that have been in the of the Black Lives Matter Rockets and Blue Lights and Dangerous give to famous and the of these as visual archives to us about the Zong case and the slave trade in As already Pinnock's play around Turner's painting The Slave Ship, and in a more way Rockets and Blue As writes about the first of these two it troubling about what it as well as it was and is of Pinnock these and trying to on the around Turner's infamous does not use it as a to be but as a for about the historical amnesia the slave trade and the of artistic as shown in the two twenty-first-century Black their views of Turner's of the not only the inherent in The Slave Ship but also the fascination that the canvas can on at not only of its striking and but mostly of the massacre that it and the of its one a views the painting as a work of to the notorious and the to what took the other the mentioned that it to the narrative of white while it was for the can be about Turner's in painting the eighteenth-century The play the English artist as a with issues and of his and he can be a for the drowned that he in the of his painting. only does Pinnock Turner as a who in works he was but also that an with Black people on the part of white people is all but thereby the of and the character of Turner in the play are on The and up a on the that of but Turner his alleged by in his he is to that the is an is Turner in a out of it. nothing to do with Likewise, the Turner in the film at the of the claims that he has as a that his as and that he is an for Still, he does not her is out of the he the film to be at all Turner's in the nineteenth-century narrative is in the contemporary to the that have not and that white over they are to or up for Black people in critical Rockets and Blue Scott's Dangerous on a visual but of the two by Lord and his a of about the white representation of Black of the novel is almost to the of the two which is via Elizabeth of her as is on her to and for to the that was meant to be just The painting, which is one of the very few of her in history, to the that her from they her into a The not only in the a of and but it also in her an crisis via a long of was was this by Elizabeth The way the painter as a of the of the white people around her and the that her with them is bound to be on her for if is first is also her and cannot be for is in the of an it be one and quite In the same Elizabeth Lord as and and an Elizabeth the of her white is told by that they have the many that to and from her over This and a in her to understand is a for white of Black and their of Black the better to their of the world and their Scott had this in he Dangerous Freedom. One of the during the that with the of his novel was it was a for as a white of Caribbean to tell the story of a Black he be of a history that was not Scott revealed in to such that he had the narrative of his from the first used in the to the in the published a meant to avoid of The still provides to fictional voice, and that of her via the in the narrative of the the two a to the Still, he has to his protagonist with and for her or on her but voice to her film Belle, to in an on the of for the of by on Dangerous the treatment meted out to Elizabeth by her white family by on the the of its while the of the film the life of Lord great-niece and at the end that the novel to the of the people Elizabeth and with her from a is only This if is to establish with her who now on the other side of the are two white in story on can in Pinnock's which out any of such the two different The first one is her white who is and an her The other white for the protagonist of Dangerous is the of her but also a in the As his this is a a who works with Elizabeth to the publication of a of of her story with the to and from her in any way with for who might be as an of Lawrence to a voice to Elizabeth and her two narratives had been by the other in Dabydeen's A Harlot's is not on with the stories he to into just novel provides us with a of m. nourbeSe philip writes in a in Zong!, is a quality to the way of the Zong (philip 2008, come again and again, which is to their haunting Rockets and Blue and Dangerous undoubtedly to the of narratives around this massacre but are by means the last the of the these two works of fiction the readers to go to the other archives and narratives on the or while other of understanding to what this now tragedy, and the historical to for the In that Pinnock's and Scott's of the of the slave trade to his Specters of the that “the of and (2005, 332), history to us not only as or but

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