Zong!

“This song . . . is a lament for the millions gone and for what lives on. Zong! is desecration and elegy. It is the song of an untold story, a story not to be passed on, a contrapuntal fugue in which we listen for the dead.” —Saidiya Hartman

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.

condition: good, some underlining and a few very light annotations throughout

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