“I want the bones”: Submerged Hauntology in Zong! by M. NourbeSe Philip

Abstract

M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong! showcases an anti-narrative quality that prompts unsettling feelings linked to the gaps of an African presence in the archives related to the Middle Passage. By opening said archive, poetry gains a restorative feature that triggers an undoing of written language and its violence as well as a reintroduction of the voices of the victims back into the collective memory. This article proposes an approximation to Philip’s poetry through the lens of submerged hauntology as a poetic imaginative attempt that departs from absence to shape the voices and stories of those who once were pushed to the margins of the archive. By combining Kamau Brathwaite’s notion of submarine unity with Philip’s insights on hauntology, I propose a way to read Zong! that encompasses both visual and written qualities as means to articulate archipelagos of meaning expressed through the haunting voices that reside in the Atlantic. Through a close reading of visual grammar, I will analyze three fragments where submerged hauntology is present as a means of writing that, alongside water, undoes and redoes a new tenor to the massacre that occurred on Zong. Thus, the presence of a submerged hauntology can become a literary approach to understand the anti-narrative qualities of Philip’s poem that require new ways to extract meaning through fragmentation, silence, and affects of the Atlantic ghosts.