Zong!: As Told To The Author By Setaey Adamu Boateng (Wesleyan Poetry Series)

Synopsis

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 of these African slaves—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. <

Check for the online reader’s companion at http://zong.site.wesleyan.edu.

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Copyright:

2008

Book Details

Book Quality:

Publisher Quality

ISBN-13:

9780819572455

Related ISBNs:

9780819568762

Publisher:

Wesleyan University Press

Date of Addition:

12/20/18

Copyrighted By:

M. NourbeSe Philip

Adult content:

No

Language:

English

Has Image Descriptions:

No

Categories:

History, Poetry, Literature and Fiction

Submitted By:

Bookshare Staff

Usage Restrictions:

This is a copyrighted book.