A Shoal on a New Shore: Afro-Indigeneity and Multilingualism in M. NourbeSe Philip's Zong!

Abstract:In the eight sections of her 2008 book-length poem Zong!, Afro-Canadian poet NourbeSe Philip breaks apart the representational, colonialist, and objectifying language of an archived insurance document, repurposes it, and transforms it into poetry that establishes new methods of reading that resist the semantic logic of slavery's necropolitical archive. While many critics focus on the de(con)structive nature of Philip's response to the murder of 133 enslaved persons at sea, I assert that Zong! is ultimately an antinomian text of recovery and reconstruction by virtue of her inclusion of multiple Indigenous African tongues. In doing so, I turn to Tiffany Lethabo King's exploration of the “shoal”—a liminal spot of convergence between the sea and land that connects the Black Atlantic to Indigenous violence—to establish that Zong! is more than a text of the Black Atlantic. Through the inclusion of thirteen Afro-Indigenous languages, I argue that Philip creates a convergence between the Black Atlantic and Indigeneity, in a new Afro-Indigenous shoal. This expands King's shoal to the shores of Africa, demonstrating that these multiethnic convergences exceed an Americanist approach.