About
M. NOURBESE PHILIP is an unembedded poet, essayist, novelist and playwright who lives in the space-time of the City of Toronto. She practised law in the City of Toronto for seven years before becoming a poet and writer. She has published four books of poetry including the seminal She Tries Her Tongue; Her Silence Softly Breaks, one novel and four collections of essays. Her book-length poem, Zong!, is a conceptually innovative, genre-breaking epic, which explodes the legal archive as it relates to slavery. Her most recent work is BlanK, a collection of essays on racism and culture. Among her awards are numerous Canada Council and Ontario Arts Council grants, as well as the Pushcart Prize (USA, 1981), the Casa de las Americas Prize (Cuba, 1988), the Lawrence Foundation Prize (USA, 1994), and the Arts Foundation of Toronto Writing and Publishing Award (Toronto,1995), Dora Award finalist (drama, 1999). Her fellowships include Guggenheim (1990), McDowell (1991), and Rockefeller (Bellagio) (2005). She has been Writer-in-Residence at several universities and writers' retreats. In 2001 she was awarded the YWCA Woman of Distinction (Arts) and the Elizabeth Fry Rebels for a Cause awards.
Featured Work
Zong!
On November 29th, 1781, somewhere on the Atlantic Ocean between the coast of West Africa and the island of Jamaica some 150 Africans were thrown alive overboard on orders of the captain of the slave ship Zong. The ship had set sail several weeks earlier with an insured “cargo” of 470 enslaved Africans. During the course of the journey, which was longer than usual because of navigational errors, some of the crew and Africans had fallen ill and died. Under insurance law at the time, there was no monetary compensation for slaves who died of natural causes. The captain of the Zong reasoned that by killing a portion of the enslaved Africans on board, he would ensure that there was sufficient water for the remainder of the voyage, and, more importantly, that the ship’s owners would be able to claim compensation under insurance law for the very Africans he had murdered. The massacre generated a legal battle between the ship’s owners and the insurance company, and is recorded in the brief legal decision, Gregson vs. Gilbert, more colloquially known as the Zong case.
Zong!, the poem, is composed entirely from the words of the found text, Gregson vs. Gilbert. Through fragments of voices, shreds of memory and shards of silence, Zong! unravels the story that can only be told by not telling. It is participatory and ritual; an interplay between noise and silence. Zong! is an anti-narrative lament that tells the story that cannot be told yet must be told.
