Zong! (Wesleyan Poetry Series)

In November, 1781, the captain of the slave ship Zong ordered that some 150 Africans be murdered by drowning so that the ships owners could collect insurance monies. Relying entirely on the words of the legal decision Gregson v. Gilbertthe only extant public document related to the massacre of these African slavesZong! 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 readers companion at http://zong.site.wesleyan.edu.