Vocal Flesh: the sinthomatic return of the repressed in M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong!

Abstract

NourbeSe Philip’s 2008 book length poem Zong! attempts to tell a story that cannot be told. It is based upon the massacre of approximately 150 enslaved Africans being imprisoned on the Dutch-British slave ship ‘Zong’ in 1781, an event that we can only access through a two-page legal judgement certifying a claim for insurance for lost ‘cargo’ made in a London court in 1783. That our only written records are told from the standpoint of the colonist and slave trader appears to violently foreclose the possibility of telling the story of the Zong without repeating the erasure of enslaved people as subjects. In this paper I argue that a Lacanian psychoanalytic approach, read alongside the work of Hortense Spillers can help us to better appreciate how Philip deals with this problem. I show how the later work of Jacques Lacan on James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake can be put to work to help us understand the poet’s embodied approach to writing. Philip takes the silences and repressions of the legal text into her body by immersing herself in it and allows for these gaps to become felt for her as corporeal symptoms. She then skilfully channels these symptoms back onto the page in the form of her poems, allowing those murdered on the Zong to have voice through her own body and the body of the reader in a process that Lacan would label the deployment of a sinthome. Finally, I argue that this writing process has political import, because in causing meaning to appear in an embodied form, Philip causes us to feel that it is a fragile and fleshy body that underpins the appearance of seemingly infallible colonial symbolic and legal structures