Wikepedia: The Zong Massacre was a mass-killing of African slaves that took place on November 29th, 1781, on the Zong, a British slave ship owned by James Gregson and colleagues in a Liverpool slave-trading firm. The resulting court case, brought as a civil action by the ship-owners seeking compensation from the insurers for the slave-traders' lost "cargo", was a landmark in the battle against the African slave trade of the eighteenth century. The term "Zong Massacre" was not universally used at the time. It was usually called "The Zong Affair," the term "massacre" being used mainly by those considered to be "dangerous radicals," as late eighteenth-century politics stood. At the time, the killing of slaves"”individually or en masse"”was not considered to be murder, at least legally. In English law, the act was completely legal and could be freely admitted to the highest court in the land, without danger of prosecution.The publicity over this case was, however, one of the factors that led to the legal situation being completely changed within a few decades.The ship Zong, (originally named Zorg (tr. Care) by the Dutch, before being captured by the British) out of Liverpool, had taken on more slaves than it could safely transport when it sailed from Africa en route to Jamaica on 6 September 1781. By 29 November, this overcrowding, together with malnutrition and disease, had killed seven of the crew and approximately sixty enslaved Africans. With the journey prolonged by contrary winds and inept navigation, Captain Luke Collingwood had an increasing number of the dead and dying in his cargo hold. If he delivered them and they died onshore the Liverpool ship-owners would have no redress; but if they died at sea they were covered by the ship's insurance. As, in law, the slaves would be considered cargo, the "jettison clause" covered their loss at £30 a head. Collingwood called his officers and proposed that the sick should be thrown overboard. Although the First Mate James Kelsall[2] initially disagreed, the plan was agreed, and so, over three days in the mid Atlantic Ocean, 122 sick slaves went over the side: 54 on 29 November, 42 on 30 November and 26 on 1 December. Another ten, in a display of defiance at the inhumanity of the slavers, threw themselves overboard and, in the words of a contemporary account, "leaping into the sea, felt a momentary triumph in the embrace of death."Later, it was claimed that the slaves had been jettisoned because it was required "for the safety of the ship" as the ship did not have enough water to keep them alive for the rest of the voyage. This claim was later disproved as the ship had 420 gallons of water left when it arrived in Jamaica on 22 December.Amazon.com: At times I'm uncomfortable with both poetry and history, but then a book like Zong! comes along and reminds me how the lyric can shake up history's limited logics and history can shake up poetry's occasional evasive sheen."--Jill Magi, Poetry Project Newsletter"...as Philip emphasizes, the story of the Zong is ultimately a story that can only be told by not telling. So even in the sea of words that fill up the final pages of Zong!, the registers of silence that mark the text are resounding." --Kate Eichorn, XCP: Cross Cultural Poetics "But this is a story that can only be told by not telling...." With this enormously important book M. NourbSe Philip charts a fearless, moving, and gorgeous trajectory across the unspeakable. The book length poem honors a true event (the 18th century murder of over 150 slaves, thrown overboard for the insurance) while resisting and refreshing the language of the original report of the event (a legal document). Engaging a tragedy, in which the meaningful fact of humanity was not recognized, the poet refuses to supply sense, asking her reader to work with her to understand the structure of understanding itself. Fragments and associative leaps make the reading of this text a powerful experience of otherness, while her extraordinary music resonates in the heart, so that the poem finally comes from both within and without. One of the absolutely essential books. "Those still confused about why poetry might fracture and splinter and stutter can find an answer in the work of M. NourbeSe Philip. In Zong! she delves into the trauma of the plantation economy and allows her language to be shaped by the conflicts between telling and not telling, between naming and not naming that define the horrifying story of the slave ship Zong! This book is exceptional and uniquely moving." (Juliana Spahr, author of This Connection of Everyone with Lungs) -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.