Ontology and Hauntology in Zong!

Using Heidgger, Derrida, Husserl's phenomenological approaches to break down Philip's notoriously difficult book length poem, Zong!

M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong! is a mess. It is a contradictory untelling of a story through characters that do not exist. The language is ruptured, the subject unclear, and the word choice uncertain. Philip offers no clarification, no map, no structure, no chronology. Yes, Zong! is a mess. But it is a brilliant mess. An intentional mess. A mess that cannot be and should not be solved. How could it be? How does one portray the horror of a human experience without living it? How does one represent the pre-linguistic with the linguistic? How can we capture the entirety of our existential experience from within the limits of that experience? For Philip, it cannot be done. Zong! is an anti-narrative. It does not tell the story of the Zong massacre, the murder of over 130 Africans thrown overboard for profit. It does not tell the story of the 130 terminally dehydrated human beings lost forever in flesh and memory. It does not tell the story of the limbo they occupied: person and property, living and dead, dead and lost. It does not tell the story of the 130 failed flights between deck and wave. But it does. “There is no telling this story; it must be told.” Zong! is an extraordinary attempt to speak the unspeakable. To walk the line between what can be represented and what must remain silent. In this paper, I will use phenomenological approaches to uncover how the ontological question of Being is crucial to understanding Philip’s paradoxical claim. In order to do so, I will analyze the ontology of Ivan Illich’s mysterium iniquitatis and Derrida’s hauntology and the role they play in Philip’s decision not to tell the story. The poems I will be analyzing through these lenses are Zong #1 and Zong! #16, as they lend themselves to phenomenological interpretation in the most complete way. Lastly, I will establish how this leads to the conclusion that Philip was at least more successful in telling a story that cannot be told than traditional methods would be.

There is no telling. Philip’s refusal to try lies in a mystical ontological recognition that the Zong massacre is an embodiment of the being of evil. An irreducible thing that exists outside of human conception or experience. Evil is not a phenomenon that can be traced back to any ontical considerations of us as beings but is prior to it. Evil does not have psychological, sociological, or biological explanations, and any attempt to prove such would diminish its significance. There is no logic, purpose, or origin. It cannot be taken apart, added to, or subtracted from. It is holistic, a vacuous absence that hangs over human experience. Evil lacks essence. It cannot be reduced to conditions; nothing is sufficient for it to come about, nor is anything necessary. Every manifestation is singular and paradoxical: present and absent, known and unknowable, tangible but untouchable. It is a state of Being that beings come into. It is more than existential, lying beyond human experience or understanding. Irreducible to experience or language. When we attempt to fix it in words, we fit it into a linguistic structure brought about by our necessity for coherence and chronological order due to the circumstantial wiring of our brains. We fail to understand Being itself and only its effects. We attempt to rationalize the massacre by bridging the logical gap between cause and effect through language, such as economic motives. But there is a deep and wide chasm between profit-seeking and the murder of 130 human beings. There are no practical or a posteriori reasons for how one could actually do such a thing. Only the irreducible and unexplainable nature of evil can account for such an atrocity. Moreover, because evil cannot be broken down, any attempt to bridge this gap by telling the story is necessarily flawed from the start.

Despite this, NourbeSe Philip does, in fact, tell a story that cannot be told, but her telling does not consist in telling. It consists of feeling. Evil is pre-reflective. Meaning, we can understand it outside of any prior reasoning. We do not require a close inspection or verification to determine if something is evil. It is a visceral and revolting thing that exists. It is pre-linguistic. We can feel and identify it outside of conceptually understanding it. In order to tell the story, Philip evades the misstep of describing the evil, using language as a recapitulation of experience, but instead puts language first, using her pen to guide thought. By doing so, she is no longer trying to do anything particular with her writing but is in a pre-reflective state, where she writes before she thinks. Evil is pre-reflective, therefore, instead of working through the medium of reflection, a la tradition, Philip is closer to the source and more likely to write in a way that reconciles with human experience in the face of evil. Zong! #1 is an excellent example of this: 

w   a                                   t

er                                                      wa                         s

our                                              wa

te    r    gg                                  g                    g              go (exc. Zong! #1)

Zong #1 captures the raw advent of consciousness in the face of horror. It is when we interact with the being of evil. The unnamed narrator is born into a primal, pre-reflective state, suffocated by evil. Their first interaction with the world is not a coherent language after gathering thoughts but a desperate grasping for sound, an expression without understanding. Sounds spill out one syllable at a time and often multiple times in a row. The narrator is led by instinct rather than thought. The weight of evil directs their moans and cries and conveys the shock, suffocation, and desperation of the sufferers. This is not storytelling in the traditional sense. It is a plea that has become a story. The narrator cries out for basic human necessity. Linguistic transcendence is a luxury that the oppressed cannot afford. The unnamed person does not need to explain why they need water but simply that they do. Philip “allows the language to lead,” breaking free from the confines of tradition and allowing her to explore this instinctual usage of sound. In common, literature must be understood before it is felt; Philip uniquely aims to make one feel before they understand, which is much closer to our actual state in being-in-the-world.

Beyond the immediate, visceral encounter with evil, its effects linger and reshape our perception of the world. As beings aware of Being, our interaction with something like evil fundamentally alters our perception of things, even if the things themselves remain unchanged. Once utilitarian objects that we would use pre-reflectively take on a holy significance after being touched by evil. This new meaning becomes prior to any use or analysis of the subject. It is the first layer in which we experience the thing. Again, though, the object itself remains unchanged. It is our consciousness that is affected. This impression left from the interaction occupies a strange space in the mind, haunting the roots of perception. Philip adopts this conception from Derrida’s “hauntology.” (Specters of Marx, Derrida) Hauntology is the persistence of things that are supposed to be gone but remain. This means that through an encounter with evil, an otherwise lifeless being can keep Being in the lingering effects of their final experiences. The evil that ended them is non-temporal; through it, they persist. A person who witnesses a murder with a hammer might forever flinch at the sight of a hammer, as the victim had suffered something evil through the hammer, but this does not mean that the hammer is itself evil. However, the fact that a non-thinking being does not carry an imprint does not make the imprint on conscious beings any less real. 

NourbeSe Philip feels the haunting of the Zong in the water. There has been evil, and the effects of that evil contaminate the minds of those affected. The Atlantic Ocean is the final resting place for all those lost aboard the Zong. They uncomfortably lie in the presence of the thing that ended their lives. However, the being of those aboard the Zong, multiple and many-voiced, are present. Therefore, one could still return dignity to them. Philip claims that Zong! is, therefore, a wake. It’s honoring those who died without dignity. Zong! #16 powerfully honors those lost: 

should they have                     .

found being                            .

.                             sufficient

.                                 a necessity

(portion that question)                 .

should they have                         .

.                            found the justify

for exist                                      . 

…

.                            the preserving

.               the insurance of water

.                           the within loss

.                       the terms of exist

.                             a negro of wit

should they have found             .

.                   water

.                                   &

.                      being

.                                                                sufficient (exc. Zong! #16)

In order to understand this poem, I attempted to extend my phenomenological approach past ontology and into the poetry itself. This meant that I thought of every word in a vacuum, deliberating about what it meant outside of the contingencies of the previous or upcoming word. While in my original reading of lines 1-3, I had taken “being” to be a verb, devoted to sufficiency of some unknown thing, through closer reading I took it to be the ontological noun. The sufficiency became an adjective, relating to the being of those on board the Zong. Similarly, by bracketing off assumptions, my interpretation of “sufficient” at the end was not skewed by the “should” prior. Whereas I previously expected it to be a question, I interpreted it as a wish that someone might offer. “Should they have found being sufficient.” This new meaning works like the beginning of a memorial address paying homage to those lost in an irreparable and depriving manner. Similarly, the poem concludes with lines 21-25, which, under the same strategy, reads, “Should they have found water & being, sufficient.” “(water & being)” are two related things, both of which are wished as sufficient. The first is a prayer that they might be content with their final resting place; the second is their contentment in living through the water. May their souls be at peace although they live on through chaos.

This reading doesn’t do anything to explain what is happening aboard the Zong! but honors its victims in their rest. If Zong! is a memorial, it’s not the place to tell the story of how, but instead the story of who. Who we are comes prior to our self-reflection. It has less to do with the physical and more with the emotional, the pre-reflective state of being. 

While the story still cannot be told, M. NourbeSe Philip tells it in a far more powerful and truthful manner than conventional interpretations could. Her ontological understanding of the problem of evil unlocks an approach that better portrays the reality of atrocity: one that confronts our own human understanding. But, rather than narrating the actions of evil or detailing the injustices suffered by the Africans on board, Philip focuses on the effects of understanding evil as it is individually experienced. It is only through pre-reflection that one can closely perceive suffering, and attempts to gather and explain these experiences as a whole reduce and distort them entirely. Secondly, by respecting the rights and being of the dead through Derrida’s conception of the hauntological, it became clear that Zong!, as a form of remembrance, should first and foremost honor the individuals, not sensationalize the issues themselves. Zong! offers neither plot nor protagonist, but it does tell a story that can only be told through immense skill and proper restraint.