Justice is the ground: I-Mages of the (IM)Possible in Marlene Nourbese Philip's Zong!

Abstract

This study analyses Marlene NourbeSe Philip’s poetic book Zong! (2008) by focusing on select “i-mages,” or poetic images as proposed by the poet, that “re/membering” the massacre occurred on board the slave ship called Zong in 1781 configure symbolic acts of poetic and restorative justice. These poetic images confront and metaphorically “exhume” the archive of the transatlantic slave trade and “exaqua” the memory of the Caribbean sea in order to poetically repair history in the Caribbean and contribute to free its future by inscribing in the transatlantic cultural and historic memory dimensions of the humanness that were and continue to be denied to the Afro-descendants in the Americas, and by creating ways to work through and heal the historic trauma caused by the genocide and dehumanization from emotional, psychic, and spiritual perspectives. © 2022 Universidad de Chile, Facultad de Filosofia y Humanidades, Departamento de Literatura. All rights reserved.