The Strange Case of CanLit’s Disappeared Black Poet
how does one
write
poetry from a place
a place structured
by absence
One doesn’t. One learns to read the silence/s.
—M. NourbeSe Philip
Rana Hamadeh’s recent operatic art installation, The Ten Murders of Josephine (2017), sheds light on the missing testimonies overlooked in historical records of racial violence and loss. Hamadeh’s piece takes inspiration from the language of the Gregson vs Gilbert insurance case, a 1783 insurance settlement in which the owners of the slave ship Zong threw a large number of slaves overboard in order to claim insurance money for the loss of “property.” The decision of the court—the only public document in existence that testifies to the Zong massacre—cloaks the violence and injustice of the event in the logic of expense and proprietary loss. Using the insurance case as a legal artefact, she investigates the manner in which Black lives are erased through the telling of historical events in legal record. Hamadeh’s work, considered a critical “monument of absence,” and “archive of erasure,” has enjoyed much exposure, and won the prestigious Prix de Rome Visual Arts 2017. Mirjam Beerman, coordinator for Prix de Rome, writes that “[Hamadeh’s] interpretation of the past and the intelligence with which she deconstructs and rearranges it is topical and important.”
This would be all the more impressive if a Black Caribbean Canadian poet hadn’t done it first.
In fact, we wouldn’t even know about the Gregson vs Gilbert case if it weren’t for the work of M. NourbeSe Philip and her long poem, Zong! (2008). The work is the product of a seven-year long archival project wherein Philip took the language from the insurance case report, rearranged it, and created a labyrinthine journey through the historical erasure of Black bodies and their stories. Philip first came across Gregson vs Gilbert in a footnote citation in James Walvin’s historical inquiry Black Ivory: A History of British Slavery (1992). She then sought out the document in the University of Toronto Law Library and was shocked at its presence—crammed in a publication among many legal case reports, and a meagre two-pages in length, the document that spoke for the murder of over 150 people came brutally to light. Given her training as a lawyer, Philip knows all too well how legal documentations of trauma work to dissolve all aspects of humanity and emotion from events so as to reach a “pristine” principle of law. Coming across this document, Philip saw the stories of the event of the massacre locked within and without the language—what is said in the document and what is not said, what must be told but what cannot be told. While the Zong slave ship massacre has been the subject of art and literature, such as J.M.W. Turner’s painting The Slave Ship (1840) and Fred D’Aguiar’s Feeding the Ghosts (1997), aside from Walvin’s footnote citation of Gregson v Gilbert and Philip’s use of it in Zong!, there is no other work that references or takes the legal case as its subject matter. In other words, we wouldn’t even be speaking of the case report if it weren’t for Philip’s work before, during, and after Zong!
Erased before she could disappear. Her seven-year labour silenced and stolen.
I have a personal and professional relationship with Philip—we are friends, but I am also an established scholar of her poetry and poetics (much of my doctoral and post-doctoral scholarship is focused on her work). So I have a particular perspective on this situation both because I have devoted much of my scholarly energy to the study of her work, and because I have been in contact with Philip while writing this. Only six weeks before Hamadeh’s show opened at the Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, Hamadeh wrote to Philip to ask for “blessings and permission” to use Zong! and its materials in her work. In that email, which I have seen, Hamadeh tells Philip that Zong! has become “a major influence and reference; in fact a daily ritual that grew slowly throughout my working process into becoming an important theoretical and affective scaffolding within the work.” Hamadeh also tells Philip that she is “using Zong!’s typography as a logic,” and is “constructing part of the sound’s rhythmic/percussive structure, taking Zong!’s pages’ layout and the way the layout builds its intensity throughout the book as my reference.” Clearly, Zong! was a direct aesthetic and formative influence on Hamadeh’s work, and she wanted Philip’s blessing for her project. However, at the time, Philip was dissatisfied with how Hamadeh was planning to use Zong! but could not provide adequate feedback, as her sister was terminally ill and she was about to travel to see her. Philip wrote back to Hamadeh saying she was unable to respond to her query about using Zong! at the time. Hamadeh went ahead and used the materials anyway, and six weeks later, The Ten Murders of Josephine opened. Not only did she use the material and spirit of Zong! without permission, but she also enacted an extremely ironic erasure of Philip’s poetic and archival labour.
The only mention of Philip I have been able to find in relation to Hamadeh’s work is a Visitor’s Guide to the museum where the installation was being held, which makes passing reference to Philip and to the historical Zong massacre but not in reference to each other. But out of the many interviews Hamadeh has done, none link her work with Philip or speak of the exhaustive archival research Philip has done to bring the legal case of the Zong massacre back into our contemporary imaginary. This is not only a glaring critical blindness—it is unbelievable, given how much Zong! is studied, critiqued, and written about, that anyone speaking critically about this work would not bring up Philip’s name or her work—it also indicates a greater act of erasure and appropriation.
Again, an irony: Hamadeh’s work doesn’t just take an archive of erasure as its subject matter—by erasing Philip’s work, her work contributes to an ongoing archive of erasing Black presence and subjecthood that Philip’s work, including Zong!, was and is resisting. As the journal Art Radar notes, Hamadeh’s work “points towards an archive of erasure; a narrative that has never been, and never can be, attended to.” This statement points in an eerily similar way to the centralized paradox at the heart of Philip’s poetic inquiry in Zong!: “this is a story that must be told; that can only be told by not telling.” / “the story that cannot be told, but which, through not-telling, will tell itself.” Speaking about her project’s interaction with the legal case, Hamadeh says, “This archive of horror shall not be understood as the trace of the massacre, but rather as the fragmentary, unspoken, and unspeakable phonic materiality that is captured and trapped within the trace—that subsists because of and despite of that trace.” To speak of the “fragmentary, unspoken, and unspeakable phonic materiality” within the traces left behind by the legal case, without a mention of Philip or Zong!, cannot be excused as an oversight. Philip and her work has not even had a chance to appear, let alone disappear, in this conversation. Erased before she could disappear. Her seven-year labour silenced and stolen.
Zong! is a long poem written using the language from Gregson v. Gilbert—a document that is, predictably, written in a carefully ordered manner of truth-seeking “is/was” legal rhetoric. In an attempt to re-member those lives that were lost and reanimate their stories, Philip’s text dismembers the language of the document into a disjunctive, fragmented long poem that at once voices, mourns, and bears witness to these overwritten voices. Over the course of the exhaustive text, the language and rationality of the court’s decision deteriorates, mutating into a fragmentary, watery fugue of submerged voices, sounds, silences, and stories. In so doing, her text situates the archive of the sea, and of the Middle Passage specifically, as a fluid, shifting, and sonic site of living memory and history, despite the law’s attempts to silence it.
... in presencing this past, she also reminds us of the ever-present colonial project that continues to govern our cultural and political reality in Canada and elsewhere.
As Philip reveals in her “Notanda” to Zong!, the underlying reasoning or ratio of the legal decision in the insurance case is “that the law supercedes being, that being is not a constant in time, but can be changed by the law.” Philip uses poetry to interrogate the law and its order by breaking it apart and decentralizing its presumed control and authority over the story of the Zong. Bringing the concealed disorder of the language to the fore, she articulates a community of fragmented, yet united human voices brought forth against their silencing. What remains salient throughout this work, and in relation to Hamadeh, is that while the Gregson vs Gilbert document exists in physical form as a legal document in a publicly accessible archive, it is only because of Philip’s poetic labour that the case has surfaced as a cultural artifact. Her work with the document brings the historical case of the Zong into our present consciousness; and in presencing this past, she also reminds us of the ever-present colonial project that continues to govern our cultural and political reality in Canada and elsewhere.
Working carefully and conscientiously in experimental poetry, then, is Philip’s way of writing through the trauma and silencing of the past into a multivalent present. In this way, her project is different from other works of experimental poetry—although Zong! and other of Philip’s poetic works manipulate language in similar ways to other experimental poetic works, she does so not in the spirit of jouissance, to revel in the realms of ethereal semantic possibility, but to consciously and carefully critique the European colonial project, in which language was a central means of controlling and managing its subjects. The poetic oeuvre she has created over the course of 40 years is thus marked by a long-held distrust of language; as she writes in the introduction to her most recent collection of reprinted and new essays, Blank (Book*hug 2017):
I have spent my life as a poet and writer exploring what language means for someone like myself, condemned to work in a language that commits a rape in my mouth every time I speak. … I continue to be plagued by working with language that was fatally contaminated by its history of empire and colonialism, and having no language to turn to in order to hide or heal. … I’m still hunting, trying to find the word or words to describe the Middle Passage, site of so much grief and trauma, final home to so many of us; searching through poetry to find the word that will best describe what happened to us, Africans, under the boot of history.
Experimental poetry, for Philip, is less a means of making sense of the past, and more a means of hunting and wayfinding through the thicket of forgotten and silenced histories in the present moment. Hence the importance of her “translations” of documents such as Gregson vs Gilbert: for her, such experimentation with language is an act of survival, of writing a way through and with grief, akin to the ways in which African slaves would experiment with language to fool their colonial masters, as a means of finding and communicating their collective survival.
... to tell the untellable story of what happened aboard that ship is work that one just cannot pick up and use; it commands protocol and a respect for the culture and dignity of those who were aboard, lest one commits further acts of harm.
To articulate this collective survival artistically is surely a complicated, complex endeavour, one that makes Hamadeh’s bold appropriation particularly distressing, as it is also an act of spiritual trespassing. As readers of Zong! would know from the Notanda in the text, Philip was anxious about her own use of the material histories of the case and her creative reworking of them. As she writes, “I feel strongly that I need to seek ‘permission’ to bring the stories of these murdered Africans to light.” During the seven-year process of creating the text, Philip travelled across the globe seeking permission from African ancestors—she went to Ghana, the departure point of the slave ship Zong, and spoke with elders and spiritual leaders. She also went to Liverpool, where the ancestors of the English crew aboard the ship originated, to pay respects. She carefully follows a spiritual protocol, in the grace of and communion with spiritual leaders, to enter the text, its history, and the memory of those we lost as ethically and as respectfully as possible. In other words, to tell the untellable story of what happened aboard that ship is work that one just cannot pick up and use; it commands protocol and a respect for the culture and dignity of those who were aboard, lest one commits further acts of harm. Hence why the cover of Zong! reads, “as told to the author by Setaey Adamu Boateng”—Boateng is the ancestral voice that guided Philip through the artistic process. The dustjacket author bio for Philip reads, “Setaey Adamu Boateng is the voice of the ancestors revealing submerged voices of all who were onboard the Zong.” Philip felt strongly that she was more of a conduit through which this story should come to be untold, so she petitioned the publisher to have this ancestral voice listed as an author. In light of the careful, painstaking respect Philip paid towards this historical and spiritual material, for Hamadeh to extract Gregson vs Gilbert from Zong! and from the stories of those who were lost, without thought of permission, is unquestionably a violation of protocol in using other artists’ work as well as a violation and theft of the spirit and dignity of those murdered by the slave trade.
Hamadeh’s erasure of Philip’s work would be more shocking if it weren’t so predictable and ironic, given her history of activism around issues of silencing in Canadian literary culture. In Blank, Philip declares herself an “unembedded, disappeared poet and writer in Canada.” Despite Zong!’s appearances on university syllabi and its eventual critical success in Canada and internationally, Philip’s career has been marked by continued exclusion and sidestepping. As she reflects, “I write memory on the margins of history, in the shadow of empire and on the frontier of Silence; I write against the grain as an unembedded, disappeared poet and writer in Canada.” “Disappeared,” she continues, is “the metaphor that best describes how I have felt as a writer in Canada for at least the last decade … The absence in Toronto and Canada of any critical reception of Zong!, published in 2008, provides a vivid illustration of the hollowing out of my presence as a writer in this country.” That she has “disappeared” from CanLit’s sight is a historically complex and nuanced reality that traces what she calls “the brutally cut path of racism” in this country, one that, in its wake, claims to celebrate the work of racialized writers, provided those writers don’t criticize the hand that feeds. Hamadeh’s erasure of Philip is thus part of a much larger pattern of entrenched erasure at the hands of the literary establishment. Her work has struggled to get publication and even reviews in Canada. Her novel for young adults, Harriet’s Daughter, was rejected by several Canadian presses who were afraid that a Black protagonist would not sell. It was eventually published in England by Heinemann in 1988. And when Zong! came out in 2008, published by Mercury Press in Toronto and Wesleyan UP in the US, it received numerous reviews in the US but received zero reviews in Canada that year.
For all the international success Zong! has achieved in the ten years it has haunted us with its shattering, devastating beauty, it is shocking that it was met with such silence in Canada. Or is it so shocking, after all? Lest we forget, in light of recent discussions of the “dumpster fires” burning in CanLit, that Black writers—and in particular, female Black writers like Philip, Claire Harris, Dionne Brand, and others—have been calling out the hypocrisy and corruption of our cultural and political institutions for the last 50 years. For readers and critics of her work, Philip is known for her wit and cunning critique that “machetes hypocrisy,” as George Elliott Clarke has put it, on many fronts to do with the Canadian imaginary. She is a woman of letters and a champion of the now-lost form of letter writing as activism. During the later ’80s and ’90s, Philip wrote hundreds of letters to community leaders, literary magazines, newspapers, municipal bureaucrats, calling out racism and racist structures. Most notably public among these resistances—all of which are discussed in her new collection—is the PEN Congress in 1989 and June Callwood’s infamous “Fuck you!” to her and other protesters calling out the underrepresentation of writers of colour at the conference; her resistance to the anti-Black racism of the ROM’s 1989 “Into the Heart of Africa” exhibit, and her opposition to the 1993 staging of Showboat in Toronto.
Perhaps foremost of these is the fight with Michael Coren in 1995 that led to a seven-year long legal suit against him and the CFRB for libel and slander. In a radio broadcast in September of 1995, Coren, then a journalist for CFRB 1010 radio, addressed Philip’s winning the Toronto Arts Award that year. Coren caustically attacked Philip as a woman “with something like a dirty tea towel wrapped around her head,” a reference to her author photo taken by the Toronto Star for winning the Arts Foundation of Toronto Writing and Publishing award. He also accosted her work, saying she “has done nothing but defecate upon this country and this city and the Canadian culture.” The violent erasure of Philip, the “lightning rod of Black cultural defiance of the Canadian mainstream,” as Selwyn R. Cudjoe has it, is thus persistent and glaring, and widely entrenched across cultural structures. Philip says her request for speaking engagements drastically reduced after the run-in with Callwood, and became even more sparse during the years of litigation with Coren. More than that, the literati failed to support her during these times of violent silencing. The carefully deliberate and calculated strategy on behalf of Canadian media and cultural institutions to quell nonwhite disruptors was well set in motion.
Not only does the Canadian academic institution refuse to take Black expression and Black life seriously, but in the case of Philip, some critics have conflated her work and her life in a way that makes wrongful assumptions of her character and of who they think she is.
After these disputes with Callwood and Coren, Philip and her work began to disappear from Canadian cultural view. And despite Zong!’s common appearance on university syllabi (especially in the US), Philip’s work has been missing from fundamental critical texts and anthologies of radical poetry in Canada. When Susan Rudy and Pauline Butling wrote Writing in Our Time: Canada’s Radical Poetries in English (1957-2003) it was largely considered “the essential guide to a half century of Canadian innovative poetry.” Philip is mentioned a couple times in entries for the publishers of her poetry, but her actual work is neither mentioned nor named. Philip’s She Tries Her Tongue: Her Silence Softly Breaks—a book of radical, experimental poetry in English in Canada published in 1989 and winner of the Casa de las Américas Prize while in manuscript form—is markedly absent in this encyclopedic account of radical poetry in Canada. Despite many people coming forward to Philip about how foundational She Tries was to their understanding of poetic form and colonial subjecthood, critics in Canada have largely overlooked this work in crucial conversations.
As I know too well from my PhD studies and afterwards, the academy often claims to engage the work of racialized writers but ends up rabidly consuming their work with little acknowledgement of or respect for the sociopolitical labour of their writing. This is evident in the manner in which the academy taxonomizes writers according to the colour of their skin, not the timbre of their work—writers like Philip, for example, are classified as “Black innovative poets,” not “innovative poets,” which is a category reserved for whiteness. It is also evident in the way the work of a few Black writers is made to stand in for the whole of blackness as tokens at the end of a syllabus, or in the way their work is characterized as “emerging” or “new” when it has been foundational to the literary canon. As Rinaldo Walcott puts it, “CanLit fails to transform because it refuses to take seriously that Black literary expression and thus Black life is foundational to it.” Of course, not all academics are at fault for this, but by and large, the academy engages racialized writers by consuming them, using what they need to fill quotas and appearances, and then moving on.
Not only does the Canadian academic institution refuse to take Black expression and Black life seriously, but in the case of Philip, some critics have conflated her work and her life in a way that makes wrongful assumptions of her character and of who they think she is. Certainly, the Coren matter is an exemplary case of this “hollowing out” of her presence. That Philip and her work continue to be “disappeared” in this way is also starkly evident in the response I received to a research paper on her work in 2014. The paper was submitted to an American peer-reviewed journal on Philip’s poetic novella, Looking for Livingstone: An Odyssey of Silence. I received the following comments from an anonymous reviewer:
I recall reading Philip’s novella as an undergrad and finding her a particularly troubling author, commentator and individual. She is tough and tough to comprehend at times, with her work inseparable (willfully so) from her public persona (here, I cannot help but recall her infamous and loud scrap with June Callwood re feminism(s) in Canada). Her own insistence on writing, rewriting and even imposing herself, her history, her ethnicity’s history and her versions of all of the preceding prove difficult to parse and at times to grasp in their uncompromising approach (and occasional very deliberate obfuscations and exclusions, both in print and in person, in fiction and in non-fiction).
This personal attack on Philip takes up most of what the reviewer had to say about my work—rather than engage with the ideas put forth in my essay, the reviewer thought it appropriate to launch into their subjective feelings and misgivings about Philip, in particular. Note the language of her subjective erasure: Philip is conflated with the politics of her work and is seen as a difficult Black woman who is “troubling,” “tough,” “imposing,” and “uncompromising.” Moreover, the reviewer suggests that the equation of Philip’s work and her “public persona” is purposefully “willful” on her part, and references the Callwood incident, suggesting that Philip is not only to blame for the way in which she has been received, but that, echoing Coren, she asks for it.
To call her approach ‘uncompromising’ also suggests that she should be compromising—a demand placed on ‘inconvenient’ racialized writers to quell their disruptions and silence their words.
We should also consider our reviewer’s insistence that “[Philip’s] own insistence on writing, rewriting and even imposing herself, her history, her ethnicity’s history and her versions of all of the preceding prove difficult to parse and at times to grasp in their uncompromising approach” and, along these lines, that her work is marked by “very deliberate obfuscations and exclusions.” Again, let us not forget that this was a critic’s response to a research paper; rather than constructive critique, the reviewer instead launches into a personal attack that swerves into a racist tirade against Philip and “her history, her ethnicity’s history.” To call her approach “uncompromising” also suggests that she should be compromising—a demand placed on “inconvenient” racialized writers to quell their disruptions and silence their words. This reader enacts the double erasure that typifies CanLit: they treat blackness as what Dionne Brand has called an “absent presence” in Canada. That is, in talking about Philip, the critic silences her while also supplanting her own voice with their interpretation of who they think she is.
Most recently, after the release of Nick Mount’s controversial book Arrival (2017), which discusses the eruption of literary production in Canada in the 1960s and ’70s, The Agenda hosted a panel, including Mount, to discuss this era of emergence in Canadian literary production. Mount has been widely criticized for leaving Black writers out of his picture of CanLit’s boom—Black writers like Philip. Despite coming to Canada around this time (in 1968) and creating a canon of Black poetry in this country along with Austin Clarke and the Dub poets Clifton Joseph and Lillian Allen, she was not invited to speak at the panel, despite being an obvious choice. Two younger Black female writers, Jael Richardson and Canisia Lubrin, were asked to speak, yet neither was alive during the time period in question. Philip was not asked, nor was she or her work mentioned once during the broadcast—a very curious omission, given her work’s particular relevance to the subject matter and time frame of Mount’s book.
These are just a few samplings of numerous erasures that have formed an archive of silence around Philip and her work in Canada. Yes, there has been some great criticism produced that contends with her work, and Zong! continues to be taught in university classrooms. But given how vital she is as a poet and public intellectual, given the magnitude of her work and its effects on our present consciousness wherein the very spaces and places we occupy remain precarious and unsure, she has all but disappeared from media and from the cultural milieus of Toronto and Canada writ large. To be sure, I’m not suggesting that there was or is a careful plot to intentionally ostracize Philip and her work—there didn’t need to be. As a disruptive, Black, female poet in Canada—a woman who dared to be heard and demanded space—she was and is a thorn in the side of the CanLit establishment and has been made to feel unwelcome for it. This is a self-replicating structure that sets up such disruptors to fail, and ensures that they have no place to speak, and no way to disrupt the comfortable, glad-handing status quo.
Philip’s poetry poses a crucial question to Canadian writing: how does one / write / poetry from a place / a place structured / by absence / One doesn’t. One learns to read the silence/s. The structures that be in CanLit want us to see the absence of voices like Philip’s, but it is these very structures that have built up a legacy of silencing these disruptive voices, by rendering them an “absent presence.” A ghostly trace. But as always, ghosts tend to linger—in the interstices of this city, in the grammar of its sidewalks, in the walls of its museums, and in the hearts, minds, and pens of those who refuse to forget.
