Trans*Atlantic Archives: Singing the Dead in M. NourbeSe Philip’s Sangoma Poetics

In her 2008 experimental poetry collection, Zong!, M. NourbeSe Philip untells the “story that cannot be told” of the Middle Passage Zong Massacre, in which over one hundred fifty Africans were thrown overboard to ensure insurance compensation for the ship owners. Philip uses the single archival trace of the massacre, the Gregson vs. Gilbert court case, to assault the language and logic that render Black bodies consumable. Murdering words and their false sense, Philip describes herself  as a “sangoma,” or a Zulu physical and spiritual healer. She thus reclaims African diasporic ritual practice, opening to an ancestral voice, Setaey Adamu Boateng, who speaks the stammers of the dead through her onto the page. I connect Philip’s sangoma poetics to what Christina Sharpe calls “Trans*Atlantic” Blackness, a mode of living in the afterlives of slavery in which risk and disruptive possibility inhere in the surplus meanings of Black flesh.