Stammering Sea, Re-writing Sacrifice: M. NourbeSe Philip’s Sangoma Poetics

Abstract:

In her experimental poetry collection, Zong! (2007), M. NourbeSe Philip visually portrays the Atlantic Ocean not just as a historical site, but as a protean material—duplicitous as language and unreadable as the human body. Many of her poems, at rst glance, seem inscrutable—words and even split syllables are strewn across the page in wave and current patterns. The predictable poetic “line” is completely dissolved; an attempt to read the poems aloud yields stammers and slurs, with occasional glimpses of the brutal history they obscurely document. In this paper, I show how Philip, a self-described “seer, sangoma, or prophet” of the African diaspora, ritually sacrices words to testify to the Zong massacre (194). In the cuts and stammers of the poem, Philip refuses to coherently narrate the deaths of over one hundred and fty Africans who were thrown overboard the slave ship, Zong, when drinking water ran out. Moreover, Philip composes the collection by tearing apart words from the Gregson vs. Gilbert court case, in which the ship owners demanded insurance compensation for lost “cargo.” Dissecting the deadly semantics of this oceanic scene, I claim, Philip “reach[es] into the stinking, eviscerated innards” of language looking for “signs and portents of a new life” (193-4). By sacricing words instead of bodies, Philip exposes the brutal artice of capitalist logic, which writes Black bodies into a system of exchangeable value. She oers instead broken performances in which the “meaning” of Black bodies remains elusive, yet as inescapable as thirst. Building on work by Christina Sharpe, Joshua Bennet, and others, I ultimately elevate Philip’s work as an embodied mode of ecological and theological theorizing that refuses to secure the meanings of bodies, oceans, or futures. What emerge instead, through the physical intensities of her fractured incantations, are specters of unrecovered bones at the ocean’s bottom and the waves in which the dead remain—an ocean all too human.

Bio:

Sally Hansen is a Ph.D. candidate in the University of Notre Dame’s English Department. Her dissertation, “Sounding Stigma: Graphic Poetry, Mysticism in the Flesh, and the Marked Body” explores visually disruptive poems that are meant to be heard, not just seen. Graphic poets use visual techniques like collage, scrambled typographies, elaborate rhythmic notations, and redaction—they physically mark language to disorient normative modes of reading. When performed live, graphic poems’ unpredictable stammers and slurs dramatize violent histories in which bodies are racially and sexually marked. The dissertation feels through these sensory entanglements toward what Fred Moten calls “mysticism of the flesh”—the polyrhythmic performances of the dispossessed. Hansen completed her undergraduate in English Literature at the University of Virginia, and a Master of Arts in Religion at Yale Divinity School and the Institute of Sacred Music. Her work appears in ASAP Journal, Hopkins Quarterly, and Fare Forward.