Excerpted below: pp. 25-38, 40-43, 45
Chapter 2. The Ship: The Trans*Atlantic
who could not see this like the passage’s continuum
—Dionne Brand, Ossuary XI, Ossuaries
(on Jacob Lawrence’s Shipping Out, part of his War series)
Allan Sekula and Noël Burch’s The Forgotten Space—A Film Essay Seeking to Understand the Contemporary Maritime World in Relation to the Symbolic Legacy of the Sea (2010) is a film that follows the movement of shipping containers on land and sea; it is a film about global capital and the wreckage it leaves in the wake. The filmmakers “visit displaced farmers and villagers in Holland and Belgium, underpaid truck drivers in Los Angeles, seafarers aboard mega-ships shuttling between Asia and Europe, and factory workers in China,” and finally the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, where they “discover the most sophisticated expression of the belief that the maritime economy, and the sea itself, is somehow obsolete.” Burch and Sekula write in New Left Review, “The subject of the film is globalization and the sea, the ‘forgotten space’ of our modernity. Its premise is that the oceans remain the crucial space of globalization: nowhere else is the disorientation, violence and alienation of contemporary capitalism more manifest” (Burch and Sekula 2011; emphasis mine). The filmmakers say the film is about a system. With such a premise, surely a film on the voraciousness of capital, the capitalization of human misery, and the profits of immiseration would contend, even tangentially, with the Middle Passage, the shipped, and with that fleshly wreckage that capital wrought. The Forgotten Space is indebted to an earlier Sekula work, a book titled Fish Story, which consists of nine chapters. Chapter 3 of Fish Story is titled “Middle Passage,” and one might expect that as it locates its subject in and as the ocean, the shipping industry, and ports, the images and text of that chapter would contend with the historical Middle Passage and slavery. And perhaps, given the title, chapter 3 might also have addressed that always present throwing and jumping overboard, and the fish that fed and feed on those bodies in the wake of the ships. Though the long essays of the text mention slavery, the Middle Passage of Fish Story bears no discernible relation to the planned disaster that is known by that name, nor to its long and ongoing effects. No surprise, then, that the film does not address the history of the trade in abducted Africans; does not locate that trade as the key point in the beginning of global capital. Africa, the Caribbean, and the rest of the African diaspora are absent, the forgotten spaces of The Forgotten Space. And so, too, those histories and presents of slavery and colonization, of tourism, and of the establishment of military bases that containerization abets fail to appear (Llenín-Figueroa 2014, 90). They are absent, that is, but for one telling exception.
The section of the film called “Mud and Sun” begins with the Port of Los Angeles/Long Beach and with the predictably failed promise post September 11, 2001, of new jobs in the Alameda Corridor. But how is one to talk of mud and sun and firmament, the Atlantic Ocean, and the United States and not take up transatlantic slavery? The crew films in a tent city that is located between two container freight lines and in the direct path of an airfreight company. Sekula says that after public screenings audience members often ask him what the residents of the tent city are doing in the film. His reply is that he wanted the film to have in it the insights of those people who have been ejected from the system. Two of those ejected interviewees are middle-aged white men. Bruce R. Guthrie, who tells the film crew that they would have a hard time if they had to live in the tent city for a month, talks about not having the money to move now but says that after his mother dies and he inherits he will buy a trailer, put it on the river, and drink and fish his life away. He is identified as a former building contractor. The second white man, Robert W. Wargo, talks about the dearth of programs designed to help middle-aged men like him get a new start and about the indignity of “help” in the form of a lottery that one can only win once and that gives the winner a hotel room for three days. Wargo distinguishes himself from the other men in the tent city, whom he calls “reprobates,” and he is identified in the end credits as a former mechanic. Viewers of the film are to understand that Wargo’s and Guthrie’s current hardship has occurred because the system has let them down.
Then there appears in front of the camera a Black woman whom we have glimpsed in the background of earlier shots. She is the only Black speaking figure in the film, the only Black person who doesn’t just appear in the background or in file footage. Her name is Aereile Jackson, and, in my theoretical terms, she speaks in the film from the position of the wake: from a position of deep hurt and of deep knowledge. It is painful to watch and listen to her. She is pained as she talks about her children who have been taken from her and about the cruelty of the state that cast her into this position. She talks, too, about being over-weight and about her hair, and she says she wears a wig because her hair is falling out in chunks. These are symptoms of her distress. She’s not mentally ill, she tells the filmmakers—she knows she is holding baby dolls in her arms, but those dolls are placeholders for her children, who were taken from her and whom she has not seen in six years. She is identified in the end credits as a “former mother” (figures 2.1, 2.2)
I had held out some hope that this film that looks at the maw of capital wouldn’t simply feed her into it, wouldn’t simply use her as a container for all of that unremarked-upon history, would not use her as an an asterisk or an ellipsis to move forward the narrative. I had thought that Ms. Jackson wouldn’t just be a transit point (“the act or fact of passing across or through; passage or journey from one place or point to another,” Dictionary.com). But though she provides the terms and the image, if not the exact words, that give the segment its name, Aereile Jackson appears only to be made to disappear. She is metaphor. Her appearance in the film makes no sense within the logic of the film as it unfolds; yet it makes perfect sense, for, as Stefano Harney and Fred Moten (2013, 93) write, “modernity,” the very modernity that is the subject of this film, “is sutured by this hold.” The hold is the slave ship hold; is the hold of the so-called migrant ship; is the prison; is the womb that produces blackness. When Ms. Jackson appeared in the film, she stopped time for me. In my memory, the section with her in it appeared at the end of the film and not in the first half of it. “What is time?” (Sissako 2014).
At the end of the film we get to the credits, where each of the three tent city interviewees is identified again by name and former profession: Bruce R. Guthrie is a former building contractor; Robert W. Wargo is a former mechanic; and Aereile Jackson is a “former mother.” In this title, “former mother,” that the filmmakers tag her with there is seemingly no sense of the longue durée of that term à la partus sequitur ventrem and its afterlives. Recall her interview:
This [and one might hear in that “this” her anticipation and condemnation of their future labeling] is like a slap in my face to me and my family. I’m not on drugs. . . . I have, these are my dolls I picked up so don’t think I’m mentally ill or anything like that. I picked these up. I have a tent full of stuffed animals and dolls. This is the only thing that I have to hold on to for me to remember my children. I lost a lot and I’m homeless and I haven’t seen my children since I was unable to attend court because I had no transportation. The court was way in San Bernardino and I’m way in Ontario and I lost out on my children and I haven’t seen my children since and this is since 2003 and here it is 2009 so I’ve lost a lot. I’m trying . . . I’m hurt. I’m trying to figure out am I ever going to get the chance to be a mother again with my children I already have. I don’t have my children. I’m over here in the dirt, getting darker and darker and darker. And my wig is because my hair comes out you, know, mysteriously my hair comes out, and it wasn’t like that at first but I get over here and I take my hair out to wash it and stuff and it’s coming out, you know. In patches. Like someone is shaving my hair off. That and I’ve gotten overweight to where I’m just starting to handle my weight in the hot sun and I can barely walk to the corner without getting hot and without getting hot flashes. So I’m trying to deal with my weight and my situation at the same time.
Aereile Jackson has lost a lot. More than this film can or will reckon with. The violence against her is (in Wilderson’s terms) not contingent, it is not violence that occurs between subjects at the level of conflict; it is gratuitous violence that occurs at the level of a structure that constitutes the Black as the constitutive outside. Put another way, the fact and the mode of the inclusion and display of Ms. Jackson’s body and speech are indicative of how the film cannot understand the enactments of a language of gratuitous violence against the Black. That is, the filmmakers’ language of analysis begins from the violence of her absence, and it is clear the film operates within a logic that cannot apprehend her suffering. How she is written into the film and the film’s inability to comprehend her suffering are part of the orthography of the wake. The forgotten space is blackness, and as Jackson is conjured to fill it she appears as a specter. It is as if with her appearance capital is suddenly historicized in and through her body. She is opportune. They see in her an opportunity (from the Latin ob-, meaning “toward,” and portu(m), meaning “port”). But Jackson wasn’t ejected from the system: she is the ejection, the abjection, by, on, through, which the system reimagines and reconstitutes itself. “Violence precedes and exceeds blacks” (Wilderson 2010, 76). The suffering of Black people cannot be analogized; “we” are not all claimed by life in the same way; “we” do not experience suffering on the same plain of conflict, since the Black is characterized, as Wilderson tells us, by gratuitous violence (Wilderson 2010, 126).
Sekula and Burch continue: “The cargo containers are everywhere, mobile and anonymous: ‘coffins of remote labour-power,’ carrying goods manufactured by invisible workers on the other side of the globe” (Sekula and Burch 2011) (figure 2.3). How are these containers that Sekula and Burch track connected with global warming and fights over water and other resources? How are they connected with the journeys that Africans make over the land, from, say, Somalia to Libya, and then across the Mediterranean Sea in an attempt to reach places like Lampedusa? How are they connected to the containerization of people prior to and during and then after that perilous sea voyage? These are questions that Sekula and Burch’s film does not attempt to address.
These are the asterisked histories of slavery, of property, of thingification, and their afterlives. I can’t help but see that word “risk” in “asterisk.” And to link that risk and those asterisked histories to the seas and to the beginnings of the insurance trade subtended by a trade in Africans.
The history of insurance begins with the sea. Three developments are central to the conceptual framework established by marine insurance: first, the “bottomry” agreement or “sea loan” in which money is loaned at a steep rate for a voyage, the risk falling to the lender. Second, the concept of “general average,” the idea that losses undertaken to save a boat (jettisoning or cutting down masts in a storm, for instance) represent a risk shared among those investing in a voyage—usually seen as the oldest form of joint-stock enterprise. And third, in the notion of “Perils of the Sea”—the earliest form of the concept of insurable risk. (Armstrong 2010, 168)
One might say that Aereile Jackson is the film’s insurance—as she lends the film its vocabulary and her abjection underwrites its circulation (figure 2.4).
The risk in insurance: the asterisked human.
So I’ve been thinking about shippability and containerization and what is in excess of those states. What I am therefore calling the Trans*Atlantic is that s/place, condition, or process that appears along- side and in relation to the Black Atlantic but also in excess of its currents. I want to think Trans* in a variety of ways that try to get at something about or toward the range of trans*formations enacted on and by Black bodies. The asterisk after a word functions as the wildcard, and I am thinking the trans* in that way; as a means to mark the ways the slave and the Black occupy what Saidiya Hartman calls the “position of the unthought” (Hartman and Wilderson 2003). The asterisk after the prefix “trans” holds the place open for thinking (from and into that position). It speaks, as well, to a range of embodied experiences called gender and to Euro-Western gender’s dismantling, its inability to hold in/on Black flesh. The asterisk speaks to a range of configurations of Black being that take the form of translation, transatlantic, transgression, transgender, transformation, transmogrification, transcontinental, transfixed, trans-Mediterranean, transubstantiation (by which process we might understand the making of bodies into flesh and then into fungible commodities while retaining the appearance of flesh and blood), transmigration, and more.
With the Trans* I am not interested in genealogy; it is not my intention to recover transgender bodies in the archive. But when Omise’eke Tinsley writes in “Black Atlantic, Queer Atlantic: Queer Imaginings of the Middle Passage” that “the Black Atlantic has always been the queer Atlantic” (Tinsley 2008, 191), we might add that the Black and queer Atlantic have always been the Trans*Atlantic. Black has always been that excess. Indeed, blackness throws into crisis, whether in these places one can ever really think together, Black and (hetero)normative. That is, Black life in and out of the “New World” is always queered and more. We might say that slavery trans* all desire as it made some people into things, some into buyers, sellers, owners, fuckers, and breeders of that Black flesh. That excess is here writ large on Black bodies—as it is with the process of subjection. And it is that point, post the “rupture in the world,” at which, Dionne Brand tells us, we, whether we made that passage or not, are “transform[ed] into being. That one door [the door of no return] transformed us into bodies emptied of being, bodies emptied of self-interpretation, into which new interpretations could be placed” (Brand 2001, 25).
As we hold on to the many meanings of Trans* we can and must think and imagine laterally, across a series of relations in the ship, the hold, the wake, and the weather—in multiple Black everydays—to do what Hartman, in “Venus in Two Acts,” describes as “listening for the unsaid, translating misconstrued words, and refashioning disfigured lives” and to do what NourbeSe Philip calls the necessity of “telling the story that cannot be told.” “I think,” Philip says, “this is what Zong! is attempting: to find a form to bear this story which can’t be told, which must be told, but through not telling” (Saunders 2008a, 72).
To encounter people of African descent in the wake both materially and as a problem for thought is to encounter that * in the grand narrative of history; and, in the conditions of Black life and death such as those delineated by Hartman (“skewed life chances, limited access to health and education, premature death”) and the ways we are positioned through and by them, the ways we occupy the “I” of Hartman’s “I am the afterlife of slavery” (Hartman 2008, 6). Theorizing wake work requires a turn away from existing disciplinary solutions to blackness’s ongoing abjection that extend the dysgraphia of the wake. It requires theorizing the multiple meanings of that abjection through inhabitation, that is, through living them in and as consciousness.
We see that dysgraphic positioning of Black people via abjection everywhere: from responses to the Black abandoned in the multiple and ongoing disasters of Hurricane Katrina to conservative New York Times columnist David Brooks’s abhorrent January 15, 2010, op-ed on Haiti, “The Underlying Tragedy” (Brooks 2010a), in which he wrote that Haiti’s problems were less a problem for “development” to solve than they were a call for a radical and radically imposed cultural shift, coming as they do as a result of “progress-resistant cultural influences.” Drawing from the anthology What Works in Development? Brooks goes on to write, “We’re all supposed to politely respect each other’s cultures. But some cultures are more progress-resistant than others, and a horrible tragedy was just exacerbated by one of them. . . . It’s time to promote locally led paternalism. . . . to replace parts of the local culture with a highly demanding, highly intensive culture of achievement—involving everything from new child-rearing practices to stricter schools to better job performance” (Brooks 2010a). This op-ed is properly understood in the context of what is not said: its refusal to speak, for example, Haiti’s revolutionary past and the billions of dollars in indemnity Haiti has been forced to pay to France; or the successive US military occupations and coups. Three days earlier Brooks wrote an op-ed entitled “The Tel Aviv Cluster,” about the accomplishments of Jewish people all over the world. He says: “The Jewish faith encourages a belief in progress and personal accountability. Tel Aviv has become one of the world’s foremost entrepreneurial hot spots. Israel has more high-tech start-ups per capita than any other nation on earth, by far. It leads the world in civilian research-and-development spending per capita. It ranks second behind the United States in the number of companies listed on the Nasdaq. Israel, with seven million people, attracts as much venture capital as France and Germany combined” (Brooks 2010b). As with my students in Memory for Forgetting, the disaster of the Holocaust is available as human tragedy in a way that slavery, revolution, and their afterlives are not.
The asterisk is evident globally. From the death by drowning of Glenda Moore’s sons Connor and Brandon (ages four and two) on Staten Island, New York in Hurricane Sandy in October 2012, to the murders of Michael Brown and Miriam Carey, to the continued crossings and drownings in the Mediterranean Sea and the Atlantic Ocean, to the policing and cordoning of Black people on and off the streets of North America, the “problem” is Black (moral) underdevelopment. The problem is blackness. The problem is blackness is and as underdevelopment. One can’t imagine similar “culture of poverty” proclamations like Brooks’s being made, for instance, in the aftermath of the devastation of the tornados in May 2013 in predominantly putatively white communities in Tornado Alley in the midwestern United States—even though many of the people living there do not or cannot take the precautions of building storm shelters, evacuating, or otherwise readying for disaster. That such things are said and said with such regularity about Black and blackened people is some part of what it means to be/in the wake. “We are not only known to ourselves and to each other by that force” (Sharpe 2012a, 828).
The Ship
THE ZONG
The sea was like slake gray of what was left of my body and the white waves … I memember.
—Kamau Brathwaite, Dream Haiti
After spending several months off the coast of West Africa as its hold was gradually filled with abducted Africans, a slave ship named the Zong started its journey to Jamaica. It was originally called the Zorgue, and it was based in the Netherlands before being purchased in 1781 on behalf of a group of Liverpool merchants. When the Zorgue was captured by the British on February 10, 1781, it already had 320 abducted Africans on board; the “cargo” then was underwritten after the capture, after the ship had set sail from Cape Coast. Built to hold approximately 220 African men, women, and children; the Zong sailed with twice that many; there were 442 (or 470) captive Africans on board. When the ship set out for Jamaica on August 18, 1781, it had provisions for three months and the knowledge that there were a number of ports in the Caribbean where it could stop to replenish if it ran short of water and food. Records show that due to navigational errors the ship overshot Jamaica. Records show that the captain and crew reported that they decided to jettison some of the enslaved in order to “save the rest of the cargo.” The transcript of Gregson v. Gilbert (the 1783 court case) echoes this report. It reads: “Some of the negroes died for want of sustenance, and others were thrown overboard for the preservation of the rest” (quoted in Philip 2008, 210).
The Zong was first brought to the awareness of the larger British public through the newspaper reports that the ship’s owners (Gregson) were suing the underwriters (Gilbert) for the insurance value of those 132 (or 140 or 142) murdered Africans. Insurance claims are part of what Katherine McKittrick calls the “mathematics of black life” (McKittrick 2014), which includes that killability, that throwing overboard. “Captain Luke Collingwood thus brutally converted an uninsurable loss (general mortality) into general average loss, a sacrifice of parts of a cargo for the benefit of the whole” (Armstrong 2010, 173).
The deposed crew recounted that it was lack of water and the insurance claim that motivated that throwing overboard. They recognized that insurance monies would not be paid if those enslaved people died “a natural death.” (A natural death. What would constitute a natural death here? How could their deaths be natural? How can the legally dead be declared murdered?) But in his testimony in court the chief mate revealed that the crew on board the Zong never moved to “short water,” that is, at no point did they resort to water rationing (Hochschild 2006, 80). Despite the individual and combined efforts of anti-slavery activist Granville Sharp and the formerly enslaved antislavery activists Olaudah Equiano and Ottobah Cugoano, it would not be murder that was at issue. The events on board the Zong would be committed to historical memory first as the insurance claim in the case of Gregson v. Gilbert and only later as the murders (injury to “subjects”) of 132 Africans not seen in the court to be murders. “It has been decided, whether wisely or unwisely is not now the question, that a portion of our fellow creatures may become the subject of property. This, therefore, was the throwing overboard of goods, and of part to save the residue” (quoted in Philip 2008, 211).
It may be fitting that the Zong most often comes to memory not as the singular ship itself but as an unnamed slaver on which the crew threw captured Africans overboard. The murderous actions of the captain and crew of that unnamed ship are memorialized in J. M. W. Turner’s 1840 painting titled Slave Ship: Slavers Throwing Overboard Dead and Dying—Typhon Coming On. In the roiling, livid orpiment of Turner’s painting, the dead are yoked to the dying. That Turner’s slave ship lacks a proper name allows it to stand in for every slave ship and every slave crew, for every slave ship and all the murdered Africans in Middle Passage. As James Walvin (2011, 107) writes, “Everyone involved in the slave trade—from the grandest merchant to the roughest of deck hands—knew that there were times when the crew might have to kill the very people they had been sent to trade for and for whom they paid such high sums. Though no one would admit it openly, a crude human calculus had evolved at the heart of the slave trade and was accepted by all involved: to survive, it was sometimes necessary to kill.” Turner’s painting captures the horrors of the trade and refuses to collapse a singularity into a ship named the Zong; that is, Turner’s unnamed slave ship stands in for the entire enterprise, the “going concern” (Brand 2015) of the trade in captured Africans: the part for the whole. In style and content Turner’s painting makes visible the questions at the center of the Zong—property, insurance, resistance, and the question of ballast. (Think of the recent discovery of a wrecked ship off the coast of South Africa that archaeologists have determined was a slave ship because of the iron bars of ballast that they found in the wreckage. Ballast was necessary to offset the weight of the captured Africans in the hold of the ship [Cooper 2015]).
The decision of the court was achieved through an act of lexico-legal transubstantiation that declared that “the case [of the Zong] was a simple one of maritime insurance,” that is, a case of property loss and not murder. Despite the differences recorded in the numbers of Africans thrown overboard, what remains constant is that there was that throwing overboard; there was in fact that murder of over 130 abducted Africans. The event, which is to say, one version of one part of a more than four-hundred-year-long event is as follows: “29 November, at 8.00 pm, fiftyfour [sic] women and children were thrown overboard ‘singly through the Cabin windows.’ The time seems to have been chosen to coincide with the changing of the watch when the maximum number of crew members would be available. On 1 December a further forty-two male slaves were thrown overboard from the quarterdeck” (Lewis 2007, 364). We read that “the next day it rained, and the crew collected enough fresh drinking water to add a three weeks supply to the ship’s store” (Vincent Brown 2008, 159). Nevertheless, counter to the logic that lack of water is what motivated these acts that would circumvent the insurance rules of “natural death,” “in the course of the next days thirty-six more slaves were thrown overboard and a further ten jumped into the water by themselves. Kelsall later considered that ‘the outside number of drowned amounted to 142 in the whole’ ” (Lewis 2007, 364).
When the Zong finally arrived on the Black River in Jamaica on December 22, 1781, there were 208 living Africans on board. When the Jamaican Cornwall Chronicle listed those Africans for sale, they noted that “‘the vessel . . . was in great distress’ having jettisoned some 130 slaves” (Lewis 2007, 364). With that notation of great distress, the paper did not (mean to) gesture toward the enslaved. They did not (mean to) account for the psychic and material toll the long journey of forced abduction, want, and incredible violence had taken on the enslaved (violence not marked as violence nor abduction nor want). It was the ship that was in great distress, not the enslaved. Here, if not everywhere, as we will see, the ship is distinct from the slave. When the sale took place on January 9, 1782, the remaining enslaved people sold for an average of thirty-six pounds each—above the thirty-pound price at which they were insured. But, of course those enslaved people were also in great physical and psychic distress; witnesses to and survivors of the extravagant violences of the ship, its living death, and mass murder. Perhaps, especially, that one enslaved man who, thrown overboard, managed to climb back onto the ship.
How does one account for surviving the ship when the ship and the un/survival repeat?
Zong!
We sing for death, we sing for birth. That’s what we do. We sing.
—Patricia Saunders, “Defending the Dead, Confronting the Archive”
What does it look like, entail, and mean to attend to, care for, comfort, and defend, those already dead, those dying, and those living lives consigned to the possibility of always-imminent death, life lived in the presence of death; to live this imminence and immanence as and in the “wake”? I turn here to NourbeSe Philip’s Zong!. Each of the numbered poems in “Os,” Zong’s! first section, is composed of words taken from the court case of Gregson v. Gilbert. Below the line of the poems in “Os” appear Philip’s annotations—names for those Africans on board the Zong who had no names that their captors were bound to recognize or record. Those now-named Africans in “Os” (Os as ordinary seaman, mouth, opening, or bone) are the bones of the text of Zong!
Zong!, Philip says, “is hauntological; it is a work of haunting, a wake of sorts, where the spectres of the undead make themselves present” (Philip 2008, 201). The dead appear in Philip’s Zong!, beyond the logic of the ledger, beyond the mathematics of insurance, and it is they who underwrite the poems that comprise “Os.” Philip aspirates those sub- merged lives and brings them back to the text from which they were ejected. Likewise, in the structure of Zong! the number of names of those people underwriting the enterprise of slavery do not match the number of the thrown and jumped, and so, with that too, Philip dispenses with a particular kind of fidelity to the invention of the historical archive.
[…]
A ship moving through water generates a particular pattern of waves; the bow wave is in front of the ship, and that wave then spreads out in the recognizable V pattern on either side of and then behind the ship. The size of the bow wave dictates how far out the wake starts. Waves that occur in the wake of the ship move at the same speed as the ship. From at least the sixteenth century onward, a major part of the ocean engineering of ships has been to minimize the bow wave and therefore to minimize the wake. But the effect of trauma is the opposite. It is to make maximal the wake. The transverse waves are those waves that run through the back; they are perpendicular to the direction of the motion of the ship. Transverse waves look straight but are actually arcs of a circle. And every time, every instant that the boat is moving through water it has the potential to generate a new wave.
Certainly the Zong, far away from any landmass, would have been in deep water, and any object, or person thrown overboard would have been in deepwater waves. Once in the water that thrown overboard person would have experienced the circular or bobbing motion of the wake and would have been carried by that wake for at least for a short period of time. It is likely, though, that because many of those enslaved people were sick and were likely emaciated or close to it, they would have had very little body fat; their bodies would have been denser than seawater. It is likely, then, that those Africans, thrown overboard, would have floated just a short while, and only because of the shapes of their bodies. It is likely, too, that they would have sunk relatively quickly and drowned relatively quickly as well. And then there were the sharks that always traveled in the wake of slave ships.
There have been studies done on whales that have died and have sunk to the seafloor. These studies show that within a few days the whales’ bodies are picked almost clean by benthic organisms—those organisms that live on the seafloor. My colleague Anne Gardulski tells me it is most likely that a human body would not make it to the seafloor intact. What happened to the bodies? By which I mean, what happened to the components of their bodies in salt water? Anne Gardulski tells me that because nutrients cycle through the ocean (the process of organisms eating organisms is the cycling of nutrients through the ocean), the atoms of those people who were thrown overboard are out there in the ocean even today. They were eaten, organisms processed them, and those organisms were in turn eaten and processed, and the cycle continues. Around 90 to 95 percent of the tissues of things that are eaten in the water column get recycled. As Anne told me, “Nobody dies of old age in the ocean.”
The amount of time it takes for a substance to enter the ocean and then leave the ocean is called residence time. Human blood is salty, and sodium, Gardulski tells me, has a residence time of 260 million years. And what happens to the energy that is produced in the waters? It continues cycling like atoms in residence time. We, Black people, exist in the residence time of the wake, a time in which “everything is now. It is all now” (Morrison 1987, 198).
The sea was like slake gray of what was left of my body and the white waves. . . . I memember.
How a Girl Becomes a Ship
First another epigraph from Dream Haiti by Kamau Brathwaite and then a long quotation from June Jordan’s “The Difficult Miracle of Black Poetry in America or Something like a Sonnet for Phillis Wheatley.”
Brathwaite: “I do not know why I am here—how I came to be on board this ship, this navel of my ark.”
Now Jordan:
It was not natural. And she was the first. Come from a country of many tongues tortured by rupture, by theft, by travel like mismatched clothing packed down into the cargo hold of evil ships sailing, irreversible, into slavery. Come to a country to be docile and dumb, to be big and breeding, easily, to be turkey/horse/cow, to be cook/carpenter/plow, to be 5′6′′ 140 lbs., in good condition and answering to the name of Tom or Mary: to be bed bait: to be legally spread legs for rape by the master/the master’s son/the master’s overseer/the master’s visiting nephew: to be nothing human nothing family nothing from nowhere nothing that screams nothing that weeps nothing that dreams nothing that keeps anything/anyone deep in your heart: to live forcibly illiterate, forcibly itinerant: to live eyes lowered head bowed: to be worked without rest, to be worked without pay, to be worked without thanks, to be worked day up to nightfall: to be three-fifths of a human being at best: to be this valuable/this hated thing among strangers who purchased your life and then cursed it unceasingly: to be a slave: to be a slave. Come to this country a slave and how should you sing?
…
How should there be Black poets in America? It was not natural. And she was the first. It was 1761—so far back before the revolution that produced these United States, so far back before the concept of freedom disturbed the insolent crimes of this continent—in 1761, when seven year old Phillis stood, as she must, when she stood nearly naked, as small as a seven year old, by herself, standing on land at last, at last after the long, annihilating horrors of the Middle Passage. Phillis, standing on the auctioneer’s rude platform: Phillis For Sale.Was it a nice day?
Does it matter?
Should she muse on the sky or remember the sea? Until then Phillis had been somebody’s child. Now she was about to become somebody’s slave.
…
When the Wheatleys arrived at the auction they greeted their neighbors, they enjoyed this business of mingling with other townsfolk politely shifting about the platform, politely adjusting positions for gain of a better view of the bodies for sale. The Wheatleys were good people. They were kind people. They were openminded and thoughtful. They looked at the bodies for sale. They looked and they looked. This one could be useful for that. That one might be useful for this. But then they looked at that child, that Black child standing nearly naked, by herself. Seven or eight years old, at the most, and frail. Now that was a different proposal! Not a strong body, not a grown set of shoulders, not a promising wide set of hips, but a little body, a delicate body, a young, surely terrified face! John Wheatley agreed to the whim of his wife, Suzannah. He put in his bid. He put down his cash. He called out the numbers. He competed successfully. He had a good time. He got what he wanted. He purchased yet another slave. He bought that Black girl standing on the platform, nearly naked. He gave this new slave to his wife and Suzannah Wheatley was delighted. She and her husband went home. They rode there by carriage. They took that new slave with them. An old slave commanded the horses that pulled the carriage that carried the Wheatleys home, along with the new slave, that little girl they named Phillis.Why did they give her that name? (Jordan 2003, 174–76)
We know that the Wheatleys name that African girl child Phillis after the slave ship (the Phillis) on which her transatlantic abduction through the Middle Passage was completed. The Wheatleys made an experiment of her. They allowed and encouraged this Phillis, child of a “bitterly anonymous man and a woman,” to “develop,” to become literate, to write poetry, to become “the first Black human being to be published in America” (Jordan 2003, 176).
[…]
Twenty years after Phillis, the ship and the girl, arrive in Boston, Massachusetts, the Zong achieves notoriety through the binding and throwing overboard of 132 (or 140 or 142) Africans in order to collect insurance. The text of the 1783 court case Gregson v. Gilbert tells us that this was not a case of murder, tells us that “it has been decided, whether wisely or unwisely is not now the question, that a portion of our fellow creatures may become property. This, therefore, was a throwing overboard of goods, and of part to save the residue” (quoted in Philip 2008, 211). Originally named the Zorg (or Zorgue), which translates from the Dutch into English as “care,” the ship becomes the Zong after it was captured in war and bought by a Liverpool slave company and an error was made in the repainting of the name. We should pause for at least a moment on the fact of a slave ship named Care (care registering, here, as “the provision of what is necessary for the health, welfare, maintenance, and protection of someone or something,” as support and protection but also as grief ) […]