Tales of hunting will always
glorify the hunter
until the lioness
is her own hiss-
-torian.
Collins 1992: 63

Although literature cannot pretend to remedy injustices to the other on the everyday, material level, its capacity to help us appreciate, understand, and empathize with what is not ourselves is a starting point to other forms of legislation.
Aristodemou 2000: 208

1M. NourbeSe Philip was born in Tobago and after a first degree in Economics at the University of the West Indies, she completed her studies in Law in Ontario, Canada. Admitted to the Bar in 1975, Philip remained a practicing barrister and solicitor in Toronto for seven years. Facing racism, sexism and cultural exclusivism in Canada, the lawyer saw the need for reparation and social justice. This developed into what she calls a ‘cultural activism’ (Solomon 2005) as she was involved in anti-racist struggles for years after. However, the restorative justice that Philip targeted as a lawyer, one that ‘brings together victims, offenders, and significant others... in order to address wrongdoing and compensation or restoration’ (Macpherson 2007: 233) could not be effectively carried out in the case of historical oppression because of the absence of historical data. Because of this, Philip felt that she needed to engage in a process of ‘re-memory’. This is a technique reminiscent of African-American Nobel Prize-winning author, Toni Morrison; she ‘uses her fiction to recover black histories ignored by dominant western traditions’ and ‘manages to emphasise what has been irretrievably lost— those personal memories, communal traditions, and unrealized possibilities that have disappeared without benefit of permanent documentation’ (Clewell 2002: 130).

2NourbeSe Philip felt that the legal profession was too restricted a space for the task she set herself. She therefore decided that creative writing was a more viable option to which she has devoted her life since 1983. In fact, although Philip still considered it important for the African community in Canada to have black lawyers, doctors and other representatives in top professions, she felt that it was the black artist who had the most fundamental part to play in healing the wounds left by the traumatic past shared by the African Diaspora:

The people who will help us, New World Africans, to heal that other wound of being torn away from Africa, losing your language, losing your culture, losing your tribe, your nation... the people who will do that are our artists, whether they be the griots, the story tellers, the poets, the writers, the dancers... because so much of how we have been presented to ourselves is from the perspective of somebody else. (Solomon 2005)

3Determined to do her enslaved ancestors justice in her own way, Philip thus chooses to rewrite her history from the perspective of the oppressed, giving the world access to a lawful version of history as opposed to a biased one. Poetry, even more than prose, became the actual space in which she could endeavour a re- (w) ri (gh) ting of her own history. Thus by taking her former oppressors to a virtual court, it allowed her oppressed ancestors to witness in spirit and defend themselves. Philip chose poetry to express her contradictions because the domain of law did not grant her this freedom of expression: ‘In Law you have to resolve the contradictions down to the final decision’ (Solomon 2005). Countering the rigidity and apparent all-knowingness of the legal framework, Philip’s poetry mixes fragmentation, linearity and circularity, thereby enhancing contradictions without resolving them. Choosing the fragment over the whole, the fluid over the material and stretching the limits of the page in order to express the inexpressible, the author attempts to break free from the constraints of the legal text. In this sense, Philip moves from her conventional legal language to what I would call her poetics of justice. By this I mean that she continues to carry out justice but through a text where emotions are allowed and where the poetic voice becomes the prosecutor and where the juror/reader develops a multiplicity of interpretations and possible verdicts.

4Among central themes in Philip’s work therefore is the urge for justice for the oppressed and silenced ‘other’, as well as the need for the female subaltern to resist dominant systems of oppression. Philip’s work represents a variety of genres, as over the years she has produced a number of essays, works of fiction and poetry. In her most thought-provoking essays, Philip’s prose and poetry coexist and the arguments she was taught to construct during her legal training are blurred but magnified through the power of the verse. Her writing is in fact haunted by a fragmented language as she constantly seeks to come to terms with English that she sees as the ‘language of [her] oppression’ (Philip 1990: 296). Throughout her work, Philip not only re (w) ri (gh) ts African-Caribbean history, she also rehabilitates what she sees as the truth; she allows aboriginal languages of the colonized subaltern which have long been silenced by dominant discourses, to exist on the page. What is interesting to consider is the extent to which Philip’s former profession has contributed to the shaping of her writing, as well as her attempts to repossess language in order to reconstruct her fragmented past, thus doing it justice. To what extent does the poetic text allow the poet to write/right her history and to mourn her African ancestors? Overall, through her poetry, does Philip manage to challenge canonical and legal interpretations of history and to reclaim her own history, body and identity?

5If Philip’s work is relevant with regards to its treatment of themes of justice, resistance to oppression and rehabilitation of the historical truth, then four of her written productions are particularly significant. Firstly, Philip’s award-winning 1988 poetry collection She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks allows her to do justice to Caribbean women’s historical voicelessness as the poet (‘tries her tongue’) thus reacquiring her speech and experiencing the power of language. Then, some years later in 1997, in her thought-provoking collection of poetic essays entitled A Genealogy of Resistance, the power of language is further demonstrated through the enhancement of the African-Caribbean woman’s history of resistance against unlawful systems of oppression. Philip’s genealogy of resistance is a current running through the black woman’s veins as it is transferred from grandmothers to grand-daughters, from mothers to daughters. It is a vector of maroonage and certainly a leitmotif for her cultural activism and her poetics of justice. Her 1991 work Looking for Livingstone: An Odissey of Silence is a mixture of prose and poetry where the author aims to do her African ancestors justice through a virtual trial. The narrator encounters African people and examines the pieces of evidence that made David Livingstone a great ‘discoverer’ of the territories, already occupied by a number of African tribes. Last but not least, Philip’s most recent poetry book Zong! (2008) further questions dominant discourses and accepted evidence as the poet explores legal archival material and deconstructs its validity. Through its mixture of African and European languages, Zong! demonstrates not only the author’s concern with language, but also her thirst for historical truth and social justice. Renaming her enslaved ancestors, Philip allows them to resurrect and be heard as throughout her poetry the subaltern can speak (Spivak 1994) and thus subaltern justice is seen to overcome colonial justice.

6Philip’s writing appears as a fluid site where postcolonial, feminist and legal discourses interact. As the African female is often a central figure, Black Feminist thought needs to be applied since it aims ‘to empower African-American women within the context of social injustice sustained by intersecting oppressions’ (Collins 2000: 22). If definitions of blackness are often complex, women of African descent share ‘the multilayered histories of colonialism, neo-colonialism, and imperialism of people of color in the West’ (Gadsby 2006: 7). Constantly represented from a different perspective than their own, ‘the nicknames by which African American women have been called or regarded or imagined on the New World scene demonstrate the power of distortion that the dominant community seizes as its unlawful prerogative’ (Spillers 1987: 69). As a matter of fact, ‘the enslaved African woman became the basis of our [American] society’s Other’ (Christian 1985: 60), which served to legitimize race, gender and class oppressions. The impact of institutionalised sexual racism and imperialism on the black female subject from slavery to neo-colonial times is undeniable and is a major concern for Philip.

7Accounting for the presence of the female enslaved Africans in particular, Philip’s work allows them to exist on the page, to witness their trauma and voice their resistance. Her poetry appears to take shape around a number of strategies in order to organize the defence of her oppressed counterparts and subvert dominant constructions of the black female subject. Challenging the historical ‘matrix of domination’ (Collins 2000: 22) and seeking to give the black female subaltern a voice, Philip’s work strongly inscribes itself in the framework of feminist law and literature,

a field that, in some ways, replicates issues that have been prominent in feminist literary studies for some time: voice versus silence, the performance and punishment of femininity, the right to anger, and the consequences of stepping outside of prescribed gender roles. (Macpherson 2007: 12)

8Often left at the margins of first world societies, the African and African-Caribbean female has long been omitted, forgotten or devalued from canonical historical accounts and hegemonic discourses in general. Philip’s texts attempt to rehabilitate the black woman’s right to reacquire her tongue, to reclaim her body and to recover her past. What is striking, overall, is the fragmentation of the text which genuinely allows the poet to reconstruct history and ‘make the black hole (w) hole’, in the words of Philip herself (1997: 120). The poetics of justice manipulates the word with ease and often interrupts the text, a necessary rupture to reflect a complex historical reality.

The African’s encounter with the New World was catastrophic and chaotic: How does one and how ought one to manage such an experience in poetry or in writing? How does one make readable what has been an unreadable experience?’ (Philip 1990: 298)

9Winner of the 1988 Casa de las Americas literary prize, She Tries her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks, is a poetic work of disorder and disturbance where M. NourbeSe Philip consciously decides to be unmanageable and defy language. Moving away from the very strict and rigid framework of legal language, Philip truly asserts her wish to be unmanageable through this atypical poetry collection. While her poems are mostly written in standard English, Philip expresses anger and anguish through her traumatic linguistic experience and takes the language of her oppression to court, this language that has been unlawfully imposed onto her ancestors. In fact, through a subtle synecdoche, she condemns the English language, incriminating by extension the legal systems imposed through slavery, colonialism and imperialism that perpetuated oppression against her counterparts. Furthermore, in She Tries Her Tongue Her Silence Softly Breaks as well as in her poetry generally, law and order are defied and English is cross-examined, manipulated, fragmented, torn and deconstructed so that a new tongue can be implemented. In the opening poem of her sequence entitled ‘Discourse on the Logic and Language’, which is ironically rather illogic and discordant, the poetess seems silenced and alienated by the use of English as she examines the link between (‘mother’) and (‘tongue’).

I have no mother
tongue
no mother to tongue
no tongue to mother
to mother
tongue
me. (Philip 1989: 56)

10The reversal of word categories and the absence of punctuation in this excerpt illustrate Philip’s wish to subvert the language and to break free from the constraints of legal language. While Philip’s poems offer multiple interpretations to literary critics, their apparent lack of conformity often create discord and confusion to modern western readers, a strategy that may be interpreted as an additional desire to contrast with the rigour of her former profession. Hence, she still constructs arguments and defends a thesis, but her tactic is highlighted in a disorientating poetry as she plays on sounds as well as silences, on meanings as well as senses. The synecdoche of the tongue which is central to the whole collection reveals the poet’s numerous preoccupations; the tongue not only represents a vital part of the human body giving the power of speech, it is also the organ carrying human genetics and thus, identity. Enhancing a series of syllogisms, the minimalist verses drive the poet to a definite conclusion, that English cannot be her mother tongue because it is a foreign language. English is thus her father tongue as it was imposed by law and was neither transferred nor inherited. Philip’s imagery of the tongue can be extended to her desire to defend the black female subject and allow her to overcome her historical silencing. In a sense, the accepted purity of English is devalued and its validity questioned, since the black female subaltern is endowed with a language of her own in order to voice her specificities and reclaim her historically distorted body.

11Throughout Philip’s texts, a new language is therefore imposed onto the reader, a fragmented speech through which the silenced enslaved female bodies overcome speechlessness and prejudice. In Philip’s poetry, silences are transformed into bodies of speech. Indeed, Philip’s trial of the English language occurs through (‘the crack of silence’) when the body speaks, when (‘the body becomes tongue’):

That body should speak
When silence is,
Limbs dance
The grief sealed in memory;
That body might become tongue
Tempered to speech
And where the latter falters
Paper with words
The crack of silence. (72)

12Here the poet transforms the silent wounded bodies into linguistic testimonies bearing the scars (‘sealed in memory’). ‘This body whose flesh carries the female and the male to the frontiers of survival bears in person the marks of a cultural text whose inside has been turned outside’ (Spillers 1987: 67). The distinction between body and flesh is in fact essential as while the flesh is the outside physical envelope, the body is both inside and outside, as in African spirituality where the separation between body and spirit is not clear (Thompson 1984). The body is thus an embodiment of the whole, carrying both flesh and soul, both physical and psychological scars, and ‘bearing in person’ the text and the voice. Considering Philip’s perception of the body as both material and discursive, legal notions of ‘the body of law and jurisprudence’ and ‘the spirit of law’ come to mind as, ironically, this common Law was developed by British imperialism in order to enslave black bodies and spirits. The body of Law did not acknowledge the slaves as human beings, but as material property and this absence of legal rights had an even stronger impact on the female enslaved whose body and sexuality were exploited.

13On the plantation, the enslaved African woman had to adapt not only to a new geographical location and to harsher working conditions, but also to the objectification of her body by white and black patriarchy as ‘demands are made upon her body for labour for whites and sexual gratification for others, black and white’ (Anim-Addo 2007: 66). The African enslaved woman was disempowered as she was not only ‘the target of rape—in one sense an interiorized violation of body and mind—but also the topic of specifically externalized acts of torture inflicted by other males’ (Spillers 1987: 68). Moreover, Black women’s sexuality was historically controlled by European colonizers because of ‘the economic value of slave children’ (Wood 1987: 608) as ‘in slavery, the black female bodies served as one of the prime technologies of reproduction and commodification’ (Bennett & Dickerson 2001: 13).

14As a consequence of their perpetual oppression, African enslaved women’s lives were marked with rites of resistance and survival against Eurocentric and patriarchal orders, a constant struggle for freedom and for their fundamental rights. This led to a struggle for the repossession of their body and the reconstruction of their own speech to represent themselves. The growing presence of the physical and discursive body in Philip’s work further appears through the use of several synecdoches representing the black woman’s body, her skin, her hair, her cheeks and her lips. The author depicts a body which has been ill-treated and misrepresented, a body which has suffered from alienation and is reminiscent of Fanon’s depiction of a ‘sprawled out, distorted, and recoloured’ black body (80). This vision of the black body as manipulated and misrepresented by colonisers is further echoed in Philip’s poem ‘Testimony Stoops to Mother Tongue’ where the poetic voice is critical of the distortion of the black female body and spirit.

Mind and body concentrate
history—
The confusion of centuries that passes
as the word
kinks hair
flattens nose
thicken lips
designs prognathous jaws
shrinks the brain
to unleash the promise
in ugly
The absent in image. (20)

15The poet develops an accusation against the progressive devaluation and demonisation of the black woman’s body in canonical literature, and asserts her wish to deconstruct the myths of ugliness that have long been associated with blackness. Underlining the association of mind and body which both carry history, Philip denounces unlawful representations (‘passed as the word’) and legitimized by the common law. In A Genealogy of Resistance, the black female body is definitely discursive as her tongue voices her foremothers’ history of displacement and torture.

In the New World, the African woman creating life and seeing the men- the white men—taking away her children and selling them. The man who walking, getting into his boat, his plane, his ship, taking the product of her body and the body’s wisdoms— her children—like he taking the crops she tending. Body and Place. Fertilized. Cultivated. Harvested. In the same way. Between parent. And child. Mother. And child. Father. And child. (93)

16This excerpt denounces the black female’s objectification in the process of slavery, (‘her body and her body’s wisdom’) turned into an exchange item and a labouring machine. The predominance of the semantic field of the cultivation applied to both body and place, enhances the dehumanisation of the black female body which is cultivated, fertilized and harvested for reproduction in the same way as the land. The ruptured sentences evoke the fragmentation of families and the traumas of enslaved mothers who were often deprived of their children. Condemning the criminal processes in which slavery denied the Africans their being, Philip then advances the responses from African women to the dispossession of their bodies.

Some African women nursing—Infanticide!
Reproducing
A-borting
A warping and twisting of the filaments of silence between African and body- body & text
body becoming text which she learning to read in a newlanguageandshecomingtounderstandhowtosurvivetextbecomi ngbodybodiesdeadbodiesmurderedbodiesimportedbredmutilated bodiessold. (Philip 1997: 93-94)

17Here the author further engages her reader into an exploration of the black female body as dis-placed and oppressed and appears to move from the status of prosecutor to the witness box. In fact, as the poetic voice embodies a witness at the stand ‘re-memoring’ the horrible facts, the reader/juror is literally rushed into the dark insides of slavery as the black female body is depicted as fragmented, dismembered and dispossessed throughout this testimony. In order to resist oppression, the black enslaved woman chooses to control her fertility and her children’s fate thus repossessing her rights on her body and mind. Transcending the space of the plantation, she asserts her will to resist through silent acts and her body actually becomes a ‘source of restorative abundance’ (Bennett & Dickerson 2001: 10). While the black female has long been depicted as a silent victim, Philip now underlines her silence as a tool for resistance and restorative justice, demonstrating how illegal acts by colonial law such as infantilisms or physical rebellions allowed her to perform her own justice. Resistance and self-reliance therefore allow the black female subject to assert her own power and learn a new language. Translated into a series of lines with connected words, the absence of spaces between the words emphatically relays the connection between body and text, further confusing the reader.

18On the whole, Philip’s poetry is very much characterised by non-standard shapes and the omnipresence or absence of silences materialised by the gaps or absence of gaps on the surface of the page. Such a style attracts the reader’s attention through the form while at the same time highlighting the contents. Her writing is disorientating as she disturbs the reader in the same way as a lawyer would disorient the jury in order to convince and impose a different truth. This disorienting strategy is reminiscent of Indian Canadian writer Ashok Mathur’s non-standard paper entitled DisOrientation Chapbooks where unheard voices were published in a chapbook format in order to displace the reader’s look through a disorientating form of the language. Robert Budde, too, sees a link in terms of objectives between NourbeSe Philip’s work and this press which

recognizes the form of the book as a site of resistance and ideological contestation. This type of art puts tremendous pressure on the connection between form (the shape, rhythms of discourse, signs, representations, etc.) and ideology (the systems of meaning fortified by those forms). Form undoes race (293).

19NourbeSe Philip’s graphical representation of her name with a capital ‘S’ and her recent publications confirm her focus on shape, rhythm and representation and her wish to undo the idea of race. The above excerpt has an impact on the juror/reader who is undoubtedly troubled as the black female body becomes tongue and text, and is able to voice its trauma which is so profound that it can only be voiced in a different language, with different shapes and signs. The absence of punctuation and the opacity of the last section force the reader to get a sense of this suffocating feeling and picture this body scarred by rejected maternities and by the struggle for survival. Philip projects her readers into a universe where resistance runs in the black female’s veins as the subaltern overcomes the silence historically imposed on her, and chooses to create her own bodily speech, a mutilated speech and a speech of self-determination.

20Besides her obsession with language, silence and the body, Philip demonstrates a real concern with the unlawful aspect of canonical versions of history as she constantly re-tells history from her own perspective. In fact, Philip’s work is reminiscent of what Jamaican writer Michelle Cliff names ’a body of resistance literature that describes and formally enacts the struggle for cultural decolonization’ (75). Philip herself explains that through her writing ’the canon of objectivity and universality is shifted’ and ‘permanently disturbed’ (297) as she seeks to unsettle dominant discourses. Consciously or unconsciously taking shape around her law training, her writing seems to be inscribed in the dynamics of doing history justice. Turning English language upside down and blurring genres and categories, she manages to re-position her female counterparts as specific speaking subjects, thus voicing their hybrid identity and their right to rewrite their own h (I) story. Through the examination of archival legal material, Philip attempts to unveil hidden histories and retell African history from the perspective of the oppressed. Her work in general, but more specifically Looking for Livingstone: An Odissey of Silence and Zong!, significantly illustrate her need to rewrite the past from a perspective which has long been silenced, hence the desire to work against the imposed order. In Looking for Livingstone, a work which was highly criticised by some of the white Canadian intellectual elite, Philip develops a provocative prose and poetry narrative which attempts to deride the canonical historical version of David Livingstone as the acclaimed ‘discoverer’ of Africa.

21More than ten years later with Zong!, Philip’s obsession with the rewriting of history reaches its paroxysm as she recounts the 1781 story of the captain of the Zong, ‘a slave ship whose cargo was so badly affected by an epidemic that Captain Collingwood used the opportunity of an on-going storm to throw 122 sick men and women into the sea’ (Döring 1997: 3). ‘Over a period of days, Collingwood ordered 133 Africans to be thrown overboard. Ten of them evaded their murderers and leapt into the sea themselves. One African survived and climbed back onboard unnoticed’ (Rupprecht 2007: 13). When the insurers refused to pay, the ship’s owners decided to sue and the case of the Zong came to the English courts in 1783 (Rupprecht 2007: 13). This tragic episode is central to Philip’s Zong! which is told through fragments of voices, memories, silences and traumas, as the Caribbean poetess tells a part of history that cannot be told but must still be told by not telling; in her own way, she makes silence speak. Like Looking for Livingstone, this striking poetry collection epitomizes Philip’s wish to transcend the blankness and senselessness of canonical history as she creatively addresses the historical gaps and gives silence a voice. To that aim, M. NourbeSe Philip counterpoints the conventions of poetry as she subverts the forms and exploits the limits of the page, thus questioning history and engaging into a re (w) ri (gh) ting of the past. Philip’s various strategies to uncover submerged and sub-aquatic histories and therefore to do history justice must be explored as the very embodiments of her provocative poetics of justice.

22Memories of the traumatic displacement and enslavement of African peoples forcibly haunt African-Caribbean writings. Caribbean women’s historical spaces are intimately linked to the wider history of displacement of African people and the impossibility to forget is relayed through NourbeSe Philip’s poetry of displacement. The experience of slavery as a historical legacy for black people is undeniable and represents a landmark in the history of displacement of continental Africans across the Atlantic. The Black Atlantic momentum is mythical in the memory of African diasporic people as it is the initial ‘nodal point’ as Gilroy puts it (198), ‘the mythic place in their social history’ according to Gourdine who explains that in diaspora places, ‘the present is always linked to the past: race and slavery, Africa and her diaspora’ (3). The children of the African diaspora are thus originally fragmented through this displacing process as through the transatlantic displacement, the diasporic subject is in fact trapped between two contradictory spaces, between Africa and Europe, between past and present. The Middle Passage is thus the representation of this enclosed and restricted space for African people who lost their freedom and power during that passage. Re-envisioning this Middle Passage, Philip attempts to give a voice to the drowned slaves and to rehabilitate their humanity. Zong! allows them to exist and reconnect their fragmented selves.

23Looking for Livingstone is a work which represents a reversed Atlantic journey as the black female narrator travels to Africa alone through un-elapsing times and unknown spaces searching for the famous David Livingstone. Throughout her quest, the narrator meets the indigenous peoples of Africa, those who have long been disregarded or at best minimised to passive and silent creatures in western historical accounts. In this narrative, the African tribes are humanised while Livingstone’s western reputation of great discoverer is turned into ridicule from the start:

David Livingstone, Dr. David Livingstone, 1813-73—Scottish, not English, and one of the first Europeans to cross the Kalahari—with the help of Bushmen; was shown the Zambezi by the indigenous African and ‘discovered’ it; was shown the falls of Mosioatunya— the smoke that thunders—by the indigenous African, ‘discovered’ it and renamed it. Victoria Falls. (7)

24While the attention is drawn to the essential role of the subaltern (namely Bushmen and the natives) through the emphasis of the conjunction ‘with’, Livingstone’s role is openly undermined as it is suggested that although he received all the praises, he could not possibly have done any of these on his own. Most importantly, the repetitive sentence structure relays the recurrence of these invalid discoveries and the questioning of canonical western definitions. In fact, through a disguised cross-examination, Philip demonstrates that what the west has defined as ‘discovery’ cannot be qualified as such since the lands were already inhabited by African natives. Livingstone’s discoveries are thus invalidated while his renaming of places and by extension the colonial system’s renaming of colonised spaces, is further criticised in the narrative. As a matter of fact, the renaming of the Mosioatunya Falls after the Monarch of England and Ireland (1819-1901) represents one of Livingstone’s numerous attempts to impose British domination onto the African natural environment. Paradoxically, in the following poetry section, Queen Victoria is satirised and chastised as she is depicted in dual terms:

Nigger-woman
Black
Victoria
Queen or Jemimah
whore-wife
virgin-slut
across
the ache in chasm
stretched the word
too tight
too close
too loose
nestled in the flesh
grounded
in the or either.
(13)

25Far from bowing down out of respect for the Queen, the narrator rather deconstructs her royal superiority as she is described through oxymoronic structures, (‘whore-wife’), (‘virgin-slut’) thus questioning her rights. The Queen is degraded and judged since she is associated with human weaknesses on the same level as any other woman. It is also implied that although she is a so-called Queen, she is also a Jemima figure, a reference to the African-American mammy archetype, the black southern domestic Aunt Jemima. Depicted as both white and black, as both powerful and weak, Queen Victoria’s superiority is subverted through a chaotic (‘chasm’), the white queen, symbol of British Colonial Imperialism, is objectified in the same way as the black enslaved/domestic females have been. She is turned into a nigger-woman and her intimate self is fragmented, the clash of words aiming to represent her as a (‘loose’) woman. The double entendre in the word (‘loose’) as well as the poem’s closure on the word (‘either’) associate the purity of the Queen to the insanity of lust, hence a judgment without appeal. Philip’s word-plays are significantly representative of her overall writing style as she is often in a counter-discursive mode and challenges the oppression of the English language itself. In fact, one may suggest that Looking for Livingstone is constructed on the trial mode as through her criticism of Livingstone, Philip establishes herself as the counsel for the defence of the former colonised. On the other hand, questioning his legitimacy, devaluing his discoveries and turning his heroism into derision, the black female narrator becomes the prosecutor of Livingstone and exposes all the pieces of evidence to find him guilty of forgery.

26In Zong!, she takes up the case of the drowned enslaved Africans and she forces the reader to review the legal case and reconsider the tragedy.

There is no evidence
in the against of winds
The consequence of currents
or
the apprehension of rains
The certain of value
or
the value in certain
against the rest in preservation
the save in residue
negroes exist
for the throwing. (34)

27By spreading her words on the page, Philip re-enacts the criminal act of drowning the slaves whose bones are now scattered at the bottom of the ocean. The poet lodges an appeal for the reader/juror to re-examine the archival legal text of the case of the Zong according to her own direction implying a process of retrospective justice. Endorsing the role of a lawyer, she puts the pieces of evidence forward for the reader/juror to return a new verdict. The ambiguity of the notion of value in slave legislation is emphasised through the antimetabole playing on the words (‘value’) and (‘certain’) in reversed order, a strategy which is reminiscent of Philip’s poetics of justice. Here Philip’s need for retrospective justice appears through the condemnation of the imperial and capitalist system of value which treated human beings as chattel. In fact, as Ian Baucom puts it, the slaves were treated not only as if they were a type of commodity but as flexible, negotiable, transactable form of money.

Absent this financial revolution in the business operation of the slave trade, absent this contract to treat human beings as a species of money, there would have been no incentive for Captain Collingwood to do what he did, to confidently massacre 132 slaves aboard the Zong, secure in the conviction that in doing so he was not destroying his employer’s commodities but hastening their transformation into money. (61-62)

28Taking the slave legislation to court and condemning its financially-based system of torture, Philip’s poetry refutes all the justifications that could have accounted for the tragedy and subverts the transformation of black bodies into money to transform them rather into bodies of speech. In fact, in Philip’s Zong!, law and money are pictured as drowned as they lose their value and legitimacy, whereas the bones of the slaves remain at the bottom of the sea. The names of the slaves which are always present at the bottom of the page remind the reader of these bones representing their identity and their enduring spiritual presence. The capitalist legal system is thus devalued while the enslaved Africans regained their human value, thus a sort of restorative justice is processed. Enhancing the author’s need for reparation, in Looking for Livingstone, the disregarded African tribes are named and made existent and even central to the narrative. Through a technique of ‘palindromes’ (Dupriez 1991: 313), Philip uses different anagrams of the word ‘silence’ to name each African tribe that she encounters during her journey: The SCENILE, the LENSECI, the ECNELIS, the NISCLEE, the CLEENIS, the NEELIS, and the CESLIENS. The capitals contribute to inscribing the undeniable presence of the African natives in the reader’s memory thus rehabilitating their history and restoring their being. While the narrator’s experience with each tribe is unique, her encounter and interaction with the African natives represent a testimony of the diversity of African rites and traditions. Throughout the story, the narrator’s anger towards Livingstone is revealed, as her aim is to recover the historical truth and denounce colonial domination over language and culture. Through a series of trials of initiation, the narrator progresses towards her encounter with Livingstone when she eventually confronts him and forces him to admit the historical truth since he did not actually discover Africa. In Zong!, the names of the enslaved Africans are also imagined and appear as recurrent footnotes thus magnifying their descent into the water; the footnote line symbolizing the unreachable surface of the ocean. Their names also epitomize their spiritual survival despite their physical murder, reminding us of the importance of ancestry in African culture.

29Fred D’Aguiar and Derek Walcott are both in agreement when they write respectively, ‘the sea is slavery’ (D’Aguiar 1997: 1) and ‘the sea is history’ (Walcott 1979: 30-32). NourbeSe Philip concurs with them in the afterword to Zong!:

Our entrance to the past is through memory—either oral or written. And water. In this case, salt water. Sea water. And, as the ocean appears to be the same yet is constantly in motion, affected by tidal movements, so too this memory appears stationary yet is shifting always. (201)

30Memory is ‘haunting’ (201) for Philip and, in order to express the inexpressible story of the Zong, NourbeSe Philip names her African ancestors and deploys fragments of words from European and Aboriginal languages to convey meaning. To recount the tragedy, Philip crosses the frontiers of the ‘unspeakable’ and of the unspoken to reach the status of the ‘unspeakable things spoken at last’ (Morrison 1970: 214). In Zong!, silence is materialised by the gaps and the blank spaces on the page. A universal message is thus implicitly conveyed; the same message as in Philip’s work overall, that the oppressed must resist the power of dominant discourses and turn silence into presence even by creating a new tongue. Through Philip’s poetics of justice, colonial law is drowned by subaltern justice but the reconstruction of the self depends on this process of plunging in order to come to terms with history and to renew the self.

31As a matter of fact, the difference between Caribbean historians and Caribbean writers lies in the fact that the former rely specifically on objective data analysis, whereas the latter inscribe their inner selves into their own representation and rewriting of history, and they often (re) discover themselves in this process of digging into history. As pointed out by Caribbean anthropologist and writer Erna Brodber,

What conclusively separates the works from history is the relationship of their writers’ ‘I’ to his data. While the historians, having collected his data, leaves them to move logically to a conclusion, the creative writer can impose his own sense of justice, his own feeling upon the data and guide them to a conclusion which accords with this prejudice. (14)

32As for Philip’s writing, it allows us to make the distinction between the lawyer and the poet of justice. In her legal practice, Philip would not have been allowed to express her emotions and fill in the gaps by re-imagining the missing witnesses, data and archives. In fact, she chooses to tell the ‘half that has never been told’ (4) as Jamaican poet Lorna Goodison puts it, thereby re-imagining a voice for the silenced enslaved Africans and providing them with a proper defence. Philip’s writing experience gave her the freedom to inscribe her very being in her work and do her ancestors justice, thus imposing her own vision of retrospective and restorative justice on the page.