Breaking the Silence, Breathing for the Dead: Poetics of Stuttering in M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong!

This article argues that the “stuttering tongue” from M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong! (2008) challenges the historical silence of the trans-Atlantic slave trade and the subsequent commodification of the Black diaspora. The article first attends to the legal and capitalistic forces behind the Middle Passage, which fragmented Black personhood into a condition of perpetual non-being. Drawing upon the Black feminist poetics that expands on theories of stuttering, hauntology, and decolonial writing to propose an ethical-aesthetic framework for recounting colonial atrocities, I analyze how Philip’s stuttering disrupts the impossibility of bearing coherent witness to the horrors of the Middle Passage. While Philip’s metaphoric of the tongue exposes the enforced silence of the colonial and linguistic violence, I further contend that her poetic labor of stuttering reclaims the tongue’s agentive force, allowing it to “breathe” for the victims of the slave trade.