Zong! is a 2008 book-length poem by Canadian writer M. NourbeSe Philip. The work was first published in the U.S. by Wesleyan University Press and by The Mercury Press in Canada. Phillip has frequently staged full-length readings of the poem internationally as performance art.
The poem focuses on victims of the Zong massacre, approximately 150 enslaved Africans who were murdered for insurance purposes in 1781. Reaction to the massacre and the lawsuits surrounding the case would propel the British abolitionist movement forward. The entire poem is composed solely of words found in the 1783 case Gregson v Gilbert which determined that the massacre was legal. [1]
In 2016, Phillip was approached by award-winning Italian translator Renata Morresi about translating her work for Italian audiences. Phillip would later go on to denounce the Italian translation after it went forward without her knowledge or consent after her American publishers sold the rights. [2]
Phillip has also accused Dutch playwright Rana Hamadeh of heavily using her research and poem in her opera The Ten Murders of Josephine . In a lengthy blog post she criticized Hamadeh for her use of the poem and its structure. [3]
The Aeneid is a Latin epic poem that tells the legendary story of Aeneas, a Trojan who fled the fall of Troy and travelled to Italy, where he became the ancestor of the Romans. Written by the Roman poet Virgil between 29 and 19 BC, the Aeneid comprises 9,896 lines in dactylic hexameter. The first six of the poem's twelve books tell the story of Aeneas' wanderings from Troy to Italy, and the poem's second half tells of the Trojans' ultimately victorious war upon the Latins, under whose name Aeneas and his Trojan followers are destined to be subsumed.
The Elaine massacre occurred on September 30 – October 2, 1919, at Hoop Spur in the vicinity of Elaine in rural Phillips County, Arkansas where African Americans were organizing against peonage and abuses in tenant farming. As many as several hundred African Americans and five white men were killed. Estimates of deaths made in the immediate aftermath of the Elaine Massacre by eyewitnesses range from 50 to "more than a hundred". Walter Francis White, an NAACP attorney who visited Elaine shortly after the incident, stated "... twenty-five Negroes killed, although some place the Negro fatalities as high as one hundred". More recent estimates in the 21st century of the number of black people killed during this violence are higher than estimates provided by the eyewitnesses, and have ranged into the hundreds. The white mobs were aided by federal troops and local terrorist organizations. Gov. Brough led a contingent of 583 US soldiers from Camp Pike, with a 12-gun machine gun battalion.
Erasure poetry, or blackout poetry, is a form of found poetry or found object art created by erasing words from an existing text in prose or verse and framing the result on the page as a poem. The results can be allowed to stand in situ or they can be arranged into lines and/or stanzas.
Jane Draycott FRSL is a British poet, artistic collaborator and poetry translator. She was born in London in 1954 and studied at King's College London and the University of Bristol. Draycott's fifth collection The Kingdom was published in 2023 by Carcanet Press.
The Zong massacre was a mass killing of more than 130 enslaved African people by the crew of the British slave ship Zong over several days from 29 November 1781. The William Gregson slave-trading syndicate, based in Liverpool, owned the ship as part of the Atlantic slave trade. As was common business practice, they had taken out insurance on the lives of the enslaved Africans as cargo. According to the crew, when the ship ran low on drinking water after a series of navigational errors, the crew threw enslaved Africans overboard.
Shani Mootoois a Trinidadian-Canadian writer, visual artist and video maker. She was born in Dublin, Ireland, in 1957 to Trinidadian parents. She grew up in Trinidad and relocated at the age of 19 to Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. She currently lives in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
Carolyn Forché is an American poet, editor, professor, translator, and human rights advocate. She has received many awards for her literary work.
George Jonas, CM was a Hungarian-born Canadian writer, poet, and journalist. A self-described classical liberal, he authored 16 books, including the bestseller Vengeance (1984), the story of an Israeli operation to kill the terrorists responsible for the 1972 Munich massacre. The book has been adapted for film twice, first as Sword of Gideon (1986) and as Munich (2005).
Lorna Gaye Goodison CD is a Jamaican poet, essayist and memoirist, a leading West Indian writer, whose career spans four decades. She is now Professor Emerita, English Language and Literature/Afroamerican and African Studies at the University of Michigan, previously serving as the Lemuel A. Johnson Professor of English and African and Afroamerican Studies. She was appointed Poet Laureate of Jamaica in 2017, serving in the role until 2020.
Marlene Nourbese Philip, usually credited as M. NourbeSe Philip, is a Canadian poet, novelist, playwright, essayist and short story writer.
Richard Whittington-Egan was a British writer and criminologist, the author of Liverpool Colonnade and Liverpool Roundabout, two colourful chronicles of Liverpool's historical characters, crimes and mysteries. A leading author on true crime over a long period of time, he is acknowledged also as an expert on Jack the Ripper.
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature.
Heather McHugh is an American poet notable for Dangers, To the Quick, Eyeshot and Muddy Matterhorn. McHugh was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in the US and a Griffin Poetry Prize in Canada, and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She taught for thirty years at the University of Washington in Seattle and held visiting chairs at Berkeley, Stanford, Columbia, Syracuse, UCLA and elsewhere.
The Nepalese royal massacre occurred on 1 June 2001 at the Narayanhiti Palace, the then-residence of the Nepali monarchy. Nine members of the royal family, including King Birendra and Queen Aishwarya, were killed in a mass shooting during a gathering of the royal family at the palace. A government-appointed inquiry team named Crown Prince Dipendra as perpetrator of the massacre. Dipendra slipped into a coma after shooting himself in the head.
Zong may refer to:
Liao Yiwu is a Chinese author, reporter, musician, and poet. He is a critic of China's Communist Party, for which he was imprisoned in 1990. His books, several of which are collections of interviews with ordinary people from the lower rungs of Chinese society, were published in Taiwan and Hong Kong but are banned in mainland China; some have been translated into Spanish, English, French, German, Polish and Czech. He has been living in Germany since April 2011.
The Blythes Are Quoted is a book completed by Canadian author L. M. Montgomery (1874–1942) near the end of her life but not published in its entirety until 2009. It is her eleventh book to feature Anne Shirley Blythe, who first appears in her first and best-known novel, Anne of Green Gables (1908), and then in Anne of Avonlea (1909), Chronicles of Avonlea (1912), Anne of the Island (1915), Anne's House of Dreams (1917), Rainbow Valley (1919), Further Chronicles of Avonlea (1920), Rilla of Ingleside (1921), Anne of Windy Poplars (1936), and Anne of Ingleside (1939). It consists of an experimental blend of fifteen short stories, forty-one poems, and numerous vignettes featuring Anne and members of her family discussing her poetry. The book focuses on small-town life in Glen St. Mary, Prince Edward Island, and is divided into two halves: one preceding the events of the First World War and one relating incidents after the war, up to and including the beginning of the Second World War.
Poems about Babi Yar commemorate the massacres committed by the Nazi Einsatzgruppe during World War II at Babi Yar, in a ravine located within the present-day Ukrainian capital of Kyiv. In just one of these atrocities – taking place over September 29–30, 1941 – 33,771 Jewish men, women and children were killed in a single Einsatzgruppe operation.
Rana Hamadeh is an artist from Lebanon based in the Netherlands. Her interdisciplinary projects span theatrical performances, sound, text and cartographic works, among others, allowing for a discursive approach to subject matter.
George Case (1747–1836) was a British slave trader who was responsible for at least 109 slave voyages. Case was the co-owner of the slave ship Zong, whose crew perpetrated the Zong massacre. After the massacre, the ship owners went to court in an attempt to secure an insurance payout of £30 for each enslaved person murdered. A public outcry ensued and strengthened the abolition movement in the United Kingdom. In 1781, he became Mayor of Liverpool. After he died, the wealth generated by his slavery was bequeathed to the Case Fund by his grandson.