going overboard: african american poetic innovation and the middle passage

Going Overboard: African American Poetic Innovation and theMiddle Passage

Evie Shockley

Contemporary Literature, Volume 52, Number 4, Winter 2011, pp. 791-817(Article)

Published by University of Wisconsin PressDOI: 10.1353/cli.2011.0051

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Contemporary Literature 52, 4 0010-7484; E-ISSN 1548-9949/11/0004-0791� 2011 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System

E V I E S H O C K L E Y

Going Overboard: African American PoeticInnovation and the Middle Passage

I n 2008, in a single issue of American Poet, the biannual jour-nal of the Academy of American Poets, two unrelatedessays made the same claim—namely, that there has been anoteworthy trend in American poetry toward the historical

poem. That both essay writers, Major Jackson and NatashaTrethewey, are African American is more than a coincidence, andwe should not be surprised to find both essays citing a healthynumber of African American poets as examples (and forerun-ners) of this trend. Jackson pointedly acknowledges the politicalwork that poets of color and immigrant poets have performedin writing poems about our histories—broadly speaking, thework of complicating and filling in the “official record” (5). Iwould add to that accounting white women poets, who have alsobeen engaged (more and less overtly) in the project of makingpoetry tell on the willful blindnesses and smothering silences ofan “‘authorized’ history” that has located the story of our past,by and large, in the places and occupations filled by society’smost powerful people (5).

If African American poets and poets writing from similar posi-tions of exclusion and marginalization have led the way towarda recognition of the richness and power of poems treating his-tory, the growing popularity of this genre has only intensifiedtheir engagement with it. Jackson names a number of youngerAfrican American poets, in particular, who in the last decadehave published whole collections of compelling poems with ahistorical bent, including Amaud Jamal Johnson (Red Summer),

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A. Van Jordan (M⋅A⋅C⋅N⋅O⋅L⋅I⋅A), and Trethewey herself (NativeGuard) (3, 6). To these we might add the names of poets frompreceding generations whose recent publications have alsofocused on people and events of the past, such as Marilyn Nel-son, writing alone (A Wreath for Emmett Till) and collaboratingwith Elizabeth Alexander (Miss Crandall’s School for Young Ladiesand Little Misses of Color), and Rita Dove (Sonata Mulattica). Thetexts named here are only a sampling of the collections that Imight point to and do not even begin to account for the numer-ous individual poems that fall into this category. These workscollectively cover a good bit of historical territory, both withinand beyond the contours of North America, as in the case ofDove’s book, for example, which vibrantly imagines the story ofa violinist of African descent living in late-eighteenth-centuryEurope.

What is most striking to me, however, is that this explosion ofhistorical poems by African Americans has brought with it anoticeable increase in poems treating the era, the institution, thecondition of slavery. While treatments of and references to slav-ery and enslaved people have consistently appeared in poetryby African Americans since Phillis Wheatley (who occupied thepositions of “poet” and “slave” simultaneously) was writing,slavery has not really loomed large on the landscape of the tra-dition as a primary focus. But recent years have seen a noticeablywider variety of poets refracting this most painful aspect of Afri-can American experience through the prism of the imagination.Fred D’Aguiar (Bloodlines), Thylias Moss (Slave Moth), VieveeFrancis (Blue-Tail Fly), Quraysh Ali Lansana (They Shall Run: Har-riet Tubman Poems), and Camille Dungy (Suck on the Marrow), toname a few, are among the poets who have published entirevolumes within the past decade that are predominantly aboutthe enslaved and events occurring during the antebellum andCivil War periods. Moreover, these poets represent a range ofaesthetics, from D’Aguiar’s steadfastly formal ottava rima stan-zas to Moss’s fluid, free-verse lines of undulating lengths. I amexcited to find Trethewey accurate in her observation that thelively response of American poets to “the muse of history”—including African American poets engaging specifically with this

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history of slavery—comes in both “traditional” and “experimen-tal” styles (28). As the increased visibility of African Americanpoetic innovation is also a noteworthy (and long overdue) devel-opment in the poetics of this first decade of the twenty-first cen-tury, it is perhaps appropriate that this essay will discuss twoworks that participate in both the tradition of African Americanexperimentation and the tradition of African American poeticengagements with slavery’s history. One is a single, stunningpoem from the second book by Californian Douglas Kearney,“Swimchant for Nigger Mer-folk (An Aquaboogie Set in Lapis)”;the other is Zong!, the most recent volume by Trinidadian-born,Toronto-based poet M. NourbeSe Philip.1

Arguably, the poem that most famously thematizes and sym-bolizes the poetic engagement of women poets with the patri-archal history of what we refer to as “Western culture” isAdrienne Rich’s “Diving into the Wreck.” Riffing on Rich’s mem-orable title, we might say that for African American poets, “thewreck” under investigation is refigured as a slave ship. Indeed,the poem perhaps best known for treating the history of slav-ery—one which in fact revived this subject matter in the mid-twentieth century, after it had lain dormant for several decades—is Robert Hayden’s “Middle Passage” (cf. Charras 57). Hayden,who also wrote about the enslaved after their arrival in the “NewWorld,” created a modernist masterpiece in his collaged, poly-vocal rendering of the “voyage through death” that transportedmillions of African people away from their home continent—anddeposited fewer millions on the shores of North and SouthAmerica (48). Many of the people who started out from the west-ern coast of Africa died during the crossing from a ghastly vari-ety of unnatural causes, of which literal shipwrecks wereperhaps the least horrible. Yet studying the submerged and rot-ting remains of wrecked slavers has provided historians withimportant information about the conditions of and passengers

1. To be clear, I am advisedly using the term “African American” in its broad sense,to include not just black poets native to or living in the U.S., but those in the Americasgenerally (as delimited by a focus on English-language poetry).


on these voyages, as in the case of the Henrietta Marie, whichwent down off the coast of Florida in 1700 and was rediscoverednearly three hundred years later. News of this find, which beganto be disseminated popularly in the 1990s, and the correspond-ing reexamination of the Middle Passage it engendered amongscholars may well have contributed to the increasing interest ofAfrican American poets in writing about the slave trade andslavery, in part because it concretized for new generations thepaucity of information available, especially information abouthow the enslaved themselves experienced the Atlantic crossing.2

Scholars and creative writers alike have attempted to use thefragmentary evidence available to understand the captive Afri-cans as passengers—albeit involuntary ones—with a subjectiveexperience of the journey, rather than as “cargo,” which is howthe ships’ logs and other official documents framed them.

Accordingly, the first way in which I intend the title of thisessay to resonate is as a metaphor based upon the work of thedivers who recovered the beads, shackles, and other artifacts stillon board the Henrietta Marie in the late twentieth century. Likethese marine researchers, poets Doug Kearney and NourbeSePhilip are “going overboard,” so to speak, “diving into thewreck” to see what histories are preserved there. The aptness ofthis metaphor is underscored by Lorrie Smith’s observation thatMiddle Passage literature participates in “a long continuum ofliterary projects mapping black cultural geography . . . as a medi-ation of surface and depths,” including, for example, “the abyss

2. Madeleine Burnside notes that the discovery of the Henrietta Marie did not makethe popular news until 1991, but as the story began to circulate in the press, it led to adeep-sea commemoration ceremony in 1993 (179–80); the publication in 1997 of a gor-geously illustrated, beautifully written history of the Middle Passage enlarging upon theinformation generated or confirmed by the Henrietta Marie; and a museum exhibitionthat traveled to several states and at least two Caribbean islands. Scholarly attention tothis aspect of slavery is evidenced, for example, by the publication in 1999 of the oft-cited Black Imagination and the Middle Passage, a collection of essays by academics in thefields of literature, history, American studies, and Afro-American studies that discusseswhat is known about the conditions of the Atlantic crossing for those captured intoslavery and the ways in which the crossing is remembered in the cultural production ofmembers of the African diaspora (Diedrich, Gates, and Pedersen).

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of the undersea Atlantic and the surface on which ships crossed”(424). Smith’s essay goes on to argue that among writers’ dis-coveries when they go below the surface of the Atlantic are the“ghosts of history” who can “guide . . . the living toward spiritualwholeness” (425). Smith draws on the work of American studiesscholar Helene Christol, who understands the “black revenant”to have the power, at least symbolically, to “recreate[] a lostorder” and help “heal the community” (Christol 165; qtd. inSmith 422). Smith attributes this movement toward a conjoined“wholeness” and “healing” (425) even to “postmodern” or“experimental” black poetics of the type described by NathanielMackey’s discussion of “the bass notes of insubordination”(Smith 424) emitted by the “fugitive spirit” moving “from nounto verb,” and similar spatial configurations conceptualized byWilson Harris and Kamau Brathwaite, among others (Mackey269, 268; qtd. in Smith 424).

I want to suggest that the particular postmodernist strategiesemployed by Kearney and Philip in the poems I discuss belowdo not (and do not seek to) produce a representation or experi-ence of wholeness out of the voices and fragments that comprisetheir writings. The ghosts haunting their poetry may ultimatelyfacilitate a process of healing; however, they do so not by con-structing a textual “wholeness” but by confronting head-on theevidence of the ongoing injuries and losses, the gaps andabsences, that the Middle Passage literally and symbolically ini-tiated. As my readings of “Swimchant” and Zong! will demon-strate, Kearney and Philip work with disjunctive and fragmenteddiscourse to reveal the persistent role of language in producingAfrican American subjectivity. In other words, these poemsargue that the Middle Passage was a rupture that has been andcontinues to be inscribed in multiple discourses informing andshaping the subject position of African Americans, even into thefirst decade of the twenty-first century. Any healing to be foundin these poems will be produced not through a textually manu-factured wholeness, but through a reckoning with the discursiveevidence of that rupture.


“Swimchant for Nigger Mer-folk” is a breathtaking response tothe “call” of Hayden’s “Middle Passage.” Kearney’s work excitesand overwhelms a reader familiar with the Hayden poem bymanaging to function as homage while taking a largely differentaesthetic approach and ending up, arguably, in a different place.3

While taking his historical cues from Hayden (the Middle Pas-sage setting, the stunning objectification of the “cargo” by thecrew, and the sharks trailing the ships to take advantage of whatinevitably followed from this objectification), Kearney sets asidethe gravitas that Hayden brings to his work and takes more ofhis aesthetic cues from writers like Ishmael Reed, Harryette Mul-len, and even Melvin Tolson.4 Hayden’s modernist collagebecomes, in Kearney’s hands, something closer to postmodernpastiche. As David Mikics has argued with respect to Reed, Kear-ney’s relationship to postmodern techniques does not suggest anunderstanding of postmodern culture as an inescapable totality(para. 9). Rather, Kearney’s yoking together in “Swimchant” ofmultiple, incongruous, and incommensurate discourses assumesthe possibility of critical distance from and resistance to the con-sumerist (and racist) mass culture that theories of the postmod-ern posit—an assumption not unrelated to the fact that his workboth draws from and signifies upon African American culture.5

Less inclined to outright parody than Reed, Kearney also seems

3. A full reading of the Hayden poem is outside the scope of this essay, but interestedreaders could begin by turning to Francoise Charras’s article comparing Hayden’s andBrathwaite’s poetic treatments of the Middle Passage. Her discussion of “Middle Pas-sage” informs the brief references I make to it herein.

4. Lorenzo Thomas, writing about Tolson, compares the excessive gestures of hispoetry to the restraint of fellow modernists like Countee Cullen and Claude McKay, whopreferred “to express themselves with dignity” (98). Hayden’s modernism would seemto be in this latter vein.

5. Mikics points us toward sources in African American literary criticism and theory:“The sort of reconciliation between an African-American tradition and postmodernismthat I have hinted at has been offered in the context of [Ishmael] Reed’s work by HenryLouis Gates, Jr., and the late James Snead, both of whom speak of Reed as demonstratingaffinities between his own postmodern technique and the techniques of ‘signifying’ inblack culture. Snead specifically points to sudden rhythmic juxtaposition and syncretism,two features of African religion and music that are echoed in Reed’s work. Gates andSnead, by making their connection between Africa and Reed, imply that postmodernismcan be rooted, even if only by analogy, in a specific cultural tradition, such as that of theAfrican-American” (para. 13).

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to be influenced by Mullen in her tendency to ground critiquein language play, an approach to humor that leans more towardirony than mockery.

Yet Kearney does share with Reed a willingness to treat serioussubjects with outrageous humor, rather than as semisacred orprimarily heroic (as in Hayden’s portrait of “Cinquez,” theleader of the Amistad rebellion). Indeed, I see Kearney engagedin a similar project to the one Hortense Spillers attributes to Reedin her reading of how his novel Flight to Canada relates to HarrietBeecher Stowe’s archetypal text Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Spillers arguesthat Reed creates “a fictionalized ‘slavery’” (53) that allows himto appropriate and resituate certain now-conventional “iconiccodes” in order “to change the topic and the strategies that deter-mine it” (52). She values his “absurdist, dystopian, mocking” (31)treatment of slavery precisely because it demonstrates our capac-ity for “movement out of the ‘perceptual cramp’” connected withthe subject—in other words, because Reed’s work illustrates that“[w]e can, ‘in fact,’ construct and reconstruct repertoires of usageout of the most painful human/historical experience” (52). Kear-ney’s work strikes me as likewise seeking a productive, usablere-vision of the Middle Passage, one that will speak to a differentset of social conditions than those within which Hayden wrote.But Kearney does not have a bone to pick with Hayden, in theway Reed has with Stowe; rather, Kearney’s impulse to revisecomes, I would argue, from the difference between what it meansto write about race in an America on the cusp of integration (or,at least, the end of state-ratified segregation) and what it meanswhen one is writing after more than thirty years of an unevennational experiment with outlawing racial discrimination.Whereas Reed is involved in what Henry Louis Gates, Jr., wouldcall “motivated Signifyin(g)” vis-a-vis Stowe’s novel, Kearney’s“Signifyin(g)” seems to be “unmotivated,” or not invested in a“negative critique” of Hayden’s poem (Gates xxvi).6

Kearney’s poem—by presenting in the title itself what wouldappear to be two differently positioned speakers—signals imme-

6. The difference between Gates’s “movitated” and “unmotivated” modes of “Signi-fyin(g)” maps onto the distinction between parody and pastiche (xxvi).


diately that we are going to have to read both with and againstthe language we encounter. The main title indicates that the“Swimchant” (lines to recite while treading water?) is being oh-so-helpfully proffered to “Nigger Mer-folk”—a use of the infa-mous epithet that is clearly not recuperative or recuperated.Asking myself why this is clear led me to a new awareness of thegrammar of black vernacular: the affectionate or “reclaimed” useof the n-word involves the noun form almost exclusively.7 As anadjective modifying a noun (such as “Mer-folk” or “president,”for example), which is not a commonly seen or heard black ver-nacular usage, the term reads as hostile. The parenthetical sub-title, “(An Aquaboogie Set in Lapis),” on the other hand,suggests a black speaker, who uses a knowledge of the culturalsignificance of P-Funk to comment on or recast the main title.8

Given this setup, we can appreciate the possibilities of double-voicedness in the poem’s first line, which begins with a quotationfrom the Parliament song to which the subtitle refers: “neverlearned to swim/but me sho can d i v e.”9 The distinction herebetween swimming and diving recalls the paradoxical relation-ship between swimming and dancing in the song. Parliamenttells us that “with the rhythm it takes to dance / to what we haveto live through / you could dance underwater and not get wet!”What does this observation, aimed at late-1970s black listeners,mean in relation to the speaker of the poem’s first line, who dives(voluntarily or not?) from a “VERMILION SHIP”—red with theblood of the slave trade—into the Atlantic? To see the small ital-ics of the first line tumble over the side of the large, bold font ofthe next two lines (lines which invoke and visually represent theslave ship) and into the undulating fourth line, which depictsthe ocean, is to find oneself as reader “going overboard” alongwith some of the millions of captives who never made it “to life

7. The fact that the word is “reclaimed” only for a very specific and limited usagesuggests that it is not really reclaimed at all—an insight I owe to writer and professorTisa Bryant.

8. “P-Funk” refers to the particular brand of funk music produced by the GeorgeClinton bands Parliament and Funkadelic.

9. “Swimchant” appears in Kearney’s book The Black Automaton spread across versoand recto pages (62–63) as if they were a single page.

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upon these shores,” in Hayden’s words (48). What can be thepurpose of revisiting this tragically recurring scene? Why writethis poem in the first decade of the twenty-first century? Whycreate puns about the sharks that trailed the slave ships, assuredof regular meals (“mako wish / ye black fish / mako feed / beblack bleed”)? The poem’s multiple, competing voices don’tmake clear-cut pronouncements easy, but its sheer chutzpahcompels us to read on and grapple with these and other ques-tions that arise.

We proceed without knowing precisely where we are going,or in whose company—as did the Africans who ended up onthese cursed vessels. Is this “An Aquaboogie Set” (a session offunky music) being played “in Lapis” (the gorgeous blue of theocean)? Or is it “An Aquaboogie” (a funky survival dance) “Setin Lapis”—placed in a blue setting, or inscribed permanently in(blue)stone? I purposefully invite the alternative reading of “bluestone” as “blues tone,” because the blues are among the severalAfrican American cultural references, in addition to P-Funk, thatthe poem riffs upon. Along with the mournful wail of the bluestrumpet (“D’WAH-WAH OOO”), we hear the girls’ game of“Little Sally Walker” (“let yo fishbone slip ’omen”), LangstonHughes’s “I, Too” (his song of America—“Tomorrow, / I’ll be atthe table / when company comes”—floats just beneath lines like“they’s comp’ny / comin comin”), and the specifically Jamaicanblack vernacular term for ghosts (in “duppyguppies”). Theseallusions counterbalance the weight of the other discourses thaterupt in the poem’s lines. Those discourses, manifested in ref-erences that are just as absurdly anachronistic as the ones to Afri-can American culture, nonetheless point us toward the socialforces, beliefs, and institutions whose language has created andperpetuated the racist conditions under which African and Afri-can-descended human beings could be understood as so “differ-ent” from the white norm as to justify their treatment as non- orsubhuman objects.

For example, right away, Kearney brings in the discourse ofeconomics, particularly the capitalist system that underwrote thetransatlantic slave trade. The second and third lines of the poemcompose a couplet that illustrates the slippery duplicity of lan-


guage, whose sounds can be heard in significantly different waysby different listeners. The first line of the couplet, “O, VERMIL-ION SHIP—D’WAH-WAH OOO,” combines a damning apos-trophe with a horn’s inarticulate but deeply expressive bluesnotes (hear the trumpet and mournful mute). The second linemakes the same morphemes tell quite a different story—or, moreaccurately, tell the same story from quite a different perspective:“OVER MILLIONS SHIPPED. WAH-WAH-OO.” “Millionsshipped” is directly out of the discourse of marketing. Googlingit indicates that the phrase appears frequently on the websitesof companies selling pharmaceuticals, but it also recalls for methe words that often fell just below the company name on thosesigns with the golden arches, with a space for the ever-growingnumbers: “Over __ Million Served.” In the second half of theline, even the representation of “pure” sound has changed. If weare reading carefully, we notice that not only has the d soundmigrated away, but the final syllable has one less o and is nowlinked with a hyphen to the preceding sounds. To my eye andear (and both are called upon by Kearney’s energetic poetic strat-egies), this alteration changes the sonic phrase from a horn’sblues to a pop song’s (black) backup.10 We interrupt this ritualperformance of black blues for a message from our sponsor. Languagecannot be trusted.

As we “slip” beneath the waves suggested by the next line ofthe poem (in which “fishbone” echoes “backbone” and “wish-bone”—both of which might have their uses here), we becomeprivy to what is going on underwater, what “Poseidon[’s] . . .foaming shroud assured no one will see.” A series of three sonicallyplayful sestets sink diagonally down the space of the page—deeper and deeper underwater, would be the visual metaphor.As depicted in lines that run not parallel but at sharp angles toone another, a variety of shark species—“mako,” “hammer-

10. I have in mind here Kate Rushin’s amazing poem “The Black Back-Ups,” which isdedicated to “the Black women who sang back-up for Elvis Presley, John Denver, JamesTaylor, Lou Reed. Etc. Etc. Etc.” and “the women who open those bundles of dirty laun-dry sent home from those ivy-covered campuses,” among others (18). I do not suggestthat Kearney is referencing Rushin; rather, I think her poem illustrates the sometimesinaudible presence of blues undertones in pop music.

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heads,” and “great white”—are making a meal of the bodies thatthe slave ships could be counted on to provide. The typographyis beyond what I can replicate here, but the text of the third ofthese stanzas will nonetheless convey a sense of how Kearney ismanipulating sound (and toying with a very grim humor) in thissection of the poem: “grate white jaw / AW! great white /jaw-jaw juju / gnaw-gnaw NO! NO . . . / they’s comp’ny /dinin dinin.” The fourth and final stanza in this series finds thehuman bodies transformed into “duppyguppies,” a combinationword that indicates their status as shark food and, simulta-neously, as ghosts. The short, punchy lines of this section of thepoem are juxtaposed with the long, lyrical lines of the quintetjust adjacent to them. This five-line stanza pays homage tonallyto Hayden while incorporating Kearney’s own aesthetic of lin-guistic and sonic play. Kearney proceeds via a more somber useof rhyme to music his way across some of the same painful andhorrific circumstances treated half-humorously in the precedingstanzas: “and all about was a darkening cloud and the gullets filled ofbrine and kine [cattle/chattel] / charnel channel of a deep blue.” Bothsections draw attention to their status as poetry through theirconspicuous use of poetic strategies that seem inappropriate,perhaps, for such a mournful chapter of history, the first set toolight, the second too lovely. Together, the two sections might beunderstood to comment on the professed contradiction betweenthe beauty of lyric poetry and the deeply troubling subject matterof poems like this one, in a way that half-affirms TheodorAdorno’s conclusion concerning poetry after Auschwitz and half-confirms the claim made earlier in this essay, that language cannotbe trusted—in poetic discourse no more and no less than in othertypes.

The poem also takes its language from the discourse of capi-talism in one of its other guises—as mass-media pop culture.Song lyrics from the 1989 Disney movie The Little Mermaid areall too easily repurposed for Kearney’s poem, because the num-ber is calypso-inspired and sung by a crab (“a pair of raggitclaws” [Kearney]) with a generic Anglophone Caribbean accent.In the movie, the lyrics are meant to convince Ariel, the titlecharacter, that she is better off “under the sea” than in the human


world above the water’s surface. As applied to “nigger mer-folk,” who have involuntarily made the reverse of the transfor-mation Ariel longs for, Sebastian-the-crab’s question—“whatmore is you lookin for?”—becomes offensive . . . or laughable, ifthe shock of recognizing the Disney tune hits you in a certainplace. Having what amounts to an apologia for the bloody, inhu-mane deaths of enslaved Africans voiced by a speaker obviouslyintended to sound like an African American is a prime exampleof the kind of excessive, iconoclastic, postmodernist move thatidentifies Kearney as an heir, in part, to Reed. At the same time,the line becomes a commentary on the racial politics of Disney,which presents the people (human and mer-folk) in The LittleMermaid as racially white (though the villainess is notably bluein hue), while black culture is buried (at sea?), so to speak, withinthe figure of a crustacean. The poem thus draws a line tracing atleast two centuries of commodification of black culture to theostensibly originary moment of the transatlantic slave trade, inwhich Africans were consumed directly as commodities.

Legal discourse is foregrounded as well, not surprisingly. Thischoice marks another moment of unmotivated signifyin(g) uponHayden’s “Middle Passage,” which quotes the actual or fictionaltestimony of a person who survived a shipboard fire that took“the burning blacks” and “shrieking negresses” to an unthink-ably miserable death (50). The gruesome outline of the events ofthe day, which includes the rape of “the comeliest / of the savagegirls,” is set forth quite matter-of-factly and concludes with thewholly ironic line, “Further Deponent sayeth not.” Kearney’sreturn to the discourse of the law follows Hayden’s lead, butonce again via a different aesthetic path. In a move that recallsMullen’s pointed prose poem “We Are Not Responsible,” Kear-ney parodies the language of legal disclaimers. In a voice whoseauthority is suggested by its all-caps, boldface font, the captivesare advised not to “BLEED IN THE SEA,” because “THESTAINS WON’T WASH OUT. WE AIN’T’NT RESPONSIBLEFOR YOUR MESS.” This notice, signed by “THEE MANAGE-

MENT” (which implicates the religious discourse critiqued muchmore strongly by Hayden’s poem), is simultaneously one of thefunniest and most grimly ironic gestures in the poem. The reader

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has to double back to be certain that, yes, Kearney did just rhyme“MERNINNIES” with “SARDINNIES.” And, yes, the very peo-ple who have deliberately misrecognized the Africans chainedto their ships as “cattle/chattel” and/or as “mer-folk” (fantasticalcreatures who have some human characteristics but belongunderwater?) now assert that they “AIN’T’NT RESPONSIBLE”for the disastrous circumstances in which the enslaved findthemselves. The double negative in the phrase is striking; whileit suggests the black vernacular, it is not to my knowledge ausage that is true to the speech patterns of African Americans.Thus I read it, coming out of the mouth of this presumably white(slave-trading) speaker, as a bit of “blackvoice” minstrelsy thattells on itself, insofar as the second “not” in the contraction can-cels out the first one. Still, the line highlights the (il)logic of thedisclaimer: under the law, if an enterprise posts a disclaimer,those with whom it does business are put on notice that respon-sibility for certain injuries cannot be attributed to it. Whether theenterprise should be held responsible is another question alto-gether, and one that the law does not entertain.

Kearney is a wizardly manipulator of language, as speech andas text.11 He is also an artist deeply steeped in the African Amer-ican and American poetic traditions. In “Swimchant,” he hastranslated his skills and knowledge base into an homage thatoffers a friendly yet chilling amendment to the original it revises.Hayden’s powerful poem gains its majesty from his ability totransform the cold, distancing, hypocritical discourses of nine-teenth-century economics, law, and religion into a poetic lan-guage of utter beauty, while at the same time mining theideology of “unlove” (51) contained in these discourses for thenugget of hope that they contain, almost in spite of themselves—the evidence of “[t]he deep immortal human wish” that cannotbe extinguished (53). Kearney, writing more than a half-centurylater, revisits those discourses in their twentieth- and twenty-first-century manifestations, purposefully inscribing them, pal-

11. A video recording of Kearney reading/performing the poem can currently befound on his website’s audio-video page (http://www.douglaskearney.com/p-p). It iswell worth checking out—but it is also worth my insisting that the poem’s shape on thepage is as essential an aspect of the poem as its oral qualities.


impsest-style, over the same eighteenth- and nineteenth-centuryhistorical period that Hayden had treated. Where Hayden cre-ated a poetic language that seemed “natural” for the historicalperiod and fitting for the subject matter, Kearney’s anachronisticallusions, “sacrilegious” humor, and audacious use of varioussonic and visual devices make language itself as much the sub-ject of the poem as the history it revisits. Kearney is not a Lan-guage poet, nor is he aiming to be, but this aspect of his poemmight be usefully placed in conversation with Marjorie Perloff’sdescription of “the animating principle” of Language poetry, that“poetic language is not a window, to be seen through, a trans-parent glass pointing to something outside it, but a system ofsigns with its own semilogical ‘interconnectedness’” (336). WhileKearney’s “Swimchant” has some elements in common withpoems that cultivate the kind of transparency that Languagepoetry rejects, I would argue that he very purposefully fogs thewindow, so to speak, in his poem, so that we cannot ignore whatwe are looking through. He thus calls our attention to the systemof signs connecting the phenomenon of the Middle Passage andall that it entails to the ongoing racism whose impact on thepossibilities and circumstances of African Americans remainsdeeply felt to this day.

Obviously, the commodification of blackness no longer func-tions via chattel slavery, but there is a continuum that we needto have our eye on, the poem suggests. The othering of blackpeople and devaluation of black lives still leads to millions ofunacceptable deaths, in the “New” and “Old” Worlds, thoughthe contemporary beneficiaries of these practices do not includesharks, except metaphorically. Hayden’s “Middle Passage” con-cludes with a phrase used in the beginning of the poem to signalirony and resignation, but whose meaning, by the end, has beeninfused with a fierce optimism: “Voyage through death / to lifeupon these shores” (54). The penultimate line of Kearney’s poemsharply curtails both Hayden’s wording and his optimism:“{Voyage: through.}.” Bracketed and small beneath the all-uppercase letters of the disclaimer notice it follows, these wordsmight be described as the “fin(e)???” print. But their significanceresonates: the language that relegated millions and millions of

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Africans to the condition of “duppyguppies” and “nigger mer-folk” still egregiously overdetermines the circumstances of Afri-can Americans today. For too many, the voyage ends in theMiddle: we “can’t re-member” those destroyed in the Passage, andhistory’s “stains won’t wash out.”

The unflinching analysis in the poem’s ending, with its call forthis recognition of the past in the present, should not, however,eclipse the earlier sections of the poem, which, in retrospect, Iread as a kind of swimming lesson. For all of its painful subjectsand disturbingly funny gestures, the poem provides us with “anaquaboogie set in lapis”: a blue(s) funk, a funky blue(s), a man-ifestation (and an echo) of the African American cultural mate-rial—literature, music, intricate wordplay, and ability to laughoutrageously in the face of outrageous events—that enables usto “dance underwater and not get wet.”

Kearney’s “Swimchant” presents us with multiple voices but notvoices that are “representative,” in a realist sense, of thosebelonging to the survivors or the fatalities of the Middle Passage.In that way, as well as in his postmodernist approach to employ-ing humor to explore one of the most ghastly aspects of ourhistory, Kearney produces a poem different from the majority ofAfrican American historical poems, which seek—quite under-standably and admirably—to give full-throated voice to thosewhom the official history has silenced. For the poet to imagina-tively reconstitute those voices is to exercise and re-present anagency that was denied to the historical figures or, alternatively,made invisible. Kearney’s poem takes another approach to hon-oring what has been lost; it instead underscores the irrecovera-bility of those voices by giving us in their place, so to speak, aspirited series of utterances that remind us of what is absent viaexcessive strategies of postmodernist play. This paradox is whathe gestures toward with the phrase “c’ant remember”: as hedescribes it, it suggests how the “c(h)ant” marks “a simultaneousmemory and amnesia” (“Re:”).12

12. I took the liberty of asking Kearney about the one word in the poem that I couldn’taccount for (“c’ant”). I am grateful for his willingness to respond to my question.


This paradox is likewise a point of connection between Kear-ney’s poem and the dramatically different sensibility of M.NourbeSe Philip’s book of Middle Passage poetry, Zong! Philipengages “the poetics of fragmentation” (202) to conjure a “fuguestate” (“Fugues” par. 25) in her work about one particularly pain-ful and iconic instance of the Middle Passage phenomenon: theZong massacre, in which the captain of the slave ship of thatname jettisoned more than a hundred African captives for insur-ance purposes. A “fugue state,” in Robert W. Rudnicki’s account,which Philip quotes from and discusses at length, is a “dissoci-ative disorder,” representing “an escape from one mode of con-sciousness to another, and a literal escape from home to a newor unfamiliar place,” as the individual, detached from his or herown past, creates a new identity (Rudnicki 9; Philip, “Fugues”par. 25). Relating this condition to her use of fragmentation,which so markedly characterizes Zong!, Philip writes:

The fragment is both/and: containing the w/hole while being at the sametime a part of the w/hole—it compels us to see both the w/hole and thehole: impulse to memory and impulse to amnesia. The fragment is notstatic; it contains its opposite and it is that opposite—the impulse to for-getting and erasure that I call the fugue.

(“Fugues” par. 24)

Philip, like Kearney, chooses to revisit the history of the MiddlePassage via a poetics that does not attempt to fill the “hole” inthe record but rather to remember the absences, the silences,and to remember that they are evidence of an irrecoverable“w/hole.” The retention of the slash mark across her uses of theterm in the quoted passage graphs that irrecoverability: one can-not even refer to a complete, unruptured history of traumaticevents such as those that constellate around this historicalmoment. Or: “[T]he complete story does not exist. It never did”(Philip, Zong! 196).

The forgetting that Zong! remembers concerns the events thatled to the British legal case Gregson v. Gilbert, whose decision onappeal constitutes the only official public record of a crime—150crimes—indeed, a massacre of 150 of the 470 African people whocomposed the unwilling “cargo” of the slave ship Zong. In 1781,this ship left West Africa for Jamaica under an inexperienced

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captain, whose navigational errors more than doubled the timeen route. As supplies dwindled, most importantly the water sup-ply, numbers of the enslaved died of dehydration (60) or jumpedoverboard in response to the prospect of continued unbearablethirst (40). (Even the crew was deeply affected, as later evidencedby the fact that nearly half of them—seven of seventeen—diedshortly after the ship finally attained port.) The captainresponded to this state of deprivation and uncertainty by forcing150 of the remaining captives overboard, to drown and be eatenby the waiting sharks (and not necessarily in that order) (Greg-son 210–11). A mercy killing? No, a calculated effort to savemoney for the “owners” of the “cargo,” whose insurance coveredlosses arising from “the perils of the sea,” but not those due to“slaves dying for want of provisions” (210, 211). Captain Col-lingwood apparently considered himself “obliged” to take thiscourse of action, to save the lives of the crew and the balance ofthe Africans on board.

These are “the facts” of the case, in the legal sense. But thefacts that are of interest to and valid in the eyes of the justicesystem do not encompass the truth, the w/hole truth, and noth-ing but the truth.13 Philip tells us in the “Notanda” to the poemsthat make up Zong! that the brief record of Gregson v. Gilbertcreated in her “a simple but profound curiousity [sic]—about thesea, a captain, the sailors, and a ship. About a ‘cargo’” (191). Sheset out to write “a story that cannot be told” (190), that instead“must tell itself” (191). If it “must tell itself,” the language of thattelling must be in the court decision, Philip decided, becausethere is no other source to which to look. Thus every word ofthe twenty-six numbered poems (and the six unnumberedpoems labeled “Dicta”) in the first section of Zong!, called “Os”(Latin for “bone”), can be found in the Gregson decision. Afterworking with (and working over) the legal discourse in thishighly constrained manner, Philip has written the remainingfour sections—“Sal,” “Ventus,” “Ratio,” and “Ferrum” (Latin for

13. Another example of poetry that investigates (in a very different manner) the impli-cations of how “facts” are understood and organized in legal discourse is Statement ofFacts, the first volume of Vanessa Place’s Tragodıa trilogy, published in 2010.


“salt,” “wind,” “reason,” and “iron”)—with a word store com-posed of the words of the decision as well as any words to befound within each of those words (each word’s imperfect ana-grams, that is). From her word store, she makes not sentencesbut fragments—small clusters of words that accumulate withoutadding up. At times, even individual words are fragmented intophonemes, creating poems that operate “[t]hrough oath andthrough moan, through mutter, chant and babble, through bab-ble and curse, through chortle and ululation to not-tell the story”(196). The poem is nonnarrative, even antinarrative, in terms ofPhilip’s writing process; she describes having to “struggle toavoid imposing meaning” on the texts of her poems (199). How-ever, her effort to resist “my meaning,” she notes, “demands acorresponding effort on the part of the reader to ‘make sense’ ofan event that eludes understanding, perhaps permanently” (199,198).

The massacre itself is unthinkable, almost literally, but it isimportant to recognize that part of what “eludes understanding”is the matter-of-fact (matter of “facts”?) treatment of the massacrein the courts. Thus even as Philip provokes us “to work to com-plete the events” that are not-told in the poem (198), she insis-tently draws our attention to the deeply problematic languagewith which we have to work. And importantly, as one sensesfrom the “Os” poems (and finds explicitly stated in the essaycomprising the book’s notanda section and in other essays andinterviews in which she discusses Zong!), it is particularly sig-nificant to Philip, an attorney, that this language is derived fromlegal discourse.14 But Philip’s focus on the discourse of the lawis not simply a reflection of her own expertise. Hortense Spill-ers’s work on slavery in American literature not surprisinglyunderstands legal discourse as a key “field of enunciative pos-sibilities” in the discourse of slavery (28). Spillers places a greatdeal of weight on the importance of recognizing the discursivenature of slavery:

[A]s concretely material as the “institution” [of slavery] was, as a naturalhistorical sequence and as a scene of pulverization and murder, “slavery,”

14. Compare the emphasis that Hayden, a profoundly religious man, places in hispoem on the religious hypocrisies embedded in the slave trade.

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for all that, remains one of the most textualized and discursive fields ofpractice that we could posit as a structure for attention. In a very realsense, a full century or so “after the fact,” “slavery” is primarily discursive,as we search vainly for a point of absolute and indisputable origin, for amoment of plenitude that would restore us to the real, rich “thing” itselfbefore discourse touched it.

(28–29)

Philip’s poem accords with this theory of slavery, insofar as herdecision to limit herself to the language of the single public rec-ord of the Zong massacre emerges from her belief that the storyshe will not-tell “is locked in” (I would offer, additionally, is bur-ied in) “this particular and peculiar discursive landscape,” justas the captives on the Zong “were locked in the holds of the slaveship” (and subsequently buried at sea) (Zong! 191).

It is impossible for me to offer as comprehensive a close read-ing of this book-length project as I was able to do with Kearney’ssingle poem. Nonetheless, I do want to spend some time exam-ining the operation of a poem in the “Os” section—the skeletonof the book, we might say—in part because much of the pub-lished critical response to the text has oscillated in focus betweenthe governing procedures and the overall effect of the book onthe reader.15 Little attention has been given thus far to the wayspecific language, generated by the procedural constraint, par-ticipates in the production of the text’s sensibility and signifi-cance.

“‘Give me the bones,’ I say to the silence that is so often whathistory presents to us,” Philip tells an interviewer about the pro-cess of writing Zong!; “the bones actually ground you” (“Defend-ing the Dead” 69). The bones—the “Os” section—indeed servethis function; they ground the reader in the concerns and basicstrategies of the text before it explodes into the increasingly lessintelligible, increasingly fragmented sections that are the book’s“flesh” (Zong! 200). The key concern, one quickly understands,is language—the availability of language, the absence of lan-

15. Philip reveals in the notanda section that, as she conceives of the book, the foursections that make up the bulk of it are “the flesh,” while “the earlier 26 poems [constitutingthe aptly titled “Os” section] are the bones” (200).


guage, the power of language, the limitations of language. Con-sider “Zong! #2”:

the throw in circumstancethe weight in want

in sustenancefor underwriters

the lossthe order in destroy

the that factthe it wasthe were

negroes

the after rains____________________________________

Wafor Yao Siyolo Bolade Kibibi Kamau

(5)

Upon first looking at the aching white space overwhelming thefew words and phrases that erupt onto the page, and looking atthe two pages of the Gregson decision, one might find it possibleto imagine that Philip is being excessive—even, like Kearney,absurd—in her use of these stammering, syntactically twistedfragments. This is to accuse her, in my mother’s language, of“going overboard,” a phrase my mother used to let me knowthat I had crossed or was about to cross the line between accept-able and unacceptable behavior, that I was carrying some courseof action too far.16 The title of my essay is, of course, meant toresonate with this sense of the phrase (in addition to other sensesnoted earlier); both Philip and Kearney use strategies in theirMiddle Passage poems that risk being in bad taste or otherwiseputting the reader off. As I hope I have demonstrated, Kearney’soutrageousness is warranted—indeed, effective; so, too, I willargue, is Philip’s sometimes sparse, sometimes claustrophobic

16. Recently, I came across this phrase in the text of Glenn Ligon’s Notes on the Marginof the Black Book. A statement attributed to Walter Annenberg, opining on the controversysurrounding Robert Mapplethorpe’s series photos of black male nudes, concludes, “Heasked for it by going overboard.”

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response to the constraint she placed on these poems. Admit-tedly, in my first encounter with the poems from this section ofher book, I felt confident that one could limit oneself to the legaldocument and, despite its brevity, compose whole sentences thatwould convey the despair or disgust inspired by the events lead-ing to the lawsuit. Undertaking the challenge, I came up with:The murder of 150 from the coast of Guinea was a great mistake. Thelives of master and mariners were of no more value than the lives ofthe negroes. The law is foul, the loss is absolute, and justice is lyingdead. Only the last of these sentences even begins to suggest theintensity of affect that seems called for. And nothing in themappears to have any purchase on the perspective of said“negroes.”

The limitations of legal discourse become utterly concrete.There are no first-person pronouns and few terms that express anegative (or positive) evaluation. There are no people (men,women, children) involved, which is to say that individuals andgroups are always identified by (locked into) their particularsocial role: “captain,” “crew,” “owners,” “insurers,” “negroes,”and “slaves.” My struggles with the obstacles that shaped eachof the sentences I came up with overwhelmingly outweighed themoments of writerly satisfaction, and I would be embarrassedto confess how long it took to devise them as I searched andsearched for words, for syntactic and affective possibilities, thatwere not to be found. Philip’s representation of silence, silence,and more silence surrounding the utterances can barely suggest,and never articulate, the wholesale condemnation that is war-ranted, yet it is profoundly apt. Her choice of constraint was abrilliant way to not only reconstruct a sense of the speechlessness(in effect) of the passengers in the hold, but also to demonstrateto the rest of us that

even when we believe we have freedom to use whatever words we wishto use, that we have the entire lexicon . . . at our disposal, . . . much ofthe language we work with is already preselected and limited, by fashion,by cultural norms—by systems that shape us such as gender and race—by what’s acceptable. By order, logic, and rationality.

(Zong! 198)


The abortive attempts to get at the “truth” of the Zong massacrerepresented in “Zong! #2” and other poems, via short bursts ofwords like those seen above, thus represent the problem of lan-guage in relation to these people and events, if not realistically,then certainly faithfully.

But as we emphasize the “disorder, illogic, and irrationality”that Philip deliberately courts in these poems, we must not forgether conviction that her process will “release the story that cannotbe told, but which, through not-telling, will tell itself” (197, 199).So what does “Zong! #2” tell us, despite Philip’s antinarrativeprocedures? I approach the first line, “the throw in circum-stance,” like any well-trained word geek presented with a syn-tactically off-kilter phrase of this sort (composed of the“nouning” of a verb and the suggestion that this verbal “object”lies “in” another noun), by looking immediately for confirmationthat “throw” is an imperfect anagram of “circumstance.” It is not,I quickly realize. How else can “the throw” be “in” the word“circumstance,” I wonder (emphasis added). Another look at theline reveals what I had not attended to before, an extra spacebetween the third and fourth words. That slight pause within theline reminds me that while this poem is about language, it is alsoabout “the throw[-]in circumstance,” the captain’s order and itstreatment under the law not as murder but as a “condition orfact . . . having some bearing on” a question of the interpretationof an insurance policy (“Circumstance”). I approach the secondline with my mind open wider, feel the heaviness of the passen-gers’ growing need for sustenance—and hear that “weight” growas the “wait” grows. A few lines down, at about the poem’shalfway point, a similarly structured phrase—“the order indestroy”—finally repays my initial reading strategy, “order”revealing itself to be an imperfect anagram that highlights boththe human agency (the command) and the “logic” that are“locked in” the word “destroy.”

The second half of the poem starts by foregrounding the coldand distancing syntax of legal discourse: “the that fact,” “the itwas” (emphasis added). The poem then takes a sharp turn—lit-erally, if we remember that the line break is the “turn” in theLatin root of “verse”—in which the same construction, “the were”

S H O C K L E Y ⋅ 813

(emphasis added), underlines the tendency of legal discourse torely heavily on the verb to be. With the next line, however, thisphrase becomes a three-word phrase like the two preceding it—“the were / negroes”—which torques the focus back to the impactof this discourse upon actual people. The verb to be is so impor-tant to the law because of its transformative quality; as here,people who understood themselves not even as Africans but asIbo, or Fon, or Twi become (“were”) “negroes,” in the eyes of thelaw. A second, even more melancholy reading of the two linestakes its force from the unqualified past-tense-ness of the“negroes” resulting from “the throw in circumstance,” “theweight in want,” and “the order in destroy.” The poem hastaught us by now to read for the double-voiced utterance in thelast line: “the after rains” is not only a bitter reminder that fol-lowing the massacre, rain “furnished water for eleven days,” buta suggestion that the aftermath of this interpersonal and legaldevaluation of African people—this horror—still reigns (5, 210).17

I want to come back to two lines in “Zong! #2” that I have notaddressed: “for underwriters / the loss.” Visually, the poem tellsus that “the loss” is central to the poem, and, of course, on severallevels—real, symbolic, and discursive—“the loss” is central tothe whole project of Zong! What makes it not just important butincredibly vexed, for Philip, is the huge abyss between the waythe word “loss” signifies in the discourse of the Middle Passage(particularly for African Americans) and the way it functions inlegal discourse. Philip articulates this issue powerfully in thenotanda section:

A sentence [in a book on contract law] catches my eye: “. . . [T]here is no‘loss’ when the insured brings about the insured event by his own act.”Since Captain Collingwood deliberately drowned the Africans on boardhis ship, I reason, he cannot, therefore, claim a loss. Does this make mefeel better? About the law? But a jury of his peers found otherwise; fur-ther, how can there not be a ‘loss’ when 150 people are deliberatelydrowned?

(190)

17. This line thus echoes the closing phrase of Kearney’s “Swimchant”: “the stains won’twash out” (63).


Part of the “magic” of the law, as Philip puts it, is its ability totransform something (or some person) into another (an other)(196). Within legal discourse, specifically insurance law, it is log-ical to determine that a party cannot get insurance against poten-tial damage to property, cause such damage to occur, and thencollect insurance monies. (Think of the archetypal arson case,where the slumlord hires someone to torch a building that is nolonger profitable to rent or sell.) A “loss” is something takenaway, not given or thrust away by the insured. But this legallogic, which our language accommodates without a trace of thedehumanizing illogic it engenders in this particular case, is pre-cisely the problem, Philip argues (197). The question thatemerges and that “Zong! #2” highlights is, for whom is the injurya loss? “[F]or underwriters”?

The underwriters of the Zong’s insurance policy were notrequired by law to treat the murders as “loss.” But the poemsuggests a different way of reading these two phrases that makesthem an acknowledgment of “the loss”—the unquantifiable lossof the mothers, husbands, cousins, healers, friends, ancestorsamong the passengers in the hold—and, in turn, a more logicalsequence of words. This reading takes into account a powerfulstrategy that Philip employs to counter the dehumanization ofthe African passengers aboard the Zong. Upon learning that theship’s inventory identified them only by gender and adulthoodor childhood status, Philip resolved that “[t]he Africans on boardthe Zong must be named” and created a series of “ghostly footnotesfloating below the text—‘underwater . . . a place of consequence’” (200),drawing likely appellations from Modupe Oduyoye’s Yoruba’sNames (xii). These “footnotes” appear on the bottom of everypage of the first twenty-six poems. I suggest that we read thesenamed figures as being, additionally, underwriters of the text, aninterpretation that both attends to their visual placement andrecalls the gesture Philip makes on the title page, where she indi-cates that Zong! is the account “as told to the author by SetaeyAdamu Boateng.”18 If “Wafor Yao Siyolo Bolade Kibibi [and]

18. This reading accords with Lorrie Smith’s discussion of the surface/depths structurethat literary critics have revealed and reinforced in “mapping black cultural geography”

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Kamau” are, in a manner of speaking, “underwriters” of “Zong!#2,” then Philip has succeeded in wresting from the discourse ofthe law an acknowledgment of “the loss” as it would be consti-tuted “for [these] underwriters” and their people.

This examination of “Zong! #2” outlines only one set of waysin which Philip’s text unlocks her source text, the Gregson case,in order to release a story of the Zong massacre—not to tell thatstory, which must tell itself, as she reminds us again and againin the notanda section. But even its own telling is not w/hole; itremains fragmented. Reading Zong!, we are never permitted torelax into the reception of a straightforward narrative, howeverharrowing. Rather, we are compelled to make ourselves com-plicit in much the same way Philip has made herself complicit:we must pick up, examine, and be pierced with the shards gen-erated by the shattering of nearly five hundred lives—those ofall the people taking that fateful voyage. We must attempt tomake sense of things caused by a senseless system, to under-stand an experience that lies beyond comprehension.

The impossibility of Zong! being or generating somethingw/hole, even 230 years after the massacre that haunts its not-telling, is inherent in the source of its language: a legal decision.Rebecca Wanzo has written persuasively about the generalinability of the law to deliver “reparative justice” to the victimsof “racial injury” (or other traumas), because to seek reparativejustice is to seek “to be made whole” (159). She explains,“Because racially injured subjects cannot return to a point ofknowledge before the wound—where they no longer know whatit is like to be wounded—reparative justice is inevitably incom-plete.” Concerning Corregidora, a contemporary narrative of slav-ery by Gayl Jones, Wanzo writes: “Traumatic injuries remainwith the descendents of slaves, shaping the possibilities for howsuch black subjects understand themselves and the possibilitiesfor their futures. Jones asks how a child born of such a legacycan be free of it and, moreover, should she be free?” (167). Philip

(424). Smith points to the hold of the slave ship, the underground railroad, and theInvisible Man’s subterranean hideout as among the “sources from which subversive, re-ordering truth erupts, bubbles up, and troubles the surface of hegemonic history.”


has said that after the long process of writing and publishingZong! was over, she no longer felt “burdened” by it—that, in fact,getting to “the other side” of grief was “the reward for goingthrough the grief” (“Defending the Dead” 79). This testimonysuggests—as do both Zong! and “Swimchant”—that confrontingthe forgetting and fingering the fragments may help descendantsof the Middle Passage heal, even as the poems contend that nei-ther the law nor the imagination can make us w/hole.

Rutgers University

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going overboard: african american poetic innovation and the middle passage

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