II “Place,” “Center,” “(W)holeness,” “In”

For Philip, a country or region has a literature of place only if it allows for an attachment to land. Attachment to land is the rudiment of belonging; it “encompasses more than legal ownership and entails a recognition and acceptance of belonging first to the land and then to a land.”Footnote ¹¹ Such an attachment makes possible a “bonding with place” that is “as essential to the poet’s development as bonding between parent and infant is to the development of humans.”Footnote ¹² Attachment to land—or rather, place experienced as a life-giving, nourishing connection—distinguishes England from the Caribbean. As Philip sees it, the British colonizer’s “attachment to his land and his place was unstintingly nurtured and developed,” so there is in English literature “a vast body of literature” that can be justly called “literature of place.”Footnote ¹³ Caribbean people, however, are deprived of this attachment by slavery and colonialism, so they produce a literature lamenting their “landless-ness,” one that reflects their “condemnation to wander the earth seeking a place to land.”Footnote ¹⁴

Whether or not it is right about English literature, this reasoning recalls how displacement has conditioned the rise of Anglophone Caribbean literature in an uneven geo-cultural space that has England as the center and the Caribbean as the periphery. Many of the founding figures of Caribbean literature—including Una Marson, V. S. Naipaul, George Lamming, Samuel Selvon, and Roger Mais—were London-based emigrants who had found little support or audience for their work in their home islands.Footnote ¹⁵ As Lamming puts it poignantly, being a writer means that “I have lost my place, or my place has deserted me.”Footnote ¹⁶ This sense of displacement, in turn, makes the metropole a compulsory destination. In The World Republic of Letters, Pascale Casanova charts an uneven world literary space where the metropolitan center sets up aesthetic standards and provincial writers establish themselves at the center by meeting those standards.Footnote ¹⁷ In the case of the Caribbean emigrant writers, literature’s world map overlaps with the empire’s. That they could only become writers as lonely Londoners reflected not only a literary hub’s demands and promises, but also the imperial center’s towering shadow over the periphery as a swamp of want.

Nevertheless, this geo-cultural imbalance is but part of the story, for Caribbean writers and intellectuals also inventively advance a dynamic, decentered cross-culturalism. If they pine over their departures from home and their vexed self-establishments at the center, they also stress how fascinatingly and flexibly the Caribbean comes into contact with other cultures and places. This latter view celebrates mobility, encounter, interconnectivity, and hybridity as the lifeblood of Caribbean culture, signaling vibrant creative opportunities that defy the constraints of the center-periphery hierarchy. As Edouard Glissant most famously contends, the Caribbean is born out of a “Poetics of Relations” in which each and every identity is constituted and extended through its movement “from periphery to periphery”; it is a poetics that bodies forth an eruptive network of global cultures and, in so doing, “makes every periphery into a center” and “abolishes the very notion of center and periphery.”Footnote ¹⁸ Glissant’s theory echoes, for instance, Kamau Brathwaite’s “tidalectics” that valorizes the Caribbean archipelago’s oceanic crisscrossing that enlivens possibilities of creation and survival, Antonio Benítez-Rojo’s view of the Caribbean as a rhizomic “repeating island” thriving on its multidirectional and multifarious ramifications, Wilson Harris’s “architecture of space” that defines the Caribbean as the site of the mythical convergence among cultures, and Lamming’s ultimate celebration of exile as a cosmopolitan “pleasure.”Footnote ¹⁹ Echoing and reinforcing each other, these theories present a decentered geography where the displacement innate in Caribbean cultural production might well illuminate an extravagant, nomadic, and reversible relationality across the world.

Philip, however, hesitates to leap from the anguish of displacement to the joy of fluid relations. For her, exile does not so much free one from cultural restrictions as erode “that initial love of place” that enables one to connect with one’s living surroundings.Footnote ²⁰ Afro-Caribbean culture is “oriented outwards,” but Philip would deem that outwardness symptomatic of a “psyche damage” by colonialism, which is the realization that “you can’t complete yourself by what’s around you” and that “you are going to leave [because] completion has to come from somewhere else.”Footnote ²¹ Philip’s appraisal of Caribbean geo-cultural mobility is far from celebratory; instead, it bespeaks an awareness of lack or incompleteness due to being “out of place,” as well as a longing for an originary, essential bonding with place. Her reflection animates what June Howard calls the “substantive approach” to place that coexists with and complements the “relational approach.”Footnote ²² If relationality has long been the shining armor of Caribbean culture, Philip divulges an equally important concern as to how the Caribbean may become a substantive place that allows for a grounding sense of completeness.

It is for such a place that she reserves the category of “center.” In an essay called “Journal Entries against Reaction,” Philip expresses her wishes to “write from a place of wholeness and integrity,”Footnote ²³ “to issue forth first statements—of wholeness” so that “[b]lack is not a reaction to white.”Footnote ²⁴ These wishes motivate her attempt at self-establishment which makes possible the emergence of “center”: “But as I write, I am constantly establishing myself, my being, my reality. As centre, not Other.”Footnote ²⁵ This center is home to the totality of being and self-conception. “To arrive at the centre,” “[t]o write from the centre,”Footnote ²⁶ “[t]o design imaginative and poetic scapes with us at the centre”Footnote ²⁷—the centralizing imperative is a step toward wholeness, as “[w]e speak from the centre and are whole.”Footnote ²⁸ At issue in Philip’s invocation of the center is not a colonization in reverse that makes the Caribbean dominate the world, but an existential search for “place” that ultimately rises above a hierarchical imperial geography. Suspending its metropolitan associations, Philip deploys the concept of “center” to speculate where the Caribbean poet would experience self-sufficiency and self-empowerment, fully and wholly.

“We speak from the centre and are whole”—if wholeness is promised by the center, it also entails a rethinking of the periphery or the margin. There is a long tradition in black feminism that valorizes black women’s marginal position as a powerful site of opposition and self-becoming, and crucial to this thinking is the fact that the margin allows for a vision of the whole. In Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center, bell hooks stresses how the margin lets black women look “both from the outside in and inside out” and gain a “sense of wholeness” that informs their “oppositional view” and sustains their struggle for self-determination.Footnote ²⁹ Comparably, Barbara Christian proposes to treat the margin not as “inferior” or “subordinate” but as a position for pursuing a comprehensive understanding of black female experience that would reveal its “complexity” and its “interrelationships [with] different areas of knowledge.”Footnote ³⁰ Philip echoes these black feminist thinkers with her definition of margin as “frontier.” Margin is frontier because it affords a “lucidity of vision [about] the mainstream society”; viewed from it, “what was the mainstream immediately becomes hinterland with all that that connotes.”Footnote ³¹ Philip stresses not only a holistic picture of the mainstream and the marginal, but also how their relationship changes once the vantage is shifted.Footnote ³² “Marginality is in the eyes of the beholder.”Footnote ³³ Margin does not have to be marginal; as frontier, it is “central” to envisioning and re-visioning the whole.

If the idea of wholeness is essential to claiming centrality from the margin, for Philip, it is to be animated through an experimental interplay between geography, the black female body, and language. Whole is “(w)hole,” a coinage highlighting a distinctive bodily position—the “place between the legs”—that marks the nadir of black women’s marginality and vulnerability.Footnote ³⁴ Nevertheless, it is from this position that a black female poet gains strength, and the Caribbean geography of displacement can be rewritten. In discussing Philip’s geographical imagination, Katherine McKittrick notes how the idea of the (w)hole coalesces the female body with spatial configuration,Footnote ³⁵ and yet that takes effect through a poetess’s verbal innovation:

Mirroring the invention of “(w)hole” is that of “dis place,” which is both the creole version of “this place” and a reminder of displacement. If “(w)hole” recalls Philip’s affinity with black feminism’s claim to wholeness from the margin, “dis place” raises the question as to how a displaced Caribbean could be superseded by or transformed into a substantive this place. Philip fuses the two verbal innovations in the phrase “dis place between the legs of the black woman” so as to simultaneously combat masculine oppression and dispel the agony of displacement. To “out out dis place” is to imagine a Caribbean without displacement and make it no longer “the threatening outer space” of man. It is to refurbish geography from and for the black woman’s “inner s/place” and hail it as a center inducing a holistic vision—“a black (w)hole absorbing everything around it.”Footnote ³⁷ (W)hole shades into whole by anchoring Philip’s reconfiguration of the Caribbean place, a practice that features a potential verbal sliding from dis to this place.

From “outing out dis place” to claiming “inner s/place”—to visualize a center is to go inward as opposed to outward. Indeed, center, as Philip sees it, revolves around “in.” “Those at the centre of systems of power believe and have always believed that those in opposition want in. The centre is, after all, about protecting ‘us’ against ‘them.’”Footnote ³⁸ With a center of domination, “in” distinguishes the powerful from the powerless, the privileged from the oppressed. Yet, Philip also uses “in” in a way that does not reinforce a power hierarchy but suggests inhabiting, belonging, and therefore another sort of “center.” An early poem, “Sprung Rhythm,” opens with such an “in”:

Recollecting her childhood in Tobago, the speaker uses “in” to enhance her sense of family and place in relation to her mastery of Creole English. The sprung rhythm here refers less to Hopkins’ verses than the leaps and lilts the Afro-Caribbean tongue performs upon English words. That English is “a foreign language” calls attention to, to say the least, the enforcement of colonial education, but “in” suggests the inhabitation of the homeplace despite linguistic alienation. The speaker not only “talks in” but “walks in” sprung rhythm, her spatial movement continuous with her orchestration of a varying and vibrant verbal music. “In language” is thus “in place,” and that prepares the way for “in blackness” as a matter of recognizing a color spectrum as diverse as Creole’s musicality—a spectrum constituting “village,” “island,” and “family.” The poem ends with a nostalgia for this homeplace:

Reflecting the speaker’s current exile, “from” helps recast “in” as signaling how “I found the place.” The interrelated registers of being “in” make the Caribbean homeplace a vantage for knowledge, a starting point for being and experience, a land of attachment—or rather, a “center” for making the first statement and ultimately completing the self. To reach for and enliven such an “in,” as I will show in the following, is a geographical telos of She Tries and Zong!. What the preposition mobilizes are visions and yearnings she recuperatively associates with “center,” and the two volumes consecutively and collectively—through linguistic experiments often informed by and expressive of black female experiences—put forth a template of inward-ness for the very making of a Caribbean poetics of place.

III She Tries: “In” Struggle

She Tries is usually read in terms of a black poetess’ struggle against silence, her vivisection of a white, masculinist English language in search of a lost African mother tongue. Ink has also been spilled on how Philip’s linguistic experiment reflects and remediates the conditions of being a black woman. Yet, if we agree with McKittrick that “black femininity and black women’s humanness are bound up in an ongoing geographical struggle,”Footnote ⁴¹ it is apt to explore how She Tries may lend itself to a geographical reading.Footnote ⁴² For Philip, place “forms the matrix of [a poet’s] work: place remains within the poet, although she be in exile or never write a word about it.”Footnote ⁴³ Given place’s primacy in her thinking, we may say that although she does not overtly write about place, her poetry is place-driven; that although She Tries barely depicts or even mentions any concrete location (except very briefly in the opening poem), its verbal innovations, along with its feminist investments, serve to chart imaginative routes of placing in abstract terms. If, as we have seen, Philip’s sense of place consists in her idea of “center” as a site of complete or sufficient being, in She Tries, “center” tentatively emerges through a struggle to adequately express the very act or state of location—a struggle that yields a tortuous choreography of the word “in.”

A look at “in” in She Tries reveals placing as a project at once insistent and difficult, for “in” very often signals impossible locations. This is acutely felt on the grammatical level. In the first poem “…And Over Every Land and Sea,” Philip draws on the Ovidian myth of Ceres’ search for Proserpine to dramatize an excruciating disconnection between a black mother and her daughter, and the agony over an irremediable loss of touch translates into an ungrammatical use of “in”:

The apparent normality of the second “in” only magnifies the abnormality of the first and the third. “Lost” cannot serve as a location just as “strange” cannot, and to use “in” before them is to both highlight the fruitlessness of the mother’s search and insist on her effort. The daughter is nowhere to be seen, and the mother cannot but take nowhere—that the daughter is “lost,” her whereabouts “strange”—as a placeholder for a somewhere to locate her and expel loss from between “She/ and I.” The grammar-defying “in” enacts “placeholding” for, or for lack of, place.

Even within the limits of grammar, “in” may problematize locating. “…And over Every Land and Sea” contains dream visions where mother and daughter come together, and “in” both locates and disrupts their union. One vision, “Afterbirth,” describes the baby girl looking for the mother’s breast, “choosing” between a black one and a white one “in a womb-black night.”Footnote ⁴⁵ “In” seemingly helps affirm the black mother’s primacy, for blackness is associated with “womb” and presented as breeding the daughter’s life. Yet, “in” remains within the phrase “in the night,” so the mother’s blackness also merges with nocturnal darkness that would potentially impede the daughter’s “choosing,” her telling the black breast from the white one. Indeed, despite their co-presence in the “womb-black night,” the daughter does not locate her black mother, but goes for a breast “neither black/nor white”Footnote ⁴⁶—hence still distanced from the mother. “In” is similarly paradoxical in the next vision, “Foreskin,” which depicts the teaching and learning of the mother tongue with a metaphor of the growing tree:

“In” indicates where the mother tongue is located, and, by “reaching in,” the daughter starts to inherit it and develop her voice (“she laughs”). However, “in” is also a road sign to silence. The “butterfly in-lodged” is freed, but not necessarily the voice. As the daughter comes upon silence, the mother tongue seems to betray its vocal promise and turns out to be lodged—namely, locked and confined—in silence. If “reaching in” suggests a mother-daughter union in voice, “in-lodged” points to silence as their final destination. Between mother and daughter, “in” wedges a voice-silence paradox that erodes the reconnection as promised by their being in the same place.

A second look at the stanza above gives us clues to Philip’s centering imagination. The phrase “circles of iridescence” has “silence” “in-lodged,” for it contains all the letters of the word, and “silence” and “in-lodged” are placed right below and above the navel of that phrase. Philip thus uses words to mark a centric position while alphabetically demonstrating “in-lodgedness.” Indeed, “…And over Every Land and Sea” culminates in images that evoke her aspiration to center, and yet center is partially achieved just as “in” is ambivalently used. As the mother follows the daughter’s spoor “as far as not-known,” the poem erupts into a vision of convergence:

This is a centralizing moment where mother and daughter embrace in “our,” where multiple voices, experiences, as well as motifs, coalesce and solidify into one entity (“diamond”). However, this moment suggests no concrete “center” per se, for it happens not in any particular place but “in the sun’s attention.” The “sun” is invoked as wishfully as in Walcott’s Omeros when he wants to write St. Lucia without Homeric allusions: “Why not see Helen [one of the personae for the Caribbean island] as the sun saw her”?Footnote ⁴⁹ Just as the sun, in recalling the light in Dante’s Paradiso, does not free Walcott from the trap of allusion,Footnote ⁵⁰ so here, proffering only “attention,” it barely suggests the “placedness” of place but seems rather in league with “far” and “not-known.” While gesturing toward “center,” “in” thus also leaves the promise of placing unfulfilled. Something similar happens with “her groin,” another meeting point for the mother and the daughter:

“Her groin” denotes the same body part as the “black (w)hole absorbing everything around it.” Yet here the place between the legs does not enable black women’s claim to wholeness but perpetuates “loss” and “need.” The centering significance of (w)hole is evoked yet compromised by this “groin” of lack. “In” leads mother and daughter not to the center but to what could have been a center, making “center” an unresolved question, an unsatisfied longing.

With “in,” the opening poem of She Tries reveals a conundrum of placement, and it seems as if the more Philip insists on placing in the volume, the more she gets the miasma of displacement. “In” signals wishes to find an adequate, secure, or definite state of location, but it often conjures up the opposite. In “Cyclamen Girl,” the mythical avian ancestress exists “[i]n a land of shadows.”Footnote ⁵² In “African Majesty,” the glory of African art is to be viewed “in a forest of made-believe.”Footnote ⁵³ In “Meditations on the Declension of Beauty by the Girl with the Flying Cheek-bones,” black beauty is tentatively affirmed through a stuttering plea of “[i]n whose language if not in yours.”Footnote ⁵⁴ In “Testimony Stoops to Mother Tongue,” the tongue has to simultaneously root “in” and root “out.”Footnote ⁵⁵ Reeking of elusiveness, uncertainty, and contradiction, “in” abuses itself and plagues placing.

What She Tries attempts in its latter half is to restore “in” to its semantic normalcy in preparation for claiming center. This occurs via a “word-in-word” strategy. “The Question of Language is the Answer to Power” stages the speaker’s combat with an anti-black, slavery-perpetuating phonetics, and she prioritizes “in” at, or as, the center of “beginning”:

To fight linguistic oppression is to exhume words from within words and find a beginning. If the speaker “word[s] [her] word” with what she finds “in” both her own (“my”) and the oppressor’s (“your”) words, she begins by uncovering “in” in the word “beginning.” Anchoring an exhuming act and itself being exhumed, “in” embodies a beginning for the speaker’s verbal reinvention. Alphabetically, “in” roughly occupies the center of “beginning,” and the speaker does progress to claim center in the same sense as Philip elsewhere theorizes it. She insists on “the evidence of newness” “in everything” before declaring ownership of “the word” in a way that evokes the opening of the Gospel of John (“In the beginning was the Word”):

If, as we have seen, Philip associates the center with completeness, totality, and the opportunity to make the first statement, these significances resound through the speaker’s assertion of a newness in and for all. With itself located in “beginning,” “in” helps locate a radical, adamant, and confident beginning that projects a center.

“The in of beginning” indexes a wider employment of words that contain “in,” and these words may work as foils to the preposition’s locating function. At the end of “Testimony Stoops to Mother Tongue,” for instance, the speaker describes her struggle against a malicious father tongue in recognition of a mother tongue:

An “in” exists in “incestuous,” a word that helps explain the ungrammatical “in” in “cohabit in strange.” If “strange” does not signify a location, “in strange” still makes sense because of the verbal incest—namely, the morbid coercion the black female speaker experiences in having to speak the language of the Slaveowner/White Man/Father. “In”’s locating significance is not diminished but brought into sharp relief as the preposition marks the speaker’s grappling with a perverse and alienated linguistic condition. Another instance is the word “sin” in “She Tries Her Tongue; Her Silence Softly Breaks”:

“In” is “sin” minus “s,” “sin” going “naked,” “sin” that is sin no more. If, by definition, human beings are expelled from Eden for their sin, “in” as sin unsinned prepares the way for re-invoking Eden as a place to be and, therefore, speaking of “in eden.” “In” thus conserves and realizes its proper meaning for an Edenic, originary place, which is also a “wordless” place where words are to be refreshed under the sign of a prelapsarian language ultimately irrecoverable. Carved out from “sin,” “in” embodies an effort toward a rudimentary sense of placedness, placing, and place.

And it is with a recuperated “in” that She Tries claims center toward the end.

If “in”‘s locating function is rejuvenated somewhat by a word-in-word strategy, this strategy also points a way toward memorializing blackness. In some sense, to locate and call forth “in” within other words is to quarry what’s hidden in those words. Similarly, black memory is hidden in white patriarchal accounts of history and needs to be excavated from therein. “In” signals where to perform that excavation. “Broken utterances” are to be witnessed “in the ordeal of testimony,” and center is to be identified “in the circles of history.” History has multiple circles or layers that bury black experiences and expressions to the deepest, or the innermost, and to claim center is to reach in there and discover a primary position for acknowledging and articulating blackness. The verbal trials and errors “in” has undergone ready it to locate the center, and black expression and black memory demand that “each word create a centre” insofar as words contain alternative messages within. As center surfaces alongside a righted sense of locatedness, She Tries practices language in such a way as to put blackness in place—a practice, as I show next, that Zong! carries onward.

IV “the x in y,” the Tobago in Zong!, “the me in become”

Zong! is sea-based; it is about the sea, the greed for more property recompense that made the slave traders throw black people into the sea, and the black victims’ voices and souls that endure in the sea. However, Philip’s composition of the poem also seems place-based. As is now well known, Philip derives every word in Zong! from the legal report of the Gregson v. Gilbert case, the sole historical record of the Zong massacre. Upon launching into this way of writing, she notes: “I enter a different land, a land of language—I allow the language to lead me somewhere—don’t know where, but I trust.”Footnote ⁶¹ The comparison of language to land anticipates her references to place later in her “Notanda” on composition,Footnote ⁶² both to concrete places where she made significant progresses with the poem—Caledon, Ontario, Tobago, Munich, Ghana, LiverpoolFootnote ⁶³—and to an abstract notion of place when stating that Zong!‘s linguistic practice “levels everyone to a place where there is, at times, no distinction between languages.”Footnote ⁶⁴ These invocations of land or place reaffirm the geographical dimension of Philip’s verbal experiment, and, like She Tries, Zong! no less animates a project of placing or landing. Critics often regard the poem as attesting to black residence, survival, and persistence in a brutal environment,Footnote ⁶⁵ a theme that reveals Philip’s poetic effort toward blackness in place. This effort, I contend, once again hinges on “in,” which marks Zong!’s organizing principle as well as Philip’s clue for detecting a place from which to accomplish the poem, to revive lost African lives, and to be. If, in She Tries, “in” manages to point to that place as an abstract center, Zong! continues to develop the word’s affordances and ultimately suggests a conception of Tobago, Philip’s Caribbean mother-island, as the center.

So much depends on “in” in Zong!. First of all, the poem embodies Philip’s insistent discovery of what is in the legal document. While the document nowhere speaks of the murdered Africans in human terms, Philip demands that their humanity be found there: “the Africans are in the text,” their stories “locked in this text.”Footnote ⁶⁶ She “would lock [her]self in this text” to reach those victimized men, women, and children,Footnote ⁶⁷ and she compares her practice to what sculptor Henry Moore does “to allow the figure that was ‘locked’ in the stone to reveal itself.”Footnote ⁶⁸ Zong! conducts an excavation, a quarrying, a digging in for black voices and memory—one akin to what She Tries proposes at the end. As a result, Zong! spews across its opening section phrases in the mode of “the x in y”: “the weight in want” (“Zong! #2”), “the circumstance in/fact” (“Zong! #9”), “the save in underwriter” (“Zong! #15”), “the save in residue” (“Zong! #19”), “the instance in attempt” (“Zong! #20”), “the justify // in // captain” (“Zong! #25”), and many more.Footnote ⁶⁹ Strange, ungrammatical, and barely intelligible, these phrases spotlight and sustain Philip’s exhumation of a story untold and hard to tell. “Within the boundaries established by words and their meanings there are silences,” she says, “within each silence is the poem.”Footnote ⁷⁰ Zong! comes into being through an attempt to penetrate the dehumanizing legal text and brave the murky depths in its words.

In other words, Zong! aims to locate black lives in the text, to find them a place in words, and this makes Philip reanimate her word-in-word strategy in a way that evokes her idea of center. Philip would obtain words “contained in” a particular word by splitting it up: “for instance, apprehension yields hen, sion, pare and pear.”Footnote ⁷¹ The foremost discovery of “hen” in “apprehension” recalls that of “in” in “beginning” in She Tries, as both are roughly at the center of their parent words. We have seen how “the in of beginning” initiates a pilgrimage toward the center as a place of holistic vision, complete being, and self-determination. Digging up a word the same way in composing Zong!, Philip revives the connection she has established between her word-in-word strategy and center. Indeed, to uncover hidden, embryonic words in words is to look toward wholeness: “The alphabet is the universe of language—all the sounds contained in each alphabet of letters and each letter a fragment–of the whole.”Footnote ⁷² As words break into alphabets and alphabets into sounds, Philip gets closer to what’s “contained in” the words. The fragment thus salvaged is centralizing insofar as it allows Philip to envision a whole, a universe. No wonder, then, that Zong! completes itself with fragments. As the poem goes on, words are split further and further until single alphabets float on the page,Footnote ⁷³ and yet this is how Zong! takes on “flesh”: “the four subsequent movements or books—I think of these poems as the flesh—the earlier 26 poems are the bones.”Footnote ⁷⁴ The exhumation, as highlighted by “the x in y”s, takes its consummate form in the ever-fracturing and ever-deepening discoveries in words. “In” marks the direction for a paradoxical realization of wholeness in fragmentation, which is how Philip claims the black victims’ stories and imagines blackness in place, at the center.

Is blackness’s place a Caribbean place? Significantly, the word-in-word strategy came alive as Philip worked on the poem in Tobago. My last few quotes are all from her journal entry marked “Dec. 15, 2003, Tobago” that she has included in “Notanda.”Footnote ⁷⁵ Whether or not she deliberately noted her birthplace in the entry, mentioning it when explaining the core principles of Zong! gives an undeniable weight to the place. In a way, the ideas of uncovering words in words, of fragmenting words from within to gain a whole, of thus locating the untold stories and completing Zong!—all these come in a Tobagonian shade. If “in” anchors the poem toward a place necessary for acknowledging the lives of the African victims, this anchoring was conceived of and realized in Tobago. To put it another way, Tobago is the place where Zong! found its way “in” and staked its claim to wholeness, and what would Philip call this place but “center”?

Philip mentions Tobago not only in that entry but also in the poem proper, and it is through a string of “the x in y” phrases that “in Tobago” suggestively surfaces. As Zong! breaks the legal text and unlocks what is therein, it turns up phrases that overtly thematize its practice: “the me in/become” (Zong! #9), “the may in become” (Zong! #20), “the within in is” and “the might have in existed” (Zong! #23).Footnote ⁷⁶ Insisting on the possible, the “become,” the “may,” and the “might have” attest to the poem’s search for alternatives in putative facts. Lurking behind the legal document are possibilities lost and yet to be found, so Zong! commits itself to the within in is and makes every “is” worth digging “in.” It is right after this thematization of “in” that Tobago appears. Woven together with “is,” Zong! #24 contains the place name:

Given “the within in is” that speaks for Zong!‘s resurrection of what may or might have happened, “is tobago” may or might have been read as “in tobago.” Indeed, “in tobago” signaled a real alternative to the Zong massacre, for, as the legal text shows, the ship “might have made” it to Tobago to refill its water tanks so that it could finish its journey to Jamaica without the sacrifice of the Africans.Footnote ⁷⁸ The massacre could have been avoided if the ship had arrived in Tobago, and Zong! calls attention to this unrealized possibility by tentatively and tenuously invoking “in tobago.” If Philip’s entry associates Tobago with a strategy of “in” that vitalizes Zong!, Zong!‘s thematization of “in” beckons to a Tobago where African lives could have been saved and sustained. If Tobago qualifies as a “center” for writing, Zong! also tempts us to view it as a “center” for life, for black being.

We have noted how Philip speaks of the center in terms of a wish to “arrive at the centre,”Footnote ⁷⁹ and “in” opens for Zong! a prospect of arriving in Tobago.

Placing “in” at the opposing sides of the page, Philip contrasts the historical fact as suggested by “the arrived/in vessel” with a poetic possibility suggested by “the me in become.” The “arrived” were the captain, the crew, and the remaining slaves Zong carried alive to its destination (Jamaica) after the murder of 150 Africans at sea. Yet Philip rewrites arrival into a matter of becoming via word fission. “Me” consists of the last two letters of “become”; it is a word we arrive at after alphabetically going through the word “become,” a word that signals a verbal destination in “become,” or what “become” leads to or becomes at its end. A distinct example of word-in-word, “me in become” potentially replaces the factuality of “arrived” with the word-activated becoming as a counter-possibility of arrival. And that counter-possibility hinges on “me,” the emergence of which echoes Philip’s self-investment in the writing of Zong!. If she splits words to uncover words and fragments within, she also identifies with what she thus obtains: “the fragment becomes mine. Becomes me. Is me.”Footnote ⁸¹ If her word-in-word excavation has gained momentum in Tobago and potentially summons a life-saving Tobago in the poem, she also, in conversation with her daughter, puzzles over the question of whether the victims had left “offspring on board the Zong” so some among the offspring might actually be her ancestorsFootnote ⁸²—namely, whether a disinterring of the victims’ stories could reach down to the root cause of her own initial arrival in Tobago, her own Caribbean birth that comes to be a topic for a mother–daughter dialogue. At work in Philip’s untelling and retelling Zong’s history is an insistent and innovative “in,” which remains linked to her self, her Tobagonian—and female, motherly—self. In reimagining arrival with “the me in become,” she ultimately calls out that self as a potential arrivant in contrast to the historical “arrived” and sets Zong! toward Tobago, toward her reckoning with her Caribbean mother-island.

Tobago, as Philip once said, is a peripheral island, one “overlooked in recent times” and “surrounded by the seas of colonialism,”Footnote ⁸³ but Zong! makes it possible to view it as central. Its centrality has nothing to do with dominating the whole world, but rather with anchoring the exhumation of black stories and sustaining the becoming of an Afro-Caribbean self. Amid the torrential sea of the slave trade and African carnage, Philip thus spots an island that enlivens the hope for blackness in place. “The me in become,” the verbal uncovering of the self as arrivant, echoes what Philip conceptualizes elsewhere as “island”’s morphing into “I-land”: “The ‘story’ that wanted out, wanted to tell itself, is one of islandness, and its transformation into I-landness.”Footnote ⁸⁴ Island’s primacy depends on the landing carried out by an “I” writ large, who in turn realizes and declares herself through finding her own land, her own place. With Tobago on its horizon, Zong! enacts a process of I-landing, which continues and culminates Philip’s search for place as a center that promises a completeness of being, for center as a place that enables absolute self-determination and autonomous expression, for a wholeness that places black lives, Afro-Caribbean lives, and black women’s lives at the center, and for a poetry of place that begins to evolve from a theatrics of “in.”