Even within this inhuman system, the Zong massacre stood out for its barbarity and cynicism. The Zong had set sail from Accra to Jamaica on 18 August 1781 with 442 slaves on board, more than twice the number it could safely have transported. Towards the end of the voyage, the crew embarked on a desperate attempt to redress a crisis brought about by their navigational incompetence, myopic avarice and poor provisioning. Between 29 November and 22 December, when the ship made landfall in Jamaica, they threw overboard fifty-four women and children, and seventy-eight men; another ten men leaped overboard voluntarily, in an act of solidarity with those being murdered. The vessel’s name perpetuated a ghastly irony: a scribal error in the owner’s records had altered its original Dutch name, Zorg, meaning ‘care’, ‘concern for one’s fellow human beings’.

The Zong massacre inspired – or has been cited in – many works of art and literature. These include J.M.W. Turner’s haunting and compelling painting, ‘Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying – Typhon (sic) Coming On (1840)’, now in the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, as well as the Caribbean-British poet David Dabydeen’s book-length poem Turner (1994), M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong! (2008) and Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric (2014).

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‘Baldachin’

This poem began as a response to the American artist Bruce Conner’s masterwork, the thirty-six-minute black-and-white film, Crossroads (1976), with a soundtrack by Patrick Gleason and Terry Riley. Crossroads is a sophisticated composition that uses declassified footage of Operation Crossroads, the first two of the twenty-three nuclear weapons tests that the United States government would conduct at Bikini Atoll in the South Pacific Marshall Islands formation between 1946 and 1958. Conner, collaborating with Gleason and Riley, generates a profoundly unsettling atmosphere of slipping time and uncertain space. Crossroads draws us into a conflict between beauty and terror, catastrophe and magnificence, and was shown to admirable effect at the first large-scale survey of the artist’s work, ‘Bruce Conner: It’s All True’, organized by the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 2016. For a detailed account and finely argued contextualization of this film, see William C. Wees, ‘Representing the Unrepresentable: Bruce Conner’s Crossroads and the Nuclear Sublime’ (INCITE: Journal of Experimental Media, Issue No: 2, Spring–Fall 2010) at: http://www.incite-online.net/wees2.html (accessed 23 March 2017).