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Jeremy Patterson
In this essay I analyze two contemporary poetic works, M. NourbeSe Philips Zong! and
Natasha Tretheways Native Guard. Both works relate maritime incidents in the
colonial Americas. Considering both from a tragic, postcolonial perspective, I argue that
NourbeSe Philip and Tretheway not only recount historical events that were severely
traumatic (or, worse, terminal) for many victims but also present those events as
traumas and tragedies is traumatic for the poets at least to the extent that their literary
style is directly influenced by the horror of what they recount. I will also attempt to show
that Philips and Tretheways approach to their material of colonial atrocities fits well in
the tragic postcolonial perspective that David Scott proposes in Conscripts of Modernity:
those mentalities had their purpose in specific sociohistorical contexts, but he argues that
they are no longer relevant or viable postures given the general failure of postcolonial
societies to overcome some of the same injustices that characterized the colonial societies
PAC Postscript Patterson: The History of Trauma 2
that preceded them and from which they were born. His argument for a tragic perspective
of (colonial) modern history does not rest, however, on a hopeless fatalism. Rather,
drawing on the work of historian Hayden White and bringing C.L.R. Jamess The Black
Romantic view of human progress and overcoming of injustice, Scott considers a tragic
perspective to accept negative outcomes that cannot be prevented even by the best
intentions and efforts. He believes this to be the best posture for explaining the challenges
of postcolonial societies:
contingency and freedom, between human will and its conditioning limits. (Scott
134-135)
As poets, Philip and Tretheway recover injustices from colonial history and injustices
that are very difficult to recover in any reliable way, at that and they do so less from
what Scott calls the anticolonial perspective of Romantic progress than from Scotts
tragic postcolonial perspective. Philip and Tretheway have different tones and emphases
in their work, but both implicitly accept the dramatic confrontation between contingency
and freedom, between, in their case, the inevitability of (post)colonial injustice and the
literary and personal necessity and ability to confront it. This tragic, or contingent,
PAC Postscript Patterson: The History of Trauma 3
perspective is particularly haunting in Zong! and Native Guard because the poets recount
historical traumas in a way that shows how they themselves have been at least
Trauma studies and postcolonial studies have in the last decade experienced a
shown just how significant the portrayal and study of trauma is in literature. Trauma
studies do not have to be the domain of interest only of the medical sciences or of
Holocaust studies, though certainly physical trauma (that which comes from an event that
leaves a serious injury) is the most obvious kind of trauma. Cathy Caruth, however,
reminds us that trauma is not only physical but also psychological wounds, that is,
inflicted not upon the body but upon the mind (3). What I call the trauma of history in
this article is referring to a trauma a psychological wound from an event not directly
experienced or lived by the sufferer. Though such trauma could not compare in acuity to
that of the actual sufferer or survivor, it is nonetheless trauma. Even though scholarly
but impossible to avoid entering personally into the details of colonial horrors or
Certainly poets like Philip and Tretheway do not face the same generic strictures on
objectivity and impersonal analysis when writing poetry. Their trauma comes from the
trauma of history (as they relive colonial atrocities) but also from the experience of a sort
of literary trauma, not simply writers block but the personal and professional
postcolonial trauma studies, considers trauma to be at the center of the knot, the
interpretive knot of how to decipher trauma, what to do with it. Trauma, she argues, may
be envisaged as a void, [] as a kernel of the real of the literary, which resists and
confounds our interpretive efforts. How then can trauma be portrayed and interpreted?
representations. This richness is developed as writers like Philip and Tretheway take on
the heavy task of reliving and portraying colonial traumas, seeking to develop
connections and human bonds that have been broken by the failed memory of
approach is that it poses a welcome and necessary alternative to the notion that trauma
theory is primarily a theory of stasis and melancholia. Thus, like David Scotts tragic
resigns itself to inert hopelessness. Both Scott and Visser remain realists in regard to the
horror of the past and the complexities of the present and future, but both also insist on a
dynamic wrestling with the issues of postcolonial or trauma studies or both. And
similarly, Philip and Tretheway, whether consciously adopting the most sophisticated of
postcolonial trauma theories or not, live the trauma of colonial maritime massacre and
abandonment through their poetry while also using their poetry as a means of recovery
December 1781 on the slave ship Zorg or Zong: the captain ordered his crew to murder
approximately 150 Africans by throwing them overboard and letting them drown. The
captain had made a navigational error and, not believing that there was enough water for
everyone, decided to jettison slaves in order to collect on the ships insurance, for slaves
who died of natural causes or upon arrival at a port would not be paid for by the
insurance company. The insurance company, however, refused to remit payment to the
ships owners back in England, and so the latter took the insurance company to court.
More atrocious perhaps than even the unthinkable action of throwing men, women, and
children to death by drowning was the response of the British justice system: initially, a
jury in England found that the insurance company was liable and determined that the
money should be paid to the ships owner. Later, however, in 1783, another trial was held
in which three judges overturned the initial ruling but less for reasons of humanity than
technicalities of British law. The judges, seeking to uphold the profitability of British sea
trade, determined that the insurers were not liable because the ship was not in poor
conditions as the owners had initially maintained but rather because the captain and crew
had simply made a serious navigational error. The chief judge, Lord Mansfield, wrote in
his decision, There is no evidence of the ship being foul and leaky (Philip 211). This
trial, known as Gregson v. Gilbert, provides the textual material and inspiration for
Philips Zong! As any legal text, the text of the decision is written in a sterile, matter-of-
fact style that nonetheless provides significant literary fodder for Philip because of the
nature of the subject matter. Thus, the law clerks can write straightforwardly, This was
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overboard for want of water (210). The dispassionate tone may surprise twenty-first-
century readers, but again it is a legal text and from the colonial and slave era, explaining
how anyone could discuss throwing humans to death by drowning as if they were
comparable to inanimate cargo. The challenge that M. NourbeSe Philip sets for herself is
story that Philip says cannot be told yet must be told or, a story that can only be told
by not telling (Philip 191). This literary methodology reveals Philips personal trauma
PAC Postscript Patterson: The History of Trauma 7
(born of both the history she has focused on and the literary need to recount it) because,
as a poet and story-teller, she must tell stories, but at the outset feels as though this story
cannot be told, at least not in any normal or adequate sense. That description of a story
that can only be told by not telling is thus more than a poetic turn of phrase. It
encapsulates, first of all, the very idea of trauma. Second, it directly inspires Philips
stylistic approach to her material. Zong! is no ordinary poem; of course, it is more than a
poem, a collection of poems attempting to describe the atrocity, but more than that it is
also a unique, experimental work of poetry that visually and textually is difficult and
disturbing to access. It represents the poets attempt to recover the trauma and make
sense out of a senseless massacre and this process introduces the trauma of history in an
intimate way.
Philip lays out three techniques that she uses to make the text of the legal decision
work for her poetically and personally as she retells the Zong massacre through the words
of the eighteenth-century attorneys, law clerks, and judges. Her first technique is to
white out and black out words (is there a difference?). Second, she says, I mutilate the
text as the fabric of African life and the lives of these men, women and children were
mutilated. Third and finally, she even goes so far as to say, I murder the text. What is
textual murder according to her? [I] literally cut it into pieces, castrating verbs,
approach of textual violence, the poetic approach that Philip adopts as analogous to the
Zong massacre and the miscarriage of justice on the text of the legal decision itself. The
PAC Postscript Patterson: The History of Trauma 8
problem for readers of Zong! is that the text is literally mutilated, castrated, and murdered
to the point of near nonsensicalness. For discussion of the poem, it is very difficult to cite
the text in any meaningful or visually comprehensible way. Thus, what follows is a
Just as Philip says, her poetic text is visually mutilated. Beyond that, the disconnected,
floating words on the white pages call to mind the bodies of the murdered African men,
women, and children (and the women and children were the first to be drowned, of
PAC Postscript Patterson: The History of Trauma 9
course, since adult males were the most profitable slaves) drifting in the ocean. Philip
chooses to portray the Zong massacre in this way, and importantly she also displays how
she has internalized the trauma of the atrocity as a poet because she deliberately chose to
make her own poetic task difficult and her poetry difficult to access. The difficulty comes
from the limited supply of words available in the legal text and also from the historical
and stylistic necessity to chop them up while also forcing them to make some kind of
sense. Thus the first line on page 90 reads a trail of / lies / lead to my truth tame / the
rage dance / dance / i say act (90). The verse starts out making sense; it is
straightforward to say that a trail of lies leads to truth except that the syntax is first
rendered awkward by the plural form of the verb (lead), then is made more challenging
to the comprehension by the addition of the first-person possessive pronoun (my truth?
As opposed to truth more generally? What is the meaning?), and ultimately defies
understanding by the lack of punctuation and unclear syntax (lead to my truth tame or
is it, [] lead to my truth. Tame the rage?). The poet thus gives some clues as to her
overall meaning but most of what she gives away are feelings and emotions. And of
course, that is the whole point, because the drowned and floating bodies of innocent
women, children, and men equally defy understanding and explanation but provoke
floods of emotion.
Philip thus recovers, accepts, and personalizes the trauma of the victims or at
least the trauma of the slave survivors who would have observed the victims death. As
poetic narrator of the Zong massacre, she can say at the very end of her
bestowing the responsibility of this work on me (xii). The trauma that comes out of the
event is the physical and psychological suffering of any dehumanizing experience. Any
survivors or observers of the Zong massacre must have carried with them for life the
nightmare of seeing human beings simply drown other human beings for potential profit.
And NourbeSe Philip, as the poet-observer who re-imagines the event, cannot un-
remember it either.
Like M. NourbeSe Philip, Natasha Tretheway chooses as the guiding subject of her
collection Native Guard the racist, colonial tragedy of a maritime massacre. The time
period is different (though still in the colonial era), and the geographic and social
conditions are different (though still in the plantation- and slave-based Caribbean,
broadly speaking). The Louisiana Native Guard, an all-black regiment in the Union
Army, represented the most progressive of American ideals in that the goal of this Civil
War-era unit was not simply to liberate slaves, or to maintain the Union, but also to
integrate former slaves into society. The black soldiers of the Native Guard actually
fought for the Union. Yet even in the context of the Union Army, they did not experience
full acceptance, and several of the poems in Tretheways collection (which also covers
broader historical and contemporary issues of the American South) are best described as
meditations on the inequality that these men experienced. Tretheway memorializes the
worst of the experiences of the Native Guard in the books longest poem titled Native
Guard and divided into nine sections on the key events between November 1862 and the
PAC Postscript Patterson: The History of Trauma 11
year 1865. In her authors notes, Tretheway summarizes three of the unthinkable horrors
(two massacres and a desecration) that the Native Guard endured and that inspire her
poetry as she tries to recover their memory. In her notes on the section of Native Guard
On April 9, 1863, 180 black men and their officers went onto the mainland to meet
Confederate troops near Pascagoula, Mississippi. After the skirmish, as the black
Union troops on board the gunboat Jackson fired directly at them and not at
phrases [that Tretheway uses in her poem] an unfortunate incident and their names
shall deck the page of history are [] from Thank God My Regiment an African
One: The Civil War Diary of Colonel Nathan W. Daniels. (Tretheway 47)
slaughter followed in which Colonel Nathan Bedford Forrest purportedly ordered the
black troops shot down like dogs (Tretheway 47). Both massacres are unthinkable, the
first because white Union soldiers shot down their own men simply due to their being
black, and the second because even though they were enemies, the white Confederate
were black. The disregard and disdain that the white soldiers of the Civil War displayed
towards black soldiers can only be summarized in racial terms and is summed up in the
PAC Postscript Patterson: The History of Trauma 12
section June 1863 of Native Guard, which comes from another incident that
During the battle of Port Hudson in May 1863, General Nathaniel P. Banks
request a truce to locate the wounded Union soldiers and bury the dead. His
troops, however, ignored the area where the Native Guards had fought, leaving
permission to bury the putrefying bodies in front of his lines, Banks refused,
This incident defies belief because it was actually a Confederate officer who wanted to
bury the dead black soldiers (even if only to be rid of the bodies) and it was a Union
officer who himself had failed to claim the bodies and then declared that they were not
even his men. This barbarism towards and dehumanization of the Louisiana Native Guard
can only be understood within the context of other racist actions of the colonial slave era
Whereas Philip attacks the colonial past head on through textual violence and
subdued, though no less condemning of the past, in her poetry. The trauma that she
expresses is also born out of disbelief but is a different stage of trauma from Philips or
one that leaves a physical or psychological wound, initially overwhelming the human
subjects normal capacity to handle pain and disorientation. But traumatic events are also
ones which humans must attempt to recover from, and the stages of that recovery differ
PAC Postscript Patterson: The History of Trauma 13
between subjects. Terms such as grief, mourning, repression, loss, forgetting, and so on
express what we try to do to overcome and to move on from trauma. In the case of poets
like Philip and Tretheway, the literary process is part of that recovery from the
experience of historical trauma (that instance when they first studied and were shocked
by the atrocities that they recount). In Tretheways remembrance of the Louisiana Native
Guard, we encounter a mournful acceptance of the immutability of the past, a calm but
forever scarred contemplativeness. Even the titles of her poems express a different tone
and response to trauma from those of Philip. The latter adds the exclamation point to the
name of the slave ship Zong! as she indignantly emphasizes the ludicrous miscarriage
of justice in this extremely low point in colonial history. Tretheway, on the other hand,
uses subdued titles for her two poems about the Louisiana Native Guard: Native Guard
and Elegy for the Native Guard. The word elegy reminds us that the massacred and
desecrated soldiers of the Native Guard are dead and inaccessible; nothing can be done.
Only an elegy can be given (whereas the exclamation point of Zong! seems to indicate an
urgency and a current possibility for rectifying the past). Tretheways verse conveys the
same trauma of resignation and mourning. Even in the section April 1863 from Native
Guard, in which she directly recounts the killing of the black Union soldiers by white
comrades on board the Union gunboat, Tretheway does not betray a rage but rather
The last words of the section are not the poets but rather those haunting and condemning
words of Colonel Nathan W. Daniels who could not bring himself to call the killing of
the black soldiers anything more than an unfortunate incident. And yet a similarly
unfortunate incident would surely have resulted in court martial and execution by
hanging or firing squad had the white Union soldiers killed other white Union soldiers
instead of black Union soldiers. Perhaps Colonel Daniels did feel some remorse over
what happened and some desire to honor the fallen men, and so he added, Their names
shall deck the page of history. Tretheway does not engage in any enraged condemnation
of the colonel or the killers, but simply allows the colonels words to condemn them all.
For despite the colonels desire and half-hearted elegy that the names of those massacred
black soldiers shall deck the pages of history, the poet calmly shows that this is simply
PAC Postscript Patterson: The History of Trauma 15
not the case. In Elegy for the Native Guards, Tretheway recounts a guided, modern-day
tourist visit to Gulfport, Mississippi: What we see / first is the fort, its roof of grass, a
lee / half reminder of the men who served there / a weathered monument to some of
the dead (44). The key words in this opening stanza of the poem are half reminder and
some. Certainly the fact that a dilapidated fort exists is proof that soldiers fought there,
and a weathered monument bears witness to them but only to some. In the next two
stanzas, the poet-tourist listens to a guide tell the history of the place and goes on to
Tretheway is not making an argument that the Daughters of the Confederacy are expected
to have given a monument to the Louisiana Native Guards (or even that they should have,
given that they are, after all, the Daughters of the Confederacy). She is simply stating
what she observes and asking an obvious question. The only possible answer is that there
In this poem, Tretheway does allow herself to make one more pointed observation,
not of direct condemnation but indirect and thus a condemnation nonetheless. After her
PAC Postscript Patterson: The History of Trauma 16
Here, then, the poet does move beyond remembering the Native Guards to implying that
God has seen all history through the elements of the natural world. The evil wrought
against the Native Guards, then, has not gone unseen, not by God, even if they are
otherwise forgotten. This is the closest that Tretheway allows herself to move towards
condemnation. That is not a critique of Tretheway, as though her poetry were less
powerful or less righteous than Philips. Again, both poets are recounting tragic maritime
horrors of the colonial period, making those events their own trauma; and the poets are at
different stages of processing that trauma when and in the way they recount those events.
Tretheways overriding tone and emotion rest on a tragic acceptance of the past. In fact,
Tretheway explicitly recognizes her own subdued tone and lack of indignant
condemnation and even hints at some fault on her part for not protesting the past more.
In Southern History, for example, Tretheway recounts both her trauma and her
passivity when faced with the traditional narrative of history of the South and its slaves:
The poet tells us that no one, including herself, raised a hand [or] disagreed with the
overtly biased account of slave history. Worse, perhaps, she even admits to guarding the
lie of the happy slave with her history teacher. Though both of these things seem to
PAC Postscript Patterson: The History of Trauma 18
weigh on the mind of the young Tretheway and on the older Tretheway-as-poet, clearly
the implied condemnation is not for a girl who chooses not to speak out against a male
teacher but rather for the latter and for all those in power who have maintained the lies
about Southern history and who have suppressed the memory of people like the
Louisiana Native Guard. Though only Native Guard and Elegy for the Native Guards
speak directly of the tragedies suffered by the Louisiana Native Guard in her collection
(Tretheway situates most of the other poems in Native Guard in contemporary Southern
American society), the past is always weighing on the present, as seen in Southern
History.
Philip and Tretheway, like scores of writers before them, have sought to give voice to the
tragedy of colonialism, particularly the racism and slavery and dehumanization that
remain the largest permanent blights on its history. But these two poets also represent
something particularly tragic and postcolonial in their perspective, something that I have
tried to demonstrate as the dual trauma of historical trauma (encountering and processing
the trauma of others in history) and literary trauma (the attempt of two poets to portray
and articulate the horrors of the past). The literary component of Philips and
Tretheways trauma comes from the inability and even impossibility of full articulation.
This impossibility comes, in part, from the lack of evidence. Most evidence (and
most history) from the colonial period comes, understandably, from the colonizers rather
than the colonized. And so what sources tell us reliably about the victims of the Zong
PAC Postscript Patterson: The History of Trauma 19
massacre? Or as Tretheway points out in her meditation Elegy for the Native Guards,
unreliably? Tretheway shows how the issues of the colonial past continue to weigh on the
postcolonial present. And in poems like What Is Evidence, she also demonstrates that
what we really need is not just historical evidence or testimony to what happened but
rather, in order to achieve full articulation, we need to recover the unrecoverable bodies
Looking for a way out, nor the quiver in the voice shed steady, leaning
Settling a bit each day, the way all things do. (Tretheway 11)
Through this contemporary scene of domestic violence, Tretheway reminds us that the
body and life of the person are the evidence of human dignity and value. And if those
PAC Postscript Patterson: The History of Trauma 20
bodies and lives are gone and disappeared, full recovery and articulation are impossible.
This is nowhere more evident than in situations like the Zong massacre and the
mistreatment of black Union soldiers because the very objective was to erase traces of
those peoples existence and value. This realization traumatizes Philip and Tretheway as
What then is the sense of the tragic for our postcolonial time? (Scott 220). David
Scott asks this question at the end of Conscripts of Modernity, and I argue that the poetry
of M. NourbeSe Philip and Natasha Tretheway answer it for us poetically just as Scott
does theoretically. This sense of the tragic of which all three writers speak to in their own
embrace of the trauma that the past brings even to our own lives. And then it proceeds to
a constructively nuanced understanding that the present as well as the past is complex and
subject to forces beyond human control. The most difficult force to come to terms with,
perhaps in part because we forget its power, is the past. And as Scott also says, The
colonial past may never let go (220). And perhaps that is just the realization that the
postcolonial present needs, and the reason that the work of Philip and Tretheway is so
valuable. A tragic postcolonial perspective will keep the past on hand even while
addressing problems of the present: The sense of the tragic for our postcolonial time is
an [] awareness that our own struggle for alternative futures, beginning as they do with
the inheritance of what has gone before, has always to be tempered by our remembrance
Works Cited
Caruth, Cathy. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. Baltimore, MD:
John
N.C.: