Carolina Calvo 

Marija Jankovic 

Humanities 103

10 November 2025

“There is No Telling this Story, it Must be Told”– A Rhetorical Analysis of “Zong!”

“There is no telling this story, it must be told”. These are words from the author’s note, and they are important. It is hard to tell this story, but even then, it must be told regardless because it is so important for the story to be communicated. The following rhetorical analysis considers the collection of poems in Zong! and how the poet uses particular methods to construct an experience for the reader.
The Gregson v. Gilbert court case focuses on a slave ship that left Africa for Jamaica in 1783. Many of the enslaved people on the ship died due to the lack of food and water, and others were thrown overboard. However, the language used in the court case was very technical and was focused on the legality of the “cargo” on the ship, rather than the human beings on the ship and the lives that were lost. “Zong!” by M. NourbeSe Philip, is a poem that gives humanity to the enslaved people in the Gregson v. Gilbert court case. The poet used words from the court case to deconstruct the poem, and construct it again in the form of a poem by giving humanity and justice to the enslaved people on the ship by communicating their story. 

Philip wanted to take the court case and convert it into an emotional experience– as it should have been in the first place– and have it be remembered as a time where people, in this case, the lawyers, judges, and other court individuals, were not giving honor to the lives that were lost in the slave ship. 

The use of the words in the court case to bring back humanity of the enslaved people on the ship. Philip takes a court case and deconstructs it by pulling out words that were used in Gregson v. Gilbert, and writes poems using the language of it. She freely constructs them back on the page and adds an element of poetry to the harsh language that was used to discuss a ship that lost “cargo” instead of human lives and human experiences. For example, in the first Zong, the words from the court case that are taken are “water”, “one”, “won”, “good”, and “day”. Philip takes these words and spreads the letters that make up the words on the paper, making it read not in the usual way, but in a way where if read out loud, it sounds like it is someone begging for water. This is a very real depiction of what was happening in the slave ship, with hundreds of lives lost because of the lack of water on the ship. This example shows the humanity of people suffering on the ship, instead of just using the word “water”. This deconstruction of the word into sounds harnesses a connection between the reader and the enslaved people on the ship, because thirst is something that everyone can relate to (on different levels). 

Focusing on Zong #26, the poem is very rigid, and this is displayed by words and phrases like “record”, “argument”, “particular circumstance”, “policy”, and “apprehension”. The words are neatly stacked up on each other and form a square. This is an effective form of placement on the paper because the rigidness of the poem can be depicted as having a serious tone and mood to it, exactly how the court case was. This excludes the humanity of the poem because it shows the technicality of the court case, rather than discussing the people that suffered and died on the slave ship. 

The purpose of the poem is to bring justice to the lives lost in the ship using words from the court case to describe how inhumane it was because both sides in the court case were talking about the ship in an economic way, regarding the enslaved people as cargo instead of humans. By telling their story using the only “story” that is available (the story or narrative being the court case), Philip brings a whole new meaning to telling a story using the information from another story. In this way, she brings justice to those on the slave ship. 

The layout of the poem can cause confusion because they are not complete sentences or complete thoughts, but the point of the poem is exactly that– that the court case did not make sense because how does it make sense that they were talking about people using that language. 

When the poet was performing her poetry as spoken word, her expressiveness can tie into the pathos that was used in the poem. The author uses methods such as the placement of the words on the page to illustrate the situation. For example, when the words are spread out and can take the form of a storm, of waves, of a ship and someone being overthrown in the ship. The words can be splayed chopily across the text, or placed tightly together. 

These effects illuminate the writing as a whole because the reader faces a text that is hard to understand and know why the author is using the literary devices that she is using. 

Something that I think the author could have done better is put the author’s note and the court case in the beginning, before her poems, making it more effective to convey the context of the poem to the reader. 

The author uses her artistic choice in precisely making the poems hard to understand– it’s because the court case and the scenario are hard to understand, to wrap one’s head around, as to how something so tragic could have been analyzed by a group of people so disconnected from the humanity of the hundreds of lives lost and the hundreds of others that suffered. 

Sources 

Philip, M. NourbeSe. “Zong!”, page 45, 2008