Multiple Consciousness and Zong!
as Remembering, Mourning and Disruption of Legal Pedagogy
Yuan Stevens, Autumn 2016She has become immortalized, but her body lay buried for 59 years before her headstone bore her name. Neither Henrietta Lacks nor her family gave permission for her doctor to take and later perform research with samples from her body. The story goes that at the time, it was not customary for doctors to ask for any informed consent before they scraped peoples’ bodies for cells and harvested them.[1] Hers is a story of multiple consciousness.
In her masterpiece talk delivered to the Yale Law School Conference on Women of Color and the Law, Mari Matsuda implored her listeners to take up multiple consciousness as jurisprudential method.[2] She reminded her listeners then and reminds us now that the “best” or most effective jurists are the ones who are able to “detach law and to see it as a system that makes sense only from a particular viewpoint, and then shift out of it for purposes of critique, analysis, and strategy.”[3]
But the multiple consciousness that Matsuda urges us to attain “is not a random ability to see all points of view.”[4] Rather, it is “a deliberate choice to see the world from the standpoint of the oppressed” — where we eschew the privilege of abstraction with respect to liberty and rights and instead make connection to what those concepts mean in real people’s lives.[5]
While reading M. NourbSe Philip’s Zong!, it is difficult not to think of the burden that Matsuda has invariably placed on all of her empathic listeners and readers.[6] And indeed, as we make sense of the form and meaning of Philip’s poetry, we see that responding to Zong! is an enactment of our call to Matsuda’s multiple consciousness as jurisprudential method. More than this, as we make sense of Zong!, we — as members of the legal education community — are also spurred on to continue taking up this further as pedagogical method.
Below, I explore what Philips’ poetry and form means to me and in the order of the movements of her work. I chronologically make sense of the story of my brothers and sisters, who were so heinously thrown overboard and murdered. By doing so, I embody the change I want to see here at the law faculty as a locus of power: I take part in disrupting the form, grammar and logic of legal education by bending and stretching not only what is studied (slavery in the Canadian context) but also how we study it (empathically, dialogically, critically).
I begin first by upending approach. Typical legal analysis (at McGill’s Faculty of Law) often begins with deciphering the “legal issue” (in the form of a question) of a given situation, as though it were always there to be found. Philips herself understood this oft unquestioned framework when she wrote about the jurist’s rational pursuit of finding a legal decision’s ratio decidendi.[7] But in response to Philips’ poetry on the Zong massacre, my question is this: how can we break out of particular kinds of form — of knowing, of answering questions, of learning, of unlearning, of law school-ing, of lawyering, of understanding, of de(con)structing, of liberal legalism — so as to practice new and particular ways of discussing questions to which the law should respond?
Os. It is here where we begin to remember the hundreds of people—our brothers and sisters—on board this ship. And in our remembering, we mourn. We collectively mourn so rarely when we study law, but mourning is the beginning of seeing from the standpoint of the oppressed or enslaved. Just like Philips and the family members of those who died, “I want the bones.”[8]
Philips’ inclusion of superscript names here helps us remember that each person had an identity, even if marginalized in real life. In so doing, she uses a tenet of liberal legalism — the presupposition of the primacy of the individual — in order to honour the invaluable individuality and personhood of those who were at best seen as a faceless and nameless group of “fellow-creatures.”[9]
No two poems in Os are as symmetrical when viewed side-by-side as they are in the rest of the entire book. Instead, each Zong! here stands apart, retaining some individuality as did the enslaved before they were mercilessly thrown overboard. This is multiple consciousness in action.
Dicta. The dissent into rational frenzy has come. Our brothers and sisters are thrown overboard. I could weep as I imagine it. They are murdered in hopes of avoiding their “natural death”, so that those in control of the ship could profit under maritime and insurance law from the heinous acts of killing fellow humans. The names of the victims have been fully erased as superscripts. Even each Zong! becomes nameless. Words begin to be crumped together.[10] There are fewer full phrases here that make sense, unlike phrases in Os that retain some grammatical meaning.
Instead we see here fragments of words that, when we read them and hear them read, give a sense of timelessness — perhaps akin to the feeling of floating through the air before you know you will land in the sea. In feeling with those who have suffered, we live up to the calling placed upon us to see from the standpoint of the enslaved.
Sal. The bodies of our brothers and sisters are in the water now. Almost all hope has been lost, except perhaps for the few that somehow make it back on board. We see and hear the cries of those floating in saltwater for “our souls”[11] and often their cries out to deities: “the oba sobs”,[12] “ifá”,[13] “my lord”, and “deus”.[14]
It is here where the poetry, seen side-by-side over two pages, begins to be symmetrical.[15] The aesthetic form of Philips’ poetry now allows us to feel as though we can easily understand this experience all while blurring our eyes and looking away. But such ease makes the continued choice to read each word all the more meaningful.
Rather than let the predictable and intervallic logic of such symmetry wash over us (just as the water did over the bodies of those who were murdered), we consciously and profoundly experience egregious and harrowing phrases such as “murder made us”[16] or “zen in frenzy”[17].
Ventus. This is the aftermath of carnage. When we look at Philips’ text and blur our eyes in this movement, we begin to see words in the shape of ocean waves or gusts of wind. We sense and see the utter silence of the murdered in the white space of Philips’ words. Interestingly, it is only here and in the Ferrum movement where we see words in a wholly different cursive font. It is unclear who speaks to us, but the cursive phrases still contain coherence.
We begin to be incredibly frustrated with the apparent aimlessness and listlessness in Philips’ text. We want answers. No more mystery, even if evil. But we realize: we are still trying to find meaning in the “disorder, illogic and irrationality” of these poems.[18] There is no order to be found here, for this story — like so many of extreme injustice — cannot be logically told, but still must be told and particularly to law students as acts of disruption in the predictability of legal pedagogy.
Ratio. We are now at the courts in England. This as well as the Dicta movement are in fact hidden from the table of contents and are thus emblematic of the hiddenness of legal logic. Legal pedagogy would indeed typically see this case at face-value; that is, that this is a case merely involving contract and insurance law. But the power in responding to this framing of the Zong massacre (thanks to this course at McGill) lies in its upending of unquestioned frameworks. By studying the form of Philips’ poetry on this massacre, we break out of particular kinds of knowing, law school-ing, and legal pedagogy imbued with liberal legalist values.
Ferrum. This is Philips’ writing of Zong!. She has removed all extraneous material—other re-tellings of the Zong massacre—and carved out with these borrowed, cacophonous, and continued sounds the un-tellable story that was “locked” into place already through the course of history.[19]
Ẹbọra. We are now in the present. Our spirits, as trite as it sounds, are in connection with the underwater spirits of our murdered brothers and sisters. Our experience with Zong! as a collection of poetry allows us to choose new and particular ways of discussing questions to which the law should respond. We remember the oppressed. We profoundly mourn with and for them, thereby feeling with as an act of multiple consciousness. We choose to do this when it becomes hard. We embrace illogical stories that cannot but still must be told as necessarily disruptive to our legal educations.
Do you remember Henrietta Lacks? Hers is a story of multiple consciousness. For it is Matsuda’s multiple consciousness that allows us to utilize, in one breath, the tenet of liberal legalism which presumes the primacy of the rational individual in order to wholeheartedly fight for Lacks’ and her ancestor’s rights as legal persons who cannot themselves be property. And in another breath, we could defy this same logic to potentially argue that the treatment of Lacks’ body as property in fact warranted informed consent from her family who deserve — and so thankfully have in part received — some sort of concrete recognition that what happened was wrong.
We can and should at times even tearfully rejoice in having achieved these fragile milestones, just as we did in class when we learned about the inclusion of Ruth Bonners at the recent opening of the African American Smithsonian Museum.[20] For it is in remembering and eschewing abstraction that we empathically make connection to what liberty and rights could mean in the lives of real people, particularly for those who are oppressed or enslaved.
→ References
[1] “Informed Consent” (2011), University of Maryland, The First Year Book Program, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (blog), online: http://fyb.umd.edu/2011/informed.html; archived version: https://web.archive.org/web/20160715205938/http://fyb.umd.edu/2011/informed.html.
[2] Mari Matsuda, “When the First Quail Calls: Multiple Consciousness as Jurisprudential Method” (1992) 14 Women’s Rts. L. Rep 297.
[3] Ibid, at 299.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Ibid.
[6] M. NourbeSe Philip (As told to the author by Setaey Adamu Boateng), Zong! (Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 2008).
[7] Ibid, at 199.
[8] Ibid, at 201.
[9] Ibid, at 211. Referring specifically to Gregson v Gilbert (1783) 3 Doug KB 232 and particularly citing judges Lee, S.-G, and Chambre.
[10] Ibid, at 51.
[11] Ibid, at 61.
[12] Ibid, at 59.
[13] Ibid, at 60.
[14] Ibid, at 61.
[15] Ibid, at 64-71.
[16] Ibid, at 67.
[17] Ibid, at 73.
[18] Ibid, at 197.
[19] Ibid, at 198.
[20] “US: First African American museum opens its doors” Al Jazeera (24 September 2016), online: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2016/9/24/us-first-african-american-museum-opens-its-doors.