I understand that the trans-Atlantic slave trade and refugee migration differ. African people were kidnapped, trafficked and enslaved; today’s refugees and migrants are forced to flee through perilous routes because of poverty, war and crisis. But as different as these two historical occurrences are, they share the cruelty and global apathy that allowed them. And the result is fundamentally similar: humans denied their homes, their humanity and, far too often, their lives.
In particular, the Adriana catastrophe reminded me of the case of the slave ship the Zong. (Its original name was actually Zorg, meaning “care” in Dutch, but a mistake was apparently made when the name was painted.) In 1781, the ship sailed from Ghana, packed with two times as many people as it was built to hold. The Zong’s owners claimed that, owing to dwindling drinking water supplies, they were forced to throw more than 130 living enslaved people into the sea. When the shipowners tried to collect compensation to offset the loss of their murdered cargo, the insurers refused to pay, and the two parties went to court in the historic Gregson v. Gilbert trial of 1783. As the insurers argued, the ship’s crew had had several opportunities to restock their water supplies from rainfall and various ports, but instead killed the Africans to turn a profit.
If, as James Walvin, the author of “The Zong: A Massacre, the Law and the End of Slavery,” calls it, the Zong case was “mass murder masquerading as an insurance claim,” then the Adriana disaster was mass malaise masquerading as a claim to innocence.
The Western world often turns its back on refugees and migrants fleeing the flames of conflict we’ve fanned, claiming it’s not our problem. Yet perhaps the real truth is unbearable: that we who watch others suffer and do nothing are responsible for the tragedies we witness. I write not to wash my hands clean of these crimes, but to honor those still in the water.
Deeply inspired by the Canadian poet M. NourbeSe Philip’s book-length poem “Zong!” — constructed only from text that appears in the court report of the Gregson v. Gilbert case — I have composed my own erasure, or “found” poem, from the same source. By writing an elegy through the words of history, I hope to unearth, or unwater, the dead from beneath a mass of waves.