Comparative counter-archival creativity: M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong! and La Vaughn Belle’s Chaney

Abstract

This article presents a comparative analysis of works of Caribbean art and literature that engage in a mutual project of addressing the paradox of the colonial archive. Trinidadian-Canadian writer M. NourbeSe Philip crafted her long poem Zong! from an eighteenth-century legal document about the murder of 132 enslaved Africans onboard the slave ship of the same name. Exposing the dehumanizing language of historical record from which she nonetheless extracts affective and poetic scraps of human experience, Philip shows the power and necessity of artistic intervention in the colonial archive. The similarities between Philip's literary strategies and Belle's artistic interventions in the archive of the Danish (now U.S.) Virgin Islands are striking, and the two illuminate one another. Focusing on Belle's series entitled Chaney (We Live in the Fragments), the analysis delves into her work with "chaney," a Creole term for the colonial-era shards of china that wash out of the soil of the Virgin Islands as a reminder of the centuries-long Danish presence there. Belle's art is both counter-archival and counter-canonical in her direct address to the national Danish institution of the Kongelige Porcelainsfabrik, or Royal Copenhagen Porcelain Factory. Both the poem and the artwork focus on the aesthetic of the fragment, whether in terms of the fragmented nature of the colonial archive with its many blind spots, the fragments of lost narrative that Philip scatters across the page, or the fragments of pottery that Belle transforms into paintings and ceramics that evoke the disjointed nature of Caribbean identity. Framing Zong! and Chaney with the notion of "comparative relativism," the article draws on literary and art historical methodologies to reveal an important transdisciplinary approach to Caribbean archives and to the creation of cultural memory.