M. NourbeSe Philip: October 27, 2018

Without introduction, M. NourbeSe Philip begins with a seated performance, masked and in all white. As the audience enters the venue Philip continues the seated performance until the room is filled. She then chimes a bell, and walks through the audience with both bell and percussive beads, eventually returning to the center of the stage, where she then performs excerpts from Zong!. The performance culminates with a participatory reading with the audience using previously distributed papers containing excerpts from Zong!. The reading ends with Philip passing out either squares of white cloth, marigold flowers, or sprigs of baby's breaths to each member of the audience.

M. NourbeSe Philip takes questions from the audience. Philip speaks on the importance of giving names to those left unnamed by history and of her experience at the West Indian Literature Conference at Miami University a few weeks prior. She then discusses the development of her performance of Zong! as an homage to her Caribbean upbringing, describing her intention for the audience to be "contaminated by the work." Prompted by Laura Moriarty, Philip speaks on her creative process, first of incorporating the white male colonial gaze into Zong! and of her approach to different genres of writing in works such as Harriet's Daughter (The Women's Press, 1998) and She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks (Poui Publications, 2006), noticing a preoccupation with language as a major commonality between these works. Philip then talks of previous live readings of Zong!, noting these performances as a way to bring poetry "back to orality," with further remarks on her particular intentions in regards to the night's performance. With reference to her essay "Dis Place -- The Space Between" from A Genealogy of Resistance and Other Essays (Mercury Press, 1997), Philip comments on the subject of women's bodies and sexual labor in Zong!, and how, with the exception of Carnival, black women's bodies are "harvested" in the same nature as the land. The conversation ends with Philip speaking of continuing interest in incorporating digital technology in her work.