(Re)writing the (His)story of the Zong
In Feeding the Ghosts, a man reimagines women’s suffering during the Transatlantic slave trade — and with more accuracy than female slave writers ever could.
“[I]f the black man is silenced in history, what is the nature of the censure of the black women?”
This is what British-Guyanese author Fred D’Aguiar asked himself before creating Mintah, the female protagonist of his 1997 middle-passage novel Feeding the Ghosts (Frías 422). The text was based on the 1781 Zong slave-ship massacre, during which one hundred and thirty-two allegedly ill slaves were thrown overboard by the crew who hoped to receive insurance money for the human cargo; however, D’Aguiar’s writing challenges the overly male perspective[1] on these historical events — as well as on slavery in general — by reimagining them through a woman’s eyes (Brown 159).
The main counterfactual element of the novel is thus embodied by the rebellious and independent Mintah, a fictional African woman sold to the Zong, whose survival story, except for her gender, corresponds with that of the only jettison survivor. According to the memoir of the eighteenth-century abolitionist Granville Sharp, one jettisoned…
