The Poetry Society Annual Lecture Series revolution was made possible by “deliveries from the Caribbean womb”, which helped to increase “Western capital accumulation”. He continues: “In fact the history of the Caribbean is one of the main strands in the history of capitalism and vice versa.” Today the area is best known as a tourist destination with all the ills that come with that designation. It remains an area, however, that punches above its weight intellectually, producing thinkers such as Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon and Sylvia Wynter to name but three, whose work scholars continue to grapple with.

My response to Brathwaite’s observation that there is “So much undone to be undone” is to turn to performance, which I consider to be a central aspect of the Caribbean aesthetic. With each performance of Zong! the Silence/s begin to speak and that which is fragmented is not so much made whole as put in relation with the other fragmented parts, which, if only for the duration of the reading, leads to a transcendence rather than erasure of the fragmentation. And that must be – is – suffi cient. For the moment.

Coda or what is the un in unepic that which is imperfect, in the sense of becoming that which is a failure or perhaps more apt, an unfailure that which is serial as in the sense of allowing for other developments that which is perhaps the negative capability of the poem, within the poem itself that which is one poem one long poem that I write or writes me writing from a place but out of place the better to situate myself in place somewhere – nowhere always here

Other than childhood what was there in those days that no longer is?

This is the published version of the lecture given by m. nourbeSe philip on 3 November 2021, as the third and final in the series of Poetry Society Annual Lectures 2021.

58 The Poetry Review