ballast

“I will not be the fulfilment of the object,” reads a mostly redacted page of ballast by Quenton Baker, the surrounding text darkened not digitally but by human hand. The first sequence of the collection takes aim at a government record that collects testimonies of white slavers and officials about a successful rebellion of enslaved people in 1841. The revolters are not only excluded from this document, but as the author notes, “There is no known recorded speech or testimony” from any of the 135 enslaved people. Over 90 pages, the surviving words express life despite violent erasure: “name me,” one page reads, followed by “I am not dead.” “I” is central, “calling out in a crowded English” to counter inhumane grouping: “I took place in transaction.” Three consecutive pages offer various conclusions for a sentence that begins “I am”: “several boats filled black,” “several boats filled with longing,” and “the sea filled and longing.”

M. NourbeSe Philip is listed in the book’s extensive bibliography honoring poets and scholars of black and postcolonial studies, and her spectacular Zong! is a logical reference point. In tone and purpose, Baker’s meaning-making is also aligned with Frantz Fanon’s essay on the necessity of violence in decolonization, which declares: “[t]he colonial world is a world divided into compartments” (The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington). As Fanon argues, and ballast demonstrates, close regard of such a system of division and “its ordering and its geographical layout will allow us to mark out the lines on which a decolonized society will be reorganized.” The project identifies, perturbs, and alters literal lines considerably and painfully, toward ultimately hopeful ends.

After erasures enlivening “I,” a second sequence uses “we” in poems that “negate nation” and the modern state’s control of space and time: “at that brutal crossing / we spoil what’s linear.” Collective action, not conditions, power black relationships and resistance, holding that “we are […] in no need of discovery // for we are unto each other a shore.” ballast’s prose conclusion, “Washing the Bones,” remarks that escape is not “a positive story,” since it “tak[es] place, still, within an anti-black world.” All three parts are testimony to Baker’s deliberate style: scrupulous processes toward a decolonized and connected reality.