Dickinson’s inability to tell the story of slavery is contrasted with M. NourbeSe Philip’s lifework Zong!, a book that attempts to listen to the missing, those who have been obliterated from the judicial archive or murdered in the Black Atlantic. Zong! is derived from a set of procedural constraints, using a legal summary of the Gregson vs. Gilbert decision – a case that determined whether slaves thrown overboard could be claimed as insured goods – to produce sequences of dispersed poems, associated texts and performances. Philip compares these procedural constraints to entering the hold, and her acts of linguistic selection and discarding to those of the slave masters. This radical attempt to restage the violences of history and recover the lost are complicated by her contention that the lyric poet must act as a bridge between the individual and the group. This chapter consider how Philip’s practice moves from page-based experiments with formal constraints, through an antagonistic relationship to the colonial lyric, into collective performance. It considers the significance of re-enactment and ritual in Philip’s work to channel the voices of the ancestors and disrupt the silences of the archive.

The rise of Rastafari in popular consciousness and the 1968 Rodney disturbance in Jamaica, the 1970 Black Power revolution in Trinidad, and a range of leftist political parties emerged to challenge the post-independence status quo. The 1979 overthrow of Eric Gairy’s government in Grenada, by the New Jewel Movement (NJM) – a party of young, black radical intellectuals and activists – was yet another example of how the earlier independence models were being challenged, and in some cases completely dismantled. This chapter examines literary works by Merle Hodge, Earl Lovelace, and V. S. Naipaul, to analyse how anglophone Caribbean writers addressed questions around the unfinished business of independence. I also discuss work by Walter Rodney, Derek Walcott, and Sylvia Wynter. Their work represents many of the key formal, thematic, and philosophical experiments that define the literature of this period. I call the unfinished business these authors describe ‘postcolonial stirrings’, where stirrings means disorder and ferment. Concentrating on four themes that surface across the field – nation language, Black Power, history and literature debates, and radicalism in crisis – I mark the end of the radical 1970s in the Caribbean as 1983 with the end of the Grenada Revolution and the collapse of the NJM.

Black British poetry is the province of experimenting with voice and recording rhythms beyond the iambic pentameter. On the stage and also on the page, it constitutes and preserves a sound archive of distinct linguistic varieties. David Dabydeen employs a form of Guyanese Creole to commemorate the experience of slaves and indentured labourers, whilst others adapt Jamaican Creole to celebrate folk culture and explore the postcolonial metropolis. Using modified forms of Guyanese Creole, Grace Nichols frequently constructs gendered voices and John Agard celebrates linguistic playfulness. The emergence and marked growth of ‘London Jamaican’ indicates that borders between linguistic varieties are neither absolute nor static. Daljit Nagra’s heteroglot poems frequently emulate ‘Punglishd’, the English of migrants whose first language is Punjabi. Nagra’s mainstream success also indicates the clout of vernacular voices in poetry, which can connect with oral traditions and cultural memories, record linguistic varieties, and endow ‘street cred’ to authors and texts. These double-voiced poetic languages are also read here as signs of resistance against monologic ideologies of Englishness.