Is M. NourbeSe Philip actually being... an a*shole?

Philip has been trying to get an Italian translation of one of her books destroyed. Is she in the right?

Zong! is great. I mean, insofar as something that harrowing can be great. It kinda feels weird to call something like Zong! great, I guess? I once told a friend that my favourite movie was The Act of Killing and he got angry at me for saying that, so I changed my answer to Arthur Lipsett's Very Nice, Very Nice. Can you say you like something like Sri Lanka’s Killing Fields? What does it mean to give five stars on GoodReads to Wiesel’s Night?

I didn't know all that much about Philip. I saw her at an MLA panel a little while back with the always very dope Fred Moten, and she seemed really cool, though that may have been relative to the presence of Claudia Rankine (who maybe we’ll write a piece on one day). Recently it came to my attention that Philip was wrapped up in some kind of translator feud—a translator had produced a supposedly unauthorized Italian translation of Zong! and Philip hated the thing because she didn't like the formating. I’m serious. This entire conflict has to do with inadequate line-spacing. Apparently Renata Morresi, a lauded translator and academic who studies literature involving slavery, wasn't good enough to get the job done, because she somehow couldn’t make Italian, which generally has longer words than English, magically more condensed. And as for the “unauthorized” translation—NourbeSe’s own website uses the phrase—I don’t know a whole lot of “unauthorized” translations that actually involved a translator reaching out to the writer, being put in contact with the publisher, and signing a contract. Because that’s what happened. Philip even posted a lot of the whole emails publicly onto her website, which you’d think a woman who is a lawyer would know not to do when said emails are potential evidence in what she’s trying to frame as a legal battle? Good at erasure, bad at litigation I guess. It also smacks of a lack of self-awareness, because the emails from Benway (the book’s publisher) she chooses to display make them sound pretty fucking reasonable.

It's astounding to see so many people who style themselves as “politically progressive” siding with Philip in what amounts to a fight over a successful writer’s right to throttle anyone who attempts to use their IP without genuflecting first. The same people were probably (rightly) up in arms when Margaret Atwood was being a cantankerous copyright hawk a decade ago, so what's the difference now?

If Philip has such a problem with it, she can ask to have her name taken off the book and let it stand alone as an adaptation. She has no right to demand its destruction. It's funny to me that an author of erasure poetry, of all things, could come to the conclusion that some things should be unalterable. It's also a pretty callous disregard for the work of the translator. Keep in mind that translators often expect to collect some royalties from the books they translate, so Philip is literally taking food off of this woman's table for work she did, again, because of a gripe about line-spacing. Not that Philip would know anything about all that—keep in mind that the woman is a Rockefeller fellow and a lawyer literally descended from plantation owners.¹ The Walrus article writer laments that “it had taken Philip years to find this form.” No attention is given, of course, to the time it takes to translate something, which, in this case, took ten years. 

Look at this fucking petition. Imagine typing the words “immediate destruction” with regards to books and not feeling like the bad guy. Have any of these people seen the line-spacing of the translation in question? Here’s a comparison! Provided by Philip herself on her own fucking website!

HOW RADICALLY DIFFERENT!!!

Philip has in the past referred to herself as a “disappeared” writer due to her activism. Why, yes, a very “disappeared” writer and lawyer, descended from a rich plantation owner family, with both Guggenheim and Rockefeller fellowships, a PEN/Nabokov Award, a Molson Prize... “I write against the grain,” she has the balls to say, having pocketed handouts from fossil fuel billionaires. Yeah, “disappeared” alright, “disappeared” all the way to the fucking bank. Look, lady—the truth is, were the establishment to perceive you as an actual threat saying anything of real subversive substance, you wouldn't be swimming in accolades and institutional offers in the first place. You’d have lost your job and been in prison like Angela Davis.

Let’s take a minute here to hear Philip speak about this conflict in her own words, shall we?

Neither Renata Morresi nor Benway Series Press appear interested in the fact that in allowing the words to breathe on the page, the experience of the Zong massacre by drowning—the content, if you will, has been braided into the formal and textual properties of the work; in other words the form of Zong! is also the content and the content the form.  Benway Series and Renata Morresi appear more concerned with what the former describes as the “graphic rendering” of the text, and the latter with how the text can be used to further the discussion of racism in Italy... For the most part, they are more interested in how Zong! can kick start a discussion on race related to the migrant crisis in Italy today and be used to challenge a Fascist legacy.

Sorry, can you repeat that? That last part especially?

For the most part, they are more interested in how Zong! can kick start a discussion on race related to the migrant crisis in Italy today and be used to challenge a Fascist legacy.

Err... yeah Philip, you definitely seem like the reasonable party in this conflict! Sure, they may be trying to spark important discussion on racism and challenge fascism, but my poetry needs more negative space damn it! Let's see here—a bougie woman trying to squash a struggling small press with nothing but a free Wordpress site by trying to force them to destroy all of the books they just printed and keeping a hard-working translator from seeing the reward for her decade of labour. Hmm... Gee, I don't know which side to choose! Ethics is so freakin' hard!

The translator meant to call attention to parallels between the callous inhuman treatment of Black chattel slaves and Arab refugees drowning in the Mediterranean. I'm not one of those people who thinks that poetry has any real world political value, now less than ever, but Philip strikes me as the sort of person who does, so it seems particularly strange that Philip would want to choke out what would then seem to be a work that was pretty urgently needed in Italy, all because of her concerns about line-spacing. Benway responded defensively, and they were right to, especially as this probably signals an existential threat to their tiny press. They were right to imply that calling for the destruction of books is fascistic, and they were right to call out Philip for inappropriately crying “racism.” Like, yeah, implying a lack of attention to line-spacing is somehow doing disrespect to mass-murdered Africans seems pretty ridiculous, and is probably doing far more disrespect to said slaves than anything this translation is doing—do you honestly think your poem’s formal integrity would have been that important to them? You don’t think they had bigger problems to worry about? Philip in the Walrus article alleged that this was all part of “the set of practices that keep dooming Black artists to the status of disposability” because, yes, I suppose translating a Black poet so they can reach a wider audience is certainly making said Black poet… disposable? Are you fucking stupid?

In a last ditch effort to silence the thing, WUP tried to buy up all the copies it could to destroy them. Some bookstores refused to sell to WUP, likely knowing the fate of the books—good for them. They probably would have made more money selling them to WUP than they would having half the copies collecting dust on their shelves for the next decade.

How does Philip see this? “It’s like when the West goes into Africa, sees the art, sees the culture, then literally seizes the physical artifacts and brings them home... It’s a move right out of the colonial playbook.” Can you imagine, as a bougie Canadian woman, implying that a small press that probably has even less money than you do, trying to use your book to make an important political stand against racism and fascism, is somehow... doing a colonialism to you? That you have the right to be compared to an Africa being plundered of its heritage and its people? You’re really willing to make that comparison?

I'm gonna say it. M. NourbeSe Philip? You’re an asshole.

AS FOR ANOTHER CANLIT INTELLECTUAL-PROPERTY HAWK:

1. Side note: M. NourbeSe Philip’s actual birth name was Marlene Philip, she was named after the German actress Marlene Dietrich. She gave herself the middle name “NourbeSe” which she claims is a name from Benin that means “marvellous child” (bit of a weirdly egocentric name to give yourself but okay). Having looked into it, this does not appear to be a common or traditional name anywhere in West Africa that I could see, and I couldn’t find much to verify the alleged etymology of this name. I also have no idea why she capitalizes the “S” because no typographical rendering of names in any language I looked at from Benin does this. I suspect the name is made up.