In her long poem Zong!, Marlene NourbeSe Philip makes the impossible attempt to represent in language what refuses to be said: the massacre of presumably 150 enslaved people who were taken from West Africa to Jamaica on board the British freighter Zong. The murder of these people became the subject of an insurance dispute that was settled in court and only therefore remained anchored in the collective memory in the form of a two-page transcript. Based on this document, Philip attempts to free the lives and painful deaths of the victims from legal language and to recover their fate in a polyphonic, multilingual, at the same time scattered and formally tightly bound textual form. The present text is intended as a first descriptive attempt to grasp the connection between language, violence and transgenerational transmission with regard to Philip’s bold poetic experiment.