Unhousing the Archives Around the Zong, Again: Winsome Pinnock's Rockets and Blue Lights and Lawrence Scott's Dangerous Freedom

The massacre of the Zong in 1781, during which slavers threw 132 captive Africans overboard, and the historical ramifications of such a horrendous event, have exerted a fascination on the authors of the anglophone Caribbean diaspora. This essay deals with the publication in 2020 of two fictional literary texts covering related grounds: Anglo-Jamaican Winsome Pinnock’s play Rockets and Blue Lights and Trinidadian Lawrence Scott’s novel Dangerous Freedom.
What I want to show in this essay is that beyond their many differences in tone, scope, and genre, Pinnock’s and Scott’s books, coming as they do in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement and the Windrush scandal, display epistemological commonalities that are bound to the time of their release, at least in the way they can be read by contemporary readers. Like the fictionalizations of the Zong that came before them, Pinnock’s and Scott’s works contribute to the understanding of the British involvement in the slave trade and slavery by staging historical and visual archives. They also demonstrate the centrality of such documents in any attempt to draw a nuanced picture of the history of the nation, as fragmentary as these archives might be.