Unquiet Waters: Exaqua and Spectral Justice in Giles Terera’s The Meaning of Zong

The Zong Massacre has an infamous legacy, and Giles Terera’s play The Meaning of Zong (2022) imagines the voices of the enslaved Africans onboard the Zong speaking out from the unquiet sea. In 1781, the crew of the Zong jettisoned 132 enslaved Africans because of supposedly dwindling water supplies. Through well-established maritime insurance protocols, the Gregson syndicate pursued financial compensation for this loss. As a legal dispute arose between the shipowners and insurers in 1783, Granville Sharp and Olaudah Equiano campaigned for murder charges to be brought against those involved. The Meaning of Zong weaves together the stories of Ama, Riba, and Joyi, who are captured and imprisoned aboard the Zong, alongside Sharp’s and Equiano’s pursuit of justice. Ama experiences exaqua when she is jettisoned from the Zong and enters the water. Terera imagines Ama’s recovery from the water and therefore her survival within the play. With no water-based equivalent of “exhume,” the poet M. NourbeSe Philip coined the term “exaqua.” Here, I use exaqua to describe a process in which a subject submerged in water undergoes a process of imaginative emergence, thereby enabling a narrative to be salvaged from the sea. This article focuses on the ways in which ghosts enable Terera to establish a connection between the sea, the slaving ship, and the courtroom, culminating in the Zong’s entrance into Westminster Hall. Through acts of haunting, exaqua operates as a supernatural intervention that facilitates this transposition and, crucially, allows Terera to imagine the recovery of a lost testimony. In doing so, the play stages a form of spectral justice that allows the enslaved women to bear witness against the foundational structures of racial capitalism that enabled their commodification and subsequent erasure.