Responding to the questions provided, M. NourbeSe Philip shared the challenges and experiences of direct community-engagement with museum institutions as she recalled her engagement with the Royal Ontario Museum as part of the 2018 Of Africa Project.

M. NourbeSe Philip is a poet, writer, independent scholar, and former lawyer. Her published work, poetry, fiction, essays, and playwriting have garnered her prestigious awards such as the PEN Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature as well as the Canada Council for the Arts Molson Award for her contributions to the arts in Canada. She is both a Guggenheim and Rockefeller (Bellagio) Fellow. In 2018, NourbeSe Philip, using her seminal long-form poem Zong! as a tool of incantation and memorial, created in collaboration with a dancer and musicians The Moveable Shrine, a public ceremony performed to “re/turn” selected pieces from the Royal Ontario Museum’s African collection.

The Uncontainable Collections Research Project is funded in part through the support of the Elizabeth L. Gordon Art Program, a program of the Walter and Duncan Gordon Foundation and administered by the Ontario Arts Foundation.