She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks. M. NourbeSe Philip

      FrwrdHe Tongue Ties She ( or How NourbeSe Philip Breaks English to Fit Her Mouth)Luck can play a great role — shockinglyso — in bringing someone to the poetry she wants, or even needs, to read.Someone, reading this volume, is having a very lucky day. Perhaps this person rst encountered M. NourbeSe Philip’s poetry in the powerful book Zong!, oundered in those quietly troubled waters for a time, in over her head, slowly learning that she was not entirely lost, that she could swim with Philip’s words, that she could breathe in the space be-tween them — that, in some sense, this poetry was her natural habitat.Perhaps this person is new to Philip’s work, as yet unaware of how the poet can takea word and hold it up to the light to see what it obscures, what it refracts, what it illuminates; can blow air into it tohear its song, its call, its howl; can crack it open; can use it to open us.Perhaps this person knows her luck, is a long-standing member of that unmarked body of Philip devotees, initially formed circa 1989, com-posed of those who, once dispossessed of their languages, have regained their voices under her poetic tutelage, who identify one another through the ritual exchange of alchemical (pass)words? She Tries Her Tongue (this reader whispers urgently,and I fervently reply), Her SilenceSoftly Breaks . . .I was introduced to Philip’s writing almost twenty years ago, in a course called New World African Literature (taught by the irrepressible black Canadian poet and scholar,George Elliott Clarke). In the context of James Baldwin’s eloquent social analysis, Dionne Brand’s politicized lyr-icism, Dany Laferrière’s playful provocations, and NtozakeShange’s de-antly vernacular self-determination, Philip’s prize-winning collection of poetry was both right at home and utterly unique. I remember being

      xmystied, yet strangely compelled by the unpredictable ways the pages of her book oered up language. I was lucky to have such a sure and dar-ing guide as Philip be the rst to lead me o the charted paths.The collection includes an essential essay: part autobiography,part Caribbean cultural criticism, part literary theory,and part critical race studies. In it, Philip carefully gives her readers a crash course in what they need to know — about the Caribbean values (at least among people of African descent in Tobago and Trinidad) that shaped her youth, about Caribbean immigrants in Canada, about postcoloniality (as the status of the Caribbean andof Canada), and about the transatlantic slave trade, as all these subjects relate to her need, desire, and ability to use language for self-expression, to write poetry.I had some of the necessary knowledge. Having grown up as one of Shange’s “colored girls” — “outside”Nashville, “outside”Chicago, and, at that point in my life, “outside”Durham, NC — I understood how speech tasted that came from what Philip calls “the lin-guistic rape and subsequent forced marriage between African and En-glish tongues.” I’d been having the same dish that Philip’s poems serve up, just with dierent seasonings. Shange’s characters’ search for self in cities across the United States (“bein alive & bein a woman & bein col-ored is a metaphysical dilemma / i havent conquered yet”) was akin to the desperate search of Philip’s Caribbean Ceres for her stolen daughter Proserpine:is pinch somebody pinch and tell me, up where north marry cold I could nd she — Stateside, England, Canada — somewhere about, . . . “. . . stop looking for don’t see and can’t — you bind she up tight tight with hope, she own and yours knot up in together; although she tight with nowhere and gone she going nd you, if you keep looking.” (“Clues”)Philip, born and raised in Tobago and Trinidad, and living as an adult through Toronto’s winters, might be read as metaphorically staging the Caribbean woman immigrant’s bifurcated identity through this mother-daughter relationship: bonds stretched, but not broken.The immedi-ate facts and representation of the split were dierent, butin whatever

      xilocation, we were women “double-imaged / doubly imagined / dubbed dumb,” as Philip writes in “Eucharistic Contradictions,” “with a speech spliced and spiced / into a variety of life and lies.”Philip’s Caribbean and Canadian experiences are not mine, but they will be intimately familiar to some readers. Maybe one such reader is the “Girl with the ying cheek-bones” or the “woman with a nose broad / As her strength”; maybe another is “the man with the full-moon lips /Car-rying the midnight of colour.” Of these African Caribbean readers (and of all “New World Africans” whose roots are in exile), her poetry asks:If not in yours In whose In whose language Am I If not in yours Beautiful (“Meditations on the Declension of Beauty . . .”)It is up to these readers to name her features — our features — with words that carry a positive charge, to makethe English words express the love-liness and desirability of her body — our bodies — in the face of centuries of connotations to the contrary.To her African Caribbean readers, in particular,she asserts in her essay (and I, reading along over here, overhear): “For too long, . . . we have been verbal or linguistic squatters, possessing adversely what is truly ours.” (Yes, Philip’s legal training manifests itself in this volume as in Zong!and elsewhere.) Not only is this fabulously musical, rhythmic,elastic “Carib-bean demotic” your language, she argues — that which Kamau Brathwaite earlier in the same decade had called “nation language,” and which poets like“Miss Lou” Bennett (earlier)and Linton Kwesi Johnson (contempo-rarily) have shown to be so versatile, so ingenious, and so penetrating, as well. But also, Philip insists, the “Queen’s English”is yours by right, no matter how hostile it has been to your (our) humanity, nomatter