Sound Or Text: How Do You Heal a "Foreign Anguish"?(M. Nourbese Philip) (Critical Essay‪)‬

M. NOURBESE PHILIP PUBLISHED "Discourse on the Logic of Language" in her collection titled She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks (1989) to address a diasporic Caribbean collective identity, demanding a recognition and "rememberance" of a shared history in a Canadian landscape (CD track 10). In that collection, she assumes the "the ordeal of testimony" for the people, calling her audience to "hold we to the centre of rememberance / that forgets the never that seers / word from source" (96). By acting as the voice of this community, she seeks to "break the culture of silence" and to reclaim the power of the word. In order to do so, she not only addresses the topic of slavery but also subverts the standard English lyric voice with frequent interruptions in Trinidadian English speech. (1) However, as she 'became conscious of wanting to subvert the lyric voice [...] I had so succeeded at my 'subversion; I found it difficult to 'read' many of the poems in the collection," she reveals in A Genealogy of Resistance and Other Essays (126). Therein lies the paradox of her linguistic subversion: although she has disrupted the authority of standard English, its language and history, she has disrupted her ability to read her poems aloud. As a result, she determines that "my work does not fit the traditions of Black poetry" (A Genealogy 130-31) that rely upon performance and oral transmission. Thus, her "unreadable" poems alienated her from the community of "Caribbean and Afrosporic people" whom she was trying to represent. At the time of She Tries Her Tongue's publication, there were a number of dub poetry anthologies produced in Canada and in the Caribbean diaspora at large. (2) However, when placed side by side with a dub poet in a public reading, she feels that she has to compete, but in vain, for that identification. Once asked to perform after the dub poet Linton Kwesi Johnson, she felt bound to fail: "[M]y poetry [...] was difficult to 'read'--even I found that so ... I found myself avoiding these poems that could be described as 'difficult' and 'abstract' or 'innovative"' In order to address her desired audience, members of the Caribbean diaspora, she "selected poems, usually older ones, which were closer, on the surface at least, to being the 'spiritual helpmate of Black nation"' poems more in line with "the traditions of Black poetry" (A Genealogy 129). (3) At the time of her writing, Afro-diasporic authenticity included having the ability to represent and to replicate an "oral" voice.