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

twenty-rst-century sound-scape “From Slave Sho’to Video aka Black but Beautiful” as work whose

      xiitelling permutations ring in tune with Philip’s “Meditations”: “ain’t she beautiful,” “she ain’t beautiful,” “boot-boot booty-full,” “shetoo beau-tiful,” “she too black”). This is not a project of “transcending” (as some would put it) the linguistic baggage English carries, of putting it all be-hind us, so to speak. Rather, Philip sees the “challenge . . . facing the African Caribbean writer” as that of “us[ing] the language in such a way that the historical realities” — the role of English in brutalizing and dehu-manizing African people — “arenot erased or obliterated, so that English is revealed as the tainted tongue it truly is.”Her poems meet this challenge head-on in a number of ways, some of which will appeal especially to readers who, like me, bring to this book an investment in “postmodern”or “innovative”aesthetics. Some of the strategies that have led to Philip’s frequent association with both lan-guage poetry and conceptual poetry are employed in her arresting poem “Discourse on the Logic of Language.” Though it is technicallyfour pages, I read it as two two-page spreads, each of which contains four “voices” speaking in distinct discourses. One speaks in a recognizably “poetic” discourse; this text, which is lineated and centered on the left-hand page, progresses via repetition, with subtle but powerful variations. Another, represented in italics and located in the right margin of the left-hand page, announces “edicts” in a legal discourse. A third, in the left margin of the left-hand page, in all capital letters and landscape ori-entation, oers a storytelling discourse. And the last “voice”dominates the whole right-hand page; like the rst, it is in normal typeface, but its unlineated paragraphs communicate through the “objective”discourse of education: the prose of a textbook or reference volume. To speak of these discourses as “voices” reminds us that we “hear” or associate dier-ent tones with the kinds of language used in the dierent contexts (the commanding tone of the lawgiver,the matter-of-fact authority of the educator, and so forth). This terminology also highlights the role of the visual in the production of speech eects in written poetry — the poem’s polyvocalityis expressed through very writerlydevices. A discourse (in the sense of a formal, lengthy discussion of a subject) can be either written or spoken, and Philip’s poem harnesses both these possibilities together.The poem analyzes and unpacks the questions concerning language that her essay addresses: the poem a piercingly beautiful and achingly

      xiiibrutal collage; the essay, precise prose of stunning insight. As theoret-ical treatments of the same issues in two dierent genres — and dis-courses — the two works reenact the formal structure of the poem within the larger framework of the book. (Indeed, the essay functions as both echo and elaboration for virtually all the poems in the collection.) The opening stanza brilliantly crystallizes the “dilemma” that the African Ca-ribbean writer, in Philip’s account, always faces:English is my mother tongue. A mother tongue is not a foreign lan lan lang language l/anguish l/anguish — a foreign anguish.The other discourses of the poem comment more or less obliquely on this central problem. The legal discourse demands that “slaves” be prevented (by separation) from speaking in the languages they were born to in Af-rica, lest they “foment rebellion.” The narrative discourse tells a story of childbirth and of the “mother’s tongue”licking her daughter clean. The nal discourse educates us about the brain, parts of which — parts that are critical to our capacity for speech — are named for doctors who worked hard to makescience of their prejudices, to demonstrate that white men’s brains made them “superior to women, Blacks, and other peoples of colour.” English is a tongue that dirties some of us, and the pain it can cause is in no way foreign to our experience of it. Yet it is the tongue with which we must expose and negotiate this very problem.The nal poem in the collection is the title poem, “She TriesHer Tongue; Her Silence Softly Breaks” — at sixteen pages, the longest poem in the book and one in which Philip marshals all the knowledges and all the strategies she has developed up to that point. The poem opens with a simple yet elegant lyricism that joins syntactic patterns derived from the Caribbean demotic (patterns which have become her rhetorical signa-ture) with allusions to Greek mythology, ina stanza whose fourteen gor-geous (unrhymed,unmetered) lines gesture toward the English literary

      xivtradition’s beloved sonnet form. Her theme is mourning, an elegy for the catalogue of losses brought on by the transatlantic slave trade, cemented in the middle passage, and renewed in every generation:the me and mine of parents the we and us of brother and sister the tribe of belongings small and separate, when gone. . . on these exact places of exacted grief i placed mint-fresh grief coins sealed the eyes with certain and nal; in such an equation of loss tears became a quantity of minus. with the fate of a slingshot stone loosed from the catapult pronged double with history and time on a trajectory of hurl and ing to a state active with without and unknown i came upon a future biblical with anticipationLosses this vast necessarily result in change, transformation, metamor-phosis, and thus possibility.Into this space cleared by tragedy rush a slew of discourses, among them: advice (“The Practical Guide to Garden-ing”), instruction (“How to Build Your House Safeand Right”), inventory (“oath moan mutter chant”), and prayer (“foreign father forgive / . . . /this lack of tongue”). The poem speaks with the voices of anger,irony,wisdom, and desire. In elliptical, fragmented, cerebral, and deeply felt lines and sentences, it tells how one might survive the loss of almost anything . . . almost everything.Someone wants — someone needs — this poetry.Luckily,it is here for us again, in a beautiful new edition. Whether we come to be healed or to be schooled, to be amazed or to be unleashed — whatever brings us to Philip’s work — we are fortunate to have found it.Evie Shockley Jersey City, NJ September 2014

      AcknolegmentsThe author would liketo thank the Canada Council for its support, and the following journals for publishing some of the poems in this book: (f.)Lip, Dandelion, Obsidian, Tiger Lily, Hambone, and Tessera. “Testimony Stoops to Mother Tongue” is included in the anthology Poetryby Cana-dian Women.In the poem sequence “And Over Every Land and Sea” quotations from The Metamorphoses of Ovid, translated with an introduction by Mary M. Innes (Penguin Classics, 1955), are reproduced with the kind permission of PenguinBooks Ltd.; in the poem “She Tries Her Tongue” quotations from Klein’s Comprehensive Etymological Dictionaryof the English Lan-guageare reproduced with the kind permission of Elsevier Science Pub-lishers B.V.;in “Universal Grammar” references are to Noam Chomsky’sLanguage and Responsibility(Pantheon Books, 1977) and to Grammatical Manby Jeremy Campbell (Simon & Schuster,1982); references to Cecily Berry’s Voice and the Actorare reproduced by kind permission of Harrap General Books Ltd., rst published by Harrap Ltd., 1973. Copyright Ce-cily Berry, 1973.

      And Over Every Land and Sea

      2Meanwhile Proserpine’s mother Ceres, with panic in her heart vainly sought her daughter over all lands and over all the sea.Questions! Questions!Where she, where she, where she be, where she gone? Where high and low meet I search, nd can’t, way down the islands’ way I gone — south: day-time and night-time living with she, down by the just-down-the-way sea she friending sh and crab with alone, in the bay-blue morning she does wake with kiskeedee and crow-cock — skin green like lime, hair indigo-blue, eyes hot like sunshine-time; grief gone mad with crazy — so them say. Before the questions too late, before I forget how they stay, crazy or no crazy I must nd she.

      3As for Cyane, she lamented the rape of the goddess . . . nursing silently in her heart a wound that none could heal . . .Aoption BueauWatch my talk-words stride, like her smile the listening breadth of my walk — on mine her skin of lime casts a glow of green, around my head indigo of halo — tell me, do I smell like her? To the north comes the sometimes blow of the North East trades — skin hair heart beat and I recognize the salt sea the yet else and . . . something again knows sweat earth the smell-like of I and she the perhaps blood lost — She whom they call mother, I seek.

      4It would take a long time to name the lands and seas over which the goddess wandered. She searched the whole world — in vain . . .CluesShe gone — gone to where and don’t know looking for me looking for she; is pinch somebody pinch and tell me, up where