Sound or Text: How Do You Heal a “Foreign Anguish”?

Abstract

M. NOURBESE PHILIP PUBLISHED Discourse on Logic of Language in collection titled She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks (1989) address a diasporic collective identity, demanding a recognition and of a shared history in a Canadian landscape (CD track 10). In that she assumes the ordeal of testimony for people, calling audience hold we centre of rememberance / that forgets never that seers / word from source (96). By acting as voice of this community, she seeks break culture of silence and reclaim power of word. In order do so, she not only addresses topic of but also subverts standard English lyric voice with frequent interruptions in Trinidadian English speech. (1) However, as she 'became conscious of wanting subvert lyric voice [...] I had so succeeded at 'subversion; I found it difficult 'read' many of poems in collection, she reveals in A Genealogy of Resistance and Other Essays (126). Therein lies paradox of linguistic subversion: although she has disrupted authority of standard English, its language and history, she has disrupted ability read poems aloud. As a result, she determines that my work does not fit traditions of Black (A Genealogy 130-31) that rely upon performance and transmission. Thus, unreadable poems alienated from community of Caribbean and Afrosporic whom she was trying represent. At time of She Tries Her Tongue's publication, there were a number of dub poetry anthologies produced in Canada and in diaspora at large. (2) However, when placed side by side with a dub poet in a public reading, she feels that she has compete, but in vain, for that identification. Once asked perform after dub poet Linton Kwesi Johnson, she felt bound fail: [M]y poetry [...] was difficult 'read'--even I found that so ... I found myself avoiding these poems that could be described as 'difficult' and 'abstract' or 'innovative' In order address desired audience, members of diaspora, she selected poems, usually older ones, which were closer, on surface at least, being 'spiritual helpmate of Black nation' poems more in line with the traditions of Black (A Genealogy 129). (3) At time of writing, Afro-diasporic authenticity included having ability represent and replicate an oral voice. Nonetheless, graphical manipulation of text, particularly in standard English, is a dominant concern for Philip because she identifies language as place where fissure between a collective and a personal identity occurs. As critic Hortense Spillers claims that African-American writing is subject violent formation of a modern consciousness, [propagated by] initiative strikes which open Atlantic Slave Trade (63), so too does Philip assert that the progenitors of society as it exists today created a situation such that equation between i-mage and word was destroyed for in context of slavery (She Tries 14). [I]n stripping of language, by forced relocation and immersion in foreign language of English, slave's voice lost power to make and, simultaneously, express (12) and could only articulate a European ethnocentric world view that affirmed negative ]-mages about her (16). The role of New World Artist, according Philip, is give voice this split ]-mage of voiced silence (16), using new and different words, forged by the African []]n vortex of New World slavery (17)--words that comprise the demotic (18). As well, Philip alters orthography of word image speak essential being of people ... for whom artist creates. (4) Thus, Philip believes that she must, as Spillers puts it, strip down through layers of attenuated meanings . …