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Articles

Volume 19, Number 1 (1994)

To "Heal the Word Wounded": Agency and the Materiality of Language and Form in M. Nourbese Philip's She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks

  • Brenda Carr
Submitted
May 22, 2008
Published
1994-01-01

Abstract

In She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks, M. Nourbese Philip confronts us with the question of how to account for the entanglement of the historical subject's flesh-and-blood body with the material effects of an alien mastering language that is "etymologically hostile [to] and expressive of the non-being of the African" (Philip). Philip's poetry activates a displacement of colonial and neo-colonial power relations as they are realized in language; embodied memory functions as an elegaic witness to a collective loss rooted in socio-historic realities. Philip's complex and disjunctive text uses language as a material manifestation of her hybrid location between axes of identity, geographical space, linguistic and cultural traditions, and histories; her poetic praxis activates theoretical questions circulating around the interlinked concepts of body, memory, history, and materiality.