TY - JOUR AU - Carr, Brenda PY - 1994/01/01 Y2 - 2024/03/29 TI - 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 JF - Studies in Canadian Literature JA - SCL VL - 19 IS - 1 SE - Articles DO - UR - https://journals.lib.unb.ca/index.php/SCL/article/view/8195 SP - AB - In <em>She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks</em>, 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. ER -