Looking at M. NourbeSe Philip's Archival Gestures

At Boston Review, Carina del Valle Schorske's "They Want that New New World" reflects on the work of M. NourbeSe Philip, particularly the book She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks, which came out from Wesleyan last year (originally published in 1989), with a new forward by Evie Shockley.

"This moment in the history of Philip’s work raises both kinds of archival questions—practical and aesthetic—as Wesleyan University Press republishes a book she wrote almost twenty years before Zong! In 1989 She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks won Cuba’s prestigious Casa de las Américas Prize for works by Latin American and Caribbean writers." More:

Philip was born in Tobago and has lived in Toronto for most of her adult life, producing a steady pulse of poetry, essays, plays, and novels since 1983, when she left a legal career to write full time. Despite her prominence in Canada, she was not widely read by the mainstream (read: white) American literary public until Zong! went viral among poets who think of themselves as postmodern, conceptual, or experimental. It is now a predictable presence on certain syllabi and a touchstone for both sides in contemporary debates about the racist exclusions of the conceptual canon. But She Tries Her Tongue has so far bypassed both Europe and the United States. How will its alternative trajectory—and the doubled-back timeline of its republication—inform the role Zong! has come to play in today’s poetic perturbations? What will Philip’s archival gestures compel us to remember and imagine?

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Philip has explained that writing Zong! involved “breaking and entering” the legal text that classified the people locked in the hold of the slave ship as commodities, a “salvaging operation” that amplified ghostly traces into “the collective voice of the ancestors.” It is impossible to read Zong! without thinking of this founding taxonomy of people-as-things, but the text does not foreground the process of categorization. Instead, the fragments, strewn over white space, leave us floundering in the dismemberment that results from categorization’s inevitable failure. She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks does something different: it tries to catch the deadly dictionary in the act of definition. Philip snatches the language of (Greek) myth, (colonial) law, (English) grammar book, and (Christian) catechism with all its “eucharistic contradictions” to perform the many ways the African experience in the New World has been formed and deformed by language systems hostile to its flourishing.

The book is dominated by three long poems-in-parts: “Discourse on the Logic of Language,” “Universal Grammar,” and “The Question of Language is the Answer to Power.” Sometimes her sources seem straightforward: “Edict II: Every slave caught speaking his native language shall be severely punished. Where necessary, the removal of the tongue is recommended.” But more often, multiple discourses are juxtaposed within a single poem, even a single stanza.

Read the full essay at Boston Review.