An Interview With M. NourbeSe Philip!

At the new Lemonhound (3.0!), an interview with M. NourbeSe Philip is up, taken from the forthcoming Blank: Essays and Interviews by M. NourbeSe Philip (BookThug, 2017). "Q: I have some difficulty seeing how you equate success with—how do you put it?—the reader choking and gagging." Ah! The response, and more:

A: I once did a reading of “Discourse” with two other women. One was a Canadian of European background, the other was a First Nations woman. When we were done, the white woman said to me that she felt extremely uncomfortable reading the edicts forbidding Africans from speaking their languages. She understood, however, that the discomfort was an important lesson for her. The First Nations woman confessed to stumbling over the description of how the brain worked. This was also the section that spoke of the naming of certain parts of the brain after two nineteenth-century doctors who believed that Africans and other peoples of colour as well as women were inferior to white men. My answer to her was that as a First Nations woman, she was intended to stumble over those words. The parts of the brain that controlled speech—our speech—were not named with her in mind. We—as Black and First Nations women—were never intended to be in control of our own lives.

I want to take this metaphor about eating further. So much of the so-called developing world has been/is being consumed—literally—slipping into the great maw of the West and slipping down its throat to its stomach, there to be digested and transformed into some imitation of the original.5 And bearing names like “world music” that separate the product from its source. In such a world, to be indigestible—to have the ability to make consumption difficult—is a quality to be valued.

Q: You’ve made reference on more than one occasion to history and memory. Would you care to talk about your history?

A: It’s not only my history. It’s also your history. Ours, if you will.

Q: Talk to me of our history then. And how it influences your writing.

A: How does one write about the rupture that is Africa and the Caribbean? One doesn’t. First one has to acknowledge the silence, because what happens demands silence. As a form of respect. But as a writer and poet the impulse is always to words. The question is, do you—should you—turn the horror of a particular history into something beautiful, because of course it is that beauty which will make the work ultimately digestible...

Read on at Lemonhound.