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M. NourbeSe Philip | 283 the language of trauma Faith and Atheism in M. NourbeSe Philip’s Poetry1 Dawn Lundy Martin What draws me to M. NourbeSe Philip’s poetry is its painful limp—the “ex/plosive tongue on the brink of,”2 trying to remember and speak the past. Although Philip is the author of five collections of poetry (Thorns, 1980; Salmon Courage, 1983; She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks, 1988; Looking for Livingstone: An Odyssey of Silence, 1991, a hybrid work; and Zong!, 2008),3 I will focus here on She Tries Her Tongue and Zong! as they are most emblematic of both the painful limp and the way in which what the poem wants to say dictates, for Philip, not only how the poem is able to speak (or not), but the relationship between that speaking and becoming. The work asks: How can this terrible story be told, this horrific thing spoken? What tools are at my disposal? Is the telling at all possible? Might this story be imagined from the perspective of an “I,” a self emerging from fracture into stability, attempting to write its self into existence, to say like Harriet Jacobs and Frederick Douglass, “I was born,” and now “I am”? But what is the horrible thing? Before her most recent collection, Zong!, in which the “horrible thing” is the murder of newly captured slaves aboard a slave ship, Philip’s poetry focused almost exclusively on the“postcolonial ,” female, “subject.” A Caribbean-Canadian woman born in Tobago , Philip writes poetry investigative of the predicament of raced gender in the aftermath of colonial control and subjugation. Unlike a book like Claudia Rankine’s Don’t Let Me Be Lonely, which situates itself within and against the“American”imagination,“assimilation”seems less relevant in Philip’s post-colonial work.4 So we find more precisely “hegemonic” relations and “hybridity,” the latter of which Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths , and Helen Tiffin in their edited collection, The Post-Colonial Studies Reader, call “complex cultural palimpsests . . . that emerge most strongly where no simple possibility of asserting a pre-colonial past is available.”5 In Tobago, which before independence had been occupied by twenty-two different entities (English, French, Dutch, various pirate groups), that precolonial past is far removed and so thin that its contemporary cultural currency isn’t easily spent. Still, in She Tries Her Tongue, the text is pungently haunted by this irrecoverable past; it makes attempt after attempt to pull something from its depths, indicative perhaps in the speaker’s “anguish” in “language,” some way of speaking that feels natural. As Ien Ang asserts 284 | Eleven More American Women Poets in the 21st Century in “Identity Blues,”“no matter how convinced we [scholars] are, theoretically , that identities are constructed not ‘natural,’ invented not given, always in the process and not fixed, at the level of experience and common sense identities are generally expressed (and mobilized politically) precisely because they feel natural and essential.”6 Many of the poems in She Tries Her Tongue, indeed, struggle in the terse space between the unrecoverable and the desire for a natural native tongue. Yet even while the speaker’s anguish/language haunts her and us, Philip’s language play—her repetition and variation—seems to celebrate the creation of a new language that challenges the mother tongue/foreign language binary. Perhaps this is what Philip has in mind later in Zong! when she writes about a “way to make language yours” (Z, 211). Repetition , variation, and linguistic mischief converge to break down the mother tongue/foreign language divide, and reveal the anguish beneath it. The textual playfulness results in a “new” language that reflects the speaker’s complex, fragmented, and “emergent” subjectivity. Katherine Hayles uses the term “emergent,” in her essay “How We Became Posthuman,” as a way to describe the cybernetically altered being: The chaotic, unpredictable nature of complex dynamics implies that subjectivity is emergent rather than given, distributed rather than located solely in consciousness, emerging from a chaotic world rather than occupying a position of mastery and control removed from it.7 Hayles’s “emergent” subjectivity, then, is described as akin to a cybernetic being—part machine, part human. Likewise, the post-colonial woman is part native, part colonizer(s), part what appears to be artificial, part what feels natural. The dynamics of her existence are chaotic and unpredictable, as they are an accumulation of conflicting languages, experiences, and cultural references. When she attempts to speak, attempts...

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