Читать книгу She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks - M. NourbeSe Philip - Страница 11

xiitelling permutations ring in tune with Philip’s “Meditations”: “ain’t she beautiful,” “she ain’t beautiful,” “boot-boot booty-full,” “shetoo beau-tiful,” “she too black”). This is not a project of “transcending” (as some would put it) the linguistic baggage English carries, of putting it all be-hind us, so to speak. Rather, Philip sees the “challenge . . . facing the African Caribbean writer” as that of “us[ing] the language in such a way that the historical realities” — the role of English in brutalizing and dehu-manizing African people — “arenot erased or obliterated, so that English is revealed as the tainted tongue it truly is.”Her poems meet this challenge head-on in a number of ways, some of which will appeal especially to readers who, like me, bring to this book an investment in “postmodern”or “innovative”aesthetics. Some of the strategies that have led to Philip’s frequent association with both lan-guage poetry and conceptual poetry are employed in her arresting poem “Discourse on the Logic of Language.” Though it is technicallyfour pages, I read it as two two-page spreads, each of which contains four “voices” speaking in distinct discourses. One speaks in a recognizably “poetic” discourse; this text, which is lineated and centered on the left-hand page, progresses via repetition, with subtle but powerful variations. Another, represented in italics and located in the right margin of the left-hand page, announces “edicts” in a legal discourse. A third, in the left margin of the left-hand page, in all capital letters and landscape ori-entation, oers a storytelling discourse. And the last “voice”dominates the whole right-hand page; like the rst, it is in normal typeface, but its unlineated paragraphs communicate through the “objective”discourse of education: the prose of a textbook or reference volume. To speak of these discourses as “voices” reminds us that we “hear” or associate dier-ent tones with the kinds of language used in the dierent contexts (the commanding tone of the lawgiver,the matter-of-fact authority of the educator, and so forth). This terminology also highlights the role of the visual in the production of speech eects in written poetry — the poem’s polyvocalityis expressed through very writerlydevices. A discourse (in the sense of a formal, lengthy discussion of a subject) can be either written or spoken, and Philip’s poem harnesses both these possibilities together.The poem analyzes and unpacks the questions concerning language that her essay addresses: the poem a piercingly beautiful and achingly