Читать книгу She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks - M. NourbeSe Philip - Страница 12

xiiibrutal collage; the essay, precise prose of stunning insight. As theoret-ical treatments of the same issues in two dierent genres — and dis-courses — the two works reenact the formal structure of the poem within the larger framework of the book. (Indeed, the essay functions as both echo and elaboration for virtually all the poems in the collection.) The opening stanza brilliantly crystallizes the “dilemma” that the African Ca-ribbean writer, in Philip’s account, always faces:English is my mother tongue. A mother tongue is not a foreign lan lan lang language l/anguish l/anguish — a foreign anguish.The other discourses of the poem comment more or less obliquely on this central problem. The legal discourse demands that “slaves” be prevented (by separation) from speaking in the languages they were born to in Af-rica, lest they “foment rebellion.” The narrative discourse tells a story of childbirth and of the “mother’s tongue”licking her daughter clean. The nal discourse educates us about the brain, parts of which — parts that are critical to our capacity for speech — are named for doctors who worked hard to makescience of their prejudices, to demonstrate that white men’s brains made them “superior to women, Blacks, and other peoples of colour.” English is a tongue that dirties some of us, and the pain it can cause is in no way foreign to our experience of it. Yet it is the tongue with which we must expose and negotiate this very problem.The nal poem in the collection is the title poem, “She TriesHer Tongue; Her Silence Softly Breaks” — at sixteen pages, the longest poem in the book and one in which Philip marshals all the knowledges and all the strategies she has developed up to that point. The poem opens with a simple yet elegant lyricism that joins syntactic patterns derived from the Caribbean demotic (patterns which have become her rhetorical signa-ture) with allusions to Greek mythology, ina stanza whose fourteen gor-geous (unrhymed,unmetered) lines gesture toward the English literary