Читать книгу She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks - M. NourbeSe Philip - Страница 13

xivtradition’s beloved sonnet form. Her theme is mourning, an elegy for the catalogue of losses brought on by the transatlantic slave trade, cemented in the middle passage, and renewed in every generation:the me and mine of parents the we and us of brother and sister the tribe of belongings small and separate, when gone. . . on these exact places of exacted grief i placed mint-fresh grief coins sealed the eyes with certain and nal; in such an equation of loss tears became a quantity of minus. with the fate of a slingshot stone loosed from the catapult pronged double with history and time on a trajectory of hurl and ing to a state active with without and unknown i came upon a future biblical with anticipationLosses this vast necessarily result in change, transformation, metamor-phosis, and thus possibility.Into this space cleared by tragedy rush a slew of discourses, among them: advice (“The Practical Guide to Garden-ing”), instruction (“How to Build Your House Safeand Right”), inventory (“oath moan mutter chant”), and prayer (“foreign father forgive / . . . /this lack of tongue”). The poem speaks with the voices of anger,irony,wisdom, and desire. In elliptical, fragmented, cerebral, and deeply felt lines and sentences, it tells how one might survive the loss of almost anything . . . almost everything.Someone wants — someone needs — this poetry.Luckily,it is here for us again, in a beautiful new edition. Whether we come to be healed or to be schooled, to be amazed or to be unleashed — whatever brings us to Philip’s work — we are fortunate to have found it.Evie Shockley Jersey City, NJ September 2014