From Margin to The (Canadian) Frontier: “The Wombs of Language” in M. Nourbese Philip’s She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks

Abstract

In this close reading of M. Nourbese Philip’s collection of poetry She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks, the author examines the revised Canadian literary cartography by Philip’s complex poetry series. In her effort to foreground the “histories” of Africans in the New World and their entangled relationship to the history of the West, Philip ultimately challenges the “uni-verse-all” voice, while calling attention to the politics that underlie assertions of “universalism” and “objectivity." The author pinpoints a number of Western epistemologies that are the targets of Philip’s re-vision: specifically Greek myth, Christianity, the English language/grammar and its impact on the social construction of bodies. For instance, Philip re-visions Greek myth so that the Proserpine/Ceres separation of mother/daughter becomes rewritten to encompass the fragmentation of cultures that resulted from the African diaspora. The author argues that Philip traverses the Caribbean and Canadian landscape in an effort to create a “mother-tongue” that is not circumscribed by sexist or racist hegemony and that Philip’s overall objective is to reposition Black Canadian poetry from the literary margins to the frontier.

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