‘Ain’t I a Woman?’ Grace Nichols and M. NourbeSe Philip. Re-Membering and Healing the Black Female Body

Abstract

The black African body is a highly historicised space as it has been tortured and traumatised through the processes of enslavement and colonialism. As for the black female body, a raced and gendered space, it has been even more exploited, objectified and fragmented by hegemonic and patriarchal systems. In diasporic Caribbean women’s literature, the black female body is often depicted as a site of tension, and a complex entity struggling to make itself heard outside of historical spaces of oppression and mutilation. This body needs to transcend traumatic memory in order to renew and heal. Grace Nichols’s The Fat Black Woman’s Poems and M. NourbeSe Philip’s She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks and A Genealogy of Resistance allow the black female body to be heard beyond intersectional oppressions. This paper seeks to demonstrate how these women writers embody resistance as they assert corporeal visibility and allow transcultural bodies to speak and heal through creative discourse.

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