She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks

M. Nourbese Philip, She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks. foreword by Evie Shockley. Middletown, Ct: Wesleyan University press, 2015. 102pp. $15.95Thanks in no small part to the critical acclaim garnered by Zong! (2008), M. NourbeSe Philip's first US book of poetry, some of the author's early writing has now appeared in this volume from Wesleyan. Originally published in Cuba in 1988 and in the UK in 1993, She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks is finally available in the US. For those of us with access to NourbeSe Philip's sound recordings on PennSound, and to her individual works published in various journals, this collection represents an important addition to our reading and understanding of one of the most innovative poets writing today from global perspectives. Caribbean, the UK, and Canada are just three of her vantage points.)Like NourbeSe Philip's overlapping global perspectives, her book as a whole has the structure of a Venn diagram. Insofar as the title is an eponym of the last poem in the book, both title and poem frame the collection, giving it a circular shape from beginning to end. The title itself can be read as two titles, simultaneously detached and linked by a comma, a caesura that encapsulates the silent break between the two predicates. Moreover, as in Zong!, NourbeSe Philip back-ends this book with an autobiographical essay that explains its social, cultural, and linguistic contexts. Not a strategy that I generally like (it was the one thing I thought detracted from the power of Zong!), here it seems appropriate. Since the book is also frontloaded by Evie Shockley's introduction, NourbeSe Philip's afterword amplifies Shockley's efforts to familiarize American audiences with the aesthetics, formal strategies, and cultural modalities informing the author's work. Shockley's introduction partially overlaps NourbeSe Philip's afterword, thanks to the eponymous book title and concluding poem, which suture this entire structure.This Venn diagram structure also describes the relationship between one's and one's languages. These terms, as NourbeSe Philip shows us, must be qualified: the poems in this collection argue that all language is acquired and that all languages, therefore, may be regarded as either one's actual or potential mother tongues. But it's precisely the differences between the actual and the potential that constitute history-here, the history of colonialism. NourbeSe Philip's poems move from excoriating enslavement and theft to valorizing language acquisition. She acknowledges what has been lost (daughters, mothers, and their languages) but also reminds us that what is lost is not destroyed. Most important, these poems insist that what has been imposed (another mother tongue) had already belonged to those on whom it was forced.This past perfect of prior ownership is best expressed and justified in a section of the book entitled Universal Grammar, but it gets established in the formal and thematic structures of the book overall. Unlike the collective, almost epic, sweep of Zong!, She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks focuses on the rippling effects of colonialism and slavery on the African mother-daughter relationship. The sequence of poems can be read as loosely corresponding to a bildungslied, a kind of formation poem. We begin with theft, a daughter snatched from her mother-Where she, where she, where she / be, where she gone? This daughter winds up in an Adoption Bureau, attends a Catholic school (The Catechist and Eucharistic Contradictions) and eventually, while learning her new language, not only recalls the language she has lost but also learns the Declensions of Beauty associated with the language in a mouth not made (she has Flying Cheek-Bones) to form these strange sounds: English / is my mother tongue. / A mother tongue is not / not a foreign lan lan lang / language / l /anguish (Discourse on the Logic of Language). …

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