Speaking the Unspeakable: The Creation of a New Caribbean Identity - eScholarship

Speaking Identity the Unspeakable Marlene Nourbese Caribbean Philip's Poetry and the Creation of a New Claire Gallon Doiloral Ciinclldcilc In ihc Dcpaitmenl of Coinpuniiive Lileraliirc. i'CLA Maiiene Nourbese Philip's ancestors were crime and the recipients of the punishment for it. at the same time the victims of the Indeed, not only were they uprooted from West Africa as slaves, but when they were freed by the British colonists, no 1962 in this case, they also had to face the consequences of the status of passi\e subjects which they had held for centuries. The} had neither a native tongue, nor earlier than an idea of to how to govern themselves; they had neither dreams to achieve, nor the means Philip as achic\e them. The were silenced. Ihe mark of this gratuitous punishment remains of course on to be herself a poslcolonial subject of Tobago, a small Island in the Caribbean, close to Venezuela. when she had been robbed of a self and imposed an identity ? How How to was recover from such a traumatizing crime? How to speak, when her native language imposed by the oppressor? However, poetry in if one cannot speak, perhaps one can write. In fact, to paradoxicall). Philip exposes the trauma and deals with the wounds thanks language English, the very language of the oppressor, and this poetry reminds us at once elitist European trends. How can this autonomous Caribbean identit). or Philip's own of the French Oulipo. of deconstruction. and of writing contribute to creating a new. identit>? If the themes and places mentioned in her poetry are the onl differences between her poetrv and the continental one. does it not reinforce the idea that she belongs to the Western World, as the mere representative of a subcategory determined by context, race and gender? She would then belong to one of the \ery categories that sometimes seem to limit communication between the Western and postcolonial worlds, like postcolonial feminist poetry. How to achieve liberation without falling into minority categorizations? Or are these categorizations meaningful in wa)s that are not limiting? Philip's personality comprises double exile: two double displacements. First, she embodies a her ancestors' and her own. from Tobago to Canada in the late sixties. Second, she experienced a double linguistic distancing: she vsas nati\e language. In her that split b) language in the Lacanian sense, but she also had to learn English, the language of the criminal, as her own words, her tongue is not a mother tongue but a father tongue, of the while male colonist, which tends to categorize negati\cl other races, as Philip states: the [Wlhen we hear certain words and phrases, such as thick lips' or kinky hair.* accompanying images are predominantly negative: such expressions connote far more than lhe> denote. From whose perspective are the lips of the African Certainly not from the Africans perspective. thick or her hair kink\? How then

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