| Popis: |
Originally from Trinidad and Tobago and now a Canadian citizen, Marlene Nourbese Philip writes important poetry that knows its own importance. Not satisfied with speaking from the confines of personal experience and memory, Philip is interested in the larger picture: the relationship of citizens of the African diaspora to their past and future through what Toni Morrison has called "rememory," an active revisioning of history and mythology to parallel and counter the myths of Black inferiority. Neither didactic, like much "political poetry," nor focused on the self, Philip's work is moving in its authenticity of voice and its desire to speak to a large audience. She is concerned with the blocked communication of a people who, like the mythological Philomela, have been kidnapped, enslaved and robbed of their tongue, who must re-member themselves in order to conquer their victimization. In her book, She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks, Philip explores the particularities of the Afro-Caribbean experience while making connections between patriarchy and oppression of women around the world. Against a dominant mythology which is ready to privilege the voice of easy communication and blame the suffering for their silence, Philip posits a discourse of dissent through the use of history, mythical imagination and interrogation of the dominant and racist discourses which keep the silent looking backward. Philip's goal is to force an active reconstruction and questioning of the past, particularly of how the imperialist project succeeded in dominating African slaves through "the logic of language." Hybrid in form-a border text which is neither essay nor poemShe Tries Her Tongue juxtaposes texts from many sources, not always telling the reader the origin of a quotation, sometimes mimicking the discourse of the oppressor in fictitious quotations from fictitious books to jar the reader into recognizing the bitter ironies of the colo |
