By M. NourbeSe Philip Mercury Press, 223 pages, $18.95
~ Check out M. NourbeSe Philip's Website ~
PEOPLE of African heritage have borne witness to the truth of their oppression, or their pain, or their angst in European-controlled polities ever since the first slaves landed in the Americas.
Hence, New World Africans laud heroic intellectuals such as philosopher Angela Davis, sociologist W. E. B. DuBois, historian C. L. R. James and psychoanalyst Frantz Fanon. Clearly too, African-American leaders consist now not only of classical religious politicos like Jesse Jackson and Louis Farrakhan, but also of such public intellectuals as Cornel West and bell hooks. In English Canada, a corps of black intellectuals has emerged, featuring journalists Cecil Foster and Odida Quamina, filmmakers Clement Virgo and Sylvia Hamilton, and writers André Alexis, Dionne Brand, Austin Clarke and Charles Saunders. However, the most provocative anglophone African-Canadian intellectual is M. NourbeSe Philip, whose ninth book, A Genealogy of Resistance and Other Essays, yields potent meditations on the political relevance of language. It is a Cité Libre of impassioned reason.
Philip rejects the aristocratic notion that intellectuals should have no truck with supposedly vulgar political passions such as nationalism and feminism. She respects no divide between citizen and poet, thus producing exacting, elegant critiques on social issues ranging from the Showboat imbroglio to the Bernardo-Homolka murders. Both notoriety and adulation followed her principled media contretemps with June Callwood and Michael Coren. Even though silence lies at the crux of her poetics, Philip refuses silence. From her first book, Thorns (1980), to her Casa de las Americas-winning poetry collection, She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks (1989), to her first essay collection, Frontiers (1992), the Guggenheim Fellow, ex-lawyer and Tobago-born writer has scorned American and British imperialism, damned Canuck racism and exulted in the gyno-specific experiences of birth and menstruation, engaging all with a fierce intellectuality.
For Philip, then, the word "genealogy" may denote family record-keeping, but it connotes histories of suffering and legacies of resistance. Biblically, the title essay consecrates historical acts of self-affirmation: "I shall begin with him. Not with the word. Which was. In the beginning. I shall speak of him who every evening with slow and careful hands brought light to displace the darkness" Arrestingly, Philip links her alteration of her own name to the organic instability of the names of all post-Middle Passage blacks: "Marlene Philip to M. NourbeSe Philip. As if we are all somehow uncomfortable in these names; wearing them like strange and foreign clothes that generation after generation we keep changing and adjusting for a better fit." Her work cancels the dangerous comfort of amnesia; it demands recognition of the cultural and socio-economic wounds inflicted by slavery and colonialism.
But Philip spurns victimology. Rather, she practices a version of sankofa, excavating the past to conceive the future. Her analysis of the annual Toronto festival of Caribana is prefaced by her recollection of the efforts of elites, throughout modernity, to police the movements of festive black bodies. Even so, diasporic Africans are "moving and moving and in the moving they are throwing out the seeds that defying the holding in the ships crawling across the Atlantic with them and their brothers and sisters."
Slavery is cited again in Philip's magisterially lucid essay The Absence of Writing, in which she hypothesizes powerfully that Creole tongues represent a deliberate Africanization of European languages: "The formal standard language was subverted, turned upside down, inside out, and even sometimes erased. Nouns became strangers to verbs and vice versa; tonal accentuation took the place of several words at a time; rhythms held sway."
Swinging between "word-jazz" lyric and surging prose, and fusing Caribbean demotic passages with barrister-exact English, Philip's essays attempt a Creole tone. Approaching her poetics, Philips reveals, "I set out to destroy the lyric voice, the singularity of the lyric voice, and found that poetry had split." Her essays return constantly to this theme: the making of poetry (and argument) out of an imposed, treacherous language, English, "this mother of a tongue." The struggle noble, though, for poetry "is the only activity" that yet resists "the all-consuming maw of consumerism": a de facto defence of the "gut-busting, tear-jerking, son-of-a-bitch art."
Philip's assertions are occasionally weak. Her claim that, in Canada, "there was no tradition of writing which was receptive to the African writer," parrots the ivory-tower convention that sermons and other folk forms are sub-literary. Her statement that African-Canadian writers have had "until very recently, nothing to follow, join, or even resist" parallels, ironically, Trinidadian novelist V.S. Naipaul's unthoughtful 1962 allegation that "nothing" was created in the West Indies.
Then again, Philip seems philosophically opposed to writing anything that does not spark a degree of disagreement. C'est bien. Long may she "mess with the lyric ...'interrupting and disrupting it"; long may she contest the page, that "blank space -- where the silence is and never was silent."
Poet and playwright George Elliott Clarke received the Portia White Prize earlier this month. He is the editor of Eyeing the North Star: Directions in African-Canadian Literature (1997) and teaches Canadian and New World African Literature at Duke University, Durham, N. C.
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