 "I
WEEP FOR THIS GAUNT RED WOMAN with the dread hair who, without much formal education,
understood the workings of capital and empires. Who was pissed to hell that the product of
her labours, her beloved cocoa, could only fetch one cent per pound. I weep for her. And I
sing. For her... I feel her anger all these years after her death. Know her anger. Own it
as my own. And hers, .. In knowing her anger I know that she is kin. In ways more powerful
than blood. .. Oh, but I will give an account of descent from ancestors. I am neither
alone. Nor mutant, Not a changeling. The current of resistance runs swift, runs deep,
weaving its way through the genealogy of these people lurking in the half shadows. .
."
- from "A Genealogy of Resistance"
©M. Nourbese Philip 1997
|
CONTENTSA Genealogy of Resistance
Whose Idea Was It Anyway!
The Absence of Writing
or How I Almost Became a Spy
Earth and Sound: The Place of Poetry
Dis Place--The Space Between
The Habit of: Poetry, Rats and Cats
Ignoring Poetry
Notes on the Completion of Potentiality
Father Tongue
South of the Border
Cuban Journal
A Piece of Land Surrounded
Dragon Come Down, Dove Corn Up:
-The Poetics of Silence and the Unvoiced
African Roots and Continuities:
-Race, Space and the Poetics of Moving
|
A Genealogy of Resistance and Other Essays,
yields potent meditations on the political relevance of language. It is a
Cité Libre of impassioned reason....Swinging between
"word-jazz" lyric and surging prose, and fusing Caribbean
demotic passages with barrister-exact English, Philip's essays attempt a
Creole tone
-George
Elliot Clarke, Globe and Mail
(full
article at http://people.senecac.on.ca/patricia.clark/outrage.htm
)
"Philip's questions are difficult, and of an intensity of
insistence rarely achieved."
-Erin Mouré. BOOKS IN CANADA
"Philip's writing lives on a
linguistic frontier where the essay and poem merge to create a new literary form, uniquely
hers. These pieces are a pleasure to read--at once sensual and thought provoking."
-Robin C. Pacific, ART1ST
"[Philip deploys] all thoughtful ways of making readers aware of
how history is created, And how it is denied." -CANADIAN MATERIALS
|
