winner of the Casa de las Americas prize

In 1988, Marlene Nourbese Philip won the prestigious Casa de las Americas prize for the manuscript version of this book. She is the first anglophone woman, and the second Canadian, to win the prize. Brilliant, lyrical and passionate, She Tries Her Tongue is an extended jazz riff on the themes of language, racism, colonialism and exile.

Poems from this collection have been the subject of many academic papers and have been widely anthologised and reviewed. 

Critics and fellow poets have had this to say about Philip's groundbreaking work:

The award-winning manuscript, She Tries Her Tongue, is a book-length linguistic and feminist odyssey in which Nourbese Philip documents her triumphs over the uni-voiced, uni-verse-all, white forces of the English language, Christianity and tradition. At the book's core is a chant that should become famous for its music and bravery:
--Phil Hall, Books in Canada

Philip asserts herself at the intersection where South meets North, rupturing words and concepts...in search of a new path to redirect and rearrange the logic of her literary tongue.   
--Jayne Cortez

... and english is  
my mother tongue
is
my father tongue
is  lan lan lang
language
l/anguish
anguish   
a foreign anguish
 is english-...

When Haitian born author Danielle Legros Georges was asked which books had had the greatest influence on her. "She Tries her Tongue" and "Looking for Livingstone" were the first two books she named.

"This slim volume conceals an enterprise of epic proportions. Caribbean-born poet M Nourbese Philip has undertaken the difficult post-colonial dialogue with English, the conquering language, ‘a foreign anguish’. The challenge is colossal – to weave between the poles of ‘standard’ language and dialect, exposing the history of inevitable oppression when a new world is grafted upon an unwilling people by means of an alien tongue. Then there are the hierarchies of gender and capital which are ingrained in language. Philip asks, ‘in my mother’s mouth shall I use the father’s tongue.
... a thoughtful and resonant collection." 
--Urvi Patel, Wayne Ellwood and Louise Gray, New Internationalist

 The brilliant audacity of Marlene Nourbese Philip's language supports the potent images that give this book a level of lyrical intensity attained by only a few poets.  --Keith Ellis

A haunting, intelligent poem about Black loss and exile, About the wombs of language and culture. About being whole, about resistance,..a 'must read.'  --Claire Harris
"This...is more than a book of poems. It is a shamanistic medicine bundle in which she wraps the mother tongue of ancestral speech".  -Elizabeth Anthony, Kingston Whig-Standard

By wedding two different kinds of English, Philip creates a new music—a paperbound cool jazz or dancehall reggae—in Canadian poetry.  -George Elliott Clarke, The Daily News

"…Philip’s poetry encompasses an all-inclusive verbal awareness." -Mark Ford, The Guardian

She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks is a political statement of the tenacity of black female livelihood, of our rebellion against our colonizers, of our defiance through speech"  -Rozena Maart, Fuse magazine

The poems do not flinch; they indict and admit incredible pain in order to cure and grow. Nourbese Philip's questions are difficult, and of an intensity of insistence rarely achieved in poetry....read this book and know.  -Erin Moure, Books in Canada

Introductory Essay or
Afterword
The Absence of Writing 
or How I Almost Became a Spy*

Poems:

And Over Every Land and Sea*

Cyclamen Girl    play  audio (8:30 min)

African Majesty: From Grassland and Forest...
(The Barbara and Murray Frum Collection)

Meditations on the Declensions of Beauty
...by the Girl with the Flying Cheek-bones  play audio  (2 min)

Discourse on the Logic of language*    play audio (8 min)

Universal Grammar

The Question of Language is the Answer to Power*

Testimony Stoops to Mother Tongue

She Tries Her Tongue; Her Silence Softly Breaks*

…When silence is
Abdication of word tongue and lip
Ashes of once in what was
…Silence
Song word speech
Might I…like Philomena…sing
continue
over
into
…pure utterance

(excerpt from She Tries Her Tongue...)

The author describes her use of physical space on the page in her poem  "Discourse on the Logic of Language".
 "By cramping the space traditionally given the poem itself, by forcing it to share its space with something else -- an extended image about women, words, language and silence; with the edicts that established the parameters of silence for the African in the New World, by giving more space to descriptions of the physiology of speech, the scientific legacy of racism we have inherited, and by questioning the tongue as organ and concept, poetry is put in its place".
The Absence of Writing or How I Almost Became a Spy

Originally published in 1988 in Cuba by Casa de las Americas. Published in1993 in North America by Ragweed Press (now Stoddart Press) and in the UK  by The Women's Press   Currently published by the author's own publishing house, Poui Publications.

 Four of these poems, together with fourteen earlier poems, have been published in the anthology Grammar of Dissent*

All M. NourbeSe Philip's works copyright© to the author.

For information on obtaining any of  M. NourbeSe's books go to the order page.

To contact or provide feedback  to the author please email - nourbese at nourbese dot com (type the "@" sign and the "." in the appropriate places )

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