Breaking Silence in Marlene Nourbese Philip’s She Tries Her Tongue

Born on the island of Tobago, Marlene Nourbese Philip, an Afro-Caribbean Canadian poet, was shaped by her experience as a colonized subject whose African ancestors had been transported to the Caribbean and whose lives as slaves were largely unrecorded. This loss of history and the marginalization some Afro-Caribbean people feel, weighed heavily on her poetry. The paper examines Philip’s collection She Tries Her Tongue (1988) to reveal how she attempts to break silence and survive hardship and adversity. The paper explores her use of myth to highlight her quest for a voice as a strategy of resistance to coercion and investigates her attitude towards the “father tongue,” i.e. the English language of the colonizer. For a theoretical frame work, the paper draws on various postcolonial texts with special emphasis on the ‘Calibanic discourse’ and strategies of language and resistance.