Marlene NourbeSe Philip’s (Un)Doing of Language: Omissions, Interpolations, Critical Fabulation

Starting with a reflection on the responsibility (or lack thereof) around the act of omitting, especially with reference to archival practices, this article focuses on the exploration of a series of experiments with language that the Canadian writer Marlene NourbeSe Philip carries out in her poetic intervention in the archive of transatlantic slave trade and its unspoken and unspeakable stories. Omissions appear in fact not only across and through archival sources, but also as instrumental vehicles of meaning in Philip’s narrative/poetic process. This occurs in the way they work as addition rather than subtraction by providing a space for the articulation of embodied experience that the language alone is unable to convey. The article focuses more specifically on two texts: ‘Discourse on the Logic of Language’, from her 1989 collection of poems She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks, and the 2008 book Zong! In the exploration of both texts, the article’s main aim is to highlight the way Philip literally and figuratively breaks the language and is thereby able to create new meaning. This occurs through omissions (not only historical and archival, but also textual and often achieved through deliberate fragmentation), interpolations from other textual genres and languages in the original texts, as well as the process of critical fabulation. Her way of pushing the boundaries of textuality enables not only the exposure of the violence inherent in English as a language-system and in its colonial legacy but also gives space to the expression of ‘black noise’ and its surplus of embodied experience.