There are two edicts in the poem, which are italicized passages located on the right side of each page. Each edict is a passage concerning language and slavery. Edict I recommends that slave owners should separate their slaves into “as many ethnolinguistic groups as possible” (354) so that they will not come together to rebel. Edict II declares that any slave speaking his native tongue cut out, linking the paternal to brutality and coercion. The significance of the edicts is that they show the violence and oppression involved in the enforcement of English as the father tongue and the eradication of the mother tongue. The understated tone of the edicts contrasts with the brutal subject matter. Like the passage about the physiology of the brain, the edicts are expressed with a detached voice that depict the inhumanity and horror of the atrocities committed. Also, the incorporation of the edicts and scientific passages into the poem draws attention to the sociopolitical forces and institutions that conspired together to stamp out the language, culture, and identity of the colonized.
The first-person narrative is written in free verse and centered on the page, foregrounding a voice that has historically been marginalized and silenced by cutting out the tongue. The woman of colour, who is traditionally depicted as an object in White patriarchal discourse, becomes a subject in the poem who the audience can identify with. Line breaks, abrupt and irregular rhythm, wordplay, and the repetition of syllables are utilized to create a sense that the speaker is struggling to express herself. One gets the sense that the speaker is a non-fluent aphasiac who knows what she wants to say, but is fumbling for words with which to tell her story. The motif of aphasia is reinforced by the poem’s reference to the Wernicke’s and Broca’s areas – damage to these parts of the brain causes aphasia. Damage to Wernicke’s area results in fluent aphasia, where the individual’s verbal comprehension is impaired, and effortless but nonsensical speech is produced as a result (Kalat 435). Damage to Broca’s area results in nonfluent aphasia, where the individual’s ability to articulate oneself is impaired (Kalat 435). Verbal comprehension is normal, but it results in difficulties in producing speech. Aphasia can be read as a symbol for an identity crisis brought on by the imposition of the father tongue (and by extension, Western culture and norms). The speaker has no mother tongue and is forced to express herself with a foreign father tongue, which leaves her “tongue/dumb/dumb-tongued/dub-tongued” (lines 31-34) and, to an extent, silenced. Expressing herself in English is painful for the speaker because of its foreignness and because of the violence with which it was forced into her culture. Her efforts to speak causes her pain, anguish, and frustration because she has great difficulty in expressing herself and telling her story in her own terms using the father tongue. English is not her own language, but one violently imposed upon her culture by their colonial masters. Language is not a neutral medium, but one that reproduces the norms, values, and ideologies of a culture. In the case of English, it reproduces the racist and sexist assumptions of a Western patriarchal hegemony. It is through language that one learns about and expresses one’s own identity. Because of colonialism, the speaker has no mother tongue and only knows English, the same language spoken by the colonial masters who cut out the tongues of the slaves, and the same language that marginalizes the speaker as a woman of colour and relegates her to the role of the inferior Other. Thus, the speaker has great difficulty representing her own subjectivity since English is “a foreign anguish” (line 9), an oppressive and disempowering language. The speaker’s search for her mother tongue and words with which to express herself with also represents her culture’s search for their own cultural identity and history, which has become distorted and fragmented by colonial rule.
The narrative of the mother and her newborn daughter, printed on the left side of the page and running vertically down, is literally on the margins. When asked about the distorted positioning of this narrative by Barbara Carey, Phillip comments that it “symbolizes the way Black women, and all women, have been positioned in society: there is a gap between the main text and the woman’s story, and to read the woman’s story you have to make an effort – a physical effort” (Carey, cited by Milz). Therefore, the marginal position of the mother-daughter story represents women’s marginal position in patriarchy. Yet, it is from the margins that some people find expression. Phillip also wanted to “take up the physical space on the page refused to the woman writer” and to disrupt the “man-made spatial order which allows women to take up physical space only when they are pregnant” (Carey, cited by Milz). While the story is positioned on the margins, it is printed in capital letters, which emphasizes its importance. Thus, the story is a form of literary resistance against Western patriarchal discourse. In European male literary tradition, women are peripheral and when they are written about, they are depicted in terms of their relationships to men. The narrative displaces European literary tradition by foregrounding the intimate relationship between mother and daughter and depicting the transferal of a matriarchal language from mother to daughter. In this story, the tongue is depicted as an organ of nurturing and empowerment. The mother licks the child clean of the “creamy white substance covering its body” (354). Taken within the context of the poem, this “creamy white substance” can be read as a symbol for colonial power. Through the act of licking her child clean, touching her tongue to her child’s tongue, and blowing the “her words, her mother’s words, those of her mother’s mother, and all of her mothers before” (356) into her daughter’s mouth, the mother emancipates her daughter from colonial power and breathes into her a new life and language. This story reclaims the female gender from the negative images of women in colonial discourse. Here, the mother figure is depicted as a figure of resistance and empowerment.
The poem establishes a mother/father tongue dichotomy. English is aligned with the violent, invasive, logical, and oppressive paternal, and the reader is led to conclude that English, therefore, is a father tongue because “A mother tongue is not a foreign lan lan lang/language/l/anguish/anguish-- a foreign anguish” (lines 4-8). In contrast, the lost mother tongue, which is presumably the native language of the speaker’s culture, is aligned with the loving, nurturing, and mythical maternal. The gender binary onto which the two languages are mapped also reflects the power dynamics between colonizer and colonized. Just as woman is the subordinate Other to man, the colonized is the subordinate Other to the colonizer and oppressed by Western patriarchy. The poem also makes a connection between the physical tongue and the mother/tongue dichotomy by showing the different contexts for the usage of the tongue: depending on the situation, the tongue can speak, nurture, give edicts, explain the world, and so on. This is reinforced by the sarcastic rendition of a multiple-choice exam at the end of the poem, which associates the tongue with the lip and jaw, and forces the reader to associate the “principal organ of articulate speech” with “the principle organ of oppression” (357). One of the challenges that the poem addresses is the articulation of the subjectivity of the marginalized, which is repressed within Western patriarchal language and ideology. The central voice of the poem acknowledges the difficulty of doing so: the father tongue leaves her “dumb-tongued” (line 32); the racist and sexist ideology embedded in the language suppresses her subjectivity. The poem sheds light on how Western language and ideology isn’t as innocent and value-neutral as it appears. By talking about colonialism, the silencing of slaves, the eradication of the mother tongue, and scientific racism and sexism, the poem makes the reader conscious of the ways in which Western discourse, ideology, and knowledge making is biased against women and people of colour. As well, the poem has the reader empathize with the agony of silence and oppression of the marginalized. However, the poem is not merely about oppression and silencing. Through the mother-daughter story printed on the left margin of the page, Phillip explores new ways of using the language in ways that do not perpetuate the norms and ideology of Western patriarchy. The mother-story’s unusual positioning relative to the other texts represents going against convention in order to create a new literary tradition to empower articulate the subjectivities of women of colour.
Discourse on the Logic of Language expresses a subjectivity that has been repressed by Western ideology and language by examining its power relations and violent history, and exploring new ways of writing. The poem, through its critique of the father tongue, colonialism, and science, uses English to talk back to the colonial masters – it dismantles the master’s house with the master’s tools and envisions new ways of expression.
Works Cited
Kalat, James W. Biological Psychology. 9th ed. Belmont, CA: Thomson Wadsworth, 2007. 435.
Milz, Sabine. "Resistance in the Hybrid Space of Embodied Language and Body-Memory: a Comparative Study of Marlene Nourbese Philip’S She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks and Emine Sevgi ÖZdamar’S Mutterzunge." Postmodern Perspectives (1999). 11 June 2008 <http://www.gradnet.de/papers/pomo99.papers/Milz99.htm>.
