M. NourbeSe Philip

REQUIRED READING FOR A DECOLONIZED WORLD. This should be the first book in any decolonized reading list of poetry. The essay at the end on language, power, and colonization is the most brilliant thing I've read in years on the subject. I wanted to cheer and weep while reading it. The struggle to make a language for ones imaginative capacity as a woman, a woman decontextualized and colonized, in a "politely but vehemently racist" society -- though I am not an African Caribbean and so that show more particular facet struggle I can only witness and listen and learn to understand -- that struggle she describes to destroy or decenter language in order to allow it to express the imaginative capacity of this female, foreign, colonial subject, no where have I seen it better articulated.

Read it, and then read it again, and then read it again until you know it in your blood. show less

Com muito esforço consegui terminar esse livro no Dia da Consciência Negra.
Esforço porque é o livro mais difícil que li na vida e tive que lê-lo aos pouquinhos devido ao cansaço que me dava, o li sóbria, o li com vinho, mas nada arrefecia sua dificuldade.
Tal dificuldade não se devia apenas ao experimentalismo da linguagem que segue os revezes do contraponto musical, com idas e vindas com quebras de palavras e sintaxe, mas ver o reflexo histórico desse desespero linguístico na show more saga do navio Zong do século XVIII, em que centenas de escravos foram atirados ao mar por ser mais lucrativo do que levá-los ao seu destino.
Todos esses espaços e quebras são silêncios e falta de ar dos que morreram naquele navio, transposto em forma de linguagem de maneira tão brilhante que não me resta nada mais do que ir em busca dos outros livros de Marlene NourbeSe Philip.
Se a autora levou quase dez anos para escrever tal épico, quem sou eu para reclamar da dificuldade de lê-lo? O que resta é apenas seu brilhantismo. show less

Right now I'm feeling it's one of the best books of poetry I've ever read. I actually can't think of anything that's blown me away, page by page, to the same degree...

M. NourbeSe Philip writes:

It was during those lectures I heard one of the truisms that form part of the canon on African art, and one which helps foster another type of erasure - this time about Western art. It also reveals how useful African art and primitivism have become as countercultural alternatives to Western art practices.

African art is functional, inseparable from the social order, the argument goes, vis-à-vis the Western art tradition where art by designation is what we have come show more to understand art to mean. Integral to this approach is the belief that art exists here in the West over and above the social order - often apart from the social order. The commodity value assigned to art - and to the artist - makes it a part of the economy, but essentially it is a thing apart - alien, alienated and, at times, alienating.

It is, however, integral to the concept and understanding of art here in the West, that its connection to the social matrix - to labour, history and politics - not be seen, acknowledged or articulated. Which is where the African and Oceanic - the primitive - has served such a useful purpose, for with the primitive, the cultural connections between art and the social fabric - although irrevocably torn - could be clearly seen and held up as a significant difference from the Western tradition.

On the one hand, the cultural object forcibly torn out of its context, assigned artistic value and meaning, and reinterpreted as functional - an integral part of the social order; on the other, the cultural object still within its context, but with its connections to the social fabric hidden or obliterated. What are, in fact, flip sides of the same coin are presented as radical differences. show less