Performance as Critical Practice: Nourbese Philip’s “Discourse on the Logic of Language”

Abstract

The title of her book, She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks, refuses to stabilize into a single voice. The verb “tries” means “harasses, vexes,” and means “attempts to use.” The word “tongue” splits its referent also, as the organ of speech and then by metonymy as the speech, or language, itself. The book consists in a series of trials—attempts, ordeals—pitting the subject pronoun against the tongue, and staging the subject as the tongue’s operator and manager. It’s a book about a linguistic situation that is unstable, with English in an equivocal position: as mother tongue, as father tongue. But this equivocation does not conceal a truth—we cannot decide between them, nor can we discover a mother tongue elsewhere. We cannot retrieve a mother tongue by any laborious effort.