In Whose Language

NourbeSe Philip’s essay “The Absence of Writing, or How I Almost Became a Spy” centers on the term “i-mage,” a coinage that enacts her argument that language is a critical site of colonial harm and reparative potential.¹ As theorized by Philip, the i-mage is more than an element of poetry / creative writing or a description of the world through language; it is the building block of being-in-language. Philip’s fracture of the word into two component parts—the “I” and the “mage,” the self and the magic, separated yet hinged together by the hyphen—mirrors her claim that, historically hollowed of language to express Black i-mage and forced to use language that “served to articulate the non-being of the African,” the Black postcolonial subject’s articulation of self necessarily involves a wrestling with (and potentially a de- and reconstruction of) language.² Ultimately, Philip’s theory of the i-mage posits that subjectivity is alchemized through language. Consequently, it repositions poetry—particularly the lyric—as an activity through which i-mage can be transformatively engaged: through lyric labor the subject is empowered to resist anti-Black i-mages and inspired to create Black i-mages that emerge organically from a Black consciousness.

“Meditations on the Declension of Beauty by the Girl with the Flying Cheek-bones,” from She Tries Her Tongue, demonstrates this lyric activity by making visible the process of unearthing, unseating, and recontextualizing that precedes meaningful utterance (or writing) for the Black postcolonial subject.³ The lyric speaker of the poem, the “Girl,” struggles to wrap her voice around the subject position necessary to produce articulation, grasping for an i-mage of herself that aligns with the idea of beauty upon which she wishes to meditate; the entire poem rests on her attempt to call herself “beautiful” and enacts the hesitations, stutters and uncertainty that surrounds that endeavor. However, it is this persistent effort that ultimately breaks through and empowers her to speak her beauty into being to and through herself. Philip’s use of the lyric here serves a dual function: it provides testimonial and experiential evidence for the psycholinguistic trauma to which the Black consciousness is / has been / continues to be subjected within the confines of colonizing language (in this case, “standard” English) that disconnects Blackness and i-mage, and simultaneously carves a space for subject construction and i-mage reconstruction through lyric activity itself.

Philip’s activation of the lyric as a tool in re-i-maging the Black postcolonial subject begins at the poem’s title. “Meditations on the Declensions of Beauty” offers high philosophical register and locates the poem firmly in the realm of the lyric, which is by definition contemplative, meditative, and pensive. The ostensible subject of the meditation, “the Declensions of Beauty,” also fits into the character of the lyric, which traditionally engages universal themes common to the human experience. The title turns, however, on “by,” which introduces the agent of this contemplation—“the Girl with the Flying Cheek-bones.” Philip’s whimsical description of the speaker’s cheekbones (a stereotypical phenotypic marker for Black people) as “flying” immediately inflects the familiar language and offers new i-mage possibilities for Blackness with the liberatory connotations of the word flying. Most critical, however, is the title’s syntactical assignment of the task of meditation to this Black Girl, who is both the occasion for and agent of the meditation. This positions the Girl as an i-mage maker herself—one who is able to “create in, while giving name to, her own i-mage.”⁴ Thus Philip establishes the Girl as a subject, positions her as one who is engaged in subject-making, and activates the poem as a space in which Black i-mage can manifest through lyric labor.

Multiple formal lyric strategies allow readers to witness the trauma to which the speaker is subjected, and poetically perform the struggles produced by loss of i-mage. Repetition, for example, is used throughout the poem to highlight and enact the Girl’s uncertainty, her disconnection from and entrapment within the language she must use to express what is ultimately an understanding of herself as “beautiful.” An anaphoric repetition of “If” at the beginning of the poem sets up a logic circuit that is never satisfactorily completed:

If not    If not    If

Not

If not in yours

                        In whose 

In whose language

Am I

                                              (lines 1–6)

The repetition of the phrase “If not,” with its incompleteness and implied question and negation, sets the poem’s initial anxious tone; additionally, the phrase is identically repeated (Philip’s “If” begins with a capital I), implying that each utterance is a restart or, rather, that the poem’s beginning is a series of false starts. Similarly, the repetition of “In whose” also evokes a feeling of displacement and confusion of ownership—the voice itself is unanchored, uncertain where or to whom it belongs. When the poem finally is able to construct what can be read as the poem’s lyric question—If not in yours, in whose language am I?—it seems unable to move beyond the question itself and continues to repeat identical or similar versions:

If not in yours

                        In whose

In whose language

Am I    I am

                  If not in yours

In whose

                Am I 

(if not in yours)

                                               (lines 7–14)

This initial repetition continues through line 22, and a variant of it returns in line 36 and remains through the end of the poem, which means the majority of the poem is comprised of this stuttered and fragmented attempt at self-articulation.

The poem’s visual structure compounds this stuttering, unanchored effect. Its words are run through with white space, which in conjunction with the short lines (the longest line is seven words, and the majority are four words or fewer), and the caesuras within the lines themselves make visual islands of language on the page. The words appear unconnected, incoherent, even, as the eye leaps from word to word to phrase in search of the sentence or a complete unit of meaning. In the poem’s first two lines, the gap between the first and second “If not,” in conjunction with the line break (which perches the third “If” on a visual cliff), underscores a feeling of disorientation, and as the eye/mind leaps to the second line, it lands only on the word not, to which it must cling because it is followed by even more white space. Reading the poem, then, becomes a constant negotiation, a struggle to hold on to meaning as one navigates the chasms of white space that appear at every turn.

However, Philip’s repetition and visual cueing serve a contradictory and equally critical function: in addition to being enactments of subjection, they are strategies of subject-construction in the poem. On the one hand, the repetition functions as a stutter and a kind of self-effacement; on the other, because of the repetition, the word “I”—the poem’s most repeated word, appearing nineteen times—gives the subject substantial presence in the text. Similarly, although the repetition of “if”—the second most repeated word in the poem, appearing fourteen times and almost always in sentence case (i.e., “If”)—acts to undermine the speaker’s lyric authority, it actually contributes visually to the presence of the letter I throughout the poem. In these ways, the repetition serves to inscribe the self both visually and sonically into the text—the “I” in i-mage repeating like a spell or chant conjuring the self into being.

Visually, the gaps in the poem are disorienting and form chasms between the “word symbols” of the poem;⁵ however, shifting focus from the white space to the text itself allows another reading. From this perspective, it is possible to read the islands of text as instances of insistence, as the lyric voice refusing the oppression of silence that consistently attempts to erase it, as the language of the speaker—however incoherent, however unformed—chipping away at the overwhelming whiteness of the page. The visual tension between the blank spaces and text acts as a record of the lyric subject’s struggle against erasure and her persistence despite the resistance she encounters, thus actively participating in the construction of the lyric speaker’s presence in the poem.

Notably, the poem also expresses a brief shift in its visual and vocal performance:

Girl with the flying cheek-bones:
She is
I am
Woman with the behind that drives men mad
And if not in yours
Where is the woman with a nose broad
As her strength
If not in yours
In whose language
Is the man with the full-moon lips
Carrying the midnight of colour
Split by the stars — a smile
If not in yours

                                               (lines 23–35)

In this section several important moves occur that contribute to the tensions Philip creates around the idea of a subject. In terms of the lyric subject, there is a momentary shift to the third person, which can be read as dissociative—the speaker turns her gaze to her body but cannot describe it without the interruption of her own destabilizing voice, as the phrases from the earlier section—“If not,” and “If not in yours” and “In whose language”—interrupt her description. Moreover, the descriptions also flirt, like “the flying cheek-bones” in the title, with stereotype—that is, with language that serves to obscure rather than elucidate its subject matter: “the woman with a nose broad” and the hyper-sexualized “behind that drives men mad” feel a touch generic. Again, this serves to reinforce the reader’s understanding and experience of the postcolonial Black subject as she seeks to find herself reflected in a language that is hostile to her or, as Philip writes, “a language comprised of word symbols that . . . affirmed negative i-mages about her.”⁶

However, alongside this reading there is also the sense that at this point it feels as though some resistance in the poem has collapsed—as though the poem’s relentless repetition has finally pierced some invisible barrier (colonial oppressive linguistic violence), and the language cracks and gives way. The shift is marked by the speaker stepping outside herself, at which moment she becomes the subject of her own gaze—seeing, recognizing, and naming herself: “Girl with the flying cheek-bones: / She is / I am.” The descriptors, rudimentary as they are, can be read as the speaker’s forays into self-articulation beyond the existential barebones “Am I    I am” of the previous section. Additionally, the descriptors build and increase in their complexity and resonance as the speaker moves from “flying” to describe the cheekbones, to “the behind that makes men mad,” which both describes the body and demonstrates its impact on others. The line break also serves this growth in the next image, which begins with the stereotype “woman with a nose broad,” but as the line breaks, the image keeps going; “a nose broad” is not just a stereotypical descriptor but also the vehicle for the tenor of a self-described internal quality: it is “broad / As her strength.” The final image of the section expands even further, growing in lyric quality as it spills over line after line: “the man with the full-moon lips / Carrying the midnight of colour / Split by the stars—a smile.”

It is important to note here that there is also a shift in the I’s capacity in this section of the poem, as the “I” becomes not just the Girl herself but emblematic of others she recognizes as relational to her being. This act confirms her as a lyric agent “growing familiarity with be-ing and how it relates to the outer world,” and who, through her engagement with language and naming, “encapsulates, reflects, and refines the entire experiential life and world view of the tribe, the race, and consequently the society at large.”⁷ This shift in capacity demonstrates how the speaker’s lyric labor enables her to move from inhabiting colonial image to creating a Black i-mage born of her own internal understandings of herself and her community.

It is in the poem’s final section that its lyric power most fully realizes its potential. In her linguistic performance, the Girl reverts to the repeated phrases of the first section:

                    In whose

In whose language

                                Am I

                                Am I not

                                Am I    I am yours

                                Am I not    I am yours

                                Am I    I am
If not in yours

                       In whose

In whose language

                             Am I

If not in yours

                             Beautiful 

                                               (lines 36–48)

In terms of enacting and evoking the linguistic struggle with which Philip is concerned, this move pulls the reader back from the brief euphoria of the previous section. The collapsed wall of oppressive silence has reassembled itself, and the speaker is back to her wrestling repetition. In this way, the poem refuses triumphalism, instead showing how language itself functions as a persistent, systematic, and repeated violence that seeks to erase the Black postcolonial i-mage.

Yet while the final section confirms that subjection to linguistic violence is ongoing, it also demonstrates that the speaker’s sense of herself as a subject has developed. Philip achieves this effect by recasting the familiar phrases of the poem’s previous sections on the page. Rather than scattered, anxious, or adrift, the spatial arrangement of lines 38–42, with their deeply indented uniform left margin, positions the speaker’s existential questioning as distinct and coherent. Unlike the previous manifestation, this layout feels reflective and intentional; it has the appearance of withdrawal, as though the poem/speaker is retreating to ponder its/her subject, the entirety of which is the “I” of the Girl that appears eight times in the five lines. The self-as-subject is firmly established by the end of the poem.

Although the "word symbols," to use Philip’s term, return relatively unchanged in the final section, it is also important to note that a key phrase—the “If not” that opens the poem—has fallen away in this final section. The phrase appears eight times in the first section but is absent from most of the last section. This question/negation is no longer at the fore of the Girl’s consciousness and no longer establishes the framework of the contemplation: “If not” is, for the most part, off the table. While the phrase does return in the penultimate line, it is answered by a swift and declarative “Beautiful”: a word the speaker has hitherto not uttered, despite its being the ostensible subject of her meditation. Thus the lyric not only gets at the real underlying question—which is not merely one of “beauty” but rather of the speaker’s right and ability to i-mage herself thus—but also answers that question through the subject-making activity of the lyric itself. Thus the very act of questioning (Am I?), the interrogation of the relationship between self and other (Am I yours?), and the venture into the symbolic (the midnight of color) all work to constitute the self that the Girl seeks to validate, activating an i-mage that emerges as the organic result of her own internal explorations—her lyric labor.

The “Girl with the flying cheek-bones” finally arrives at beautiful as a word she might claim for herself and others like her, but this represents a bittersweet victory. On the one hand, through the figure of the Girl and the staging of her lyric/i-maging process, Philip provides a window into the psychic shackles that hobble the consciousness of the Black postcolonial subject, as well as the persistence, irrepressibility, and sheer hard work—psychic, emotional, linguistic—that is necessary to move through those layers of invisible and powerful oppression into a space of selfhood. On the other hand, Philip demonstrates the power of lyric labor; through engagement in lyric activity, the “Girl with the flying cheek-bones” processes her oppression and makes visible to herself (and the reader) that she is worthy of this difficult and necessary i-mage–building and affirming work. As she works to undo her subjection to hostile i-mages, she becomes an increasingly empowered lyric agent whose defining i-mages arise from her own explorations and determinations. And, yes, she is beautiful.

 

Lauren K. Alleyne is the author of the poetry collections Difficult Fruit (Peepal Tree, 2014) and Honeyfish (New Issues Poetry and Prose, 2019) and the coeditor, with Joanne V. Gabbin, of Furious Flower: Seeding the Future of African American Poetry (Northwestern University Press, 2020). She is a professor of English at James Madison University and executive director of the Furious Flower Poetry Center.

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[1] The essay introduces Philip’s award-winning collection of poetry, She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks (Charlottetown, PEI: Ragweed, 1989), 10–25. (The essay serves as an afterword to the 2015 Wesleyan University Press edition.)

[2] Ibid., 16.

[3] M. NourbeSe Philip, “Meditations on the Declensions of Beauty by the Girl with the Flying Cheek-bones,” in She Tries Her Tongue, 52–53; hereafter cited in the text by line number. 

[4] Philip, “The Absence of Writing,” in She Tries Her Tongue, 21.

[5] Ibid., 16.

[6] Ibid.

[7] Ibid., 14.