M. NourbeSe Philip

Shaman/poet/shaman

How many days is it? I’ve lost track — feel stuck and unmoored at the same time. This day, May 3, 2020, feels like day one of the lockdown — it could as well be day one hundred, or day thirty, despite the recent advisories that certain businesses will be allowed to reopen. This balmy Spring day of 20 degrees Celsius actually marks the seventh week and the fifty-second day of the lockdown here in Toronto.

Sometimes I feel my soul harrowed by this experience …

Language under pressure

M. NourbeSe Philip

Language under pressure; risk-taking of highest order, otherwise known as working on the edge; a way of life — these three qualities constitute my personal definition of poetry, even as I’m aware that the sum of these small parts is so much less than the more-than of poetry.

Covidian catastrophes: deep, dark places of light

Sometimes one can only sit with the dead and mourn …
Sometimes I feel my soul harrowed by this
experience …
Sometimes … all I can do is weep for the earth …
Sometimes the world’s burdens weigh heavily …
Sometimes …
Sometimes I hear the bells
Sometimes I hear the bells ring out … ding ding dong,
din din don done dead done died …
Sometimes …
Sometimes one must embrace death …
Sometimes the earth refuses to die …
Sometimes, sometimes, sometimes the earth insists on
being reborn …

In her essay, “Poetry is Not a Luxury,” Audre Lorde urges her readers, especially women, to see poetry as a necessity, not a luxury. In these precarious times we are stalked by a deadly virus whose modus operandi is stealth; harvesting the old and sparing the young, it culls the poor, the ill, and the racialized, while imposing on us a brutal regime of physical and social separation disturbingly redolent of totalitarian dictatorships. Simultaneously we teeter on the brink of widespread economic disaster, not to mention the looming climate catastrophe. More than ever, we will need to find “places of possibility within ourselves (which) are dark because they’re ancient and hidden,” Lorde writes; places which, she argues, have flourished because of “that darkness.” The darkness she talks about brings to mind the powerful, foundational Ifa deity, Esu, of the Yoruba of Nigeria. Associated with darkness or blackness, which in turn represents the generative power of the womb, Esu represents both male and female qualities, embodying reparation as well choice and possibility symbolized by the crossroads. These are all ideas we will need to engage with in the coming weeks, months and even years. COVID-19 has, indeed, brought us to a crossroad — perhaps to many crossroads. Some may even say, the ultimate crossroad of existence. Others may say that we have already made the fatal choice regarding climate change. Even so, the question remains: what choices will we make in the days ahead?

For Lorde, approaching “poetry as illumination” helps us to “name … ideas which are — until the poem — nameless and formless, about to be birthed, but already felt.” Covidian catastrophes: deep, dark places of light takes its title from those ideas, and will become a container on the journey to my, and our, own deep, dark places using the illumination of poetry.

M. NourbeSe Philip is a poet, essayist, novelist, and playwright. A former lawyer, she lives in the space-time of the City of Toronto. She is author of five books of poetry, including the seminal She Tries Her Tongue; Her Silence Softly Breaks, as well as four collections of essays, including her most recent, BlanK. Her fiction includes several short stories and the young adult novel, Harriet’s Daughter, winner of the Canadian Library Association Book of the Year Award for Children (1989). Her most recent work of poetry is the hauntological, genre-breaking, book-length poem Zong!, which engages with the law, history, and memory. Among her awards are the Pushcart Prize (USA, 1981), the Casa de las Americas Prize (Cuba, 1988), thePrairie Schooner Lawrence Foundation Award (USA,1994) and Guggenheim and Rockefeller Fellowships (USA, 1990, 2005). She has been a finalist for the Dora Award (1999), the National Magazine Award (1998) and the Max and Greta Abel Award for Multicultural Literature (1989). She was awarded the Elizabeth Fry Rebels for a Cause Award for her social activism through her writing. In 2020 Philip was awarded 2020 Pen America Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature.

Posts

Language under pressure

Shaman/poet/shaman

Going to meet the wave

Death's great black wing

'Mi say mi cyant believe it'

Fuck poems

In extremis

We are many and if not now, when?

Big poems

Conditions of expanse

Algebraic equations of death