This assignment has been tough to do, because it concerns race, slavery, and their very real modern day after-effects. Philip published her poem around 2011.Douglass published his work in 1845. Their discourse and narrative pick at the limitations of the english language. Language and the tongue are fundamental to our human essence. yet english comes out stuttered and foreign in the poem. This is symbolic of the imposition of a foreign language on an enslaved people. There is languish and anguish in their experience, and because they can’t fully express this experience after being robbed of home and freedom, and taken to a foreign land to be slaves, there is languish and anguish in the language. Douglass echoes this many times in his narrative. He describes the men on the way to the Great House Farm. They were singing, but it wasn’t the words they sang that expressed the dehumanization of slavery, it was the emotion in the sound. In fact they didn’t know that they were expressing their degradation and deep emotion. These travelling men experienced a linguistic confusion. Their souls languished in anguish, yet they communicated better than any narrative or poem. I can apply something from my own experience to sort of understand this. A lady I know had just buried her husband of many years. All of a sudden, she uttered a moan or wail that I had never heard before or since. The sound struck me in my gut and I felt the love and loss let loose in that sound.
Philip describes a mother’s tongue being used to bring a child into relationship with its mother. At first the child protests, but the tongue blows in relationship/ancestry/security/connection. Douglass recounts how he did not speak much at all to his mother in the few times he saw her alive. Relationship is broken. Language is broken.
Douglass says, “I have no language to express the high excitement and deep anxiety which was felt among us. We had no voice…A single word from the white man was enough…to sunder forever the dearest friends, kindred and strongest ties known to human beings.” Slavery gave the white man the voice and thus the power. Broca et al continued the legacy.
Truth is suppressed. The tongue is suppressed. The tongue can tell its truth, but at great cost. “To all complaints no matter how unjust, the slave must never answer a word” (page 10 quote). We are told of the slave who was chained, handcuffed and carted away from friends and family for truthfully answering questions about his master’s treatment. Douglass quotes the maxim “a still tongue makes a wise head.” This also ties in with the poem where it says, in the intuitive sense, that the tongue is dumb. This is really a contradiction. Even Philip’s use of multiple choice points to the dichotomy of language. Did she describe a tongue or a penis? Is it all of the above or none of the above? Interestingly, both tongues and penises were cut off during slavery.