M. NourbeSe Philips’ poem “Discourse on the Logic of Language” mainly talks about the power of language in colonial contexts. According to Philips’ demonstration, language has the power of shaping identity. Philips points out that English, which is called the “Father language” in the poem, has been used as a tool/tactic for frustrating slaves’ self-realization and identity formation by the colonizers. In order to oppress slaves and gain power over them, the white slaveholders teach their slaves the “Father language” and punished “Slave caught speaking his native language” as a means of destroying their “mother tongue”. In the poem, the sentence “English / is my mother tongue / A mother tongue is not / not a foreign lan lan lang / language / l / anguish / – a foreign anguish” is the most impressive to me. Philips plays on the word “language,” repeating “lan” to represent that she cannot locate her mother-tongue because it has been severed from its cultural and linguistic origins. This sentence can also express the anguish of the African people under the brutality and the violence practiced by the colonizers. Philips’ poem relates to Douglass’s Narrative regarding to how white slaveholders gain power and retain slavery by keeping their slaves ignorant. Douglass uses his own experience to explain that the enforced ignorance robs slaves’ natural sense of individual identity. Slave owners keep slaves by depriving them of knowledge and education in order to prevent them from pursuing freedom. In short, Philips and Douglass illustrate the same tactic of how white slaveholders control their slaves.