Hybrid Tongues: Language, Identity and Cultural Resilience in Marlene Nourbese Philip's Diasporic Poetics

Abstract

This article unpacks the intricacies of cultural identity, language, resistance and ancestral connection in the works of Caribbean-Canadian poet Marlene Nourbese Philip. Applying postcolonial and diaspora theoretical frameworks, the analysis reveals Philip’s linguistic experimentation as a process of “writing back” against colonial hierarchies. Her innovative use of creolized syntax, vernacular idioms, and fragmented grammar enacts new anti-colonial meanings. Equally, Philip’s thematic interrogation of fractured histories and spiritual loss critically engages the psychic implications of displacement. The article examines selective poems demonstrating how Philip contests Orientalist paradigms that exoticize diasporic cultures as static or inferior. Overall, Philip’s corpus is shown to navigate complex identity hybridities while underscoring continuities with African origins and epistemologies counter to ruptures expected with cultural mixture. Her works push boundaries of both Caribbean literary aesthetics and fixed notions of subjecthood.This article unpacks the intricacies of cultural identity, language, resistance and ancestral connection in the works of Caribbean-Canadian poet Marlene Nourbese Philip. Applying postcolonial and diaspora theoretical frameworks, the analysis reveals Philip’s linguistic experimentation as a process of “writing back” against colonial hierarchies. Her innovative use of creolized syntax, vernacular idioms, and fragmented grammar enacts new anti-colonial meanings. Equally, Philip’s thematic interrogation of fractured histories and spiritual loss critically engages the psychic implications of displacement. The article examines selective poems demonstrating how Philip contests Orientalist paradigms that exoticize diasporic cultures as static or inferior. Ov

Keywords

• caribbean poetry
• postcolonialism
• diaspora and hybridity