m. nourbeSe philip (Poet and Writer) and Jonathan Howard (Yale University), “(Sub)Aquatic Conversation” (Windham Campbell Prizes)

m. nourbeSe philip hails from the island nation of Trinidad and Tobago, and in all of her work the ocean and its depths play dramatic, if often tragic, roles. Jonathan Howard, a scholar of water himself, joins philip in a wide-ranging conversation about her life and career.

 

Born in Woodlands, Moriah, Trinidad and Tobago in 1947, m. nourbeSe philip is an internationally renowned poet, novelist, playwright, and essayist. Across her diverse and rich body of work, philip has constantly and deeply engaged with the complexities of art, colonialism, identity, and race, with a particular interest in forgotten and suppressed histories. In her 2017 book Bla_k: Essays and Interviews, philip describes her long struggle against the horrors of history: “I’m still hunting, trying to find the word or words to describe the Middle Passage, site of so much grief and trauma, final home to so many of us.” Her work Zong! (2008) is at once a representation of this struggle as well as a recovery of its historical subject: the murder of 142 Africans by a slave-ship crew in 1781. Zong!, which has become a seminal text of memory work, sets the terms for what it means both to write poetry in the long shadow of the transatlantic slave trade and to contend not just with political and social violence but with the many accompanying forms of silence: archival, historical, and aesthetic. Zong!, like philip’s earlier works, including She Tries Her Tongue—Her Silence Softly Breaks (1989), are demotic in the most profound sense, using multiple forms and voices to speak to the postcolonial world at large and to its inhabitants past, present, and future. The recipient of many honors, including the Molson Prize (2021), the PEN/Nabokov Award for International Literature (2020), and a Guggenheim Fellowship (1990), philip was educated at the University of the West Indies and earned graduate degrees in law and political science from the University of Western Ontario. Her writing has featured in numerous anthologies, including the Oxford Book of Stories by Canadian Women in English (2000) and International Feminist Fiction (1992), among others. She lives in Toronto.

 

Dr. Jonathan Howard is an Assistant Professor of English and African American Studies at Yale University. His research and teaching broadly interrogate western ideas about race and nature, weighing their entangled contribution to the formation of a modern world in ecological peril while also exploring black expressive culture as an alternative site of ecological thought and practice. He is the recipient of numerous fellowships and awards, including generous support from the Fulbright Program, The Institute for Citizens and Scholars (formerly the Woodrow Wilson Foundation), The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the Harrington Fellows Program. His articles can be found or are forthcoming at Callaloo, Souls, and Atlantic Studies. His current book project, Inhabitants of the Deep: The Blueness of Blackness, illuminates the abiding relationship between blackness and the oceanic by undertaking a black ecocritical study of the trope of the “deep” in African Diaspora literature.