#polyvocal

As a Black, female, colonized subject, what was the source of my authority, and was such authority necessary—indispensable perhaps?—to speech, public speech? To poetry? Being neither male nor white and without an observable or tangible source of authority, could I even speak? Or would I only speak a silence? What I hadn’t realized until “I will, if you read it with me” was that in shifting the lyric voice, in at least forcing it to share the page with other voices, with other histories—moving it from centre stage and page; in clearing a space—I had allowed for other voices to be heard. A multivocal, polyvocal discourse could now be heard. It was the chorus of the unheard, the not-heard, the barely whispered. This to me was closer to the discourse of women. To the call and response of African speech. I saw the text now as a jazz text. If you look at “Discourse,” for instance, the centre refrain can be seen as the main musical theme and the linguistic events that are happening in english around this centre theme can be seen as riffs speaking into the silence around the “anguish that is English.” Indeed, the entire work can also be seen to be working around the central theme that “Discourse” represents—the loss of language.