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In his severe polemic, The Treason of the Intellectuals, written three-quarters of a century ago, the French Jewish philosopher Julien Benda flays any thinker who desires "to feel himself determined by his race, and to remain fixed in his native soil to the extent that it becomes in him a political attitude, a nationalist provocation." For Benda, such a defrocked "clerk" -- as he referred to such intellectuals -- defrauds reason.

One exception, however, is allowed: the artist. This "estate" alone should not have to exclude "national passion or the spirit of party from their vibrant material."

Meet M. NourbeSe Philip. Though English Canada desires decorum everywhere save Parliament, and demands politesse from everyone but police, this Tobago-born ex-lawyer and black woman writer is the model of the Benda-approved artist: She machetes hypocrisy.

Passionately raisonable, but also openly championing her Afro-Caribbean identity, "Afrosporic" culture -- i.e. the culture of those who are a part of the African diaspora -- and women's equality, Philip has vexed our holier-than-thou liberals and our too-starched Tories for more than 20 years. She exudes the proud, scissoring wit of a Marx-affianced former barrister, and her incisive analyses of our murky prejudices charge one of the most electrifying bodies of work in our literature.

But this is Canada, and so Philip has paid a price for disputation. Since 1989, she has starred in major dustups with our cultural elite, denouncing their apparent sidelining of black and other visible-minority artists. Her roster of battles includes the PEN Canada/June Callwood fracas of 1989; the Showboat showdown of 1993; and, beginning in 1997, a spat with radio station CFRB and Michael Coren that became a draining five-year-long legal contest. Due to these contretemps, Philip says that her Canadian speaking engagements fell from about 40 a year to 10.

Philip has been so controversial to so many for so long that many forget she is, first, a writer. Since 1980, she has published 10 books, including the award-winning poetry collection She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks (1989), which attacks racism and sexism by hacking at the stifling roots of English grammar itself. Then there's the fierce, irrepressible Frontiers: Essays and Writings on Racism and Culture (1992); and Coups and Calypsos (staged in the late 1990s in both Toronto and London, and now launched onto bookstore shelves) that deals with marital breakdown and racial unrest during the 1990 coup d'état in Trinidad.

Having just settled her suit against CFRB and Coren, and with Coups and Calypsos now in print, Philip is freshly ready to confront the powers that be. When she was a prophet without honour in her own land, she felt sustained in part by her international audience. Caribbean academics and writers laud her work, as do many in the United States, Europe, Africa and India.

The irony of her acceptance abroad and her "disappeared" status at home is not lost on Philip. Yet, decades from now, when scholars ponder the multiculturalization of urban Canada and the cultural-political stresses of that transformation, Philip's work will no doubt appear to have been prescient.

Born in post-Second World War Tobago, Marlene Irma Philip was raised in Trinidad from the age of 8, and there adopted the Benin-Nigerian name, NourbeSe. After earning a BSc in economics from the University of the West Indies in Mona, Jamaica, in 1968 she emigrated to Canada, where she received an MA in political science followed by a law degree at the University of Western Ontario. From 1973 to 1982, Philip was a family and immigration lawyer, and partner in Toronto's Jemmott and Philip -- the first black women's law firm in Canada.

Somewhere along the line she developed a polemical style that does not gladly suffer fools. Philip's writing has been about elaboration and delineation, signification and indignation. She follows "public intellectuals" like bell hooks, James Baldwin, C. L. R. James and George Grant, in practising the credo, "Make shame more shameful by making it public."

At a downtown Toronto lounge, where she sips Perrier as we talk, Philip comes across as both savvy and searing as she reflects on her engagement in two decades of strife and art: She is wiser, yes, but still no mediator, remaining one of English Canada's most fearsome -- and fearless -- critics, and one of its most provocative, enlightening and exciting writers.

Yet there's a danger in alleging such affirmations about a Canadian writer of African ancestry: that we may seize upon an author like Philip -- one who directs our attention to bigotry -- and marginalize her as a "spokesperson," thereby reducing her art to a sociological curiosity. Though political comment is integral to Philip's art, her first responsibility is to creation.

Asked to identify her favourites among her own books, she cites She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks and her 1991 novel, Looking for Livingstone."Both continue to feed me," she reflects. "I continue to learn insights -- aspects that have to do with language and exile and memory."

For Philip, as for most African-Canadian writers, her greatest readership is white progressives. "I think the strongest audience for my work is the academy," she says. "I think the work lends itself to a certain kind of analytic critique."

To claim a larger, more diverse audience, Philip seeks to accent the "performative aspect" of her writing. "I think that's part of the Caribbean aesthetic; I think it's part of the African aesthetic," she says. "And I would love that people on the street -- at Eglinton and Oakwood [in Toronto] Port of Spain [Trinidad] Kingston [Jamaica]-- could understand some of what I was trying to grapple with: issues of exile and place and language, and how to belong in places that have made you feel alien for a long time. It's one of the reasons I began writing fiction -- because I thought I stood a better chance of having a wider audience." (Philip's children's novel, Harriet's Daughter, first published in 1988, is widely read in the Caribbean.)

"I think we live in an age of fictions," she says, "and the kind of attention that poetry requires and demands . . . there are not many people who are prepared, outside of the academy, to give that kind of attention."

Commenting on Coups and Calypsos as a vehicle for bridging the gulf between page-bound, avant-garde writing and the hunger -- particularly on the part of Afrosporic audiences -- for the spoken and sung word, Philip says, "There is a potential in drama just because it is performative, because the word lives immediately on the stage . . .

"And the Caribbean: It's theatre. Theatre is happening 24/7. [ Coups and Calypsos]came to me in that way because I was listening to a lot of radio broadcasts during the coup in Trinidad, and I just knew when I wrote about it, it had to have an aural and oral quality to it, because that was how I was getting the information."

Though the English language, in her mouth, seems as sweet and tense as licorice, Philip distrusts its originally rebarbative tang. An ambivalence shades much of her work.

"How," she asks, "do I take this tongue, that we [diasporic Africans]have fashioned out of a particular and peculiar history, a traumatic history at that, and fashion it in a way that I can begin to deal with these emotions, which is what all humans do with language?"

The question is crucial, and, for Philip, its resolution echoes both Benda's appeal for reason and his approval of artistic nationalism. "I resist and refuse the either/or -- that we should either work in Standard English or we must work in the demotic," she says. "When we speak, many of us go, within a sentence, from the vernacular to standard [English]and back again. And I think that is our reality.

"This," she adds, "is why I say that the Caribbean has been postmodern long before postmodernism developed."

It is also, it would seem, why Philip's unique brand of writing blazes a distinctive and vivid path through the bland, often undifferentiated wilds of much of Canadian literature. George Elliott Clarke represented Canada at last month's Barcelona International Poetry Festival. His Whylah Falls: The Play was staged -- in Italian translation -- in Venice on May 24.

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