Quote by M. NourbeSe Philip: “The language, the very language of the law, destroys what it purports to protect.”

Legal systems claim to protect people's rights, but when those systems were designed by and for a dominant group, their very language encodes the biases of that group. The neutrality of legal language is a fiction — it carries embedded values that systematically harm those it claims to protect.

Philip published She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks in 1989, working through how English — specifically the language of colonial law and Standard English — shaped and constrained Caribbean women's self-expression. She was practicing law in Canada while developing her theory of language as a site of colonial violence.

Trinidadian-Canadian poet and essayist whose experimental work confronts the violence of colonial language and legal systems. Her 2008 poetry collection Zong! reconstructs the legal decision in the Zong massacre — in which enslaved people were thrown overboard for insurance money — from the original court documents.