‘”Hearing Voices” and Performing the Mind in debbie tucker green’s Dramatic-Poetics’

This chapter explores tucker green’s unique dramatic idiom through her distinctive play ‘text’ which produces opportunities for audiences and readers to relish the ways in which language can be sounded – as it is seen, heard and uttered. Framed by Charles Bernstein’s distinctions between orality and aurality, the chapter examines tucker green’s technique for making the mind physically (en)actable through her non-naturalistic methods for staging a character’s thoughts. dirty butterfly (2003), stoning mary (2005) and nut (2013) exemplify a noteworthy aesthetic for ‘performing the mind’ — be it as a borderless aesthesia, a sensory space shared by multiple characters’ perceptions (dirty butterfly) or as an individually, physically embodied, character in mimetic stage space (stoning mary, nut). The chapter proposes that three socio-cultural acknowledgements are requisite for examining tucker green’s creative impact. These emphasize the considerable influences of post-war Caribbean poetic heritage, the ongoing after-shock of colonization as being crucial to conceptions of contemporary British culture, and the ‘right to opacity’ (Édouard Glissant 1997) as a counter-stance to the hegemonic critical and aesthetic frameworks that are habitually applied to (and even ‘post-colonize’) black British writers and their writing.