CANR
WORK TITLE: Salvage
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PSEUDONYM(S):
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CITY: Toronto
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COUNTRY: Canada
NATIONALITY: Canadian
LAST VOLUME: CANR 216
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PERSONAL
Born January 7, 1953, in Guayaguayare, Trinidad and Tobago; immigrated to Canada, 1970.
EDUCATION:University of Toronto, B.A., 1975; Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, M.A., 1989.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Poet, writer, and journalist. Agency for Rural Transformation, Grenada, information and communications officer, 1983; Immigrant Women’s Centre, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, Caribbean women’s health counselor; Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada, Ruth Wynn Woodward Professor, 2000-02; University of Toronto, Toronto, writer-in-residence, 1990-91; University of Guelph, Guelph, Ontario, Canada, assistant professor of English, 1992-94, writer-in-residence, 2003-04, professor of English, University Research Chair, retired in 2024 and named University Professor Emerita; St. Lawrence University, Canton, NY, distinguished visiting scholar and writer-in-residence, 2004-05; Vancouver Island University, Nanaimo, British Columbia, Canada, distinguished poet for the Ralph Gustafson Poetry Chair, 2006; Banff Centre, Banff, Alberta, Canada, Writing Studio, program faculty, 2007, 2009. Associated with Black Education Project.
Director or crew for documentaries, including Older, Stronger, Wiser, associate director, National Film Board of Canada, 1989; Sisters in the Struggle, codirector, National Film Board of Canada, 1991; Long Time Comin’ director, National Film Board of Canada, 1991; Listening for Something: Adrienne Rich and Dionne Brand in Conversation, director, National Film Board of Canada, 1996; Beyond Borders: Arab Feminists Talk about Their Lives … East and West, narrator, National Film Board of Canada, 1999; Under One Sky: Arab Women in North America Talk about the Hijab, narrator, National Film Board of Canada, 1999; and Borderless: The Lives of Undocumented Workers, narrator, KAIROS Canadian Ecumenical Justice Initiatives, 2006.
MEMBER:Academies for Arts, Humanities, and Sciences of Canada (elected fellow, 2006).
AWARDS:Publisher’s Grant and Artist in the Schools Award, both from Ontario Arts Council, 1978; Canada Council Arts Grant, 1980; Ontario Arts Council grant, 1982; Governor General’s Award and Trillium Award, both 1997, both for Land to Light On; Pat Lowther Award, 2003, for Thirsty; City of Toronto Book Award, 2006, for What We All Long For; Harbourfront Festival Prize for contribution to literature, 2006; named Toronto’s poet laureate, Toronto City Council, 2009; Griffin Poetry Prize, 2011, for Ossuaries; Trillium Book Award, 2019, for The Blue Clerk; Blue Metropolis Violet Literary Prize, 2019; Toronto Book Award, 2019, for Theory; Windham-Campbell Prize, 2021, for fiction; named “best 2022 Canadian book in the poetry category,” CBC Books, and poetry prize, Los Angeles Times Book Prizes, both 2022, both for Nomenclature.
WRITINGS
Contributor to books, including, “We’re Rooted Here and They Can’t Pull Us Up”: Essays in African-Canadian Women’s History, University of Toronto Press (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 1994; and A New Anthology of Canadian Literature in English, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 2002. Contributor to periodicals, including Spear and Contrast.
SIDELIGHTS
Brand was born in Guayguayare, Trinidad, on January 7, 1953. Her family was a complicated and extended one—a “pumpkin-vine family,” she told an interviewer in the Montreal Gazette. With her mother and aunt spending several years working in England when she was a child, Brand was largely raised by her grandparents. As a child she was a voracious reader. “I suppose that little girl who lay under the bed and read books was on a journey, one to other consciousness and other worlds,” she told the Gazette interviewer. “In that bed I traveled. I read Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin, so I was in Paris as a young gay man. I read about the Haitian revolution.”
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Over the years, Brand has written in multiple genres and also worked as a filmmaker and taught at various institutions. She was the recipient of numerous awards, including the Trillium Book Award in 1997, the Griffin Poetry Prize in 2011, and the Windham-Campbell Prize for Fiction in 2021. She was the poet laureate of Toronto from 2009 to 2012. In 2024, the University of Guelph, where Brand had taught on and off since 1992, celebrated her and named her University Professor Emerita, an honor bestowed on professors who have retired but continue their relationship with the university due to “sustained, outstanding scholarship . . . that is recognized internationally.”
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Poetry
“Dionne Brand is one of the best young poets writing in Canada today,” Libby Scheier asserted in her Books in Canada review of Brand’s collection Primitive Offensive. An essayist for Contemporary Women Poets described Brand’s poetry as “the thoughts and feelings of a black female coming to realize her place in history. … Brand’s poems speak from the perspective of the outsider—the narrator who, because of race, gender, sexual preference and ethnic background, finds herself at odds with the surrounding society.” A native Trinidadian who immigrated to Canada, Brand wrote poetry for many years and gained increasing renown in the late 1990s for two novels that brought her respect from readers in the United States as well as in Canada. She has worked actively for the black community in Canada through her affiliation with the Black Education Project and as a Caribbean counselor with the Immigrant Women’s Centre.
In her 1980 collection Earth Magic, Brand presents poems depicting a more difficult side of her upbringing in Trinidad, where she worked as an agricultural laborer. When she moved to Canada at age seventeen, Brand enrolled at the University of Toronto; she earned a B.A. there in 1975 and went on to graduate study at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education. Brand has made a living as an educator for much of her writing career, spending time in many different parts of Canada and in several other countries, but maintaining a home base in Toronto.
Brand has also devoted her energies to political activism, working at the Toronto Immigrant Women’s Centre as a counselor serving the city’s large population of immigrants from the West Indies, serving with a group that sought to improve education for blacks in Canada, and affiliating herself with a labor organization, the Ontario Coalition of Black Trade Unionists. Brand quickly set her sights on writing; her first poetry collection, ‘Fore Day Morning, was published in 1978. Some observers have noted a synergy between her writing and her more directly political activities. “To read her poetry is to read not only about her but also about her people, her identification with their struggles both in the metropole of Canada and in the hinterland of the Caribbean,” commented Himani Bannerji in Fifty Caribbean Writers. The poetry in No Language Is Neutral, wrote a contributor to Books in Canada, “is one of waking and attentiveness, to one’s own history, one’s pain as a woman, as an immigrant to the place of foreign habits, to one’s own sexuality.” In the title poem, Brand explores the lives of women who know “what it means to be black and women and to struggle constantly with that ‘blood-stained blind of race and sex.’” The reviewer concluded that the collection contains some of “Brand’s most engaging poetry.”
In her later poetry collection Ossuaries, Brand continues her focus on political, social, and racial issues. Toronto Star reviewer Barbara Carey noted that “in style and tone, Ossuaries is somewhat similar to Brand’s previous poetry collection, Inventory. A brooding, book-length series of meditations setting a personal story in the context of social injustice and political comment, Ossuaries [ponders] ‘the so much sorrow that cracks eyes.’” According to Sonnet L’Abbé in the Toronto Globe and Mail, within “the ‘stone pit’ of Brand’s awareness of modern massacres, repressions and regimes, hopefulness is as tender and rare as lavender blossoms in the paved lots of poor suburbs. Ossuaries is a difficult, but beautiful, exhumation, a furious dirge for an era not yet passed.”
Fiction
In 1983 Brand’s political impulses came to the fore once again as she returned to her native Caribbean to serve as an information and communications officer for the Agency for Rural Transformation in Grenada. Sans Souci, and Other Stories, a collection of short stories, “follows Brand’s own cycle of growing up in Trinidad, moving to Canada as a teenager, and returning to Grenada during the revolution to reconnect politically and spiritually with the Caribbean,” reported Rhonda Cobham in the Women’s Review of Books. In Cobham’s opinion, Brand is a “militantly feminist and anti-imperialist writer.” Cobham reported that female sexuality is a prominent theme of this collection, which contains stories of people who struggle to find a place in a world that is racist as well as sexist.
In the 1990s, there was a strong demand for high-quality fiction written by black authors, and Brand was one of many writers who addressed herself to filling that demand, signing a two-book contract with Grove Publishing. In her first novel, In Another Place, Not Here, Brand draws upon her own Trinidadian background in depicting Elizete, a sugarcane cutter on an unnamed Caribbean island, and her developing romance with Verlia, a Marxist Canadian labor organizer. Verlia, too, is partly reflective of Brand’s own experiences; part of the novel is devoted to the problems women from the Caribbean encounter in Toronto’s closed society. Eleanor J. Bader in Library Journal noted that “its plot is less compelling than its poetic, dream-filled musings.” A critic for Publishers Weekly believed that “the melding of Elizete’s dreams and Verlia’s fierce pragmatism achieve a powerful resonance.”
In 1999, Brand’s second novel, At the Full and Change of the Moon, appeared. In this work Brand succeeded in fusing her political concerns with the popular novel convention of the multigenerational saga. The book is structured around stories told by the descendants of a fictional Trinidadian slave named Marie-Ursule who, in the early nineteenth century, led a group of slaves in a mass suicide but allowed her young daughter to escape. The daughter and her offspring down to the present day remember and recount parts of their grim family history in language that GraceAnne A. DeCandido in Booklist called “dreamlike or nightmarish.” Letta Neely, reviewing the novel for the Lambda Book Report, declared: “I felt as if a spell were oozing and flying from the page into the here and now of real-life neglected and caressed remembrances.” Michael Arditti in the London Times admitted that Brand “is an acclaimed poet and there are occasions when the poetic impulse dominates at the expense not just of narrative but of character and clarity.” But a critic for Publishers Weekly concluded that At the Full and Change of the Moon is “a distinguished, visionary work, grounded in the language and legacy of her native Trinidad.”
The novel What We All Long For follows four twenty-somethings living in Toronto, all of whom are beset with personal crises revolving around their ethnic backgrounds. A mixed-race woman named Carla feels responsible for her younger brother’s crimes. Oku, the son of a Jamaican immigrant father, is a budding poet, but his father is suspicious of Oku’s artistic character. Tuyen is the lesbian daughter of Vietnamese immigrants, but her parents are more concerned with her dead brother than with her. Jackie is a black woman who feels that her parents’ dreams have not been met. According to Evelyn C. White in Canadian Literature, “Brand primes readers for an experience that is both fantastically cinematic (à la Alfred Hitchcock) and reminiscent of another novel that explores, to magnificent effect, a similar immigrant theme: The Book of Salt by Monique Troung.” Although White called the book “an ambitious novel weakened by a surplus of weak characters,” she admitted that “it stands as a worthy contribution to the rising chorus of ethnic voices in Canadian literature.” Sook C. Kong, writing in Herizons, asserted that “Brand’s text is gifted with unavoidable questions of what partnership means—between self and other, between people and place, between unending histories and new memories. … Hence, the question turns on what we all want—from ourselves and from each other.” Praising the novel further, Canadian Ethnic Studies Journal reviewer Noula Mina wrote that Brand “presents the possibility of Toronto as a space where silenced voices are given language and where the intimacy of both ordinary experiences and horrific memories can be rooted in the Canadian landscape. Toronto is not merely an amalgamation of ethno-racial communities; rather, it becomes a space that recognizes and validates the complexity of hybrid identities.” Mina added: “Brand presents a beautiful, tortured story of the vulnerability of human existence.”
Nonfiction
Brand’s various academic appointments—including a course she developed for Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, British Columbia, covering the works of African American writer Toni Morrison—have allowed her to explore the experiences of African peoples through the use of interviews. She has worked on volumes of recollections of African Canadians and other minorities. Rivers Have Sources, Trees Have Roots: Speaking of Racism, coauthored with Krisantha Sri Bhaggiyadatta, seeks to educate readers against racism through a combination of interviews and “succinct and simply stated analysis,” wrote a Canadian Forum contributor. Through the testimony of the book’s black, Native American, and Asian subjects, the reader is led to realize that “racism is a deliberate attack on the self-image of the other.” The authors also chart some of the history of the struggle against racism in Toronto, and according to the reviewer, Brand and her coauthor “succeed admirably in their educative purpose.” In No Burden to Carry: Narratives of Black Working Women in Ontario, 1920s-1950s, an investigation into the role of black women in Canadian history, Brand uses personal recollections and interviews from fifteen black women. A Books in Canada reviewer found that reading the book “is like spending an afternoon with a roomful of charming, strong, witty women who have a lifetime of stories to share.”
Brand’s 2001 book A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging is a personal essay that juxtaposed her own immigration to Canada and travels to other parts of the world with the forced voyage African slaves made to the New World. “It’s all about Brand’s inability to fit in pretty much anywhere she goes,” noted a critic for the Ottawa Citizen. According to Ingrid Johnston in Resource Links, Brand “has created a powerful exploration of identity and belonging in a culturally diverse world.” Similarly, Kong, writing in Herizons, believed that in A Map to the Door of No Return, Brand “embarks on a long journey into the ontological night, taking her reader to the edge between life and death, history and violence, politics and grief.” [OPEN NEW] A Map to the Door of No Return was reprinted in 2024 with a new preface by Brand and an afterword by the writer and professor Saidiya Hartman.
Also in 2024, Brand wrote a new but related nonfiction work, Salvage: Readings from the Wreck. It is a reflection on Brand’s own experience of reading classics such as Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park. She writes on how those works written at the height of colonialism exhibited imperialist and racist ideas, but how she has since learned to read them in an anticolonial framework, how she has “salvaged” worthwhile material from the wreck of imperialism and slavery.
Emily M. Keeler, in the Globe and Mail, wrote that the book is a combination of literary analysis and “writing closer to the directness of experience,” with Brand commenting on her own writings as well as her childhood. Keeler sees one of the book’s major themes as “how the legacy of colonial resource extraction and exploitation shaped the world we live in and the books we exalt.” She sees Brand’s goal as not “doing away with the past” but trying to discover “what can be brought to the surface.” Keeler praised Brand for arguing “with elegance and verve.”
Writing in the New York Times Book Review, Sophie Gee saw Brand’s project as recognizing the “slippage of literary realism,” how novels can teach people to overlook the racism and colonialism on which they were based: “The particulars of white daily life [in the novel] distract from, but never efface completely, the Black and Indigenous characters lurking at the margins.” Gee notes that one of the recurring motifs in Salvage is Brand rereading a book she read when she was younger and noticing now all the things she did not notice when she was young. “Penetrating cultural criticism” is how a writer in Kirkus Reviews described Salvage. They called it a “shrewd, intimate reading” of the novels that Brand grew up on and now “astutely analyzes.”
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BIOCRIT
BOOKS
Chancy, Myrian J., Searching for Safe Spaces: Afro-Caribbean Women Writers in Exile, Temple University Press (Philadelphia, PA), 1997.
Contemporary Black Biography, Volume 32, Gale (Detroit, MI), 2002.
Contemporary Women Poets, St. James Press (Detroit, MI), 1998.
Dance, Daryl Cumber, editor, Fifty Caribbean Writers: A Bio-Bibliographical Critical Sourcebook, Greenwood (Westport, CT), 1986.
Modern Black Writers, 2nd edition, St. James Press (Detroit, MI), 2000.
PERIODICALS
Ariel: A Review of International English Literature, April, 1999, Heather Smyth, “Sexual Citizenship and Caribbean-Canadian Fiction: Dionne Brand’s In Another Place, Not Here and Shani Mootoo’s Cercus Blooms at Night,” p. 141.
Atlantic Monthly, October, 1999, review of At the Full and Change of the Moon, p. 114.
Black Issues Book Review, January, 2001, review of At the Full and Change of the Moon, p. 18.
Booklist, August, 1999, GraceAnne A. DeCandido, review of At the Full and Change of the Moon, p. 2023; April 1, 2006, Gillian Engberg, review of Earth Magic, p. 38.
Books, Christmas, 1999, review of At the Full and Change of the Moon, p. 19.
Books in Canada, December, 1983, Libby Scheier, review of Primitive Offensive, p. 31; December, 1990, review of No Language Is Neutral, pp. 42-43; May, 1992, review of No Burden to Carry: Narratives of Black Working Women in Ontario, 1920s-1950s, pp. 52-53; December, 1994, review of Bread Out of Stone: Recollections, Sex, Recognitions, Race, Dreaming, Politics, p. 16; February, 1995, review of Bread Out of Stone, p. 32; September, 1996, review of In Another Place, Not Here, p. 36; June, 1997, review of In Another Place, Not Here, p. 3; summer, 2003, review of Thirsty, p. 41.
Book World, February 1, 1998, review of In Another Place, Not Here, p. 6.
Callaloo, summer, 2003, Salamisha Tillet, review of At the Full and Change of the Moon, p. 913.
Canadian Book Review Annual, 1995, review of Bread Out of Stone, p. 253; 1997, review of In Another Place, Not Here, p. 174; 1999, review of At the Full and Change of the Moon, p. 159.
Canadian Ethnic Studies Journal, spring, 2003, Ayn Becze, review of A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging, p. 210; spring, 2006, Noula Mina, review of What We All Long For.
Canadian Forum, January, 1988, review of Rivers Have Sources, Trees Have Roots: Speaking of Racism, pp. 39-40; July-August, 1995, Robert Richardson, review of Bread Out of Stone, p. 36; May, 1999, review of At the Full and Change of the Moon, p. 43.
Canadian Literature, autumn, 1996, Guy Beauregard, review of Bread Out of Stone, p. 113; summer-autumn, 1999, Susan Gingell, review of Land to Light On, p. 182; winter, 2000, review of At the Full and Change of the Moon, p. 178; autumn-winter, 2001, Maureen Moynagh, review of At the Full and Change of the Moon, p. 193.
Canadian Woman Studies, summer, 2000, Rinaldo Walcott and Leslie Sanders, “At the Full and Change of CanLit: An Interview with Dionne Brand,” p. 22.
Chatelaine, https://chatelaine.com/ (April 24, 2023), Huda Hassan, “Why Dionne Brand Is the Alchemist of Language.”
CNW Group, September 6, 2006, “Dionne Brand Wins the 2006 Toronto Book Awards.”
Essays on Canadian Writing, winter, 1995, review of No Language Is Neutral, p. 194; summer, 1999, Pamela McCallum and Christian Olbey, “Written in the Scars: History, Genre, and Materiality in Dionne Brand’s In Another Place, Not Here,” p. 159; spring, 2000, Jason Wiens, “‘Language Seemed to Split in Two’: National Ambivalence(s) and Dionne Brand’s No Language Is Neutral,” p. XII.
Essence, October, 1999, review of At the Full and Change of the Moon, p. 74.
Gazette (Montreal, Quebec, Canada), October 10, 2001, author interview, p. F3.
Globe and Mail (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), April 17, 1999, review of At the Full and Change of the Moon, p. D18; November 27, 1999, review of At the Full and Change of the Moon, p. D26; October 20, 2001, review of A Map to the Door of No Return, p. D4; April 23, 2010, Sonnet L’Abbé, review of Ossuaries; September 21, 2024, Emily M. Keeler, “Dionne Brand Untangles Questions of Truth and Justice,” review of Salvage: Readings from the Wreck, p. R9.
Griffin Poetry Prize website, https://griffinpoetryprize.com/ (December 18, 2024), author profile.
Herizons, spring, 2002, Sook C. Kong, review of A Map to the Door of No Return, p. 31; fall, 2005, Sook C. Kong, review of What We All Long For.
Kirkus Reviews, August 1, 1997, review of In Another Place, Not Here, p. 1127; July 1, 1999, review of At the Full and Change of the Moon, p. 979; September 1, 2024, review of Salvage.
Lambda Book Report, September, 1995, review of Bread Out of Stone, p. 45; March, 2000, Letta Neely, “A Hero to Live By,” p. 17.
Library Journal, August, 1997, Eleanor J. Bader, review of In Another Place, Not Here, p. 125; August, 1999, Janis Williams, review of At the Full and Change of the Moon, p. 134.
Los Angeles Times Book Review, November 7, 1999, review of At the Full and Change of the Moon, p. 4.
Maclean’s, June 24, 1996, review of In Another Place, Not Here, p. 54; June 21, 1999, review of At the Full and Change of the Moon, p. 52.
Ms. November, 1997, review of In Another Place, Not Here, p. 85.
New York Times Book Review, January 4, 1998, Catherine Bush, review of In Another Place, Not Here, p. 12; December 6, 1998, review of In Another Place, Not Here, p. 23; October 17, 1999, William Ferguson, review of At the Full and Change of the Moon, p. 22; November 10, 2024, Sophie Gee, “Hidden Figures,” review of Salvage, p. 13.
Ottawa Citizen, October 8, 2001, review of A Map to the Door of No Return, p. D9.
Publishers Weekly, April 3, 1995, review of Bread Out of Stone, p. 57; August 11, 1997, review of In Another Place, Not Here, pp. 382-383; September 6, 1999, review of At the Full and Change of the Moon, p. 82; September 22, 2008, review of What We All Long For, p. 39.
Quill and Quire, January, 1995, review of Bread Out of Stone, p. 31; May, 1996, review of In Another Place, Not Here, p. 26; March, 1997, review of Land to Light On, p. 76; April, 1999, review of At the Full and Change of the Moon, p. 27; August, 2001, review of A Map to the Door of No Return, p. 25.
Resource Links, October, 2002, Ingrid Johnston, review of A Map to the Door of No Return, p. 56.
School Library Journal, July, 2006, Kathleen Whalin, review of Earth Magic, p. 118.
Skipping Stones, March 1, 2006, review of Earth Magic, p. 29.
Times (London, England), September 30, 1999, Alex O’Connell, review of At the Full and Change of the Moon, p. 42; October 2, 1999, Michael Arditti, review of At the Full and Change of the Moon, p. 18.
Times Literary Supplement, November 5, 1999, review of At the Full and Change of the Moon, p. 25.
Toronto Life, February, 2005, Gerald Hannon, “The Miracle Worker,” profile of Dionne Brand, p. 6.
Toronto Star, August 7, 2010, Barbara Carey, review of Ossuaries.
University of Guelph College of Arts website, https://www.uoguelph.ca/ (December 18, 2024), author profile.
University of Toronto Quarterly, winter, 1992-93, review of Sans Souci, and Other Stories, pp. 256-281.
Women and Environment, winter, 1997, Dawn Carter, review of In Another Place, Not Here, pp. 24-30.
Women’s Review of Books, July, 1990, Rhonda Cobham, review of Sans Souci, and Other Stories, pp. 29-31; December, 1995, Rosaria Champagne, review of Bread Out of Stone, p. 14; April, 1998, Suzanne Ruta, review of In Another Place, Not Here, p. 12.
World Literature Today, spring, 1997, Michael Thorpe, review of In Another Place, Not Here, pp. 446-448.
ONLINE
Canadian Literature, http://www.canlit.ca/ (September 29, 2010), Evelyn C. White, review of What We All Long For.
Canadian Poetry Online, University of Toronto Web site, http://www.library.utoronto.ca/ (September 29, 2010), author profile.
Dionne Brand
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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Dionne Brand
CM FRSC
Brand in 2009
Brand in 2009
Born 7 January 1953 (age 71)
Guayaguayare, Trinidad and Tobago
Occupation Poet
Education University of Toronto (BA)
Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (MA)
Genre
PoetryAutofiction
Dionne Brand CM FRSC (born 7 January 1953) is a Canadian poet, novelist, essayist and documentarian. She was Toronto's third Poet Laureate from September 2009 to November 2012 and first Black Poet Laureate.[1][2][3] She was admitted to the Order of Canada in 2017[4][5] and has won the Governor General's Award for Poetry, the Trillium Prize for Literature, the Pat Lowther Award for Poetry, the Harbourfront Writers' Prize, and the Toronto Book Award.[6] Brand currently resides in Toronto.[7]
Early life and education
Dionne Brand was born in Guayaguayare, Trinidad and Tobago. She graduated from Naparima Girls' High School in San Fernando, Trinidad, in 1970 and emigrated to Canada. She attended the University of Toronto and earned a BA degree (English and Philosophy) in 1975 and later attained an MA in Philosophy of Education from the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE) in 1989.[8][9]
Career
Her first book, Fore Day Morning: Poems, came out in 1978, and since then Brand has published numerous works of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, as well as editing anthologies and working on documentary films with the National Film Board of Canada.[6]
She has held a number of academic positions, including:
Assistant Professor of English, University of Guelph (1992–94)
Ruth Wynn Woodward Professor in Women's Studies, Simon Fraser University
Distinguished Visiting Scholar and Writer-in-Residence, St. Lawrence University, Canton, New York (2004–05)
Distinguished Poet for the Ralph Gustafson Poetry Chair, Vancouver Island University (2006)
She is currently Professor of English at the School of English and Theatre Studies at the University of Guelph, where she also holds a University Research Chair.
In 2017, she was appointed as poetry editor of McClelland & Stewart, an imprint of Penguin Random House Canada.[10] Brand is also a co-editor of Toronto-based literary journal Brick.[11]
Writing
Brand explores themes of gender, race, sexuality, feminism, diaspora, nation, white male domination, injustices and "the moral hypocrisies of Canada"[12] Despite being often characterized as a Caribbean writer, Brand identifies as a "black Canadian".[13]
She has contributed to many anthologies opposing the violent killings of Black men and women, the massacre of 14 women in Montreal, and racism and inequality as experienced by Aboriginal women of Canada, particularly Helen Betty Osborne's death in the Pas.[12]
A Map to the Door of No Return
Brand explores intergenerational trauma and post memory in her piece A Map to A Door of No Return. Using a variety of different elements, she explores her own experiences through an autobiographical perspective as well as diving into explain a concept she calls "The Door of No Return". The Door is the space in which the history of black people is lost, specifically when slaves from Africa were transported through the Atlantic slave trade. Brand defines the Door of No Return as "that place where our ancestors departed one world for another; the Old World for the New."[14] It is a place that is as metaphorical as it is psychological, as imaginary as it is real. It is not a physical door, in the sense that it be found at a single location, but rather a collection of locations. At the same time, however, the Door can bring profound grief and pain to many in the Diaspora when they visit it—for example, at the slave caves in Ghana or Gorée Island—or encounter it, as Brand does when she flies over it and feels overwhelmed, tense, consumed with thoughts and feelings and images. The Door is a site of traceable beginnings that are left at the doorsteps, eventually forgotten and lost in historical and familial memory, as demonstrated when Brand's grandfather can no longer remember the name of the ancestral people they belong to. When passing through The Door, people lost their history, their humanity, and their ancestry. This trauma is still felt by black people today, which is the perspective from which Brand explores the concept. She gives examples of this through sports. she writes: "I hear my neighbour downstairs enter Shaquille O'Neal's body every night of the NBA Championships this year"[15] Brand also describes how her interactions with her grandfather eventually became "mutually disappointing" and led to estrangement, as he could not remember the name of their tribe, the people they came from, and could not, thus, remember their family history.[16] Essentially, Brand's short anecdote is about the insufficiency of memory and how incredibly limiting that is. The "fissure" that developed between her grandfather and herself parallels the "fissure between the past and the present", that gap in memory, as represented by the Door of No Return.[14] There is a sort of historical, intergenerational trauma that is associated with this loss of memory, as those in the Diaspora can feel profound grief and pain from their interactions with the Door of No Return ("one does not return to the Diaspora with good news from the door"[17]).
Brand begins A Map to the Door of No Return by recounting her long-standing struggle with her grandfather to remember where their ancestors were from. She marks this as being the first time she felt a burning desire to know her ancestry, stating that "a small space opened in [her]" (Brand 4) and that not knowing was "profoundly disturbing" (Brand 5). She describes this moment of recognition as reaching the door of no return; a place where our ancestors departed one world for another (Brand 5). In this moment, she is confronted with the reality that her life will consist of a never ending battle to complete her identity. Brand is intentional to note that her desire only came into full effect when she was denied knowledge of her ancestry. Contrary to Frantz Fanon's[18] theory that the pivotal moment in a Black child's life is the moment when they come in contact with the white world and are confronted with the full weight of their blackness, Brand's awakening was not dependent on the white world. The onset of her inner struggle to find belonging and self-assuredness occurred in an entirely black space. This feeling of being incomplete is common among Black people throughout the diaspora and, as Brand demonstrates, and is one of the driving forces in her desire to know her ancestry.
As with her struggle to remember her ancestors, Brand suggests that black individuals experience the sort of "double consciousness" that W. E. B. Du Bois discusses in his work The Souls of Black Folk', the idea of having to understand two different approaches as they go through life.
Another theme explored in A Map to the Door of No Return is the theory and praxis of geography. In the text, Brand references several maps, geographers, and ideas related to geography and navigation (e.g. the Babylonian map, David Turnbull and "way-finding", [19] Charles Bricker, the North Star and the Big Dipper, etc.) Juxtaposing these references to her analyses and reflections, she begins to deconstruct and challenge the systems of logic that constitute geography and borders, the way geography has been constructed and hailed as truth, and the emphasis we place on origins when we should not, as origins are not only arbitrary, but they also reproduce the violence of the nation-state. As seen in her explanation, analysis, and subsequent application of Charles Bricker's notes on Ludolf and how asinine he (Ludolf) was, it's apparent that geography and the knowledge that is produced from this discipline is flawed.
Brand uses figurative language in the text. Water, doors, the radio and memory figure boldly and lyrically. Through this figurative language, Brand links form and content where the figurativeness of her language, mimics the literal images of slavery that Brand witnessed on her journey to Africa. Her metaphors also help elaborate and emphasize her thoughts, and the understanding of the door. As she puts it, "The door casts a haunting spell on personal and collective consciousness in the Diaspora."[20]
Rivers Have Sources, Trees Have Roots
In Rivers Have Sources, Trees Have Roots (1986), Brand and co-author Krisantha Sri Bhaggiyadatta interviewed a hundred people from the Canadian Native, Black, Chinese, and South Asian communities about their perceptions of racism and its impact on their lives. The authors critiqued the existence and ubiquity of racism, disparities and resistance, arguing that two themes exist where racism prevails in their interviewees' lives: through "the culture of racism" and through structural and institutional ways.
Rivers gives each individual an opportunity to speak about his or her personal and migration story. The interviewees speak of their anger, resentments, and complaints of being treated as different and inferior. Brand sees racism as a powerful tool to censor oppositional voices and disagrees with the conception of racism as isolated or unusual.[21]
No Language Is Neutral
No Language is Neutral was originally published in 1990 by Coach House Press. It is a 50-page tour-de-force which tackles issues of immigration, environmentalism, slavery, lesbian love, identity, place and the female body, all from a no-holds-barred Black feminist perspective. The title of the book indicates that Brand is in conversation with writers of the Black Diaspora, namely Derek Walcott. Susan Gingell goes as far as to call him her "antithetical literary ancestor"[22] whose views Brand fights against and rewrites in No Language is Neutral. She is calling out Walcott, who in her opinion plays to the belief that "colonization brought civilization, brought culture".[22] She confidently posits herself as the antidote to Walcott: he is the "Black colonial"[22] who through literature dances with oppression instead of fighting it. In the Caribbean context, Brand's literary forebears had almost been exclusively male so her take in No Language is Neutral is of particular importance and her calling out of Walcott even more revolutionary.
Coach House Press contracted Grace Channer to do the cover art of the book. Cohesive with Brand's vision, Channer produced a cover which depicts the bare breasts of a woman caressed by a hardened fist. The cover plays with the softness of themes such as love and desire but the hardened fist is there as a reminder of the difficult politics Brand is confronting in this volume. In her acknowledgements Brand thanks Ted Chamberlin, Michael Ondaatje and The Sisterhood to the Toronto Black Women's Collective. No Language is Neutral is blurbed by Michelle Cliff, Dorothy Livesay, Nicole Brossard and Betsy Warland.
The critic Winfried Siemerling described No Language is Neutral as a "breakthrough volume"[23] for its uninhibitedness. In 1991 the critic Ronald B. Hatch wrote that the "highly provocative material" in No Language Is Neutral coupled with "the Trinidadian English" was "monotonous" and lacked "imagistic representation".[24] He said that the fault in No Language is Neutral was that it was "highly formal" and "highly rationalist" as if expecting Brand to write the opposite because of her "other"/ "exotic" status. Brand, however, did not conform to any of these expectations, as can be seen in her later work too. Her incorporation of Patois in her prose-like poems for example continued way past No Language is Neutral.
"No Language Is Neutral, sold over 6,000 copies, a remarkable number, even with a Governor General's Award nomination."[25] Today, it has been adopted into school curricula Canada-wide.
"St. Mary Estate"
Personal experience and ancestral memory[12] inform her short story "St. Mary Estate",[26] from Sans Souci and Other Stories, pp. 360–366. The narrator, accompanied by her sister, revisits the cocoa estate of their birth and childhood, recalling past experiences of racism and shame. She focuses on the summer beach house belonging to "rich whites" that was cleaned by their mother, the daughter of her overseer grandfather. Her anger over discrimination and poverty is triggered by the recollection of living quarters made of thin cardboard with newspapers walls - barracks that depict the physical, social and psychological degradation endured by the slaves who were denied the basic human rights and freedom.
"This Body For Itself"
In "This Body For Itself" (1994), in Bread Out of Stone, Brand discusses the way the black female body is represented. She asserts that in male authored texts, the black female body is often portrayed as motherly or virginal. In female authored texts, the black female body is often portrayed as protector and/or resistor to rape. Brand states that it is understandable why this happens. The avoidance of portraying black female bodies as sexual is out of self-preservation, as black female bodies are often overly sexualized in their portrayal. However, Brand argues that this self-preservation is a trap, because desire and sexuality can be a great source of power, and suppressing this only further suppresses female power to own their own desire. She writes, "The most radical strategy of the female body for itself is the lesbian body confessing all the desire and fascination for itself" (p. 108).[27]
Chronicles of the Hostile Sun
Brand wrote many of the poems in her fifth book of poetry, Chronicles of the Hostile Sun, in response to the United States military occupation of Grenada. Brand had been living in Grenada and working for a Canadian non-profit organization when the United States invasion of the island took place.[28] The Reagan Administration sanctioned the military invasion in response to the Marxist-Leninist revolutionary political party, the New Jewel Movement, led by Maurice Bishop, who became Prime Minister of the island after a coup in 1979. He was arrested and assassinated in the days leading up to the invasion in 1983. Brand's Chronicles of the Hostile Sun, published one year later in 1984, is divided into three sections: Languages, Sieges, and Military Occupations. Poems in the lattermost section refer directly to Grenada, including mentions of Bishop and other prominent political leaders, the island's socio-political landscape, and scenes during and after the harrowing invasion. Titles in this section are often dates of significant events during the occupation, including "October 19th, 1983," the day Bishop was assassinated and "October 25th, 1983," the day the U.S. military began the invasion. The poem "On American numeracy and literacy in the war against Grenada" places the occupation in the broader context of revolution and U.S. military action in Cuba and El Salvador.
Other themes
Other topics addressed in Brand's writing include the sexual exploitation of African women. Brand says, "We are born thinking of travelling back."[29] She writes: "Listen, I am a Black woman whose ancestors were brought to a new world laying tightly packed in ships. Fifteen million of them survived the voyage, five million of them women; millions among them died, were killed, committed suicide in the middle passage."[12]
Brand has received numerous awards. Writer Myriam Chancy says Brand found "it possible ...to engage in personal/critical work which uncovers the connections between us as Black women at the same time as re-discovering that which has been kept from us: our cultural heritage, the language of our grandmothers, ourselves."[30]
Filmmaking
Brand made a number of documentaries with NFB's feminist-film production unit, Studio D, from 1989 to 1996. When Studio D was criticized for its lack of diversity, Rina Fraticelli, the executive producer at the time, created a program called New Initiatives in Film (NIF).[31] It was out of this program that Brand partnered with Ginny Stikeman to create the award-winning Sisters in the Struggle (1991), a "look at Black women in community, labour and feminist organizing". This was part of the Women at the Well trilogy that also included Older, Stronger, Wiser (1989) and Long Time Comin' (1991).[31] Brand's collaboration with producer Stikeman also became the "model for the Internship Component of NIF",[31] which offered production experience at various regional studios across Canada and at Studio D in Montreal. Brand's film Older, Stronger, Wiser (1989), which "features five black women talking about their lives in urban and rural Canada between the 1920s and 1950s", and Sisters in the Struggle, were both distinct films in that they broke away from the mid-1980s survey films and instead focused on local issues to Canadian women.[31]
Brand did not have pointed interest in filmmaking until an opportunity arose to consult on a documentary about racism at Studio D. A white filmmaker was the lead on the project and after meeting with her for several days, Brand decided she did not want to be a part of the film. She told the Studio that she would be willing to "do something about Black women from their point of view," which resulted in Long Time Comin'.[32]
Brand directed Listening for Something… Adrienne Rich and Dionne Brand in Conversation (1996), a filmic reading and discussion between herself and the American elder lesbian writer.[33] Listening for Something was being made during turbulent times as Studio D was being dismantled.[34] Brand has also written the script and text for Under One Sky… Arab Women in North America Talk About the Hijab.[4]
Brand's documentary work frequently focuses on multiculturalism and sexual pluralism in Canada. She warns against state-sponsored images of multiculturalism, stating that true diversity means people having "equal access to equal justice, equal jobs, equal education". Having critiqued the concept of 'nation' as the notion of "leaving out" Black women, Brand has focused much of her work on representation for her communities.[34]
Critical reception
Critics of Brand's early work focused on Caribbean national and cultural identity and Caribbean literary theory. Barbadian poet and scholar Edward Kamau Brathwaite referred to Brand as "our first major exile female poet."[35] Academic J. Edward Chamberlain called her "a final witness to the experience of migration and exile" whose "literary inheritance is in some genuine measure West Indian, a legacy of [Derek] Walcott, Brathwaite and others."[36] They cite her own and others' shifting locations, both literal and theoretical.
Peter Dickinson argues that "Brand 'reterritorializes' … boundaries in her writing, (dis)placing or (dis)locating the national narrative of subjectivity … into the diaspora of cross-cultural, -racial, -gender, -class, and –erotic identifications."[37] Dickinson calls these shifts in her conceptualization of national and personal affiliations "the politics of location [which] cannot be separated from the politics of 'production and reception.'"[38] Critic Leslie Sanders argues that, in Brand's ongoing exploration of the notions of "here" and "there" she uses her own "statelessness"[39] as a vehicle for entering "'other people's experience'" and "'other places.'"[40] In Sanders' words, "by becoming a Canadian writer, Brand is extending the Canadian identity in a way [Marshall] McLuhan would recognize and applaud."[41] But, Dickinson says, "Because Brand's 'here' is necessarily mediated, provisional, evanescent – in a word 'unlocatable' – her work remains marginal/marginalizable in academic discussions of Canadian literary canons."[42]
In Redefining the Subject: Sites of Play in Canadian Women's Writing, Charlotte Sturgess suggests that Brand employs a language "through which identity emerges as a mobile, thus discursive, construct."[43] Sturgess argues that Brand's "work uses language strategically, as a wedge to split European traditions, forms and aesthetics apart; to drive them onto their own borders and contradictions".[44] Sturgess says Brand's work is at least two-pronged: it "underline[s] the enduring ties of colonialism within contemporary society";[45] and it "investigates the very possibilities of Black, female self-representation in Canadian cultural space".[44]
Italian academic and theorist Franca Bernabei writes in the preamble to Luce ostinata/Tenacious Light (2007), the Italian-English selected anthology of Brand's poetry, that "Brand's poetic production reveals a remarkable variety of formal-stylistic strategies and semantic richness as well as the ongoing pursuit of a voice and a language that embody her political, affective, and aesthetic engagement with the human condition of the black woman—and, more exactly, all those oppressed by the hegemonic program of modernity."[46] The editor and critic Constance Rooke calls Brand "one of the very best [poets] in the world today", and "compare[s] her to Pablo Neruda or—in fiction—to José Saramago."
The Thames Art Gallery in Chatham called Brand's documentary Sisters in the Struggle "radical in its amplifications of the voices of black Canadian women, who reflect on the legacy of the intersection of racism and sexism, alongside their personal battles in community, labour and feminist organizing".
Activism
In addition to being a writer, Brand is a social activist. Openly identifying as a lesbian, Brand is vocal against the discrimination of the LGBT community.[47] She is a founder of the newspaper Our Lives, the first Canadian newspaper devoted to Black women. She is also a past chair of the Women's Issues Committee of the Ontario Coalition of Black Trade Unionists, and does work with immigrant organizations around Toronto.[7]
Awards and honours
Brand's awards include:
1997: Governor General's Award for Poetry and the Trillium Book Award for Land to Light On (1997)
2003: Pat Lowther Award for thirsty (2002)
2006: City of Toronto Book Award for What We All Long For (2005)
2006: Harbourfront Festival Prize in recognition of her important contribution to literature
2006: Fellow of the Academies for Arts, Humanities, and Sciences of Canada (formerly the Royal Society of Canada)[48]
2009: Poet Laureate of Toronto
2011: Griffin Poetry Prize for Ossuaries[49][50][51]
2015: Honorary Doctorate from Thorneloe University[52]
2017: Honorary degree from the University of Windsor[53]
2017: Member of the Order of Canada (Invested on 6 September 2018)[54]
2019: Blue Metropolis Violet Prize[55]
2021: Windham-Campbell Literature Prize (fiction)[56]
Bibliography
Poetry
1978: Fore Day Morning: Poems. Toronto: Khoisan Artists, ISBN 0-920662-02-1
1979: Earth Magic. Toronto: Kids Can Press, ISBN 0-919964-25-7
1982: Primitive Offensive. Toronto: Williams-Wallace International Inc., ISBN 0-88795-012-4
1983: Winter Epigrams and Epigrams to Ernesto Cardenal in Defense of Claudia. Toronto: Williams-Wallace International Inc., ISBN 0-676-97101-6
1984: Chronicles of the Hostile Sun. Toronto: Williams-Wallace, ISBN 0-88795-033-7
1990: No Language is Neutral. Toronto: Coach House Press, ISBN 0-88910-395-X; McClelland & Stewart, 1998, ISBN 0-7710-1646-8
1997: Land to Light On. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, ISBN 0-7710-1645-X
2002: thirsty. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, ISBN 0-7710-1644-1 (shortlisted for the 2003 Canadian Griffin Poetry Prize) (Excerpt from thirsty, online at CBC Words at Large)
2006: Inventory. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, ISBN 978-0-7710-1662-2 (Excerpt from Inventory, online at CBC Words at Large)
2010: Ossuaries. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, ISBN 978-0-7710-1736-0 (winner of the 2011 Canadian Griffin Poetry Prize and Pat Lowther Award)
2018: The Blue Clerk. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, ISBN 978-0-7710-7081-5 (shortlisted for the 2019 Canadian Griffin Poetry Prize, longlisted for the Pat Lowther Award, Governor General's Awards finalist)
2022: Nomenclature. Durham: Duke University Press, ISBN 978-1-4780-1662-5
Fiction
1988: Sans Souci and Other Stories. Stratford, ON: Williams-Wallace, ISBN 0-88795-072-8 and ISBN 0-88795-073-6
1996: In Another Place, Not Here. Toronto: Knopf Canada, ISBN 0-394-28158-6
1999: At the Full and Change of the Moon. Toronto: Knopf Canada, ISBN 0-394-28158-6
2005: What We All Long For. Toronto: Knopf Canada, ISBN 978-0-676-97693-9
2014: Love Enough. Toronto: Knopf Canada, ISBN 978-0-345-80888-2
2018: Theory, Toronto: Knopf Canada, ISBN 9780735274235
Non-fiction
1986: Rivers have sources, trees have roots: speaking of racism (with Krisantha Sri Bhaggiyadatta). Toronto: Cross Cultural Communications Centre, ISBN 0-9691060-6-8
1991: No Burden to Carry: Narratives of Black Working Women in Ontario, 1920s–1950s (with Lois De Shield). Toronto: Women's Press, ISBN 0-88961-163-7
1994: Imagination, Representation, and Culture
1994: We're Rooted Here and They Can't Pull Us Up: Essays in African Canadian Women's History (with Peggy Bristow, Linda Carty, Afua P. Cooper, Sylvia Hamilton, and Adrienne Shadd). Toronto: University of Toronto Press, ISBN 0-8020-5943-0 and ISBN 0-8020-6881-2
1994: Bread Out of Stone: Recollections on Sex, Recognitions, Race, Dreaming and Politics. Toronto: Coach House Press, ISBN 0-88910-492-1; Toronto: Vintage, 1998, ISBN 0-676-97158-X
2001: A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging. Toronto: Random House Canada, ISBN 978-0-385-25892-0 and ISBN 0-385-25892-5
2008: A Kind of Perfect Speech: The Ralph Gustafson Lecture Malaspina University-College 19 October 2006. Nanaimo, BC: Institute for Coastal Research Publishing, ISBN 978-1-896886-05-3
2020: An Autobiography of the Autobiography of Reading. Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, ISBN 978-1-77212-508-5
Salvage. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. October 2024. ISBN 978-0-374-61484-3.[57][58][59][60]
Documentaries
Older, Stronger, Wiser. Dir. Claire Prieto. Assoc. Dir. Dionne Brand (Part I, Women at the Well trilogy). National Film Board of Canada, Studio D, 1989
Sisters in the Struggle. Dirs. Dionne Brand and Ginny Stikeman (Part II, Women at the Well trilogy). National Film Board of Canada, Studio D, 1991
Long Time Comin'. Dir. Dionne Brand. Perf. Faith Nolan and Grace Channer (Part III, Women at the Well trilogy). National Film Board of Canada, Studio D, 1991
Listening for Something: Adrienne Rich and Dionne Brand in Conversation. Dir. Dionne Brand. National Film Board of Canada, Studio D, 1996
Beyond Borders: Arab Feminists Talk About Their Lives ... East and West. Dir. Jennifer Kawaja. Narr. Dionne Brand. National Film Board of Canada, 1999
Under One Sky: Arab Women in North America Talk About the Hijab. Dir. Jennifer Kawaja. Narr. Dionne Brand. National Film Board of Canada, 1999
Borderless: A Docu-Drama About the Lives of Undocumented Workers. Dir. Min Sook Lee. Narr. Dionne Brand. KAIROS Canadian Ecumenical Justice Initiatives, 2006.
Anthologies edited
2007: The Journey Prize Stories: The Best of Canada's New Stories (with Caroline Adderson and David Bezmozqis, comps. and eds). Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, ISBN 978-0-7710-9561-0
2017: The Unpublished City, BookThug, ISBN 9781771663731
Archives
There is a Dionne Brand fond at Library and Archives Canada, containing multiple media including 4.89 meters of textual records, 78 audio cassettes and two posters.[61]
Sources
Amin, Nuzhat et al. Canadian Woman Studies: An Introductory Reader. Toronto: Inanna Publications and Education Inc. 1999.
Brand, Dionne. "Bread out of Stone", in Libby Scheier, Sarah Sheard and Eleanor Wachtel (eds), Language In Her Eye. Toronto: Coach House Press. 1990.
Brand, Dionne. No Language is Neutral. Toronto: Coach House Press. 1990.
Brand, Dionne. Rivers Have Sources, Trees Have Roots: Speaking of Racism (1986) with Krisantha Sri Bhaggiyadatta. Toronto: Cross Communication Centre 1986.
Brand, Dionne. "St. Mary Estate," in Eva C. Karpinski and Ian Lea (eds), Pens of Many Colours: A Canadian Reader (1993), Toronto: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich Canada Inc. 1993.
Brand, Dionne. "Just Rain, Bacolet". In Constance Rooke (ed.), Writing Away: the PEN Canada Travel Anthology, Toronto: McClelland & Stewart Inc. 1994.
Kamboureli, Smaro. Making A Difference: Canadian Multicultual Literature. Toronto: Oxford University Press. 1996.
Further reading
Birkett, Mary F. Review of Earth Magic, by Dionne Brand. School Library Journal 27.3 (1980): 83.
Dalleo, Raphael. "Post-Grenada, Post-Cuba, Postcolonial: Rethinking Revolutionary Discourse in Dionne Brand's In Another Place, Not Here". Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies 12.1 (2010): 64–73.
Dickinson, Peter. "'In Another Place, Not Here': Dionne Brand's Politics of (Dis) Location", in Veronica Strong-Bong, Sherrill Grace, Avigail Eisenberg, and Joan Anderson (eds), Painting the Maple: Essays on Race, Gender, and the Construction of Canada, Vancouver, BC: University of British Columbia Press, 1998. 113–29.
Fraser, Kaya. "Language to Light On: Dionne Brand and the Rebellious Word." Studies in Canadian Literature 30.1 (2005): 291–308.
Machado Sáez, Elena (2015). "Messy Intimacies: Postcolonial Romance in Ana Menéndez, Dionne Brand, and Monique Roffey". Market Aesthetics: The Purchase of the Past in Caribbean Diasporic Fiction. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. ISBN 978-0-8139-3705-2..
McCallum, Pamela, and Christian Olbey. "Written in the Scars: History, Genre and Materiality in Dionne Brand's In Another Place, Not Here." Essays on Caribbean Writing 68 (1999): 159–83.
Quigley, Ellen. "Picking the Deadlock of Legitimacy: Dionne Brand's 'Noise Like the World Cracking'". Canadian Literature 186 (2005): 48–67.
Russell, Catherine. Review of Primitive Offensive, by Dionne Brand. Quill and Quire 49.9 (1983): 76.
Saul, Joanne. "'In the Middle of Becoming': Dionne Brand's Historical Vision". Canadian Woman Studies 23.2 (2004): 59–63.
Thorpe, Michael. Review of In Another Place, Not Here, by Dionne Brand. World Literature Today, 22 March 1997.
Knight, Chelene. "Does the world need this line?" Conversation with Dionne Brand. Rungh Magazine, Vol. 7, No. 1, 19 October 2018.
Dionne Brand was born in Trinidad and is a poet, novelist, non-fiction writer, filmmaker, educator, and activist. She has written 10 previous books of poetry, and is a winner of the Governor General’s Award, the Trillium Book Award, the Pat Lowther Memorial Award, and a past winner of the Griffin Poetry Prize. She was Toronto’s third Poet Laureate from 2009-2012. In 2017 she was named to the Order of Canada. Brand is a Professor in the School of English and Theatre Studies at the University of Guelph. She lives in Toronto.
Dionne Brand
Retired Professor, University Research Chair
School of English and Theatre Studies
Email:
dbrand@uoguelph.ca
Summary:
Areas of Specialization:
Literature and creative writing, poetry, fiction, non-fiction, social justice, issues of gender and race.
Description
Dionne Brand is a renowned poet, novelist, and essayist. Her writing is notable for the beauty of its language, and for its intense engagement with issues of social justice, including particularly issues of gender and race. Her writing has won the Governor General’s Award for Poetry, the Trillium Prize for Literature, the Pat Lowther Award for Poetry, the Harbourfront Writers’ Prize and the Toronto Book Award.
Dionne Brand became prominent first as an award-winning poet, and is perhaps still best known for her poetry. But she has also achieved great distinction and acclaim in fiction, non-fiction, and film. Her fiction includes the novel In Another Place, Not Here, a New York Times notable book in 1998, and At the Full and Change of the Moon, a Los Angeles Times Notable Book of the Year in 1999. Her latest critically acclaimed novel, What We All Long For, is the story of four young people in Toronto; like thirsty, a recent book of poems, the novel offers an indelible portrait of this great multicultural city. Her non-fiction includes Bread Out Of Stone, a book of essays that prompted Adrienne Rich to describe Dionne Brand as “a cultural critic of uncompromising courage, an artist in language and ideas, an intellectual conscience for her country,” and A Map to the Door of No Return, which is a meditation on Blackness in the diaspora.
Dionne Brand has published eighteen books, contributed to seventeen anthologies, written dozens of essays and articles, and in the 1990’s made four documentary films for the National Film Board. She was a Distinguished Visiting Professor at St. Lawrence University in the U.S. and has taught literature and creative writing at universities in both British Columbia and Ontario. She has also held the Ruth Wynn Woodward Chair in Women’s Studies at Simon Fraser University.
Why Dionne Brand Is The Alchemist Of Language
Through her storytelling and activism, the CanLit giant has always found ways to respond to and reflect the times.
By Huda Hassan
Updated April 24, 2023
An illustration of a woman with a blue background of a bookshelf
Illustration by Shantel Miller
Study Suggests Lyrics Have Gotten
Simpler Over Time
It’s a sweltering July day in Toronto and I am sitting on a café’s back patio in the city’s West End with Dionne Brand. We’re holding court on turf familiar to her, a literary giant, despite the decades that have passed.
One block away from us is Tyndall Avenue, where Brand was a member of a Black radical and creative conclave in the 1970s. Back then, she was an emerging writer, collecting bylines and accolades as a poet, author and documentarian. Those days, hanging out on a nearby patio with other Black artists, were punctuated by rich music and artistry. They were also a time for organizing and fighting—against surveillance of Black Canadians, police brutality and structural racism.
I ask Brand to jog down memory lane. “As soon as the work is produced, I just move to the next thing, and I forget about it. And I just keep moving, right?” she says. “[These are the] things I had forgotten in my haste to get as much work done as possible.”
That work has earned her a lasting legacy. Forty-odd years later, Brand is a fixture of Canada’s literary world, the author of 23 books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction (No Language Is Neutral, A Map to the Door of No Return and Thirsty, to name a few). The recipient of many awards—including a Governor General’s Award for English-language poetry and a Windham-Campbell Prize for fiction—she was named to the Order of Canada in 2017.
Today on the patio, inspired by a past of organizing and artistry, Brand and I are looking forward to her next endeavour: her new publishing imprint, Alchemy by Knopf Canada. In August, she also released Nomenclature, featuring a new poem and eight volumes of previously published works.
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But looking back on her legacy, Brand is characteristically humble: “I don’t think of [where] as arrival in any way. I just survived some years.”
In person, Brand is kind and graceful. She is measured in her responses, taking time to contemplate the right words. In as much as she is thoughtful, she is emotively observant, a listener. The summer day we meet, Brand is wearing black, attracting the blazing sun. But between the two of us, I’m the one sweating. Despite the heat, I arrived with great nerves.
Brand has always loomed large in my mind. In my first encounters with her writing, she brought vitality to the untold stories of a city I’ve always called home. In the years since, Brand’s writing has greatly influenced my own work. Just a single line from A Map to the Door of No Return (“To live in the Black Diaspora, I think is to live in a fiction—a creation of empires, and also self- creation”) drew a six-year dissertation project out of me. I know I’m not alone in this; Brand has become an integral part of the canons of many Black and racialized writers.
Born in Guayaguayare, Trinidad, Brand immigrated to Canada in 1970. At 18, she published her first poem, “Behold! The Revolutionary Dreamer.” The piece ran in Spear: Canada’s Truth and Soul Magazine, a print publication centering Black cultural politics in Toronto. She wrote for Spear until it went defunct in 1987.
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But shortly after Spear was formed, the RCMP created a dossier on the publication and its surrounding community, surveilling “subversive activities” among Black people. Around the same time, police officers who were charged with man-slaughter in the killing of Albert Johnson, a 35-year-old Toronto Black man, were acquitted. This led to massive demonstrations against police brutality, and motivated several Black artists and activists in the city, including Brand, to band together and form a collective.
Some of this growing collective of activists and artists would gather on the patio of filmmakers Claire Prieto and Roger McTair’s Tyndall Avenue residence. “[All of us at that time] were both community workers and artists,” Brand recalls. “Those things weren’t different. They fed each other [and] they were the same thing. That was the beginning.” Novelist Makeda Silvera and writer Clifton Joseph were some of the many other artists who passed through.
“Dionne has a capacious and sparkling imagination. Thinking with her is always a gift.”
During this early period, Brand was consumed by anti-colonial literature, reading Toni Cade Bambara, Sonia Sanchez, Amiri Baraka and Kamau Brathwaite. “I encountered all this wonderful writing about Black liberation. It just took me up—it lifted me.” Brand was also shaping her politics while reflecting on Toronto, a city growing increasingly divided, and discovering tensions along the way.
Regardless of the medium—from her first published collection of poetry, ’Fore Day Morning in 1978, to the numerous documentaries she directed with the National Film Board throughout the 1980s and ’90s—Brand picked at these tensions. In A Map to the Door of No Return, Brand unpacked the collective loss of Black histories and grappled with past stories in the present-day diaspora.
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“Brand has given us maps that mark Black complexity—our laughter, our sorrow, our hurt and our joy,” author Rinaldo Walcott wrote for CBC in 2019. “In doing so, she has written the ordinary story of our Black queer existence without ever spectacularizing us as [anything] other than we might be.”
In 2009, Brand became Toronto’s third Poet Laureate. It seemed a fitting position for a woman whose work so frequently wrestled with Toronto as a landmark. Brand used her time in the role to bring art into the streets of Toronto, creating “Poetry is Public is Poetry,” a project that saw poetry posted on billboard-style panels around the city. “We want to have poetry in the moment between the doughnut shop and car dealership, speaking through the cacophony of consumerism,” she told a university alumni magazine. She remained the city’s Poet Laureate for three years before joining publisher McClelland & Stewart as poetry editor.
Her latest project, Alchemy, is another foray into the behind-the- scenes world of publishing. Conceived with Knopf publishing director Lynn Henry, the imprint aims to decentre colonial models of literature. Alchemy launches this year, with a first title to follow in fall 2023. “[Alchemy] is an old word, but it represents the various trajectories that arrive at a particular point and sort themselves into a disorderly order,” she says. Publishing fiction and non-fiction titles, the imprint will also be accompanied by a lecture series. The first lecture will take place this November, and the events will span disciplines to dissect contemporary social and political issues.
Then there’s Brand’s latest tome of poems past and present, Nomenclature. The titular poem, “Nomenclature for the Time Being,” spans 66 pages and confronts “our quotidian disasters” with narration from both a present and future perspective. (“The apocalyptic reports have come true,” it grimly opens.) “Brand’s ongoing labours of witness and imagination speak directly to where and how we live, and necessarily, reach beyond those worlds, their enclosures, and their violences,” says Christina Sharpe, Canada Research Chair in Black Studies in the Humanities at York University, of the poem in its introduction.
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Sharpe will also collaborate with Brand on the Alchemy Lectures. “Dionne has a capacious and sparkling imagination,” she says. “Thinking with her is always a gift.”
Nomenclature also contains a continuum in Brand’s work: the recurring character and backdrop of Toronto. “Something has continued in terms of the city and where we currently are in it,” says Brand. The violence has found new ways to expand itself: an ever-expanding housing crisis, a recession, climate catastrophe, the opioid crisis.
But through her storytelling and activism, Brand has always found ways to respond to and reflect the times. One thread remains clear in her work: Her commitment to Toronto is her commitment to people, histories, stories and the expressions of this place and beyond. The city might try to cling to the poet and all of her magnificence, but Dionne Brand is still imagining better worlds.
Byline: EMILY M. KEELER; Special to The Globe and Mail
History is like the ocean, with its unexamined depths. There is capital-H history, and there is the intimate scale of one's own journey through time. In both cases there are mysteries, rivers leading to oceans, journeys made and failed, travellers and treasures lost to the sea.
"Maybe it was about tonnage," Dionne Brand says, over iced coffees on a recent August afternoon. I've just asked her why the shipwreck is such a strong motif in Salvage, which examines colonial-era English literature and a life spent reading its heirs. The book is the first work of nonfiction from the poet - who has won both the Griffin Poetry Prize and a Governor-General's Award - since 2001's A Map to the Door of No Return. In the gap between the two essay works, Brand has written eight books, delivered and published two book-length lectures, been awarded the Windham Campbell Prize for her long career and been invested in the Order of Canada.
"Maybe it was about the Atlantic," she says of Salvage, "that transatlantic trade that reshaped the world. And therefore what all that cargo was, what it filled and what it evacuated. The new world begins in that moment, those huge ships hauling human cargo. Also, the beginning of that kind of ship. The moment that kind of capital begins."
The word "salvage," of course, means to save or rescue from a wrecked ship. Brand's latest book looks at the terrible period of colonial enslavement and exploitation and considers what was canonically saved and, crucially, all that was lost to the wreck. Brand weaves analyses of William Thackeray's Vanity Fair (1848), Daniel Defoe's The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1719), Jane Austen's Mansfield Park (1814), and Aphra Behn's Oroonoko (1688) with a backward glance at her own life, at becoming a reader and writer.
Salvage, however, is explicitly not an autobiography - even if the sections have titles such as "An Autobiography of the Autobiography of Reading." In the text, Brand warns: "When I use autobiographical, it is artifice. ... Where it appears, it will have been pored over, turned over, refashioned as art, made theoretical through those processes."
She delivers on her promise.
Most autobiographical elements here are transformed into data points for her larger analysis, such as a photograph taken in 1954 or '53, when Brand was a child in Guayaguayare, at the southeasternmost edge of Trinidad. The portrait depicts her two sisters, her cousin and herself; the little girls are instructed to smile for a picture that will be sent to England, where their mothers are working as midwives. Brand parses the image as a text, holding it up to the light and trying to see everything there: "This porous portrait is full of multiple autobiographies: Mr. Wong, the photographer, probably traces his family to Chinese indentured labour - from 1846, or perhaps even as far back as 1806 ... ; the children, whose history goes back to the period of Arawak/Carib extermination and the enslavement and transportation of their families from West Africa to the New World."
There are glimmers, however, of something beyond literary analysis, artifacts that occasion writing closer to the directness of experience. Another photograph, of her young mother astride a bicycle in England, gives Brand reason to reflect on how prevalent cyclists are in her own body of work as a novelist and poet, despite never having herself learned to ride a bike. In her searing critique of Robinson Crusoe's position in the canon as a text worth constant revisiting, constant salvaging, Brand parenthetically remembers her own narratively significant footprints, a source of childhood joy: "(On the beach at Guaya, it was a game with what we called the sea, which was the Atlantic ocean. This game involved having our footsteps washed away.
We would run toward the receding tide, put our footprints on the sand and run away as the tide came to claim them again.)" In person, Brand reiterates her stand against the merely autobiographical. "I'm not interested in it," she says with a smile. Her work here is in artfully untangling questions of truth, and of justice. "From which angle is this to be attended to?" she says. "So one lives their life. Yeah. Everybody will live their life. A life to be told perhaps, but you do that with friends or something." A pause. "But a life to be examined, now, that's another thing. So I'm not interested in the linear structure of a person taking themselves from A to B to C, through what they think is a life, choosing those objects that they feel are pivotal points." For her, the act of writing, of reading, is non-linear, non-narrative. She writes: "Destiny has a closed narrative shape, it is a told tale, but time is much more suggestive."
So her work here suggests and queries.
One of the principal questions Brand asks, directly and indirectly, throughout Salvage is how the legacy of colonial resource extraction and exploitation shaped the world we live in and the books we exalt: "We have run into something. What? And who is 'we'?" The question of "we" pervades the book; at times Brand uses "we" in the way most readers are accustomed to, as a way of marking out a general, or normative, experience. But that normative "we" can create exclusions and isolations, like the ones Brand herself felt as a young Black Caribbean immigrant in her undergraduate days at the University of Toronto. In Salvage, she creates a separate group from the normative "we," using "a reader like me" when, for instance, she remembers reading Mansfield Park for an English literature class: "If you are a reader like me, you may not have noticed this mention of Antigua until quite late in your reading, though the length and tediousness of the work may have made your eyes cross - especially then, in university."
Sometimes Brand will abandon the "we" entirely, preferring simply "I" or, provocatively, "this reader," as when she interrogates the impulse in French-Martinique author Patrick Chamoiseau's 2012 novel Crusoe's Footprint (trans. 2022) to recast Crusoe as an existentialist everyman for modern readers: "In his notes at the end of his book, Chamoiseau remarks: 'It's sad: Defoe's Crusoe was a slave trader.' But this reader asks, why is that sad?
... I am not sad that Crusoe was a slaver. I am sad that I have had to read him as the universal human."
Just once does she use "a Black reader like me": "If we say that these imperialist texts have an untouchable status as objects of aesthetic value and if we say that literature cultivates the human ... then the experience of a Black reader like me cannot be anything but the cultivation of a continuous dread."
"That refrain is deliberate. I'm looking to disaggregate whoever that 'we' is. I wanted to say that the reader is active, a reader is an active thing, not a passive receptor of something called story, but an active and interested being," Brand says, as our second round of coffees arrive. "The act of reading is emotional and it's physical. It harnesses all kinds of energies. It's not a passive act at all." She pauses, raises her glass.
"If there is passivity, even that passivity is political. So I want to make the distinction between a certain kind of reader who reads these texts passively - or is handed the benefit of that passivity."
In literature, writers both inherit and build the world. Salvage does not argue for doing away with the past, abandoning the canon, but looks at what can be brought to the surface if a reader (like Brand) plumbs the depths.
She finds that the colonial attitudes present in Defoe and other writers from the long period of European exploitation, slave trading and domination are not something astute readers can merely look away from; these writers cannot be excused for their unexamined beliefs simply because, as the saying goes, it was another time. "Well, yes," Brand says. "And what you receive from that time are the stories of the victor."
In Salvage, Brand writes toward "another archive we might explore, an archive of the intellectual life and human activity that somewhat contemporaneously addressed questions of humanism and silence." She draws out non-fiction examples in Letters of the Late Ignatius Sancho (spanning 1768-1780) and Quobna Ottobah Cugoano's Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil and Wicked Traffic of the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species from 1787. "There are conversations going on at the very time those novels are taking place," she says. "There are other texts in contention - they don't survive in the same way because they're not triumphant, but they exist. There was an argument going on in that moment too, against those systems."
Brand's work continues the argument with elegance and verve.
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Keeler, Emily M. "Dionne Brand untangles questions of truth and justice; The poet's new book, Salvage, examines colonial-era English literature and a life spent reading its titles." Globe & Mail [Toronto, Canada], 21 Sept. 2024, p. R9. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A809412952/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=7bd473bc. Accessed 5 Dec. 2024.
For her new book, ''Salvage,'' the Trinidadian-born writer Dionne Brand rereads classic English novels, teasing out evidence of the ravages of colonialism.
SALVAGE: Readings From the Wreck, by Dionne Brand
Dionne Brand is a poet, novelist and essayist who was born in Trinidad and moved to Canada in 1970. She seeks, across all her work, to interrupt history. Or, as she puts it in her new book, ''Salvage: Readings From the Wreck,'' describing how the fiction writer John Keene blows ''life into the collapsed world of coloniality,'' she exposes histories that have not previously come to the surface, finding traces that were of little importance to the white writers of England's colonial past.
In ''Salvage,'' which Brand calls ''an autobiography of the autobiography of reading,'' she returns to some of the 18th- and 19th-century social-realist novels -- ''Vanity Fair,'' ''Jane Eyre,'' ''Robinson Crusoe'' and ''Mansfield Park'' -- that she read as a young person, along with more recent spinoffs such as Jean Rhys's ''Wide Sargasso Sea'' and J.M. Coetzee's ''Foe.'' Having been trained to read the classics as an Anglophile Commonwealth subject, first in the West Indies and then in Canada, Brand rereads them to recover the Black and Indigenous lives that English realism obscured.
It's not that Black and Indigenous bodies are simply pushed aside in these novels; they're kept in sight just long enough for their presence to underscore and intensify their absence. In short, Brand shows that learning to read English literature involved learning not to notice who, or what, was missing.
The most striking instance she discovers of her past misreading occurs when she returns to Thackeray's ''Vanity Fair.'' She cites the Trinidadian historian and activist C.L.R. James, who wrote, in Brand's paraphrase, ''that Thackeray, not Marx, made him.'' James meant by this that literature was always an ''active, interested'' part of the ''imperializing project,'' collaborating in colonialism's disparaging of Blackness by relegating it to the margins of fiction. When Brand rereads ''Vanity Fair,'' she notes that Becky Sharp's status as an aggrieved social misfit ''gestured toward Blackness in this respect of wanting what one did not have and growing bitter without it.''
But Brand's real shock comes when she encounters Miss Swartz, a ''rich woolly-haired mulatto from St. Kitts,'' and, more shocking still, ''Sambo,'' a Black servant. She hadn't noticed these characters on previous readings (I didn't recall them either), yet it's Sambo who on the novel's first page rings the bell of Miss Pinkerton's academy for young ladies and sets Thackeray's plot in motion. ''How did I miss Sambo?'' Brand exclaims. ''On the first page! What slippage of interpretation accomplished that?''
The slippage is the slippage of literary realism. It's the slippage that makes people think of shipwrecks as artifacts of the West's adventuresome, treasure-seeking past, involving bullion and intrepid survivors, and not as human tragedies in which lives were lost and the families of sailors left without livelihoods. ''There are many shipwrecks now,'' Brand writes, linking the enslaved and forcibly displaced people hidden within canonical novels of the imperial age to victims of contemporary humanitarian disasters, often involving migrants. ''The salvage there, in wrecked pirogues, is bodies, small possessions, wallets, cellphones, T-shirts, raincoats, jackets, keys to houses and rooms, sodden papers, only valuable to the ones who lost their lives.''
These are the kinds of details that made up the worlds of the realist novel, too. Brand's key point is that the minutiae of white characters' daily lives serve to conceal the unseen -- unsalvaged -- minutiae of the enslaved and Indigenous lives under imperial control. She makes her case forcefully in a chapter on Jane Austen's ''Mansfield Park.'' The family in the novel derives income from a sugar plantation in Antigua, but we learn this only from a passage about procuring a horse for the heroine, Fanny Price, while Sir Thomas Bertram, the plantation's owner, is away in the colony. The horse carries a ''freight'' of information about the family's slave-owning past that ''we must nonetheless ignore,'' Brand argues, ''because our concern is for Fanny getting a horse.'' This is how English realism works: The particulars of white daily life distract from, but never efface completely, the Black and Indigenous characters lurking at the margins, as so much literary flotsam.
Equally suggestive are moments in Brand's book when she shows us how a passage ostensibly not about the violence of colonialism is in fact a barely conscious acknowledgment of it. Reading Charlotte Brontë's ''Jane Eyre,'' for example, Brand stresses not only that it is a novel of ''confinement and submission'' for its white female characters, but that the wealth and luxury in the novel are ''produced by the political economy of slavery,'' including in the case of Jane Eyre herself, who attains financial independence when she inherits an estate in Madeira, a former sugar colony.
Confinement and submission thus double as unacknowledged descriptions of the colonial world on which the book's English characters depend. The episode in which Jane Eyre hears ''the snarling, canine noise, and a deep human groan'' of Bertha Mason, the famous ''madwoman in the attic,'' is perhaps the most important in Brontë's narrative. Bertha's groan, her immeasurable suffering, has been interpreted many ways; Brand reads it as ''the noise of the plantation world, the suppressed, the made-mad, the sequestered'' that was Blackness. This is the very essence, and paradox, of so-called novels of sympathy that became so iconic during English colonialism: ''The contentment'' that Jane Eyre ''feels, and that we are to feel for her, is riven with violence.''
SALVAGE: Readings From the Wreck | By Dionne Brand | Farrar, Straus & Giroux | 217 pp. | $27
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PHOTO: Bertha Mason, the famous ''madwoman in the attic,'' in ''Jane Eyre.'' In Bertha's groans, Dionne Brand writes, we can hear the suffering of the enslaved under Britain's colonial rule. (PHOTOGRAPH BY F.H. TOWNSEND, 1868-1920) This article appeared in print on page BR13.
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Gee, Sophie. "Hidden Figures." The New York Times Book Review, 10 Nov. 2024, p. 13. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A815353683/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=8eb1574a. Accessed 5 Dec. 2024.
Brand, Dionne SALVAGE Farrar, Straus and Giroux (NonFiction None) $27.00 10, 1 ISBN: 9780374614843
Black lives in literature.
Award-winning novelist Brand, Toronto's former poet laureate, melds autobiography and literary criticism to offer a shrewd, intimate reading of the 17th-, 18th-, and 19th-century novels that shaped her sense of self. She terms this fictional trove a "wreck," from which she aims to salvage "the literary substance of which I am made." As a Black girl attending an Anglican school in Trinidad, she was schooled in "the racial work of literature, whose most abiding feature will be our absence, on the one hand, and our eternal subjugate presence, on the other hand." From novels such as Thackeray'sVanity Fair, Defoe'sAdventures of Robinson Crusoe, Austen'sMansfield Park, Aphra Behn'sOroonoko, and Charlotte Brontë'sJane Eyre, which she reread later at the University of Toronto, she came to understand the power of narrative structure and style--sentences, character, dialogue--to teach her "how to feel and what to feel" about her identity as a Black woman in a "world of coloniality." "I am not interested in the morality of any given writer," she asserts; "I am interested in the construction of, and the information contained in and relayed by, their paragraphs. I want to see what the writing imports from the systems in which the writer (and the work) is immersed." That system was imperialism, dependent on the slave trade, on the suppression of non-whites, and on a firm belief in the unbridgeable chasm between civilized and savage--a depiction, Brand finds, that persists even in contemporary novels. J.M. Coetzee'sFoe, for example, insists on reviving the question, "Can Black people be trusted with freedom?" Paintings, movies, photographs (especially a significant portrait from her childhood), and American novels and popular culture are all part of the wreckage that Brand astutely analyzes.
Penetrating cultural criticism.
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"Brand, Dionne: SALVAGE." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Sept. 2024, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A806452798/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=878588be. Accessed 5 Dec. 2024.