Fierce Departures: The Poetry of Dionne Brand

by Dionne Brand, Leslie C. Sanders (Editor)

The selections in "Fierce Departures," drawn from Dionne Brand's work since 1997, delineate with searing eloquence how history marks and dislocates peoples of the African diaspora, how nations, concretely and conceptually, fail to create safe haven, and how human desire persists nevertheless. Through a widening canvas, Brand unfolds the (im)possibilities of belonging for those whom history has dispossessed. Yet she also shows how Canada, and in particular Toronto, remade by those who alight on it, is a place of contingency. Known for her linguistic intensity and lyric brilliance, Brand consoles through the beauty of her work and disturbs with its uncompromising demand for ethical witness.

In her introduction, editor Leslie C. Sanders traces the evolution of Brand's poetic concerns and changing vision. In particular, she observes Brand's complex use of landscape and language to delineate the ethical and emotional issues around the desire for place. She argues that Brand reformulates Northrop Frye's question "Where is here?," disturbing and expanding the national imaginary.

As afterword, Brand has selected passages from her evocative collection of essays "A Map to the Door of No Return." Read as an "ars poetica," the passages summon the presences of those whose lives are circumscribed by the histories the poet narrates as her own.

Genres: Poetry, Canada

60 pages, Paperback

First published February 12, 2009

About the author

As a young girl growing up in Trinidad, Dionne Brand submitted poems to the newspapers under the pseudonym Xavier Simone, an homage to Nina Simone, whom she would listen to late at night on the radio. Brand moved to Canada when she was 17 to attend the University of Toronto, where she earned a degree in Philosophy and English, a Masters in the Philosophy of Education and pursued PhD studies in Women’s History but left the program to make time for creative writing.

Dionne Brand first came to prominence in Canada as a poet. Her books of poetry include No Language Is Neutral, a finalist for the Governor General’s Award, and Land to Light On, winner of the Governor General’s Award and the Trillium Award and thirsty, finalist for the Griffin Prize and winner of the Pat Lowther Award for poetry. Brand is also the author of the acclaimed novels In Another Place, Not Here, which was shortlisted for the Chapters/Books in Canada First Novel Award and the Trillium Award, and At the Full and Change of the Moon. Her works of non-fiction include Bread Out of Stone and A Map to the Door of No Return.

What We All Long For was published to great critical acclaim in 2005. While writing the novel, Brand would find herself gazing out the window of a restaurant in the very Toronto neighbourhood occupied by her characters. “I’d be looking through the window and I’d think this is like the frame of the book, the frame of reality: ‘There they are: a young Asian woman passing by with a young black woman passing by, with a young Italian man passing by,” she says in an interview with The Toronto Star. A recent Vanity Fair article quotes her as saying “I’ve ‘read’ New York and London and Paris. And I thought this city needs to be written like that, too.”

In addition to her literary accomplishments, Brand is Professor of English in the School of English and Theatre Studies at the University of Guelph.

For more information, please see http://www.answers.com/topic/dionne-b...

Reviews

[Emily Hays]

I'm not gonna rate this, because it's not what I thought it was and I don't think a collection like this can be rated. I thought it might be a collection of short poetry from Brand, but its actually excerpts from her longer works. I still absolutely loved it, and I think it's motivated me even more to pick up other works of poetry from her. But seeing that this isn't any one full piece of work, I'm not gonna rate it.

[M.W.P.M. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fierce Departures: The Poetry of Dionne Brand brings together a selection of poems from No Language Is Neutral , Land to Light On , thirsty , and Inventory ...


From No Language Is Neutral ...

No language is neutral. I used to haunt the beach at
Guaya, two rivers sentinel the country sand, not
backra white but nigger brown sand, one river dead
and teeming from waste and alligators, the other
rumbling to the ocean in a tumult, the swift undertow
blocking the crossing of little girls except on the tied
up dress hips of big women, then, the taste of leaving
was already on my tongue and cut deep into my
skinny pigeon toed away, language here was strict
description and teeth edging truth. Here was beauty
and here was nowhere. The smell of hurrying passed
my nostrils with the smell of sea water and fresh fish
wind, there was history which had taught my eyes to
look for escape even beneath the almost leaves fat
as women, the conch shell tiny as sand, the rock
stone old like water. I learned to read this from a
woman whose hand trembled at the past, then even
being born to her was temporary, wet and thrown half
dressed among the dozens of brown legs itching to
run. It was as if a signal burning like a fer de lance's
sting turned my eyes against the water even as love
for this nigger beach became resolute.

- No language is neutral, pg. 1

From Land to Light On ...

Maybe this wide country just stretches your life to a thinness
just trying to take it in, trying to calculate in it what you must
do, the airy bay at its head scatters your thoughts like someone
going mad from science and birds pulling your hair, ice invades
your nostrils in chunks, land fills your throat, you are so busy
with collecting the north, scrambling to the Arctic so wilfully, so
busy getting a handle to steady you to this place you get blown
into bays and lakes and fissures you have yet to see, except
on a map in a schoolroom long ago but you have a sense that
whole parts of you are floating in heavy lake water heading for
what you suspect is some other life that lives there, and you, you
only trust moving water and water that reveals itself in colour. It
always takes long to come to what you have to say, you have to
sweep this stretch of land up around your feet and point to the
signs, pleat whole histories with pins in your mouth and guess
at the fall of words.

- V i, pg. 7

From thirsty ...

It isn't, it really isn't
the city, brief as history,
but my life in it passing sooner
than this thirst is finished, I
can offer nothing except a few glances
an uneasy sleep, a wild keening,
it would appear nothing said matters,
nothing lived, but, this is my occupation.
One day I will record the tenses of light,
not now

- XVII, pg. 17

From Inventory ...

One year she sat at the television weeping,
no reason,
the whole time

and the next, and the next

the wars' last and late night witness,
some she concluded are striving on grief
and burnt clothing, bloody rags, bomb-filled shoes

the pitiful domestic blankets
in the hospitals,
the bundles of plump
corpses waiting or embraces by screams,
the leaking chests and ridiculous legs

the abrupt density of life gone out, the
manifold substances of stillness

- One year she sat at the television weeping, pg. 22

[Niki Rowland · Rating 4 out of 5]

“No one wakes up thinking of a stranger.”

[Jessie B. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent

[Olivia · Rating 3 out of 5]

“Days are perfect, that’s the thing about them, standing here in half darkness, I think this.”

[Nathan · Rating 2 out of 5]

Read for ENGL2271.