Dionne Brand
The ability to make history concrete by capturing the small, ordinary things of life along with a sense of broader historical actions is not found too frequently in English poetry, particularly in North America. Dionne Brand, however, is a significant exception. To read her poetry is to read not only about her but also about her people and their struggles both in Canada and the Caribbean. In the introduction to her poetry published in A Caribbean Dozen, a collection of poetry for children, Dionne Brand illustrates both her biographical and literary background, pinpointing the essence of her desire to write:
"I was born deep in the south of Trinidad in a village called Guayguayare. Our house was so close to the ocean that when the tide came in the pillow tree logs on which the house stood were almost covered by surf. When I was four or so my grandmother, who brought me up, moved to San Fernando, but every holiday we would return to Guaya where my grandfather lived. It is the place I remember and love the most. I now live in Toronto, Canada, but each time I go back to Trinidad I always go to Guayguayare just to see the ocean there, to breathe in the smell of copra drying and wood burning and fish frying. In the Sixties when I was in elementary and high schools, none of the books we studied were about Black people's lives; they were about Europeans, mostly the British. But I felt that Black people's experiences were as important and as valuable, and needed to be written down and read about. This is why I became a writer. In San Fernando I went to a girls' high school where I was taught that girls could use their intellect to live a full life. My teachers and friends there helped me to see that women should enjoy the same rights and freedoms as men. When I moved to Canada in 1970 I joined the civil rights, feminist and socialist movements. I was only seventeen but I already knew that to live freely in the world as a Black woman I would have to involve myself in political action as well as writing."
Being an Afro-Caribbean Canadian poet and writer, Dionne Brand is a particular kind of exiled woman who has made a strength out of her experience of multiple displacements. Of African descent, her cultural and linguistic history has been truncated by the forcible displacement of her ancestors from Africa to the New World. Her life in the Caribbean has been affected coined by the unavoidable impact of colonialism, namely the linguistic and cultural displacements which she often deals with in her poetry. In Canada, despite encountering racism and rejection, she has emerged as a multicultural and multifaceted poet and writer who has left a indelible imprint on the cultural mosaic of Canada.
Dionne Brand was born in 1953 in Guayguayare, Trinidad. After graduating from Naparima Girls' High School in Trinidad in 1970, she moved to Toronto, where she has lived ever since. She graduated in 1975 from the University of Toronto with a BA in English and Philosophy. In 1989, she completed an MA in the philosophy of education from the Ontario Insitute for Studies in Education.
Since coming to Canada, Brand has worked with the black and feminist communities in many capacities. She has belonged to the Communist Party of Canada and remains committed to Marxist ideas, particularly to the principles of equal distribution of the world's wealth and ending the exploitation of the labor of the majority of the world's peoples. She was a founding member and editor of Our Lives, Canada's first black women's newspaper. She has edited, written, and done research for a number of alternative journals and papers, including Spear, Fuse Magazine, Network, Our Lives, the Harriet Tubman Review,Fireweed, Poetry Canada Review, Canadian Women Studies, and Resources for Feminist Research. She guest-edited Fireweed's issues on Women of Colour (1983) and Canadian Women Poets (1986). Brand has also done extensive community work and organizing. She has been a community worker in Toronto for the Black Education Project; a counselor for the Black West Indian community of Toronto at the Immigrant Women's Centre; an Information Officer for the Agency for Rural Transformation in Grenada, and for the Caribbean Peoples' Development Agencies. She has chaired the Women's Issues Committee of the Ontario Coalition of Black Trade Unionists, of which she was a founding member; helped organize the Black and Native Women's Caucus of the International Women's Day Coalition; and served on the board of the Shirley Samaroo House, a Toronto shelter for battered immigrant women.
Brand's poetry, essays, and films arise directly out of her political involvements. 'Fore Day Morning (Khoisan, 1978) and Earth Magic(Kids Can Press, 1978), a book of poetry for children, were followed by two more politically engaged volumes of poetry, Primitive Offensive (Williams-Wallace, 1982) and Winter Epigrams and Epigrams to Ernesto Cardenal in Defense of Claudia (William-Wallace, 1983). Chronicles of the Hostile Sun (Williams-Wallace, 1984) is a reaction in poetry to Brand's experience of the US invasion of Grenada, which occured while she was working there. No Language is Neutral (Coach House, 1990), the novel In Another Place Not Here (Vintage Canada, 1997), and her Governor General's Award-winning Land To Light On (M&S, 1997) have established her as one of Canada's finest poets and writers. Major prose titles, which have also emerged from Brand's political work, include:Rivers Have Sources, Trees Have Roots: Speaking of Racism, with Krisantha Sri Bhaggiydatta (Cross Cultural Communication Centre, 1986); "Black Women and Work: The Impact of Racially Constructed Gender Roles on the Sexual Division of Labour" (Fireweed1987 and 1988); and, with Lois de Shield, No Burden to Carry: Narratives of Black Working Women in Ontario 1920s to 1950s(Women's Press, 1991). Documentaries she has done for the National Film Board's Studio D are Older Stronger Wiser (1989), Sisters in the Struggle (1991), and Long Time Comin' (1993). She has also published Sans Souci (1988), a collection of short stories, andBread out of Stone (Coach House Press, 1994), a volume of essays.
Brand's poetry and short stories have appeared in many anthologies, including Other Voices, The Penguin Book of Caribbean Verse, Poetry by Canadian Women, Stories by Canadian Women, Her True-True Name: An Anthology of Women's Writing from the Caribbean, Other Solitudes: Canadian Multicultural Fictions, and Eyeing the North Star: Directions in African-Canadian Literature. She has been writer-in-residence at the Halifax City Regional Library and taught poetry at the West Coast Women and Words Society Summer School and Retreat. In 1990-91, she was writer-in-residence at the University of Toronto. In 1991-92, she taught creative writing at the University of Guelph. She has now returned to writing on a full-time basis.
About influences on her work, Brand has said: "What some white reviewers lack is the sense of what literature that is made by Black people and other people of colour is about. If you read my work, you have to read Toni Morrison, you have to read Derek Walcott, Rosa Guy, Jean Rhys, Paule Marshall, Michael Anthony, Eddie Brathwaite, and African writers and poets...Bessie Head. I don't consider myself on any margin, on the margin of Canadian Literature. I'm sitting right in the middle of Black Literature, because that's who I read, that's who I respond to" (Books in Canada, October 1990: 14). More recently, Brand has said that she counts as influences Pablo Neruda, Bertold Brecht, Martin Carter, Roque Dalton, Taban Lo Liyong, Sonia Sanchez, Nikki Giovanni, Nicolas Guillen, and Aimé Césaire.
Significant issues and themes that Brand takes up in her work include the experience of existing on the external frontiers of the Caribbean diaspora, issues of personal and national identity, her experience as a lesbian, colonial oppression and its consequences on the colonial subject, multiculturality reflected in a multicultural identity, and the immigrant experience in Canada. Her self-articulation is an act of liberation, breaking the silence and giving voice to the silenced and marginalized people of her world.
The above profile has been written by Carmen Lassotta, M.A. For information on how you can write an author profile, visit ourcontributions page, or e-mail us at nwp@mwsolutions.com
Thu, Jul 29, 2010
Anarchism, History, Publication Reviews