Caribbean Beat — September/October 2019 (#159)

closeup
The
reinvention
of poetry
For writer Dionne Brand — born in Trinidad and now
based in Canada — the shapeshifting, transgressive
possibilities of poetry are essential to understanding
the self, the world, history, and politics. Over a
forty-year career, she has pushed past boundaries
of convention and genre — creating something
“unparalleled,” writes Shivanee Ramlochan
Photography by Cole Burston
Don’t take it personally, but Dionne
Brand isn’t gushing to tell you her
life story.
The reason for this is its
own poetry. “My biography is
my books,” she tells me — and
anyone who’s read her, across multiple genres,
spanning decades of poetry, fiction, essays, and
hybrid forms, is nodding and saying yes. Her newest
books, The Blue Clerk: Ars Poetica in 59 Versos
and Theory, were launched on the same day in
September 2018. How’s that for prolific?
Both books are radical genre-defiers, challenging
a collective Western understanding of
what poetic and prose forms can offer. They are
audacious, shocking, and revealing in the best
possible way. Brand, who lives and works in
Ontario, Canada, has been publishing this kind of
work, writing woven with threads of the brightly
transgressive, since her first collection of poems,
Fore Day Morning, published in 1978.
Before all of these stories were written, a young
girl stood before a field blazing with bright orange
blooms in Guayaguayare, in Trinidad’s southeastern
county of Mayaro. Many Trinidadians would
be hard-pressed to tell you how to drive there, but
for Brand, the village’s urgency as a site of childhood
imagination has never faded. “I remember as
a kid walking from the house,” she says, “trying to
get to these heliconia flowers, this sea of orange,
repeatedly trying to walk towards it, never being
able to get there, getting halfway there and crying.”
When she returned to visit as a young woman, in
her twenties, a part of her, one rooted in her earliest
memories, was astonished at not being able to
locate that field of flowers. That heliconia orange
has “accrued significance as something unreachable,
but quite beautiful.”
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