Caribbean Beat — September/October 2019 (#159)

The Blue Clerk; and the Blue Metropolis Violet Prize, given in
celebration of an established LGBTQ+ writer’s career. Yet these
laurels aren’t quite what Dionne Brand is after. They don’t define
the anatomy of her days at the writing desk, and there is nothing
of the formulaic in them.
Just ask her if she’s ever written odes for the newborn
babies of Canadian politicians, during her three-year tenure as
Toronto’s third Poet Laureate, and gales of laughter will greet
you. Instead, Brand focused on bringing poetry to the working,
breathing world of the everyday, with a project called Poetry is
Public is Poetry. In an address given to mark the first permanent
pavement installation of a poem by Rosemary Sullivan, Brand
said, “Poetry beautifies public space, pays respect to the intelligence
of the citizenry, gives respite from the grind of daily
living, and engages the city’s humanistic ideals.” Cast in bronze,
embedded in the sidewalk leading to the Cedarbae Branch of the
Toronto Public Library, Sullivan’s lines read: “a man packed a
country / in a suitcase with his shoes / and left.”
Consider this: there is poetry pulsing under your very feet, if
you walk through Toronto, and Dionne Brand was pivotal
in putting it there. It’s a vital sign of Brand’s preoccupation
with the city, a relationship as loving and symbiotic as a house
built with adoration and concern.
Her novels What We All Long For (2005) and Love Enough
(2014) offer the reader dynamic, unsettled (and therefore
unsettling), imaginatively robust characters contending with
themselves and each other throughout Toronto. Anyone who
considers Toronto nebulous in the global literary imagination
will find it mapped with a living curiosity here. Better still, Brand
seats everyone at the table: people of First Nations communities,
immigrants, refugees, queer citizens, alongside everyone.
Brand’s work recognises that they are everyone, too.
Ferocious inclusivity articulates Brand’s politics and life
in activism. You couldn’t separate this political animus from
Brand’s work if you tried — in every genre, her commitment to
her peoples, her places, would shun any smaller analysis. Brand
returned to the Caribbean in 1983 to serve on the intellectual
and corporeal frontlines of the Grenada Revolution, as information
and communications officer for the Agency for Rural Transformation.
Upon her return to Canada, critics noted a sea swell
in her poems, published in Winter Epigrams: &, Epigrams to Ernesto
Cardenal in Defense of Claudia (1983). The language seemed to
spark off the page, to incandesce. As a teacher, community
Poetry called to her before anything
else. Brand’s relationship to the
form is a bridge to how she began
writing in other genres
organiser, and radical animator, Brand’s language has continued
to fan flames, and generate them, enveloping generations of
students, activists, mentees, and readers. As the St Lucia-born,
Ontario-based poet Canisia Lubrin says, “Dionne Brand is just
the greatest magician of language to me.”
It takes intentional, muscular crafting, to be certain, to release
two books on the same day — and to have both those books be
extraordinary, perched on the vanguard of the literary possible.
Shazia Hafiz Ramji, writing for the Hamilton Review of Books, says
of Theory that “Brand has continued to reinvent herself while
staying true to an uncompromising vision that gestures towards
the potency of the novel in the real world.” Ramji’s right: at every
page turn of Theory, I felt I was reading a new form, generating
itself. Teoria, the intellectually brilliant, interpersonally challenged
narrator of the book, is often stumped by “love’s austere
and lonely offices,” to channel Robert Hayden.
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