Caribbean Beat — September/October 2019 (#159)

Dionne Brand at home
in Toronto
Ferocious inclusivity
articulates Brand’s politics
and life in activism. You
couldn’t separate this
political animus from her
work if you tried
form, a magnificent literary achievement.” In this book, a
sustained and complicated, complicating conversation between
two personae unfurls. One, the blue clerk, keeps a ledger in
minutiae of everything the second persona — the author — has
collected. The clerk functions as shadow curatrix, as restless
and hypervigilant accounts notary: in her own words, “I am the
clerk, overwhelmed by the left-hand pages. Each blooming quire
contains a thought selected out of many reams of thoughts and
stripped by me, then presented to the author.”
Composing The Blue Clerk began in 2012. Brand says she
swiftly realised “It’s my work. It’s what I’ve
been collecting.” Despite her own adherence to
blistering candour in her poetry, Brand found that
the project of mapping the clerk and her author
exacted a ruthless, often painful honesty beyond
what she had known. The project of the clerk is
to expose the author-poet, who burdens the clerk
with constant raw material, then charges her with
keeping everything, everything, everything. Brand
says, “It was quite the fight in my own head, leaving
the verse not smoothed and raw, leaving it unspoken.
The book was difficult to lay out and difficult
to finish.” There was urgency, too, in ending The
Blue Clerk with a prime number — the 59 Versos
of the subtitle — which required an engineering
of specific mathematics, atop the book’s already
remarkable form. It succeeds, in all its coruscating
ambition — math and metaphysics dovetailing to
create something unparalleled in poetry.
Yet Brand’s gaze is not, one senses, driven by
the celebration of her ego. She’s too busy being
hungry for more work, more poems, to bask in
her own glow. In 2017, she was appointed poetry editor for
McClelland and Stewart, the venerable Canadian publishing
house. Her eye is trained to the rise of other voices, not hers. Of
her acquisition ethic, she says, “My hope is to bring a bunch of
new voices representative of living now. There is a real chorus
of people talking into the world we’re living in.” These are the
current and future biographies of others, their lives and the lives
of their subjects, laid out in poems. In Brand’s hands, they will be
much more than safe. Under her unflinching stewardship, they
will be allowed to remain dangerous. n
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