A commentary on the poetry of Dionne Brand.

"That man told me he liked my poetry but not my politics (As if they are different)" (1983, p.21)

Dionne Brand may not have thus intended the above remark, but it inadvertently addresses many of the confused notions that critics and poets entertain about the functions of poetry.

The craft and content of poetry are subjects that will forever remain contentious. Today we find it difficult to accept as poetry much of what the nineteenth century British considered so. But our difficulties with poetry have increased. Pre-twentieth century poets created for a specific culture, out of that culture's symbols, beliefs and folklore. There was nothing cryptic about their poetry. Their poems integrated easily into the broad contours of the society's values. It is therefore not surprising that their quarrels about poetry centered almost always on its craftsmanship and intellectual content. Today, despite the fact that we live in a world where Europeans have tried to impose their values, we find a multiplicity of cultures living side by side, and with nothing to link them, apart from the pursuit of wealth and power. From what body of common knowledge does the contemporary poet create? To whom is this poetry addressed? How do we determine whether it is good poetry? These questions can no longer be answered satisfactorily. A poet is left on his/her own to determine what and how she/he would write. If what she/he writes satisfies the prejudices of the publishing house and looks saleable then his/her work is published and promoted. In fact, today the problem of meaning in poetry is so great that our poets seem to be writing for members of exotic cults. To admit that we are unable to understand what they are saying is to risk being termed illiterate.

How is the foregoing relevant to the poetry of Dionne Brand? It is, in the sense that her poetry and poetics reflect what I call the communal choice. To people of African origin, art was and, in some degree, still is a portrayal of the highest ideals of the society, or its laws that must not be transgressed, of those dangers the society should avoid. In short, artists were and still could be guardians of their society's morals. Contemporary black literary artists are faced with the choice of whether to write for the big international publishing houses and their vast readership or whether to address the concerns of their people in language that their people understand. The latter group are those I term communal artists.

Primitive Offensive (1982) gives readers of Dionne Brand's work an apercu of her psychic and historical journey into her people's past and present, equipping herself as it were for the bardic role that the communal artist must inevitably fill. Throughout, the poem evokes ancestral wisdom and practices, and resurrects black folk heroes. The wisdom is necessary for present revelations and guidance and for a cleansing of the colonial detritus. The practices are needed for preservation, the folk heroes for inspiration. But it is in the vignettes, which poignantly link past and present oppression, that much of the poem's power (and instruction) lies. Whether it be the Madagascar woman running from her blackness, or the Dakar man (poor fellow, he thinks being from Senegal makes him French) mistreated by the French Gendarmes or the black Haitian cook thrown into the oven during Toussaint's era because she did not roast the hens to her white mistress's liking--the impact is to jolt you into wakefulness about the ongoing injustice and our own folly.

Equally, the poem presents the questing Black with the available choices: "the grave digger or the dead." Like the speaker in the poem, we, black people, must choose whether to augment other people's bank accounts, give reality to their dreams, be their building blocks or whether to dig the grave in which we bury these too long-enduring assumptions on the part of other races. People of action we must be:

The speaker tells us--

   I went to (Paris) to start a war
   For the wars we never started
   To burn the Code Noir
   On the Champs Elysees. (1982, p. 32)

The motive for this trip to Paris strikes the reader; it is not to learn of French culture but to protest French imperial practices. The Code Noir is the body of laws that staled how slaves were to be treated, something I suppose, like the guidelines that the SPCA put out on how animals should be treated. In metaphorical terms it needs to be burned, to be cauterized from the black psyche, since so many of our dealings with one another and with white people are conditioned by responses handed down from our slave ancestors.

In the later collection of poems. Winter Epigrams & Epigrams to Ernesto Cardenal in defense, of Claudia (1983), one of Brand's epigrams states candidly why her poetry is focused on the black experience:

   Give up the bitterness
   he told my young friend/poet
   give it up and you will be beautiful.
   But what is this bitterness?
   ... it is something hot in the hand, a piece of red
   coal,

   ,it is an electric fence, touched,
   we are repulsed, embraced and destroyed,
   it is not separate, different,
   it is all of us, mixed up in our bones
   and it cannot be thrown away
   not after all these years, all these words
   we don't have a hold on it
   it has a hold on us.... (I 35, pp. 30-31)

Of course, this attitude explains why few white people redid works that address the issue of black oppression; it explains why they tell us that our works are not universal, since we do not gratify the deep Caucasian urge of the market place. Give up the bitterness and you will be acceptable to us; being honest about our plight makes us ugly in the white man's sight.

Let us now turn to Brand's portrayal of colonialism in her works. This theme is ever-present, from her first to her last published collection, where it reaches its highest point in analysis and clarity of presentation. We should, however, look briefly at some of the preparation the earlier volumes give us for the encounters with the Chronicles of a Hostile Sun. "Fore Day Morning," the first poem in her first collection (1978), is an invitation to the reader to accompany the speaker to the battle field to fight colonialism. Apart from the fact that "fore day morning" is the time of day when Caribbean people set out on long journeys, the speaker tells the reader, "... if you see me walking .../where Che and Josina fell/come go with me." (p. 7). Other poems in the collection, in fact, ten of the twenty-five poems in the collection, deal partially or exclusively with the process or effects of colonialism. Her second book of poems, Earth Magic (1979), is principally concerned with effecting that oneness that pre-colonial Blacks felt with nature; but Brand finds room in it to let the young children know how their fore parents were brought to the Caribbean. "Slave Ship" is compiled of images of suffering piled on one another, like the horrors of the Middle Passage; but Brand simply invites young readers, at the end of the poem, to find out why, to learn their story. In Epigrams we are shown the result of colonization on the colonized, in two vivid examples: "Epigram 4" tells of a young man from Little England (Barbados) who believed stories "about cannibalism," who "didn't know Martin" and "Malcolm," "Garvey," "Dubois," or "Angela."

   Hee had been trained to be orderly and genteel
   in Little England,
   not to give an opinion either way,
   not even if it concerned him." (p. 21)

The next example presents us with a Yoruba in whose opinion, "The poor want to be poor/ nothing's holding them back/ they're just lazy." (# 45, p.34) We know these people well; they include our best known calypsonian; our black neighbours who turn their backs upon us lest their white friends think they are proud to be black; those who tell us blackness does not pay the mortgage or earn them interest; we watch them running South African townships and Bantustans; we watch them betray every freedom movement. Thus we are amply prepared for Chronicles of a Hostile Sun (1984), poems gestated in Brand's own witnessing of the abortion of the Grenada revolution.

Before we get to the actual Grenada poems "La Souffriere," where the colonial drama is played out, should be looked at, if only because the Grenada revolution was about putting an end to this and similar practices fostered by colonial heritage.

   Freddie Oliviere fondled his gun
   and threatened ...
   a woman with a pension
   of one dollar a week ... (pp15/16)

Why does he do this? Because he owns an expensive Japanese jeep, "has [a] gun in his pocket," and is protected by a "jeepful of henchmen." One by one the poet pulls the cellophane away from Freddie's colonial packages. "His Land:" No, it was bought with money he cheated the arrowroot workers of. "His hard work:" No, it is other people's labour. Moreover, the speaker astutely notes, his threats have little to do with their having wandered onto his land--rather he wants their acknowledgement of what he deems to be the power inherent in owning land, a jeep, brandishing a gun, surrounding himself with a jeep-load of henchmen, and (implicit in the name of Oliviere) having a white or off-white skin are expected to confer.

We now turn to the Grenada experience, the defeat of which would have been immeasurably painful for the poet, seeing that it was her chance to be at the place where "Che and Josina fell." She watched helplessly the feeble attempt the New Jewel Movement was making to dent the machinery that keeps the Caribbean poor, servile, and infantile--fearful of any action Washington, Paris, or London may disapprove of- dissipate beneath American bombs and OECS's treachery. In many places these poems portray the lack of basic necessities the revolution was intent on remedying, and the mostly unschooled, simple people whose qualifications were hardly more than the dream of self-sufficiency. Thus the poems that depict the treachery and the destruction emerge all the more painful.

The defenselessness one feels before the world's largest amasser of weapons, the horror of watching your fellow-oppressed in the neighboring Caribbean states pilot the Americans to your door and help them destroy you, are effectively conveyed in these poems. The following dirge captures the tone of many of the poems:

   Dream is dead
   lesser and greater
   in these antilles
   windward, leeward
   reality will die.
   I refuse to watch faces
   back once again
   betrayal again, ships again.
   manacles again ... (p. 40)

And the helplessness vividly comes across in the following:

   ... you cannot fight bombers
   battleships, aircraft carriers, helicopter gunships,
   surveillance planes, five thousand american soldiers
   six Caribbean stooges and the big American war
   machine,

   you cannot fight this with a machete
   you cannot fight it with a handful of dirt
   you cannot fight it with a hectare of land free from
   bosses

   you cannot fight it with farmers
   you cannot fight it with 30 miles of feeder roads
   you cannot fight it with free health care
   you cannot fight it with free education
   you cannot fight it with women's cooperatives
   you cannot fight it with a pound of bananas or
   a handful of fish
   which belongs to you (p. 42)

There is hardly any doubt that the crushing of Grenada was America's way of showing the rest of the New World the extent to which it is prepared to go to impose its own ideology and economic model. The first is obvious, the second more subtle. You see, if you begin to take land from the bosses you destroy serfdom, which is the condition necessary for the ignorance that makes these people accepting of American propaganda; if you establish free health care the American insurance companies that rarely honour their contracts will go bankrupt; if you build your own roads, etc., how would the CIA in Peace Corps masks overrun your country, pretending to improve its infrastructure? If you became independent of America, how could it keep you servile? And, of course, free education in its broadest meaning had to be removed by the Americans. In its most elementary meaning it translated as lost revenue to the banks, for many parents borrowed the money that paid for their children's secondary education. But free education also meant that you no longer accepted the free textbooks that taught your children that they are inferior because their lifestyle was not like the one they read about, that taught your children that America is the "greatest nation on earth" because of its "God-fearing" citizens; it also meant that you did not accept the few dollars or pounds thrown at you on condition you promote white reality in your curriculum, that you refused the teachers sent to enslave your children's minds. You could the read Marx without fear of being placed under house arrest; you could then say that theft is the basis of Euro-American prosperity; Hawkins, Drake, Nelson, Washington and Jefferson no longer had to be your heroes; you could fearlessly embrace Toussaint, Christophe, Denmark Vesey, Nat Turner, Chaka, Kimaathi, Patrice Lumumba, ...; more than that, it means you could now prevent your children from being taught that they are ugly because they are black. Ironies are many: that Reagan became proclaimed the number two figure of importance to Grenadians (God being the first) explains why free education had to be crushed. And as for eating the food you produce by your own sweat, this could not go on--no, your labour had to profit the American banks, farmers and manufacturing companies. Like the sugar you produce that they refine and sell back to you.

But the very behaviour of the Grenadian people--by extension, all Caribbean people under the same circumstances--during tile invasion underscores the need for liberation:

   ... they will give you in to the Americans,
   and they will say you belong to the militia,
   or the health brigade,
   or the civil service,
   or the people's revolutionary army,
   or the community work brigade,
   or the New Jewel Movement they
   will say that you lived in the country,
   they will say that you are Cuban,
   they will say that you served cakes
   at the Point Salines airport fund raising,
   they will say that you are human,
   they will say that one day last month
   you said that for four and a half years
   you have been happy.
   they will say all this because they want to eat.
   (p. 43)

   [A]nd when push comes to shove
   they will have change for an American dollar
   they will pocket your grief
   they will sing hymns to your killers
   the press will report their happiness. (p. 47)

The lingering pain of betrayal seems to be where the speaker is finally positioned: "... one knows that Eugenia and Adams and Seaga ... are enemies of the people and the future .../but one cannot help feeling betrayed by blood,/ one cannot part with the sense of shame/at their voraciousness and our current defeat." (p. 62) But these facts cry all the more for "Fore Day Mornings," to begin where Che and Josina and Bishop fell; and, oh yes, "We will tell each other no lies, "we will be frightened." (1978, p. 7). We must never resign ourselves to being spat upon.

In these and other ways space prevented me from treating, we see Dionne Brand as the exemplary communal artist. Her poems invite us to reflect on our motives and needs, to a better understanding of self and the forces that act upon the self so that we might resist becoming pawns on the chessboards of the powerful. These are conscious-raising poems.

WORKS CITED

Brand, Dionne. Fore Day Morning. Toronto: Khoisan Artists, 1978.

--. Earth Magic. Toronto: Kids Can Press, 1979.

--. Primitive Offensive. Toronto: Williams-Wallace Intl. Inc., 1982.

--. Winter Epigrams & Epigrams to Ernesto Cardenal in Defense of Claudia. Toronto: Williams-Wallace Intl. Inc., 1983.

--. Chronicles of the Hostile Sun. Toronto: Williams-Wallace Intl. Inc., 1984. Toronto: Williams-Wallace Intl. Inc., 1983.

--. Chronicles of the Hostile Sun. Toronto: Williams-Wallace Intl. Inc., 1984.