A Great Murmur of Voices: In Conversation with Dionne Brand.

SUMMARY: Born in Guayguayare, Trinidad, in 1953, Dionne Brand moved to Canada in 1970. Her 1999 novel, At the Full and Change of the Moon, tells the story of Marie Ursule, queen of a secret society of militant slaves in Trinidad. Marie's silent and chilling act of revolt traces itself in the lives of her descendants, who scatter across the world. Brand's first novel, In Another Place, Not Here (1996) was shortlisted for the Chapters/ Books in Canada First Novel Award. Her highly acclaimed book of poetry Land to Light On won the Trillium Book Award for poetry and the Governor General's Literary Award for poetry. A longer version of this interview was originally published in the Fall 1999 issue of Herizons.

NUZHAT ABBAS: What kind of things were you writing when you first started writing?

DIONNE BRAND: Oh very African-American! (laughs) I fell in love with Nikki Giovanni and Don Lee, Amiri Baraka and Sonia Sanchez. It was the time of the Black arts movement in the States. And there was a similar movement here--to the mainstream probably imperceptible--a community fighting against racism and racial oppression. And out of that came writers, painters and musicians.

I'm lucky--when I was born and when I grew up, the world was open. So I could hear those sounds from Sonia Sanchez, and I could hear from Kamau Braithwaite, or I could hear Aime Cesaire. I had come out of a great murmur of voices. Trinidad is a very cosmopolitan place. There are people whose origins are the Indian subcontinent, and the African continent and the European continent. And then I came to North America. I fell in love with the sound of jazz, with the sound of urban Black America. When I came to the city, many other people were coming from all over the world, Latin Americans, Jamaicans. I met Kitticians, I met Ugandans and Zimbabweans. You become, or at least I tried to become, a student of sound.

NUZHAT ABBAS: You first started writing poetry and short stories and essays. Now yoiive written two novels. What kinds of changes have you noticed in this shifting of genres?

DIONNE BRAND: Poetry is my first language. I don't think of the other [forms of writing] as separate. I think they come from it. I like the neat concentration of poetry. I like its ability to do so many things in one line. The line is physical. It's fleshy. Muscular. It's my first tongue.

I can't say there was any conscious effort on my part to move to fiction. [When] I write fiction, it is a fiction that is informed by poetry.

NUZHAT ABBAS: When did the impetus come towards writing a longer story?

DIONNE BRAND: I have no idea! (laughs) I don't know if I think about it that way. I love stories. But I don't trust elongated narratives. I trust poetry far more. There are far more places where you can rest in a piece of fiction than in a poem. I think a poem is far more bare. You simply cannot sound a bad tone in it. If [a poem] fails, it is so miserable; you're bound to be exposed. A novel doesn't require you to put forward a certain kind of proposition. It's quite flexible.

NUZHAT ABBAS: In your first novel, In Another Place, Not Here, you rewrite the landscape of the Caribbean, and also that of the Canadian city Toronto. But you name the city and its streets, whereas the places in the Caribbean seem mythic. Why is Toronto so mapped and the Caribbean told so differently?

DIONNE BRAND: It's loosely based on Grenada, because that's where the events of the revolution took place. I realized, as I kept writing, that I wanted it to signify all of [the Caribbean]. As a matter of fact, the place names that I have used are from completely different places. Maybe [the Caribbean] is mythic for me. I've spent most of my life living in North America, and perhaps it's my one romanticism. We'll have to get rid of it (laughs) because I hate the romantic!

NUZHAT ABBAS: In your poetry, especially Land to Light On, there are a lot of references to the North, about driving North. And since that is such a trope in Canadian literature, I wondered what you were doing with it.

DIONNE BRAND: Every country has its myths. One of the major myths in Canada is this myth of wilderness ... this notion of the North. It projects everyone in Canada into this "empty space." And it's a total fallacy, of course. So what is the usefulness of this wilderness? It's to be "hacked out," isn't it? To be "claimed." Which is why, I think, we still have 200-year-old disagreements about land and treaties and people's rights.

So you arrive here, and it's available to you, to me, to anyone from somewhere else. You find yourself in a world of forgetting. And your project--well, mine at any rate--is remembering ...

At the beginning of At the Full and Change of the Moon, it mentions the Caribs and the Arawaks who are becoming extinct after their 2,000-year trek across the Andes and up to these islands, and after their long devastation. I always feel I need to lay that bed down, because that is also part of the consciousness that we inherit. We inherit everything that exists.

NUZHAT ABBAS: You came here when Toronto was expanding and radical. How have you seen the city change, and how does this come out in your writing?

DIONNE BRAND: I just gobbled up Toronto at 17 and thought I was really living large! I loved this city and still do. I arrived in the 1970s, when Yorkville was still Yorkville, full of hippies, and incense, and craziness. Rochdale was real. It was gorgeous! Toronto was, and still is, one of the most interesting places for me. I wanted to know this city in a tactile way. So when I came here I began to write about the city, and specific places and specific kinds of people. There's a strange pull in this city between a kind of xenophobia and a kind of community.

I wrote In Another Place, Not Here from about 1992 to 1995. That city was becoming rough. When [the character] Verlia arrives in the city, it's different because she arrives in the '70s. When [the character] Elizete arrives in the late '80s, the city is a little poorer, a little more gritty, because governments are just beginning to talk about cutbacks, and there are lots of layoffs, and the city is a much more hostile place. So by the time I get to At the Full and Change of the Moon the city is just debris. For Eula (who drives across North America to rescue her brother), all cities are collecting into a kind of wreckage.

NUZHAT ABBAS: This vision reminds me of Walter Benjamins "angel of history, "blown by the winds of change, looking upon the wreckage of cities....

DIONNE BRAND: The interesting thing is, moving North, I began to see the city as a citadel, an enclosed space. In one of my newer essays, I talk about how it is choreographed, the ergonomics of it. Around it are these factories, and around it are these nuclear plants. There are multinational corporations set up all around the city in these strategic places, where they can take what the city has, they can take all the human effort. And then when it is not possible to take it any more from that spot they just lift off and fly off to Mexico City, or Guatemala City, or some other place.

NUZHAT ABBAS: In all your writing, there seems to be a tension between vivacity and solitude. I wondered about Bola in At the Full and Change of the Moon ... about the lovers she takes, her openness, and yet these children she keeps giving away. Is this tension specific to women, to creativity?

DIONNE BRAND: (laughs) Maybe that's writerly, I don't know! Bola is new, isn't she? She has no mother, except a mother that she remembers as mythic ... And the truth is, Bola doesn't remember slavery. Bola's is a sensibility that is completely wide open. That is both old and childish at the same time. I think that's the most free spot in the world.

NUZHAT ABBAS: How does this freedom, which is also one of desire and appetite, and even childlike greed, work alongside the world of politics, which can be one of moral strictures and works towards community?

DIONNE BRAND: I guess I'm advocating for a different sense of politics--because I think politics really is about living life fully, if you really think of what freedom actually means ... not only the freedom from harm, or the freedom to control. Ultimately, politics is about pleasure. I guess I'm being very [Herbert] Marcuse on this. I think this Eros is ultimately what we have been fighting for: to express ourselves in the most lustful and pleasurable ways. When you're fighting for or organizing towards a society that you would want to live in, it surely would be a society which is not just about making rules but about making life pleasurable and opening spaces.

NUZHAT ABBAS: In No Language is Neutral, an old woman haunts the poems. She is what the narrator seems to imagine herself becoming--until she is arrested by the love of another woman, and that figure is staved off at some level. There seems to be a real love and interest in that figure, because she comes up in all your writing There is Adele in In Another Place, Not Here, and Marie-Ursule, and Bola in At the Full and Change of the Moon. What does the old woman represent?

DIONNE BRAND: When I was eight, I saw this old woman sitting on the surf, on the beach at the back of the house. She was sitting there, and she was stark naked, and she was bathing herself. I was shocked! And I remember my aunt pulled me along saying, "Come along! Don't watch." The old woman was completely unconcerned. She didn't care. She was a good 80. But I remember thinking, how daring, how absolutely daring, how totally against everything I am being taught to become! There was this old woman with her breasts flapping, her legs in the water, and she couldn't give a shit. I recall the moment where I thought, she is free!

NUZHAT ABBAS: She seems a lonely figure.

DIONNE BRAND: Yes. Well, by now, nothing about the world, nothing of its prohibitions against her body or what she says, are of any concern to her. So I thought, there is a moment when women can attain this moment, of not having to be concerned about the number of strictures against her, both said and unsaid, both written and unwritten--a moment where you can be your complete physical self.

When I was a child, I thought that must happen when you are old. The woman in the poem meets another woman, who suggests that is not necessarily so. In a sense, that old woman is a place you are going to go, where having sovereignty over yourself is possible. But that old woman was a creation of that patriarchy, too. If you can only obtain your sovereignty by going through its hoops, you are in fact a product of it. It is, in fact, making you.

NUZHAT ABBAS: Yet, there are these incredible descriptions of fear in much of your writing. In Land to Light On, there is the image of the red truck that keeps on coming up. Elizete hides in terror from the police in Toronto. How does the courage involved in this leaping tie in to this terrible fear?

DIONNE BRAND: I don't think it takes courage. I think courage is still confined to that same patriarchal mould. I think it just takes whim, essentially. I think you just follow a moment, a clear moment. It takes clarity instead of courage. With courage it seems you have to drum something up, you have to come to it with painful means. What I mean is that sparkling moment we all have, that real, bright, sparkling moment And if you just kind of launch into that ... everything will be all right!

UPDATE: Dionne Brand is a professor of English at the School of English and Theatre Studies at the University of Guelph. She has published more than 20 books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction. In 2003, she received the Pat Lowther Award for her book of poetry entitled thirsty. In 2006 she received the Toronto Book Award for her novel What We All Long For. Brand was Toronto's poet laureate from 2009 to 2012. Brand received the 2011 Griffin Poetry Prize for her poetry collection Ossuaries. She was admitted to the Order of Canada in 2017, the same year she was appointed poetry editor of McClelland & Stewart, an imprint of Penguin Random House Canada.

Caption: Dionne Brand is an award-winning novelist and poet. (Photo: Neil Graham/Random House)

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Title Annotation:	DATELINE: 1999: POLITICS AND POETICS
Author:	Abbas, Nuzhat
Publication:	Herizons
Article Type:	Interview
Geographic Code:	1CANA
Date:	Jan 1, 2018
Words:	2189
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