What Brutal Days

In​ A Map to the Door of No Return (2001), Dionne Brand makes the argument that ‘in the diaspora, as in bad dreams, you are constantly overwhelmed by the persistence of the spectre of captivity.’ For Afrodiasporic people, captivity isn’t a condition, or a place, she argues, but an embodied memory, a haunting of bodies ‘curdling under the singing of whips, those bodies cursed, those bodies valued … they leap onto the backs of the contemporary.’ To arrive at the Door of No Return doesn’t require a visit to the Maison des Esclaves in Dakar, because the door is internalised. Despite generations of resistance, the ‘body is the prison’.

The spectral and the captive recur as figures in Salvage: Readings from the Wreck, Brand’s 24th book and sixth work of non-fiction. Her productivity is staggering; Nomenclature: New and Collected Poems, published in 2022, compiles more than six hundred pages of poems. Her writing explores histories of enslavement and colonialism – ‘history is already seated in the chair in the empty room when one arrives’ – but she refuses to dwell in mourning for the past. ‘I can only think of the future, the place where we might live, which would refute all that we are living, negate and tear up all that we are living.’

The catastrophes of the past, the haunted present, and the future with its promise that we might yet thrive, come together in a scene that Brand revisits in both Salvage and Nomenclature: the taking of the ‘only photograph of my childhood’, in Mr Wong’s studio in Trinidad. The little girl in the image is trying to quieten her sister: she wants to be perceived as well behaved. It’s an ordinary image but Brand describes its journey from San Fernando to her mother and aunt, then working in England: it is ‘marked at every step with colonial imperative’ and ‘violent trajectories’ that reach back to the genocide of Arawak/Carib peoples and the enslavement of West Africans. ‘It is possible that everything since, and therefore my writing life, emanates from the photograph.’

Across Brand’s work, the photograph is repeatedly twinned with another image, one that she writes about in the poem ‘Blues Spiritual for Mammy Prater’, from her 1990 collection No Language is Neutral. Prater, who had once been enslaved, was thought to be around 115 years old when her photograph was taken in 1920. She had waited patiently to ‘put those eyes’ on film, Brand writes: ‘she knew that if she had the patience,/to avoid killing a white man/that I would see this photograph’. She reaches out from the portrait across the decades to Brand, bequeathing ‘her will, her meticulous account, her eyes’. Prater meets the gaze of a woman still grappling with her childhood inscription in colonial relations. They share a determination, as Brand sees it, to be a subject rather than be ‘taken’ as one.

Brand grew up in Trinidad, in the coastal village of Guayaguayare. It was a community where BBC radio tones mixed with gulls and roosters, where the smell was ‘big and Atlantic. A strand of smoke, the burning coir, the voices like odours, too, against the seethe of waves … My uncle Johnny baked the anchor, the binnacle, the moonraker, the chainplates. He made them taste like good things. He could do anything with his hands.’ In A Map to the Door of No Return, Brand describes her childhood desire to know all she could about her ancestry. Where did her people come from? ‘I reeled off all the names I knew. Yoruba? Ibo? Ashanti? Mandingo?’ Her grandfather doesn’t have an answer, which shames them both. This encounter takes the form of an accusation in her second book of poetry, Primitive Offensive (1982):

why didn’t you remember
the name of our tribe
why didn’t you tell me
before you died
old horse
you made the white man
ride you

The narrator wants defiance, not acquiescence – like the memorable reply of the enslaved woman Thisbe, who poisoned everyone on her plantation and was tortured and condemned to be hanged: ‘This is but a drink of water to what I’ve already suffered!’ Brand learned about Thisbe from V. S. Naipaul’s account of her life in The Loss of El Dorado: A History (1969). She later included Thisbe as a character in her novel At the Full and Change of the Moon (1999).

Brand emigrated to Canada in 1970 with ‘five hundred dollars/and a passport full of sand and winking water’. Toronto was a place where ‘the wealth multiplies in the garbage dumps,/and the quiet is the quiet of thieves.’ But Brand’s prose writings also describe the Black community she found there. ‘Driving North, Driving Home’, from her essay collection Bread Out of Stone (1998), recalls bars, dancing all night, getting lost in hip-deep snow on the way to a party. ‘They were vibrant and hopeful days,’ she writes. ‘We argued, we debated, we came into the joy of being Black.’ She worked for the Black Education Project run by the Toronto Board of Education as well as for the Toronto Immigrant Women’s Centre and the Ontario Coalition of Black Trade Unionists. She took her politics into the streets, participating in the gay liberation movement, the anti-apartheid movement and anti-colonial organising.

Revolutions, Brand writes, ‘happen in the vein, they change you and you change yourself, you wake up in the morning changing. You say this is the human being I want to be. You are making yourself for the future.’ In 1979, the Marxist-Leninist New Jewel Movement took control of Grenada (‘Jewel’ stood for ‘Joint Endeavour for Welfare, Education and Liberation’). The revolutionary government achieved remarkable progress, providing paid maternity leave and free education and halving infant mortality rates in a few short years.

Brand arrived in Grenada four years after the revolution and began working for the Agency for Rural Transformation; she became friends with the prime minister, Maurice Bishop. But the US wasn’t glad to have another radical communist neighbour in the Caribbean, and the new government had close links to Cuba and the Soviet Union. A coup in October 1983, in which Bishop and seventeen other NJM leaders were executed, gave Reagan the pretext he needed for invasion. Brand returns again and again to this moment:

There we were in our fierce translucence. And that October everything else came loose. The moons deserted us. After sunset we gave off our neon-blue glow. More ships came. Fighter jets and transport planes. We lined up and were taken away.

The US military conquered the island in just four days and reinstated the governor-general as the sole authority on the island. As Brand wrote in Chronicles of the Hostile Sun (1984), you can’t fight the American war machine ‘with a machete/you cannot fight it with a handful of dirt’ or socialist politics; ‘finally you can only fight it with the silence of your/dead body.’

As Brand sheltered with her comrades in a house by the harbour, watching Apache helicopters strafe the prime minister’s offices, ‘all in me [was] quartered and pulled apart … If I had ideas before, these days made them into blood.’ The poem ‘Military Occupations’ tells us what she saw:

In the pale air overlooking the town
in the anxious dock
where sweat and arms are lost
already,
the ship and the cement
drop against the metal skies,
a yankee paratrooper strangles in his sheet.

prayers for rain,
instead again this wonderful sky;
an evening of the war and those of us looking

with our mouths open
see beauty become appalling,
sunset, breaths of grey clouds streaked red,
we are watching a house burn.

Across Brand’s work, beauty must be retracted as soon as it’s acknowledged: the picturesque sunset is a backdrop to occupation. As she writes in the essay ‘Nothing of Egypt’:

This is why I do not believe in magic any more. This is why my ancestors failed me with all their chants and potions. Because I wanted that day to rain sheets of water which would cover the island. I wanted a day when the enemy would be so overwhelmed by the sound of my ancestors dragging their chains that they would be killed by the clamour.

But the sun shone on America’s enterprise, and Grenada was condemned to ‘betrayal again, ships again,/manacles again’. Brand’s friend Phyllis Coard, the minister of women’s affairs, was imprisoned; Jackie Creft, a key figure in the New Jewel Movement, was executed; and still ‘the general patter continued.’ In ‘Jackie’, Brand imagines the moment that Creft stepped before the firing squad:

       That day on the last hill, bright
midday heat glistened on your hands you were in
yellow too, yellow like fire on a cornbird’s back, fire at
your mouth the colour of lightning, then in the last
moment, bullets crisscrossed your temple and your
heart.

When she thinks back on her comrades, Brand admits that ‘the dreaming had come to little and no end.’ They hadn’t destroyed colonialism or the bourgeois state. Instead of building a new world, she is left to write poems about the emptiness of the aftermath.

When​ she returned to Canada in 1983, she ‘went crazy for two years’. Brand describes a body sizzling with trauma in No Language Is Neutral (1990): ‘my skin was/flaming like a nerve and the walls were like paper/and my eyes could not close.’ Land to Light On (1997) conveys the disorientation of finding herself no longer in Grenada but in rural Canada, ‘framed and frozen on a shivered/country road instead of where I thought/I’d be in the blood/red flame of a revolution’. The north is colourless trees, racist road rage, cold, loneliness, indifference. ‘I watch, like someone without a being,’ she writes, wishing destruction on ‘this ugly and disappointing world’.

Land to Light On isn’t simply an elegy to revolutionary defeat, however. Across its multiple sequences, attention is gradually restored: to third world solidarities, to ‘stories we all love like sleep, poured in our mouths like/milk’. Those stories include the portrait of an aunt, Phyllis, who ‘taught us the jive’, rode a motorcycle and wore her hair in a ‘dougla’ wave, after the Indo-Trinidadian fashion. There are memories of being taken to a dancehall, sleepily watching the adults ‘wining and shimmying/to Lord Kitchener’; ‘that night we wanted to fly in our aunts’ skin,/we so loved their talk, the sugar in their mouths.’ These scenes of pleasure are part of a process of recovery. But they also mark the distance from home. Although Brand’s speaker ‘pretended that … life was fine’, she was ‘not/good at anything except standing still like a wall’. She can’t meet the family offer of ‘food for Christmas/and laughter and your life’.

Troubled by insomnia, loneliness and alienation, Brand’s poetics become ‘more secretive, language/seemed to split in two, one branch fell silent, the other/argued hotly for going home,’ she writes in No Language Is Neutral. This split in language – between speechlessness and nostalgia – creates new forms, both ‘secretive’ and pitiless. No Language is also the first book in which she consistently uses a Trinidadian demotic, as she tells the story of her ancestors: Liney, her great-grandmother; her grandmother who ‘trembles when she walks’; and her mother, who ‘cries near a river and/vanishes’. (Neither her grandmother nor her mother are named in the poems.) Brand offers a brutal lesson in the process of feminisation. Her mother ‘got the message, female/and black and somehow those who gave it to her/were like family, mother and brother, spitting woman/ at her, somehow they were the only place to return to.’ The speaker runs from this weeping, beaten woman and from the ‘blood-stained blind of race and sex’ that she endures. Here is a different motive behind the choice to emigrate, and a more ambivalent relation to home.

Brand’s poems written in Toronto catalogue a procession of police brutality and racist murder as well as the legacy of Canada’s own genocidal histories. Thirsty (2002) offers a fictionalised account of the death of Albert Johnson (‘Alan’ in the poem), who was shot dead in his home by police officers in August 1979. Brand helped to organise protests in response to Johnson’s murder; in her essay ‘Bathurst’, she writes that when his sister sang ‘By the Rivers of Babylon’, ‘water came to our eyes. We’ve been weeping ever since.’ Johnson’s death is one of a familiar series, for which no one is held accountable (the acquitted cop smokes a celebratory cigar on the courthouse steps). But the poem attempts to freeze time:

Her hand leafs through the grained air
of the room gleaning strands of his breath
and something to be put back together
and his mother’s tuning wail and the dark

blue of the policemen’s uniforms …

Alan is in cinders on the floor,
she herself is smouldering with her
own incandescence, her reach for what
she must keep and the child to steady her

Brand demands that we resist ‘the feral amnesia’ of the city, but at the same time Alan’s widow refuses to allow her grief to be made into spectacle. ‘Readers would seek grief there, they would/not be prepared for emptiness such as hers … /mourners expected tears, and so she would have/appeared a hard woman.’ In ‘Nomenclature for the Time Being’ (2022), Brand writes about the media’s voyeuristic interest in Black suffering, ‘how we walked before the cameras/disguised in our tears as if we were that cruel to ourselves, and wore hardened steel just to please them/they shoved microphones into our bawling mouths/and grief looked like archaeology.’

Brand writes about pain, but her poems use obscurity and abstraction to keep lyric intimacy at bay. This extends to their multiple first-person subjects. She has warned readers not to mistake the ‘I’ in her poems for straightforward self-expression. ‘When I use the autobiographical, it is as artifice. It is not an invitation to witness transparency,’ she says in Salvage. ‘Where it appears, it will have been pored over, turned over, analysed, refashioned as art and made theoretical through those processes.’

‘An Autobiography of the Autobiography of Reading’, one of the chapters of Salvage, begins in the pandemic. Brand describes rereading books she admired in her youth and finding herself more critical the second time round. Many of the books contain grotesque representations of Blackness and indigeneity. Brand tarries with characters she didn’t notice on first reading: Bertha Mason in Jane Eyre, Sambo and Miss Swartz in Vanity Fair, Camus’s Algerian victim in The Stranger, the boy who saves Robinson Crusoe but whom Crusoe sells at the first opportunity. ‘We were trained to remove or skirt our presence,’ she writes, ‘or to observe that presence as something like background.’

Brand’s inquiry into ‘the literary substance of which I am made … and must recover from’ echoes the reckoning with British colonial education in Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place, Edward Kamau Brathwaite’s writings on ‘Nation Language’, George Lamming’s In the Castle of My Skin, Merle Hodge’s Crick Crack, Monkey and Austin Clarke’s Growing Up Stupid under the Union Jack, among others. Much like these precursors, Brand is transformed from a conformist child of empire into a radical critic of imperialism.

Brand’s focus in Salvage is on the way ‘a reader like me’ might experience these books: not with the critical detachment that proposes Crusoe as the textbook homo economicus, but with an overpowering resentment towards the white characters and the histories they narrate. The problem is that pretty much everyone who has done an undergraduate English degree since the 1990s is a reader like Brand. It will surprise few readers that ‘the scrim of propriety, grace and valour’ of bourgeois manners covered up colonial violence, slavery and genocide; that the gentility of Mansfield Park depends on wealth generated by enslaved labour in Antigua; or that Oroonoko and Jane Eyre are quietly infused with that violence. Since the mid-1980s, critics have confronted readers of Austen and Brontë with the novel’s involvement in economies of slavery. The first line of Gayatri Spivak’s ‘Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism’ (1985) admonishes: ‘It should not be possible to read 19th-century British literature without remembering that imperialism, understood as England’s social mission, was a crucial part of the cultural representation of England to the English.’ Brand’s argument is forceful, but far from new.

Salvage is more interested in dismantling the canon than discussing more subversive texts. Brand asks: ‘What if fictions were not written from those moments where, as Michel-Rolph Trouillot says, silence enters the archives of the history-making machines?’ The rhetorical question implies that no novel does this. However, Brand’s passing references to ‘another archive’ – one that includes Melville’s Benito Cereno, Werner Herzog’s film Aguirre, the Wrath of God, Wilson Harris’s Palace of the Peacock, a letter from Ignatius Sancho to Laurence Sterne, Charles Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition and Gwendolyn Brooks’s Maud Martha – show that such books do exist. Still, she asks about J.M. Coetzee’s Foe: ‘Why not instead imagine that two or three people, finding themselves on an island away from the regimes of the slavocracy, might imagine sovereignty? Why not imagine that they might want to enter a different set of relations?’ Brand says she doesn’t find it compelling to ‘rewrite this adventure’ of Crusoe; and yet Salvage does just that. She critiques Patrick Chamoiseau’s Crusoe’s Footprint as a ‘parable of Euro-consciousness’ – ‘I cannot fathom why we must visit these ideas through this character’ – while using this and other works to revisit these ideas herself. If the texts she critiques have nothing to offer, but only ‘deepen the thrall in which they hold us, the thrall of the colonial world’, we must ask whether Salvage is not also in thrall to their violence.

Salvage finds in the Anglophone literary canon and the exports of the US culture industry echoes of colonialism and slavery that reverberate in the present moment of pandemic and police violence. The creative resistance needed to disrupt, or at any rate draw attention to this, is referred to by Brand as ‘the leap’. She celebrates ‘the other affective instruments of black life – reggae, calypso, jazz – that allowed one to jump and move quickly across planes of understanding’. This may be a reference both to Walter Benjamin’s ‘tiger’s leap into the past’ and to a well-known C.L.R. James essay, which quotes Lenin’s emphatic repetition of the word ‘LEAP’ when reading Hegel’s Logic. As James paraphrases, ‘the new thing LEAPS out. You do not look and see it small and growing larger. It is there, but it exists first in thought. Thought knows it is the object. You haven’t to see it (though if you know it is there you can see signs and point them out).’ The new thing might be a poetic form, but it might also be revolution.

In Brand’s poetry, the leap takes the rhetorical form of parataxis. Phrases accumulate with little punctuation, clauses appear consecutively rather than being arranged inside each other in relations of dominance and subordination. This is a vigilant grammar. Inventory (2006), for example, thrashes around in a wash of numbers: daily tallies of murderous violence, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, terror on the streets, ecological disaster. The speaker spends a year witnessing ‘burned clothing, bloody rags, bomb-filled shoes’. The lists of the dead, of besieged places, of massacres, seem unending: twenty outside a bank in Kirkuk; two from a roadside bombing. It would be tempting to look away, but the narrator must ‘keep watch at the window/of the television’, refusing to become numb to the proliferation of agony on screen.

The poems of Ossuaries (2010) follow a similar pattern: the arrangement is paratactic, the catalogue of damage less specific and the resistance to optimism decisive. ‘What brutal hours, what brutal days,/do not say, oh find the good in it, do not say,/there was virtue; there was no virtue, not even in me.’ The internal rhymes give Brand’s declarations a sing-song lilt and her inventories here are abstracted. A body is known only as a litany of pieces, ‘ankles, fenced mouths, mechanic vulva, plastic toenails,/pincered knee, nib of palms’. These are the fragments the future must use to assemble a history, but they pile up too quickly: it seems impossible for Brand to intervene as the wreckage mounts.

Brand once told an interviewer: ‘I’ve always thought of my poems as actions and not as salve or comfort.’ What the world needs is ‘an ending’, and her poems often imagine figures – archaeologists, students, old women – sifting through the apocalyptic wreckage of a world destroyed by capitalism, nuclear war or ecocide. But in Ossuaries, as elsewhere in Brand’s work, she pulls back just before she reaches the bottom of an abyss, seeking consolation in the present. A narrative emerges, with new characters: Yasmine and her lover, Owusu, for example, who hold up a bank and escape in a getaway car. Their adventure restores the euphoria of revolutionary violence: ‘the small talon of her right hand sets to the massacre,/of her old life.’ This isn’t a Bonnie and Clyde romance. Yasmine will not be punished for her daring. She dumps her companion and takes a train into the city alone.

Brand has questioned whether her vocation as a writer has any real value to the revolution she seeks:

looking at my hands, without a mark,
with self-indulgent palms to fondle paper,
I understood my ill-preparedness
for struggle.

It’s hard to know how seriously to take her claims that, if only she could write well enough, ‘hell/would break loose …/colonies and fascist states would fall,/housework would be banned,/pregnant women would walk naked in the streets,/men would stay home at night, cowering.’ When she tries to tell the story of a widow’s grief, she is confronted again with the uselessness of poetry:

              I
can offer nothing except a few glances
an uneasy sleep, a wild keening,
it would appear nothing said matters, nothing lived, but, this is my occupation.
One day I will record the tenses of light,
not now

Perhaps the only thing a poetry of vigilance can do is keep watch, imagine a different future. Brand doesn’t exclude herself from the criticism that it’s all too easy just to keep going: ‘each dawn we wake up, our limbs paralysed,/shake our bones out, deliver ourselves’ to the butchers and the gods.