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The selections in Fierce Departures, drawn from Dionne Brand’s work since 1997, delineate with searing eloquence how history marks and dislocates peoples of the African diaspora, how nations, concretely and conceptually, fail to create safe haven, and how human desire persists nevertheless. Through a widening canvas, Brand unfolds the (im)possibilities of belonging for those whom history has dispossessed. Yet she also shows how Canada, and in particular Toronto, remade by those who alight on it, is a place of contingency. Known for her linguistic intensity and lyric brilliance, Brand consoles through the beauty of her work and disturbs with its uncompromising demand for ethical witness.
In her introduction, editor Leslie C. Sanders traces the evolution of Brand’s poetic concerns and changing vision. In particular, she observes Brand’s complex use of landscape and language to delineate the ethical and emotional issues around the desire for place. She argues that Brand reformulates Northrop Frye’s question “Where is here?,” disturbing and expanding the national imaginary.
As afterword, Brand has selected passages from her evocative collection of essays A Map to the Door of No Return. Read as an ars poetica, the passages summon the presences of those whose lives are circumscribed by the histories the poet narrates as her own.
Dionne Brand is internationally known for her poetry, fiction, and essays. She has received many awards, notably the Governor General’s Award for Poetry, the Trillium Award (Land to Light On), 1997), the Pat Lowther Award (thirsty, 2005), the City of Toronto Book Award (What We All Long For, 2006), and the Harbourfront Festival Award (2006), given in recognition of her substantial contribution to literature. She is a professor in the School of English and Theatre Studies at the University of Guelph.|Leslie C. Sanders is a professor at York University, where she teaches African American and Black Canadian literature. She is the author of The Development of Black Theatre in America, the editor of two volumes of Langston Hughes’s performance works, and a general editor of the Collected Works of Langston Hughes. She has written essays on African American and Black Canadian literature.
Table of Contents for Fierce Departures: The Poetry of Dionne Brand, selected with an introduction by Leslie C. Sanders
Foreword | Neil Besner
Biographical Note
Introduction | Leslie C. Sanders
No Language Is Neutral
No language is neutral
There it was anyway, some damn memory half-eaten
Pilate was that river I never crossed as a child
I walk Bathurst Street until it come like home
But wait, this must come out then
In another place, not here, a woman might touch
Land to Light On
V
V
V
iv
V
V
thirsty
III
XII
XIII
XV
XVII
XVIII
XXX
Inventory III
One year she sat at the television weeping
nothing personal is recorded here
what confidences would she tell you then
she’s heard clearly now, twenty-three
beating on the tympanic bone, by suicide bomb
At least someone should stay awake, she thinks
and bones beatific, sharpened with heat, at least
“It is worst during the night
there’s another life, she listens, each hour, each night
If they’re numb over there, and all around her
she’ll gather the passions of women
till then / where are the packages of black pepper
she is a woman who is losing the idea
Afterword | Dionne Brand
Acknowledgements