Finally, I had an interview with her—this poet, current U of T writer-in-residence, and film maker whom I had been playing telephone tag with for the last five months. At last.
Equipped with a camera which I barely knew how to operate, sheaves of paper, an aging tape recorder, a pen, and her new book, No Language is Neutral, which was nominated for the Governor General’s Award; I came, spilled paraphernalia, and sat.
It was nice to see her.
One thing about Dionne Brand which is really fortunate for interviewers is that she has a completely relaxed disposition. No need for piddly small talk to break the ice, her smile and calm voice was invitation enough to start the interview right in the thick of things.
Namely politics and its place in the arts. Starting with this question, Brand discussed why politics is inherently part of her work as a Black woman writer. Interestingly, most of the points she made are illustrated in her work, and so the following article draws material from No Language Is Neutral as well as the interview.
“Politics always was an integral part of my work because I come out of a tradition where the politics of living Black in the world has been central to the literature. It’s in the African, or African American, or African Caribbean writers, or in the writers coming out of England.
“It’s central to the Black tradition whether that’s music or literature. There’s a kind of relevance, accountability and socio-political coherence, you know, and that has always been central to the tradition that I come out of. So when people ask me ‘so what about the politics in your work?’ I say, ‘What are you talking about? That is what work is supposed to be about. You can’t write a Black work without that. It’s not possible. [she laughs] It’s not even necessary.”
Aside from having published poetry, short stories, and fiction, Brand also helped direct Older, Stronger, Wiser, a documentary film about historically significant Black women in Canada. She is currently working on a second documentary, Sisters in the Struggle, as a sequel chronicling current efforts and achievements of Black women.
“The search for Black woman’s history is a personal search. I feel that coming out of my experience as a Black woman, the truth of Black women’s lives has not been told. They have been designated as valueless.
“But because of the fact that I am a woman and Black, I know the evidence of those lives. I find them inspiring and important and so this is a way of saying we really existed. It really doesn’t even matter what anybody else things about that; we exist and so I set myself the task of recording that existence.
“I think that every Black woman should commit herself to that project because it’s the most fulfilling project in the world if you’ve been through this experience,” she says laughing.
Brand’s decision to write, even her sense of identity as a writer, is indebted, she says, to African writers in the diaspora who have been publishing since early in the century.
“I was lucky enough to be born at the time that I was born. I was a child of the ’60s and ’70s. There was a blossoming of African literature from the diaspora and I was heavily influenced by African American writers. Sonia Sanchez, Ralph Ellison — some of the poets of the ’60s who spoke of poetry as empowerment for Black people and were part of the Black power movement.
“After discovering writers like James Baldwin, Samuel Selvon, it was like coming home. Hearing the voice of Martin Luther King was like coming home. It suddenly landed in the pit of your stomach — and it landed there because there was a place there, there was an emptiness there, there was an absence there for it to land in.
“To suddenly discover yourself like that having seen yourself before in terms of British imperialist history, it was a revelation. Millions and millions of moments of self-discovery all the time something becomes clearer and clearer to you about how you were born and how you lived and why.
“Meeting African writers like Chinua Achebe, Ngugi Wa Thiongo — Caribbean writers like Walcott, Braithewaite, Lamming—that opened up a whole spring of things, and that was another part of that spring you know. Their influence was great and I’ll always be in debt to that experience.
“What those writers taught you was the meaning of writing, you know, like what they taught you was what writing was for. In the Black tradition writing is for redeeming, rejoicing in, paying attention to Black life and being critical of the history that we’ve encountered in this part of the world.”
… I beg him to recall something of my
mama, something of his mama. The ninety year old
water of his eyes swell like the river he remember
and he say, she was a sugar cake, sweet sweet
sweet. Yuh muma! that girl was a sugar cake!
“And it’s also for the intensity and beauty of the language that come out of that history, and that come out of those people. Ways of speaking embody ways of living so all the rhythms of all those languages … you can just ponder for a long time.
“When you read someone like Toni Morrison who in a novel like Beloved who word after word after word, the selection and placement of each word has an incredible importance, and reflects so deeply that history.
“Just the sheer beauty of the gesture that comes out of that life—that comes out of Black life, how they are, how they live, how they are alive. I try to capture that gesture. Language becomes no longer word and symbol but angle and movement and I listen to that and I enjoy my life. There is a sweetness to it that’s so intense. I try to put that in my creative effort.
…Our
singing parched, drying in the silence after the
chicken and ham and sweet bread effort to taste like
home, the slim red earnest sound of long ago with the
blinds drawn and the finally snow for christmas and
the mood that rum in a cold place takes. Well, even
our nostalgia was a lie, skittish as the truth these
bundle of years.
“There are two things I meant by that, one of them is that it’s a statement against the lulling silence of sleep or even for that matter being lulled into sleep. It’s a statement about remaking all the time, staying fresh.
“And secondly, it refers to the experience, and it’s a particular one for me, of being an immigrant in this country and of that longing for some other place, for the ideal rather than the future. It’s not only my personal experience, it’s the case of a lot of us who came here who begin to, because of some of the shit we suffer, look to the past as more glorious than it was.
“In one way I’ts a good thing because it is that longing that gives us our integrity, it keeps us sane, [she laughs] or some of us at least. If we were to wait for this society to tell us who we were, we’d be totally devastated.”
Recalling the Oka incident last summer, and the recent rash of killings of Black people in Metro Toronto, Brand criticizes the treatment and negative stereotyping of people of colour in Canada.
“You just have to look in the face of something like Oka last summer, and you see what this society really thinks of people of colour, you know.
Is steady trembling I trembling when
they ask me my name and say I too
black for it. Is steady hurt I feeling
when old talk bleed, the sea don’t
have branch you know darling. Nothing
is a joke no more and I right there
with them, running for the train until
I get to find out my big sister just
like to run and nobody wouldn’t vex if
you miss the train, calling Spadina
Spadina until I listen good for what while people call it, saying I coming
just to holiday to the immigration
officer when me and the son-of a bitch
know I have labourer mark all over my
face.
“That’s how this society has constructed you. I mean there’s nothing wrong with labouring, [she smiles] but they do have their hierarchies as to where that fits, right. So on one end [that longing] keeps you sane, but at the other end of it, it might stop you from moving forward because it’s the future that should keep us sane.
“It’s what we can make, what we’re gong to make, how we rose, which is a truer reflction of us within this society.”
