SOURCE: Sturgess, Charlotte. “Dionne Brand: Writing the Margins.” In Caribbean Women Writers, edited by Mary Condé and Thorunn Lonsdale, pp. 202-16. New York: St. Martin's Press, Inc., 1999.

[In the following essay, Sturgess considers Dionne Brand's particular status as “a Trinidadian Canadian black lesbian feminist” through a theoretically informed analysis of stories from Sans Souci and Other Stories.]

‘There is always something that must be remembered, something that cannot be forgotten, something that must be weighed.’¹

In Dionne Brand's writing the effort of the ‘not forgetting’, the necessity of a confrontation between past and present, demands to be examined in the light of her particular experience. As Francesco Loriggio has said of Brand's writing, ‘It designates subtypes, the degree of distance towards the cultural past and the cultural present, of insidership or of outsidership one can or one does assume’.² As a Trinidadian Canadian black lesbian feminist, Dionne Brand folds her particular ethnic experience into a political consciousness. Writing itself determines the agenda of her commitment, marks out the possibilities of revision, does the ‘unforgetting’. Both her poetry and her prose actively seek to problematize those perceptions of race, gender and sexuality which continually reject the Other to the margins in order to reproduce a white, heterosexual, phallic ‘centre’. The ways in which her writing investigates such cultural spaces will be the object of this essay. For if writing for Brand is centred on the release from oppression, structuring, as Carol Morrell states, a ‘subject-position as a tool for political intervention’,³ the two-way pull of where one is (on the margins) and the signifying, recuperatory potential of that space, produces complex relations to language. Strong referentiality focuses Brand's political ethos in the redefinition, repositioning and dismantling of hierarchies. As Claire Harris, another Trinidadian Canadian black writer, says of her own political commitment:

I write to displace the notion that the South and its people are not integral to modern Western civilization. … The reaction of Europe, both in the Americas and at home, was to set its heart/its body/its head to scramble at the margins of backyard sinks, while its mind entertained in the drawing room.⁴

The importance of this statement would seem to lie in its gesturing to the multiple Othering that is the heritage and the medium of Caribbean writings; to the system of affiliations, desires and resistances which translate textually as borders, ruptures and erasures, and which inserts such writing within a historical context of collective violence and suffering. Colonial imaginary space is inherently split, the language of the experience of oppression at a symbolic distance from its origins in those European drawing-rooms of which Harris speaks. Contemporary racism and sexism, whether the backdrop to or the explicit themes of Brand's work, effect the erasure of the individual in the present, even as they retrace the erasure of origins in a colonial past. Presence itself has then to be constantly mediated through discontinuity, and the strategies, diversions and subversions which attest to its complicated allegiances in post-colonial time and space render the securing of the subject in language both crucial and highly problematical.

As Mireille Rosella states, the Caribbean exile has suffered a double displacement through the ‘Middle Passage’ and diasporic scattering.⁵ If therefore there is a necessary dispersal at the heart of reflection on Caribbean literature, a multiplication of overlapping codes and images, this distance from a unified linear history creates in Brand's work a fundamental migrancy: a shifting of subject positions and of voice, and a crumpling of texture as narrative deals with erasure. Resistance takes the form of revision, particularly in poetry which re-enacts the symbolic dismemberment of the African body, its enforced migrancy and loss.

As in her poetry, the displaced individual, cultural silencing, absence and exile are the themes treated in Brand's collection of stories Sans Souci,⁶ and as in her poetry, Brand's prose is interstitial, shifting on borders of meaning and concerned with the problem of finding voice as a racially and sexually inscribed Other. The story ‘No rinsed blue sky, no red flower fences’ announces the presence of absence in the title. It is written in an economy of the ‘in between’, conditioned by an arrival which incessantly rewrites departure and where living ‘here’ (in this case Toronto), means inscription on the margins of a ‘there’ where solitude reigns and personal history falls away.

This narrative of semantic fluctuations, seepages, and condensations is structured by an anonymous Black woman's combat with estrangement in a concrete cityscape. Her rented apartment constitutes a trope of fixity in the story, establishing a chain of meaning as questions of ontological boundaries and continuity provide an interface with the development of her life in Toronto. If plot development collapses, increasingly concerned with individual alienation in a city dotted with empty spaces - ‘bachelor apartments she could not afford’ - it is a narrative in which boundaries are both policed and disputed, in which the condition of presence itself is challenged. Ideological discourse at odds with personal history causes the collision of codes in the story as the concentration of values and power represented by high-rise blocks and urban consumer life-styles establishes hierarchy, whilst the irruption of images from ‘elsewhere’ establishes fluidity and dispersal. The apartment, painted yellow, then white, which ‘[w]hen she had money … sounded homely’ but where ‘… When she was flat broke and depressed, the sound of footsteps outside the door made her jumpy’⁷ is emblematic of the simultaneous imprisonment in and exclusion from a middle-class system of values. The other reality, accessible only in fantasies or dreams, therefore not attaining referential status in the narrative, belongs to the fluid register of the image: ‘The feel of the salt, blue and moving water, rushing past her ears and jostling her body, cleaning it, coming up a different person each time as she dove through a curling wave’.⁸

Both contexts remain indeterminate and narrative authority loses itself in the gaps, troubling the source of voice itself. For if the image of renewal and conversion is accomplished as the slide from referential to fantasy projection, the following statements: ‘Not knowing how it would turn out. A feeling of touching something quite big’⁹ slip out of the narrator's control and beyond the character's consciousness. The narrative registers the questioning presence of an uncanny ‘elsewhere’ lodged at the centre of the metaphor, as though the plunge into the ocean is a symbolic vector to an authorial desire, emerging in the interstices of discursive play. The richness, sensuality and fluidity of this and other images in the story coincides with Marlene Nourbese Philip's comment on the importance of the image or ‘i-mage’ citing ‘the Rastafarian practice of privileging the “I” in many words’,¹⁰ and thus founding the images in Caribbean writing in determined inscriptions of the self. The gradual slippage of the woman's identity in the story is filtered through a process of negation - her lack of a legal status in Canada, a fatherless baby sent ‘home’ after a pregnancy and birthing which are subsequently effaced from memory: ‘But no one was there, no one knew and the name she had used was not hers. Nor did the baby exist. No papers’.¹¹

The gradual succumbing to gaps and blanks which signify the unstitching of causality is increasingly the condition for the retreat of the ‘real’, both thematically, as the woman falls back into silence, and discursively, as fantasy projections increasingly disrupt linear flow, causing the apartment itself to shift perspective: ‘… her imagination tightened the walls of the apartment giving them a cavernous, gloomy look. … The phone would ring and startle her. The sound would blast around in her chest and she would pray for it to stop, never thinking to answer it’.¹² The eternal ‘detour’ of Caribbean writing, mentioned earlier, leads back through a self which is in a state of permanent flux, for, as the narrator admits, a ‘girl in a wet T-shirt, the sea in back, the sun on her body’ does not represent her home. Instead ‘[i]ts glamour shielded her from the cold outside and the dry hills back home at the same time’.¹³ Suspended on the border between worlds, where the ‘real’ is deferred and transit assured, the character's displacement would seem above all to translate the impossible terms of discourse in a narrative where reference cannot be secured, and which seems aptly encoded in the narrator's comment on the apartment: ‘The apartment had two rooms. She needed a place with two rooms. Each so that she could leave the other’.¹⁴

Another story concerned with unstitching seams of continuity which ponder an ‘elsewhere’, ‘Photograph’ clearly problematizes the structuring of a transparent secure ‘real’. The opening sentence of the story is predictive: ‘My grandmother has left no trace, no sign of her self’.¹⁵ If the grandmother is at the centre of the plot (which is little concerned with event or action for their own sake), she is equally the filter through which concepts of voice and identity are examined. As in much Black women's writing she represents continuity and origins, but the narrative process of return to the source in memory proves in fact a circular quest, for continuity itself is problematic and unity of voice not accomplished. Instead, beginnings are continuously reactivated as threads of narrative disperse with a narrative texture caught up in indeterminacy. Such indeterminacy reveals itself as much a function of unstable meanings as the obvious thematic development around the search for identity and a coherent source of voice. In this respect the narrative is littered with references which entail a questioning of the premises of representation. Such is the case in a passage which, whilst thematically inscribing a collective identity through a description of the grandmother's house and effects, is a dialectic of the discursive conditions for such an identity and the causal premises for continuity:

We never knew how anything got into the drawer, because we never saw things enter the house. Everything in the drawer was pressed and ironed and smelled of starch and ironing and newness and oldness. My grandmother guarded them often more like burden than treasure. Their depletion would make her anxious; their addition would pose problems of space in our tiny house.¹⁶

Is the reader here confronted with a process of accumulation or of loss? Where is resolution to be found if an ‘outside’ capable of structuring the narrative-represented space is an ‘outside’ of knowledge itself, denoted by ‘We never knew’ and ‘we never saw’? The absence of a secure boundary tracing the limit of the narrator's field of knowledge and manoeuvre seems to destabilize the premises of represented space itself, questioning the ontology of an ‘inside’ which does not refer back to a governing discursive responsibility. It is as if the ‘burden’ of the drawer's ‘treasure’ and its unresolvability in the contradictory oldness-newness, depletion-addition, is the saturation point heralding a crisis of meaning itself.

Connections can be made with the critic Patricia Smart's definition of what is at stake in women's writing, that is: ‘[C]ette lutte éminemment textuelle entre la texture et la Loi [qui] se répercute en effet sur l'instance narrative et se traduit dans les rapports entre les personnages masculins et féminins’ (the textual confrontation between texture and the Law which affects modes of narration and is at work in the interaction between male and female characters).¹⁷ Those institutional, ideological and symbolic (thus discursive) structures of history and continuity associated with ‘the Law’, which in narrative are influential in establishing boundaries and contours of representation, are singularly problematic in ‘Photograph’. Apart from a singular appearance of the grandfather, folded into one of the grandmother's rolling narratives, (thus gaining no referential status on the level of plot), male characters are conspicuous by their absence. This ‘absent presence’ of the masculine pole is registered in the way the narrative seems unable, through lack of defining codes, to organize and channel interconnecting networks of meaning. Instead, as the cited passage reveals, causality itself is halted on the border of the overtaxed and polarized maternal domain of the grandmother.

Another indication of the overdetermined maternal space, and the resulting slide into indeterminacy, is the concentration of objective reference itself at certain points, as though Otherness is registered through its concerted repression, thus undermining from within the terms of accumulation. This implies the gradual slippage from the specific to the general, the particular to the abstract, losing reference en route. For if the grandmother's possessions are a source of curiosity for the numerous children in her charge, their investigation provokes the type of tension which finds relief, not rift:

… we would try on her dresses or her hat, or open the bottom drawer of the wardrobe where she kept sheets, pillowcases and underwear … pieces of cloth for headties and dresses and curtains, … We would wrap ourselves in pieces of cloth, pretending we were African queens; … we were always on the lookout for the next chance to interfere in my grand-mother's sacred things.¹⁸

The shifts from the mundane to registers of fantasy - ‘pillowcases’ to ‘African queens’ - from plural to the indeterminate ‘pieces’ sets up an internal dissonance just as it provokes a saturation of reference in the effort to secure a viable ‘real’. In a similar way the children themselves fail to secure individual status, generating such appellations as ‘We were an ever growing bunch of cousins, sisters and brothers’,¹⁹ falling prey to the narrative's difficulty in structuring difference. Such is surely the significance of their collapse into ‘lawlessness’ as soon as the grandmother's back is turned, and the impossibility of ‘assigning blame’ for, as the narrator says: ‘We were all implicated and my grandmother always beat everyone, no matter who committed the crime’.²⁰

If the conditions of agency and responsibility are constantly at risk, the grandmother patrols the borders of a space in which threads of story both circulate and tail off and the hierarchy of genealogy gives in to her authority. As the narrator states: ‘We had always lived with my grandmother. None of us could recollect our mothers, except as letters from England or occasional visits from women who came on weekends’.²¹ Time itself seems to be arrested in a continuum where ‘always’ reverberates through the erasure of memory of the mother. Just as an autonomous past and future is unimaginable because all roads cross and recross the grandmother's territory, so the anchoring of dynastic history falls short on the once more indeterminate description of ‘women who came on weekends’ which rejects them to the margins of representation. After working in England, the metropolitan, colonial ‘elsewhere’, the mother's return to the Caribbean signals her arrival as the ‘strange and foreign’ outsider. Instead of a nurturing presence and a central link in family continuity, she signals a crisis of authority which is resolved in her taking on the role of Other, thus focusing the propensity of the narrative to create internal crisis. Attempting to forge a niche in the hierarchy of the household, her authority is literally ‘unimaginable’ and she passes through a period of estranged recognition to that of alienation, eventually falling into silence. In much the same way that a troubled relation to masculine structures of ‘the Law’ affects the circulation of meaning in ‘Photograph’, so the colonial presence takes shape (if a shadowy, uncanny shape), through the inability to pin a defining contour of identity to the figure of the returning mother.

Both the focus of envy, where the narrator should ‘go away and live well’, or the place where Winter kills and ‘white cannibals’ devour Black children, or the ‘Away-away’ of drifting fantasy, ‘England’ is unable to be secured as a stable reference, but instead signifies as a disruptive presence through the mother who focuses such contradictory discourses. She is in fact ‘Othered’ to such an extent that the only material shape she could take in the narrator's imagination is the racial Other: ‘To tell the truth, we were expecting a white woman to come through the door’.²² Through her violent disruption of order, her place shifting between both worlds but accepted in neither, and mediating as she does in displaced fashion the legacy of colonization, the mother's unstable presence could equally be seen as the site where the dilemma of post-colonial language itself is invested. The strategies of silencing that relegate her to the status of the ‘unnameable’ are sufficiently insistent to make us ponder the ontological trace of the silence itself. The passage which establishes her presence in the household is entirely given up to the problem of how to address her and begins, ‘We had debated what to call my mother over and over again and came to no conclusions’ in order to end fourteen lines later with ‘Finally, we never called my mother’.²³ Resistance, denial and final repression are also accomplished within the flow of stories which characterize the grandmother's signifying mode, protecting the ‘inside’ of privileged discourse from a disruptive presence by the violence of arrested communication: ‘In the end, we closed our scenes ostentatiously in her presence’.²⁴

This ambivalence towards the maternal heritage, which reveals identification to be fraught with conflict, can also be linked to the fundamental ambivalences of female-centred plots in relation to writing and history. As Marianne Hirsch comments, speaking of black women's writing and maternal discourse:

… if the fantasy is a shared and loving connection rather than separation, the realities of the texts themselves reveal the fantasy to be mixed with ambivalence, fear, and anger. Between these mothers and daughters, whose lives remain intertwined with each other in plots that never lead to separation, much remains unspeakable and indeed unspoken.²⁵

‘Home’ territory is very much the nurturing body of the grandmother, whose voice is a ‘tongue lapping over a new story’, but it is also the site where the narrator loses her own voice, signalling her incapacity to fill the gaps or bridge the absence which threatens continuity. Feminine homogeneity is such that not only are male characters absent from the plot, but the masculine pole of sexual difference caves in when menstruation, that female rite of passage, becomes a source of potential indeterminacy:

… a rumour blazed its way through all the children just let out from school that there was a male sanitary napkin at the side of the road … all the girls whipped their fingers at the boys on the street singing, “Boys have periods TOOOOOO!”²⁶

If alterity and fragmentation thus threaten narrative on the level of symbolic displacement and referential instability (the problem of voice), this narrating self is steadily subjected to a splitting and dividing, and the unity of speech posited by the reiterated ‘I’, ‘our’, ‘we’, is at risk of dispersal. One of the signs of this disputed control of voice can perhaps be identified as the constant effort by the narrator to appropriate a ‘settled’ speech through the continual return to these pronouns as a reaffirmation of the experience or speaking self, as though narrative could not weave its way into plot but that instead a constant ‘policing’ of self-presence were the only way to maintain and stabilize operations. Likewise, the reiterated use of ‘My grandmother’ throughout the narrative indicates the failure to construct her discursively. As her place in the referential ‘real’ is not assured, discourse returns repeatedly to the point of departure. We could take this further by examining those points of breakage and restitching which characterize the narrator's speech, in order to discover what ideological premises underlie such breakage.

One function of the narrating voice is to establish the premises of loss and absence which, from the beginning, situate the act of telling as the site of negative affirmation. The ‘no trace’ of the first sentence studied previously sets up a discursive mode through which negation becomes the activating force which triggers memory. This is followed by ‘[w]e never knew’, ‘we never saw’, ‘[n]one of us could recollect’, ‘[n]obody knows’, to cite only some examples. But since the epistemological absence structuring investigation implicates the narrator's own access to knowledge, the source and authority of such telling is challenged. Linked to the constant securing of the self, and the simultaneous displacement of responsibility for logic and coherence, is the constant filtering of information through the grandmother, who is, if not the source of speech, the source of authority and family history in the story. It is as if a circular movement of deferred meaning were at work in the narrative, the narrator saying what she cannot know, since the grandmother mediates the system of authoritative versions, which themselves are subject to hearsay (for the grandmother herself does not pronounce them). Subjective presence is thus divorced from grounds of knowledge and family history, and engaged in stapling tentative identities to the surface of the narration, over the gap where history should reside. This fragile relation of presence to origins within the narrating function cannot but refer us back to the narrative's skewed relation to ‘authority’ itself in the sense of structuring codes, and the way discourse is permeated by ‘official versions’ of order and constraint. Such is the case when encoding the ‘elsewhere’ of the colonial metropolis:

The clothes smelled of a good life in a country where white people lived and where bad-behaved children like us would not be tolerated. All this my grandmother said. There, children had manners and didn't play in mud and didn't dirty everything … and did not run through the house like warrahoons and did not act like little old niggers.²⁷

If the ‘doxa’ takes root within a discourse riven to the ‘unsayable’ of family history, this complex of voice can be linked to the workings of ideology in narrative. Nancy Glazener, linking women's texts to Bhaktinian dialogics, comments interestingly on the relation between textual repression and ideology:

Like the carnivalesque understanding of negation, ideology is not simply the abstract opposite of what is said but is rather the obverse, the implicated Other, of what is said. Experienced individually as an unconscious … it becomes socially intelligible according to what is unspeakable and thereby unthinkable: the unspeakable challenges to the status quo or the unspeakable assumptions that make the status quo possible.²⁸

That the narrator's access to language and to presence is mediated, that her desire is thus also mediated, is obvious, for she states: ‘All of the words which we knew belonged to my grandmother. All of them, a voluptuous body of endearment …’,²⁹ referring us to the failure of the ‘self-management’ of desire which, as Glazener continues, is the prerequisite of the liberal bourgeois individual. If desire is displaced, the site where it finds expression (the grandmother's nurturing body), is itself a contested zone, ‘mediated by the discourse of the propre: the relationship between property and propriety’³⁰ which are the foundations of social/institutional desire-management. The grandmother's edicts pertaining to this institutional propre are at odds with her status as source of nourishing ‘lapping words’, her fund of mythological narrative’ … whose thickness we felt, rolling in and out of the veranda',³¹ in which desire swamps narrative itself and is thus incompatible with the encoded reality of the household. The narrative attempts to harmonize not only two divergent forms of discourse, but two disparate systems of meaning emanating from divergent world views - the ‘word’ of the ‘body’ of Africa which expresses itself in myth and folklore versus the ‘word’ of the individualistic ethos of twentieth-century capitalism.

The episode of the mangoes in the story is an example of this concentration on discourses of the propre in the story and is emblematic of the confrontation between individual and community which finds no resolution. The tree in question spreads its bounty from a neighbour's garden into the grandmother's. Officially the property of the rich neighbours, the mangoes which fall on the grandmother's side are the object of debate as to which right should prevail, that of property or that of need. In the end the grandmother opts for self-deprivation, not because she respects the laws of property, but according to the logic already investigated, which is that of accumulation versus loss. Indeed the interest of the scene lies in the system of weights and balances which recalls the dilemma of the grandmother's possessions. As the narrator says, the tree itself, symbol of fertility and organic sensuality, ‘was so huge, it spread half its body over their fence into our yard’. Figure of excess, object of desire, the tree conditions the exacerbated scripting of borders: ‘their fence’, ‘our yard’, ‘mangoes … on our side … belonged to us … belonged to them’.³² Borders of appropriation are also moral and philosophical: the grandmother supports the claims of the tree's owners, ‘not because she thought that they were right, but she thought that if they were such greedy people, they should have the mangoes. Let them kill themselves on it, she said’.³³

In this overdetermined, hybrid space, (for the tree envelops all just as it conditions breaches and transgressions from one side to another), the factor determining the system of appropriation, disappropriation and reappropriation is the static balance between accumulation on one side of the fence counterbalanced by loss on the other, but which significantly causes violence to erupt within the grandmother's domain: ‘Let them kill themselves on it’.³⁴ Unable to establish coherence between ‘having’ and ‘being’, finally the only way out of the dilemma is subterfuge, as the booty is secreted away: ‘From time to time, we … hid them in a stash under the house or deep in the back yard under leaves’.³⁵

The chaotic potential of poverty and family disorder, the impingement of the ‘doxa’ (thus the collapse of structure), the need to repress and transform - ‘she said that changing furniture around was a sign to people that we didn't have any money’ - and its threat to linearity in the flow of casual links, continually posits an ‘outside’ of the text itself where the fissures and disruptions signal the radical inscription of a symbolic mobility and cultural silencing.

Discussion of the trope of the photograph has been left until last, in spite of its obvious significance in the story, because the governing concepts of identity debated in the story can be harnessed to the propositions of representation and correspondence it vehicles. The title itself is a clue: lacking an article, it becomes an abstraction, thus posing a challenge to the referential status of the object it designates. But photographs themselves are a recurring trace, and the beginning of the story announces their importance in the establishing of the grandmother's identity card. Likewise the children's mothers' presence is caught in photographs sent from indeterminate places abroad. What is more, the narrator herself, along with some of the children, has a photograph taken to send to England. Destined to accrue representation and to stabilize reality, these proofs of identity only serve to highlight the distance between an ever elusive reference and its ‘framed’ existence. For as we have seen, the grandmother herself gains no true referential status in the narrative. Seemingly without boundaries, everywhere and therefore nowhere in particular, she is the ontological zone where codes of language cross and divide, and where words in fact fail, for symbolic structures of the ‘outside’ collapse into indeterminacy. The narrator herself is also an absence of representation in the photograph intended to fix her presence, for as she says: ‘Nobody knows that it's me in the photograph, but my sisters and Genevieve look like themselves’.³⁶

Curiously unrecognized, then, the narrator is a stranger to her own image, the Other of the referential real. Thus the multiple attempts to secure the real only attest to its displacement. Likewise the birth certificates (which attest not only to identity but to appropriation, for the narrator designates them as the ‘proof that my grandmother own[s] us’³⁷) slide on to a sensual register with ‘their musty smell and yellowing water-marked coarse paper’,³⁸ thus once more injecting the real with alterity. One could say, then, that the taking and sending of photographs serves to designate the characters' ultimately shifting identities and perhaps, further, to signal the narrative's inability to adequately master, control, and channel meaning itself.

In this way, the multiple displacement in the narrative, the conflict of discursive modes, the ‘tunnelling’ voice which is a function of a subject of speech spoken through by symbolic dispersal, can but invite on to the stage of the representation an authorial presence of multiple transgressions - Dionne Brand, the lesbian feminist black Trinidadian Canadian. Her own shifting identity which mediates exile and displacement, just as it signifies rootedness in a Black consciousness, renders crucial the responsibility of authorship as an identifiable trait of the textual ‘real’. As Francesco Loriggio comments:

At the heart of literary ethnicity are, then, two processes, which may interlock but do not have to. In one respect, ethnicity is a perspective: it occurs when ethnics assume voice, speak about themselves, when there is a vision from within, writing with inside knowledge. In a second manner, ethnicity presupposes an indirect act of reference, one that does not willy-nilly link the text to the world or the “reality” it is presumed to hark back to, but relies on the figure of the author, and, more specifically his or her social identity, for mediation … ethnic authorship is authoritativeness.³⁹

In Brand's fiction ‘authorship’ conflated with ‘authority’ is marked textually by characters whose inscription in the linear teleologic ‘real’ is precarious, where fissures and gaps speak to ‘texture’ as poetic signifying strata rather than to narrative closure. It is writing in and of the post-colonial experience, which can also be linked to writing in a specifically Canadian context, where ‘… alienation in that space will enter and undercut writing, making it recoil upon itself, become a problem to itself’.⁴⁰ Speaking against a white, middle-class ‘centre’ and to a constantly deferred Caribbean origin, Brand both claims ethnic authorship and is ‘authored’ herself within the terms of a realism submitting to the discontinuities of a fractured, post-colonial imaginary.

Notes

1. D. Brand, ‘Bread Out Of Stone’ in C. Morrell (ed.), Grammar and Dissent: Poetry and Prose by Claire Harris, M. Nourbese Philip, Dionne Brand (Fredericton, New Brunswick: Goose Lane Editions, 1994) p. 180.

2. F. Loriggio, ‘The Question of the Corpus: Ethnicity and Canadian Literature’ in John Moss (ed.), Future Indicative: Literary Theory and Canadian Literature (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 1987) p. 57.

3. C. Morrell (ed.), Grammar and Dissent: Poetry and Prose by Claire Harris, M. Nourbese Philip, Dionne Brand (Fredericton, New Brunswick: Goose Lane Editions, 1994) p. 13.

4. C. Harris, ‘Why Do I Write?’ in C. Morrell (ed.), Grammar and Dissent: Poetry and Prose by Claire Harris, M. Nourbese Philip, Dionne Brand (Fredericton, New Brunswick: Goose Lane Editions, 1994) p. 30.

5. For discussion on Exile and the Caribbean writer see Chapter 4 of M. Rosello's Littérature et identité creole aux Antilles (Paris: Editions Karthala, 1992) pp. 91-112.

6. D. Brand, Sans Souci and other Stories (Stratford, Ontario: Williams-Wallace, 1989).

7. Ibid., p. 86.

8. Ibid., p. 87.

9. Ibid.

10. M. Nourbese Philip, ‘The Absence of Writing or How I Almost Became A Spy’ in C. Morrell (ed.), Grammar and Dissent: poetry and prose by Claire Harris, M. Nourbese Philip, Dionne Brand (Fredericton, New Brunswick: Goose Lane Editions, 1994) p. 101.

11. D. Brand, Sans Souci, p. 89.

12. Ibid., p. 88.

13. Ibid., p. 89.

14. Ibid., p. 88.

15. Ibid., p. 53.

16. Ibid., p. 55.

17. P. Smart, Ecrire dans la maison du père (Montréal: Québec/Amérique, 1988) p. 27. (Translation mine).

18. D. Brand, Sans Souci, p. 54.

19. Ibid.

20. Ibid., p. 56.

21. Ibid., p. 57.

22. Ibid., p. 69.

23. Ibid., p. 74.

24. Ibid., p. 71.

25. M. Hirsch, The Mother/Daughter Plot: Narrative, Psychoanalysis, Feminism (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1989) p. 178.

26. D. Brand, Sans Souci, p. 68.

27. Ibid., pp. 57-8.

28. N. Glazener, ‘Dialogic Subversion: Bakhtin, the novel and Gertrude Stein’ in Ken Hirschkop and David Shepherd (eds), Bakhtin and cultural theory (Manchester/New York: Manchester University Press, 1989) pp. 124-5.

29. D. Brand, Sans Souci, p. 74.

30. N. Glazener, ‘Dialogic Subversion: Bakhtin, the novel and Gertrude Stein’ in Ken Hirschkop and David Shepherd (eds), Bakhtin and cultural theory (Manchester/New York: Manchester University Press, 1989) p. 123.

31. D. Brand, Sans Souci, p. 72.

32. Ibid., p. 65.

33. Ibid., pp. 65-6.

34. Ibid., p. 66.

35. Ibid.

36. Ibid., p. 59.

37. Ibid., p. 56.

38. Ibid.

39. Francesco Loriggio, ‘The Question of the Corpus: Ethnicity and Canadian Literature’ in John Moss (ed.), Future Indicative: Literary Theory and Canadian Literature (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 1987) p. 55.

40. D. Lee, ‘Cadence, Country, Silence: Writing in a Colonial Space’, Boundary, 23 1 (1974) p. 36.

Bibliography

Brand, D. Sans Souci and other Stories. Stratford, Ontario: Williams-Wallace, 1989.

Glazener, N. ‘Dialogic Subversion: Bakhtin, the Novel and Gertrude Stein’ in Ken Hirschkop and David Shepherd (eds). Bakhtin and Cultural Theory. Manchester/New York: Manchester University Press, 1989.

Hirsch, M. The Mother/Daughter Plot: Narrative, Psychoanalysis, Feminism. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1989.

Lee, D. ‘Cadence, Country, Silence: Writing in a Colonial Space’, Boundary, 23 1 (1974).

Loriggio, F. ‘The Question of the Corpus: Ethnicity and Canadian Literature’ in John Moss (ed.). Future Indicative: Literary Theory and Canadian Literature. Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 1987.

Morrell, C. (ed.). Grammar and Dissent: Poetry and Prose by Claire Harris, M. Nourbese Philip, Dionne Brand. Fredericton, New Brunswick: Goose Lane Editions, 1994.

Rosello, M. Littérature et identité creole aux Antilles. Paris: Editions Karthala, 1992 pp. 91-112.

Smart, P. Ecrire dans la maison du père. Montréal: Québec/Amérique, 1988.