and extolling its unity in the face of oppression. Suffused with wit and irony,Winter Epigrams & Epigrams to Ernesto Cardenal in Defense of Claudia describes the life circumstances of black Canadians, suggesting that the frigid climate corresponds with the injustice and sexism of Canadian culture. Based on Brand's experience of the revolution in Grenada and the subsequent American invasion, Chronicles of the Hostile Sun narrates a history of Caribbean revolutions from a female point of view. Comprising free verse and prose poems written in both standard and Caribbean English, No Language Is Neutral demonstrates how racism, classism, and heterosexism affect speakers' attitudes toward the English language. Land to Light On bemoans the injustice and inequality of Canadian society, lamenting the worldwide collapse of socialism and the pervasive violence of contemporary times. Like her poetry, Brand's fiction also contains a strong political message that echoes concerns about gender, race, and class. The short stories of Sans Souci draw upon Brand's childhood with her grandmother in Trinidad, her relocation as a young adult to Toronto, and her return to the Caribbean during the revolution in Grenada. Celebrating the struggles and triumphs of immigrants, many of these stories also use the Caribbean vernacular in dialogue and incorporate the imagery and style of poetry. Brand's first novel, In Another Place, Not Here, encompasses the colonial and postcolonial history of slavery and its consequences, narrating the relationship between three women. Alternating from settings in the Caribbean to Toronto and back again, the novel articulates the anguish of oppression perpetrated by whites upon blacks as well as the liberation of one of the women, who comes to terms with her lesbianism. Similarly, the novel At the Full and Change of the Moon spans the decades between the 1820s and the 1990s, recounting the generational and geographical effects of a slave woman's refusal to submit to white domination, while the fictional autobiography A Map to the Door of No Return represents Brand's search for her own ancestry woven from fragments of personal memories, travel memoirs, and newspaper articles. In addition to poetry and fiction, Brand's oeuvre contains several nonfiction collections that reflect concerns about racism and cultural imperialism. An extended essay interspersed with interviews, Rivers Have Sources, Trees Have Roots addresses discrimination against black and female Canadians, while No Burden to Carry transcribes a series of oral histories by black working-class women who lived in Ontario from the 1920s to the 1950s. Comprising thirteen essays, Bread Out of Stone gathers essays on such diverse topics as the politics of writing, the theoretical applications of cultural appropriation, and the similarities between racism, sexism, and homophobia.

Critical Reception

Critics have generally praised Brand's writing as much for its political content as its rhetorical strategies, particularly for prominently using Caribbean dialect and street slang rather than conventional English diction and syntax. While some commentators have recognized Brand since the mid-1980s as Canada's “first major exile female poet,” others have traced her consistent attempts to give voices to people marginalized by their race, gender, class, or sexual orientation. Some literary scholars have studied Brand's work as both a response to and an extension of Modernism's principles, observing the creation of an original subject position and an authentic alternative voice. Similarly, feminist critics have examined the communal approach to cultural memory exhibited by Brand's writings. Such scholars closely align her work with the subversive traditions of women's storytelling that embrace struggle against and encourage resistance to patriarchal establishments. In addition, other critics have evaluated the historical contexts of Brand's work, particularly its exploration of the connections between various kinds of oppression in both the colonial past and the postcolonial present. Although the majority of critical reaction to Brand's writings has typically emphasized the ways in which it fosters racial unity and understanding, a number of critics have begun to assess her body of work on aesthetic merits alone.