SOURCE: Brand, Dionne, and Beverley Daurio. “Writing It: Dionne Brand.” In The Power to Bend Spoons: Interviews with Canadian Novelists, edited by Beverley Daurio, pp. 31-41. Toronto: The Mercury Press, 1998.

[In the following interview, Brand discusses relationship between her politics and her writing.]

Dionne Brand is the author of several books of poetry, including Chronicles of the Hostile Sun and Winter Epigrams and Epigrams to Ernesto Cardenal in Defense of Claudia, as well as a collection of short fiction, Sans Souci and Other Stories; she is also the author of a book of essays, Bread Out of Stone (1994). A community activist, scholar, and writer, she has also worked with Studio D of the National Film Board as a writer and director. Her long poem, No Language Is Neutral (1990), was nominated for the Governor General's award. Her novel, In Another Place, Not Here (1996), was published by Knopf Canada.

[Daurio]: How do you see your scholarly work interrelating with your art?

[Brand]: Well, during the years I've had about three lives; one doing community work in the women's movement and the Black movement, then a kind of academic life, and then my sort of literary life. I'm really cautious about the academic one. I always think it's dangerous just to stay in academia—it is only relevant if you can put it to some good use in the communities you work in and struggle for.

You've now lived about half your life in Trinidad and half your life in Canada. That place split and that time split seems to be a main source of imagery in your work: the snow versus the ocean … I wondered if you could talk a bit about that, about how you ended up in Canada and how it affected you, particularly as a writer.

Why I came … I think I was part of the social relations happening at the time; I got exported like a whole bunch of other people. I came to Canada on the wings of international capital. I came here to go to university and to go back, ended up doing more than that, and never really going back.

Where I come from is incredibly physically beautiful; posed against that is incredible hardship in the ways that people live and eke out a living. I was born in a country town, near an ocean; the imagery in the early part of your life is more sensual, less intellectualized, than later. Those are the things that stay with you; the landscape that you build on. I was lucky to know that you could sit beside the ocean and something was explained.

I also come out of a history of a people who were enslaved, and that struggle toward freedom was central to the whole ethos of that people. It was also infused in me in looking at that landscape. I guess if you were born in northern Ontario or something, the inevitability of the earth, the greatness of it, would strike you in the same way. But these things, posed as opposites in the beginning in my work, are somehow figuring themselves into each other.

How old were you when you knew that you were going to become a writer? Did your impulse to write originally come out of politics?

I think the first time I said I would do that I was thirteen. You know how obnoxious you are when you're thirteen; you pick up some industry and you're really self-righteous about it for a week.

All through my schooling in Trinidad, what I read as English literature never had me in it. I always felt the need to put me in it, and by me I mean Black people. When it did have them in it, they were awfully misrepresented, stereotyped, so flat and thin, and always at service of white characters. If countries of Black people were talked about, they were presented in colonial and derogatory terms. People need their lives to be elucidated, spoken about, and it struck me that that life that I had known was pretty beautiful, so why couldn't I write it down?

Did that make it hard to see yourself as a writer? When I was a kid growing up in Canada, there seemed to be no Canadian writers, and it made it difficult somehow to believe writing was possible here.

At that early stage of recognizing that I was not in the literature, it did strike me that it could be written. I became aware of certain Black writing in the Caribbean and in the States, and we were in it. Suddenly you get startled—it hadn't been written, and you could be part of doing that.

You co-authored a book on racism, Rivers Have Sources, Trees Have Roots. How did that book come about?

I'd always been involved in Black community action against racism in the city [Toronto], and there was a real dearth of information about racism in this country and about peoples of colour. It was important to document those experiences. I was asked to write the book, which was supposed to be about personal experiences with racism—but racism is a collective experience, it's a social experience. The word “personal” irritated me; it gave the sense that it might be like paranoia, or something quite individual. We interviewed about a hundred people, Black, South Asian, Native, and Chinese; we asked them, what is it like in your daily life here?, when do you encounter it?, how do you cope?, and where is it most virulent, where is it most painful? So the book talks about the randomness of racism, the way it permeates this society, the way it's just ordinary, or how it's institutional, where there are practices that you can see.

All of your work is informed by politics, by philosophy, by history; it never rests on the beautiful phrase, the lovely story, though those things are equally and compellingly present in your writing. Do you believe there can be such a thing as pure aesthetics?

No, I don't. In really vulgar terms, pure aesthetics means who's in control to make that what that is? We name the worlds we're in, and no one culture can define that, living in the incredible culture we live in.

Would you agree that a basic tenet of writing is responsibility rather than just self-fulfilment? That it involves a responsibility toward a community?

That's true of my work. I clearly have a purpose. Every relationship is social, and you don't exist outside of that. Even if you think you're not writing politically, you are in some way contributing to the making of the culture that we're in. Those who think writing can be done without responsibility are choosing that, too. Well, what does that align itself with?

But I'm not a social worker; I'm not an advocate for something that I'm not a part of. I believe that history, and the history of the people that I come from, is important, and that it is important to rewrite that history in a way that saves our humanity. Black people and women have to make their humanity every goddamned day, because every day we are faced with the unmaking of us. Sometimes any words I throw at this feel like pebbles, but the purpose in throwing them is to keep, to save, my humanity, and that is my responsibility. I mean to see Black people free from the kinds of hindrances we have hitherto encountered that have tried to and have killed us at various points in time. As a woman, as a lesbian, I have to redeem my life every day, in a society that thinks I should lead an existence that's second class; and every day I get to say, no way. I do feel that responsibility and I take it on. It doesn't feel like a burden because at the end of it is something wonderful, the day when I can be free of those things. Putting my skills toward doing that is the best thing I can do.

A debate has been raging about the question of appropriation of voice. Lenore Keeshig-Tobias, for instance, has said that white writers telling Native stories is a kind of theft, and that it robs the stories of their power.

Lenore Keeshig-Tobias is right about what happens to those stories; they become consumer items. This culture has always taught people they can take, buy, other people's things, consume everything—so why can't we take your stories? They don't realize they are really responding to commercials that tell you, if you buy this car, you can eat a woman, too. They are taking up the destiny of the culture that conquered and took Canada away from Native people and finds Native life dispensable. That's going on in that discussion; that's refused to be talked about by white writers who simply yell this is censorship. That's a deeper discussion than saying, I can write what I want.

I think white writers have to take on the responsibility of dealing with racism. Racism didn't just happen to Black people and Native people, it happened to white people. It was a relationship in which we were involved. White people cannot simply say racism was something that happened to other people. What was their role in it?

Is access to reviewing and critical writing part of the problem?

Reviews are equally racist, when you are reviewed. Work by peoples of colour has to prove universality; a white writer is never asked to prove that. The other things you look for in a review are words like “anger.” Reviewers always talk about the anger of Black writers. Anger is not the only word that can be used; the experience is far more complex: it is remorse, it is sadness, it is absolute joy, it is beauty, it is all those things.

So the mistake is in making the description a kind of containment, not opening up to what is actually there in the work?

Exactly. What some white reviewers lack is a sense of what the literature that is made by Black people and other people of colour is about. If you read my work, you have to read Toni Morrison's work, you have to read Derek Walcott's work, Rosa Guy, Jean Rhys, Paule Marshall, Michael Anthony, Eddie Braithwaite, and African writers and poets … Bessie Head. I don't consider myself on any margin; I'm sitting right in the middle of Black literature, because that's who I read, that's who I respond to—I'm not on the margin of Canadian literature.

In your book of short stories, Sans Souci, the women keep trying to solve Canada, even though it seems desolate and oppressive, racist and patriarchal.

Survival is one of the running themes in our lives as Black women; when you get faced with the possibility of not existing, then you really want to. You just don't give in. That's what I've learned from the women in my community, and I have a feeling that's women's lives in general, that we know how to make do, how to survive.

When you were writing Sans Souci, how much of a struggle was it not to become didactic?

To be didactic is to be outside of it, to think of it as an object, rather than from the point of view of the subject. When you are inside it, it is complex, and each decision you make is important and dependent on a lot. To survive and not to go crazy, you must distinguish how much of what you are going to take today, but not tomorrow.

Because I was struck by the Little Black Sambo and god knows what other derogatory stereotypes I had to handle when I was growing up, I always thought that the way I would present and represent and articulate when I wrote, Black senses, if you like, would be in all their variousness. We had been struck as a piece of cardboard, just flat; my job as a writer was to express all of it, as complex and contradictory as it comes and goes, to address how I knew I lived, how I knew my grandmother lived, address the motivations, because Black characters in those things never had any motivations. In Tarzan movies there's no motivation, you just see all these Black people running after Tarzan. What for? In order to dehumanize people, you strip them of reason, of motivation. I wanted to draw us as we were.

The stories have such different voices …

I listen well and I try not to impose myself on the story so much. My imagination is not only my own and out of no place, it is what I know and saw and heard and felt. What I'm hoping and striving for is that each of the people that I'm writing about has an integrity—they wouldn't do weird things that are not part of that integrity, are not part of who they are.

Were you consciously representing a whole range of different people?

That probably chose me more than I chose it. I marvel at how people live. As somebody who has always been very cautious, and a watcher, since I was a kid, I'm just struck by the incredibleness of what they just told me … or lived.

Your new book of poetry is called No Language Is Neutral. Why did you call it that?

It's based on a line from Derek Walcott's Midsummer. “no language is neutral / the green oak of English is a murmurous cathedral / where some take umbrage and some take peace / but all help to widen its shade.” Walcott and I come from different generations and different genders; that English language that he wants to claim is not the same one that I want to claim. The one that I want contains the resistances to how that language was made, because that language was made through imperialism, through the oppression of women. As women and as peoples of colour we write against that language. The more power we acquire to speak and act and so on, the more we change that language. I write to say something about the world. That language that I encounter as a response to me in the world is no more neutral than mine to it.

The book really reads, not as a collection of separate poems, but as a unified structure. Did you set out to write it as one piece?

The poem “No Language Is Neutral” I set out to write as one piece, and it kept getting bigger and bigger. Then some other piece would come up in something else that I was writing, and I'd say, oh, that piece doesn't belong here, it belongs somewhere else, and so on.

It's difficult to talk about poetry, because what I'm asking myself to do now is to summarize perfect speech, and it's not possible.

It's hard asking specific questions about the book, too; you can't take a little piece, because the elements of it are so interwoven.

No Language Is Neutral was like a journey. It was like a memory of when language became possible, changed, through that experience of colonization. So the poem starts somewhere back then—about how a people, if they got transported to an incredibly distant place, where they no longer had names for things, how they began to name anything, how they began to say anything, and how, faced with incredible brutality, how did they not refuse to say, and what did they say of it, and so there's an image somewhere in the poem of standing near the sea and looking out into great possibility, but endless hopelessness, too.

What did they send down to me? All of the words that we learn from them contain escape and freedom and things like that. “A morphology of rolling chain and copper gong” refers to enslavement; those things now shape our talk. And that's what I mean in a sense by the whole poem, that “falsettos of whip and air / rudiment this grammar”; this grammar; there's a new talk, a new grammar, a new language, being made in this.

There was no other way of saying it, but falling into dialect and showing how the relations of slavery, of brutality, but also of silence, of distance, of loss, begin to shape the language that I speak. My great-great-great-great-great-grandmother and -grandfather made that language, they passed it and passed it, and I've been making it. Within that language, it's not just questions of race for me, but questions of gender. What was there for my great-great-grandmother between the ocean and the sink? How did that shape what she said? And how did what she didn't say about being a woman shape it, too?

In the first part of “Hard Against the Soul,” you say: “this is you girl … this is where you make sense … and to be awake is more lovely than dreams …” which implies that being asleep sure as hell isn't …

Ordinarily, people think fantasy is more interesting. I guess I find reality more interesting. That poem is about more than my first lover, but it is about recognizing I was a lesbian, and why, somehow. I looked at ocean and earth, and I thought, that's right, I love that, and that's why I love that. There's something about the fecundity of it, the richness, that somehow verified my love for women. To know this was really startling, and also to come to a kind of completion. We live in a world that doesn't love women, a world that doesn't like women, and I suddenly faced the possibility of having to live that out.

As women loving each other we didn't need to lie to each other, because we couldn't, and there could be no heterosexual fantasy, not for us, and there is no lesbian fantasy; you've got to make whatever you're going to have. The real was more wonderful than anything. It was great to be awake, to be walking up and down the street, to be suddenly solid. For me, it just was.

The first section is followed by a section called “Return,” which contains poems about particular women, political women. How are they related to the rest of the poem?

At one time I admired those two women greatly, and still do at certain levels. Phyllis Coarde was the Minister of Women's Affairs in Grenada. She had been part of the coup, and is in jail now. I looked at them in that revolution, in that struggle, as very strong and capable women who were finally realizing the dreams of women, in a way.

Aging, for women, is also a political issue, which you address, among other places, in the poem about Mammy Prater.

I've always liked old ladies, because they lasted. It must take a hell of a lot for a woman to grow old in this society, with all the discrimination against women, all the taking care of the world that you do. That's part of my culture, too, that when you grow old you gain respect.

When I was about eight years old I saw this woman sitting on the beach naked, throwing water over her head and bathing herself, and I remember at first going by her, and suddenly looking back and thinking, she's naked, you know, and smiling to myself. And later, I thought, what freedom, she finally made it. She had earned the right not to be looked at in a certain way. It was in my mind, earning that right some day. The poem did come out of looking at a photograph of a woman one hundred and fifteen years old, and thinking of all that was in her shape, all the days and days and days and days of waiting to sit there, for the photograph … and while being enslaved, never allowing that slavery make her not wait for the day when it was over. That old woman had endured.

The general structure of the book is very interesting. “Hard Against the Soul” begins before the section called “No Language Is Neutral,” and ends after it, but it does more than begin and end the book; it wraps around it.

I wanted to come back to “Hard Against the Soul,” because there was something I had begun to say that didn't work itself out. I usually write in blocks, and I needed to say the rest. I needed to fully come out as a lesbian; I needed to say what that did in terms of how I was going to speak now as a poet. Much of my work before didn't deal with sexuality as politics; somehow I've gotten a deeper, more honest sense of myself since coming out. The other thing is, I never write until it is time to write. I suppose I could have dashed off a few love poems here and there, but until the thing can be said properly, and I hope it is said properly, I don't think it should be said.

You are not of the school that says write reams and reams no matter what …

No. I write purposefully. I really plod. It was time to say those things, and I became free when I said them, suddenly thinking that revelation is not bad, that in fact it's kind of freeing.

No Language Is Neutral talks about language, race, women, the ocean, slavery, freedom; it creates an incredible synthesis, and at the same time, makes the reader trust in words to make a difference …

In each piece of work that I write, I really want to own the world. Not as an imperialist, but as somebody who can speak of it and through it and for it. The poem tries to reveal all the parts of me, whether it's the Black me or the lesbian me or the woman me or the … and to say that it is possible for us to live this way, to talk in this way.

The woman that you address in the poem, the “you,” is also a complex/simple construction: it's you in the past and you in the future, it's the reader, it's history, it's even the future.

When I was writing this, as when I first read One Hundred Years of Solitude, I realized you could write anything. There's a moment for lots of writers when you realize: I can put anything into words. The “you” that I talk to all the time is a way of coming immediately to your chest; it says it is you that I am talking to, it jumps across the possibility of being ignored, across the possibility of your saying that we do not know each other.

And the you is sort of historical. One of the poems is about going to the Museum of the Revolution in Cuba. Suddenly I was looking at this goddamned coffle, this iron cuff that was used in slavery. It was maybe two hundred years old, and yet it looked so dangerous, and I was sacred, as if it was that day. I thought I should run from the room, or stand watching it, I didn't know which one to do. That's the history I address personally.

In its rhythm of mood, emotion, and place, No Language Is Neutral has the time feeling, the structure of a novel.

Writing it, I knew there was a tension I had to sustain, so that you'd be with me through it. I hope there's not a wasted word. Whatever emotions I moved to in it had to be precise, tight; taking the exact amount of time and the exact pitch, so that from the beginning to the end you're still there.

What is your next project?

The Lives of Black Working Women in Ontario, the oral history, that's going to be a book. And I have a long story I want to write, about a woman who lives here illegally and has about twelve lives …