SOURCE: Wiens, Jason. “‘Language Seemed to Split in Two’: National Ambivalence(s) and Dionne Brand's ‘No Language Is Neutral’.” Essays on Canadian Writing (spring 2000): 81-102.

[In the following essay, Wiens discusses the poem “No Language Is Neutral” as an ambivalent work that deals with two cultural locations—Trinidad and Toronto.]

In his recent essay “Half-Bred Poetics,” Fred Wah locates the site of a racialized, transformative poetics in the hyphen, “that marked (or unmarked) space that both binds and divides,” a “crucial location for working at the ambivalences in hybridity” (60). For Wah, as for other writers working in “opposition to a nationalistic aesthetic that continually attempts to expropriate difference into its own consuming narrative,” the hyphen further helps to develop what he terms a “‘synchronous foreignicity’: the ability to remain within an ambivalence without succumbing to the pull of any single culture (cadence, closure)” (62). While Wah usefully explicates how this ambivalence manifests itself in the scene of writing (i.e., the formal site of the poetic text), we could extend analysis to the social scene in which texts and writers are constituted and circulate. As Jeff Derksen puts it, “emphasis could perhaps be moved from the multiplicity and contingency of identity formation to the shifting and multiple social relations that these identities are situated in,” a move that would involve a shift “from multiplicity to situatedness in the analysis of identity formations” and, I should add, of literary texts (62). Critical commentary on Dionne Brand's No Language Is Neutral has tended to focus on how her writing develops a site of ambivalence adequate for the articulation of an identity triply rendered (gendered, raced, sexed) Other. My approach here is to read the title poem of that collection through its doubled position within two particular national/cultural localities, examining how the poetry's procedural workings and linguistic enjambments rearticulate these localities themselves as sites of ambivalence, demonstrating the porosity and contingencies of nationalist constructions that the phenomena of diasporic communities necessarily bring to the fore. In other words, I wish to extend the questions of cultural hybridity that Brand's work provokes from a focus on singular identity to the social context in which the text circulates—to read “No Language Is Neutral” as evidence of what Homi Bhabha describes as the “transnational and translational sense of the hybridity of imagined communities” (5).

What we might term Brand's “hyphenated” identity, for instance, mirrors the sort of doubled reputation that Brand enjoys in terms of audience, academic study, and access to institutional sites of cultural power. Her work is known both in the Caribbean and in the worldwide academic study of Caribbean literature; Edward Kamau Brathwaite calls her “our first major exile female poet” (“Winter Epigrams” 18), and J. Edward Chamberlin devotes five pages to her work in his book Come Back to Me My Language: Poetry and the West Indies, hailing her as “a final witness to the experience of migration and exile” and arguing that her “literary inheritance is in some genuine measure West Indian, a legacy of Walcott, Brathwaite and others” (266, 267). While critical approaches toward Brand's writing to this point have often framed her work in terms of literary theories emerging from a Caribbean context (in particular Brathwaite's History of the Voice: The Development of Nation Language in Anglophone Caribbean Poetry), we need to recognize that these theories not only provide us with useful critical tools for approaching Brand's poetry but also constitute to a large extent the intellectual and cultural tradition informing production of the work. If, as I demonstrate below, a text such as “No Language Is Neutral” can be read as a contestational dialogue between differing national localities and languages, then it also offers a dialogue between differing literatures—recognized as fluid and contradictory discursive fields. Broadly speaking, Brand's oeuvre demonstrates, politically and aesthetically, a closer identification with Latin American and Caribbean poetic traditions than with those of North America. However, her work has always occupied an ambivalent position within those traditions—particularly in relation to the patriarchal undertones of certain nationalist projects and the male-dominated canons of those national literatures. Her “Epigrams to Ernesto Cardenal in Defense of Claudia” (1983; see Winter [Winter Epigrams and Epigrams to Ernesto Cardenal in Defense of Claudia]), for instance, mimics the epigrammatic form, anecdotal tone, and political reflections of Cardenal's Epigramas (1960), but it does so “from a feminist and dialectical stand” (McTair n. pag.), questioning the Nicaraguan poet's misogynistic apostrophizing of a femme fatale.¹ Similarly, “No Language Is Neutral” manifests this ambivalence through its intertextual dialogue with Derek Walcott's Midsummer, specifically part LII, from which Brand's poem derives its title:

                                                                                          Have we changed sides
to the moustached sergeants and the horsy gentry
because we serve English, like a two-headed sentry
guarding its borders? No language is neutral;
the green oak of English is a murmurous cathedral
where some took umbrage, some peace, but every shade, all,
helped widen its shadow. I used to haunt the arches
of the British barracks of Vigie.

(506)

Brand simultaneously inserts her text into the context of a Trinidadian nationalist project (by an overt echo of Trinidad's most established poet) and questions the neocolonialist undertones of Walcott's stance, in particular his monophonic “Island English” syntax and diction. With its polyphonic collision of socially stratified versions of world English, “No Language Is Neutral” develops its identification with an oppositional, decolonial nationalist project at an explicitly formal level:

No language is neutral. I used to haunt the beach at Guaya, two rivers sentinel the country sand, not backra white but nigger brown sand, one river dead and teeming from waste and alligators, the other rumbling to the ocean in a tumult, the swift undertow blocking the crossing of little girls except on the tied up dress hips of big women, then, the taste of leaving was already on my tongue and cut deep into my skinny pigeon toed way, language here was strict description and teeth edging truth. Here was beauty and here was nowhere.

(22)

Here the north/south, developed/underdeveloped antagonism that marks Brand's work is not simply articulated representationally, testimonially, or polemically but is also embedded in the formal proceedings of the text's syntactic ruptures and localized idioms such as “backra white” or “teeth edging truth.” Rather than widening the shadow of the “green oak of English,” Brand's poetry contests such a myth of organic, naturalized linguistic authority.

By emphasizing Brand's ambivalent relation to the decolonial nationalisms of Nicaragua or Trinidad, I do not intend to obfuscate the differences either between those specific national contexts or, in particular, between those contexts and the Canadian context. In fact, while much of the literary and theoretical work that emerged from the Caribbean in the past two decades remained, it seemed, firmly grounded in these nationalist projects of decolonization, the situation in Canada was quite the opposite. To be sure, the nationalist project still largely framed the production, distribution, and critical reception of a significant proportion of writing in Canada over this period. Yet that project was simultaneously challenged, explicitly or implicitly, by writers—including Brand—who emerged from differing, transnational, and/or diasporic communities. Lynette Hunter, for instance, has located Brand to some extent outside dominant Canadian cultural institutions, in contrast to a writer such as Marlene Nourbese Philip, whom she argues “is an institutional fighter recognizing that the social and political roots of marginalization are something that in Canada may be changed within the institutions of power themselves” (75). Similarly, Peter Dickinson has recently suggested that “Brand's race, gender, and sexuality necessarily preclude full participation in national citizenship, and thus prevent her from ever ‘being’ a Canadian writer” (161). While I agree that Brand clearly sets herself in opposition and antagonism to the Canadian cultural dominant and that her work, as Hunter puts it, realizes “the necessity of voicing the fears, reactions, rejections that are tied up in the Black experience of Canada's racism” (75), she has largely articulated this antagonism—like Philip—through the nation's established network of institutions, including Coach House Press, the National Film Board of Canada, and writer-in-residence appointments at large, influential universities such as the University of Toronto. Brand is regularly placed on university syllabi, she has received Canada Council grants, and her work, relatively speaking, is widely anthologized.² The strength of her reputation in the dominant Canadian cultural milieu was recently demonstrated by her reception of the 1997 Governor General's Literary Award for anglophone poetry for her collection Land to Light On.³ Brand's writing, particularly since No Language Is Neutral, thus offers a curious paradox: significantly informed by a particular national literary and intellectual tradition (Trinidad-Tobago), it challenges another particular national construct (Canada) and increasingly articulates this challenge by and through its institutions.

Although postcolonial theory as a field has developed useful vocabularies and critical frames to address these questions of cultural hybridity and overlapping narrations of the nation, the theory itself as a global project of positing alternative canons and ways of reading remains bedevilled by the same problematics of asymmetrical relations of power that it attempts to contest. Monica Kaup has pointed out that immigration from the Caribbean to Canada means at once “crossing the invisible border between the Third and First Worlds” and “moving from one postcolonial culture to another, albeit one of a very different makeup” (172). Indeed, while international academic study has tended to locate “Canadian literature” within a postcolonial frame, in Canada itself there is little consensus about the accuracy of the term “postcolonial” in relation to Canadian cultural production. Recognizing that a wealthy nation-state such as Canada is too complicit in present-day colonialism and transnational capitalism to be aligned with the nation-states of Latin America, Africa, or the Caribbean, or for its literature to be discussed using the vocabulary of pain and oppression characteristic of much postcolonial discourse, Linda Hutcheon has argued that the term can be applied accurately only to the writing of indigenous peoples in Canada and not to the writing of descendants of European invaders-settlers such as Atwood or Kroetsch (156). Hutcheon further contends, however, that “The specificity of Canadian postcolonial culture today is being conditioned by [the] arrival of immigrants from other post-colonial nations” (159), including Brand. As a taxonomic category, then, the term “postcolonial” seems to be problematic when critics discuss literatures produced in Canada. If by “postcolonial,” however, we mean a theoretical approach that situates literature within a global context of asymmetrical power relations and diasporic communities, then such an approach seems to be not only productive for but also crucial to a more accurate historical understanding of contemporary cultural practices.

Published in 1990, No Language Is Neutral was part of a historical period—still very much under way—that witnessed the transformation of the Canadian polity as well as challenges to its cultural dominant. Such challenges prompted both vigorous critical debates within the academy surrounding issues such as access, pedagogy, and canonicity and attempts by successive federal governments to acknowledge the country's increasing ethnic diversity within a constitutional frame, the most recent attempt being the Canadian Multiculturalism Act of 1988. This unique piece of legislation has provoked considerable academic attention in Canada because it offers what can be so elusive: an official, judicial articulation by the state of the relations of ethnicity to citizenship. At the same time, the act has justifiably come under fire within the academy as yet another in a series of constitutional attempts to “defuse, rather than address directly, ethnic unrest” (Thompson 55), on the grounds that it “endorses, and appropriates, ethnos … with no minority or marginal overtones attached to it” or that it “depicts the ethnic subject as a stable entity whose characteristics are already fossilized, or are seen as exotica” (Kamboureli 210, 212). Smaro Kamboureli argues, in fact, that the act is not merely descriptive but also performative—that it constitutes the technology that produces ethnicity in Canada. Yet if the Multiculturalism Act becomes in this sense a hegemonic macrotechnology of ethnicity, then we could read the poetic texts of a writer such as Brand through and against this official state articulation as providing a counter-hegemonic microtechnology of ethnicity. This distinction would correspond to the split that Bhabha describes between “the continuist, accumulative temporality of the pedagogical, and the repetitious, recursive strategy of the performative” (145)—wherein the Multiculturalism Act would be part of the former and Brand's text an instance of the latter. The ninth section of “No Language Is Neutral” recollects an attempt to reproduce a synchronically frozen cultural practice in a different context and the contradictions that arise when doing so:

I walk Bathurst Street until it come like home. Pearl was near Dupont, upstairs a store one christmas where we pretend as if nothing change we, make rum punch and sing, with bottle and spoon, song we weself never even sing but only hear when we was children. … Pearl coaxing this living room with a voice half lie and half memory, a voice no room nowhere could believe was sincere. Pearl hoping this room would catch fire above this frozen street. 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.

(30)

Here the recontextualization of the cultural practice—by which I mean both the practice recollected by the text and the text's markings of cultural difference themselves—figures that practice not as an appendage to an extant Canadian cultural milieu but as an antagonistic element within it (“the mood that rum in a cold place takes”). Derksen asks how a text can “move from being oppositional—from a position of refusal—to an agent of rearticulation” (64-65). He argues that a text, “situated not in an exterior position of opposition but as an articulatory agent within a site, could be designated antisystemic: writing that consciously counters a system that seeks to interpellate a subject within a particular field of relations” (65). Derksen's argument not only demands a new model of antisystemic writing but also necessitates a new model of antisystemic criticism: a criticism that similarly refuses to imagine an “outside” and grants the text a certain degree of transformative agency within an interpellative system.

Academic reception of a text establishes another field of social reflexivity: a text becomes increasingly “social” through public articulations of readings of it. In one of the more extensive critical pieces on Brand's work, Teresa Zackodnik reads No Language Is Neutral through Mae Gwendolyn Henderson's seminal essay “Speaking in Tongues: Dialogics, Dialectics, and the Black Woman Writer's Literary Tradition.” While Henderson's compelling essay offers a useful vocabulary for a generative, discursive approach to poetics, Zackodnik's practical application of it to Brand's text, much like Henderson's own exemplary approach, is at times reductively narrative-based. For instance, Zackodnik reads “the swift undertow blocking the crossing of little girls” in the opening poem (cited above) as an allegory of the restrictions of “standard English” (195); similarly, while she argues that Brand foregrounds the “trace of the colonizer's English in nation language” in the second poem (197), she reads the poem as metapoetic commentary rather than precisely locating these traces. Although I recognize that Brand's prose poems are intensely metapoetic, particularly the second of the series, in which the homology between language, the landscape, and the body is firmly established in the collision of corporeal, geographic, and grammatical lexicons, and that a poetic text can provide a strategic location for the circulation and development of these ideas within a particular reading community, I am more interested here in the praxis rather than the theory. The limitations of “standard English,” for instance, necessitate the construction of those bizarre metaphors that dot the first prose poem: “the smell of hurrying,” “almond leaves fat as women,” “the rock stone dry like water” (No Language [No Language Is Neutral] 22). While these metaphors demonstrate the restrictions of “standard English” in articulating a Caribbean experience, they also suggest a degree of poetic agency by the writer who productively works within and against such restrictions. Moreover, Zackodnik argues that Brand's writing “determines her identity as dialogic and dialectical” and that it deploys a nation language that is “transformative, polyvocal, and constantly shifting” (205), suggesting to me an enunciative space that is, while not indeterminate, certainly contingent and contradictory. Yet Zackodnik tends to equate the speaking voice almost unproblematically with the authorial voice, and her diction often situates the poetry as theoretical polemic (“Brand argues” or “Brand expresses” [197, 195])—although, if we accept the argument that “the major concern of Caribbean women poets has been to define an ‘authentic’ self which is Black and Female” (Sarbadhikary 118), it might account for a critical tendency to read Brand's texts in this way.

Despite my differences with some of Zackodnik's readings, I agree with her position that Brand “locates her critique of language not in an attempt to resurrect or construct a neutral language, nor from a liminal position between standard English and nation language, but in the heteroglossia of both languages” (194). However, Zackodnik's approach seems to rest on the assumption that “standard English” and “nation language” are givens: “Attempts to determine which phrases are ‘standard English’ and which are nation language in these poems must necessarily rely on criteria such as ‘correct’ grammar and ‘sophisticated’ vocabulary” (205). But are such value-laden criteria necessary to a process of discernment? If we are to move beyond an abstract position that simply grinds the text through a preestablished theoretical mill (which I don't think Zackodnik necessarily does), then a discernment of the concrete instances in which the two languages are in contestational dialogue is crucial. Postponing for the moment a critique of the problematic, and perhaps untenable, notion of a “standard English,” I would locate this contestational dialogue in, for instance, the appropriation of the racist epithet “nigger” in the opening poem as an adjective connoting beauty. Here an act of hate speech, a word replete with a brutal history, itself linked etymologically to a previous (mis)nominative act of differentiation and debasement, becomes recontextualized and thus opened to alternative significations. Yet its inherited cachet cannot simply be abandoned, and the resulting semantic slippage establishes a contestational dialogue between the speaker's clearly affectionate usage and the echoes of its violent history. I also read this dialogue in the gap between written and spoken languages: “calling Spadina Spadeena until I listen good for what white people call it” (No Language 29). Here the speaker's failed utterance not only occasions cultural embarrassment but also, given the circumstances, reinforces her sense of cultural and racial alienation and disempowerment. Unlike “nigger,” “Spadina” resists appropriation because its significance is too site-specific; its meaning develops and circulates exclusively within a set of social relations from which this speaker is clearly precluded or in which she is situated as subordinate: “the thin mixture of just come and don't exist” (29).

Brathwaite defines “nation language” as “the kind of English spoken by the people who were brought to the Caribbean, not the official English now, but the language of slaves and labourers” (History 5). Distinguishing nation language from dialect, he further argues that it is “the submerged area of that dialect which is much more closely allied to the African aspect of experience in the Caribbean” (13), whose poets borrow from the resources of the calypso and deploy a dactylic rather than iambic rhythm in their work. Similarly, in an essay on one of Brand's short stories, Sylvia Priestley-Brown discusses what she calls Brand's “‘dialectical’ maneuvers,” including “the absence of possessives and grammatically correct personal pronouns” (97)—manoeuvres that we can also identify in these serial prose poems:

This time Liney done see vision in this green guava season, fly skinless and turn into river fish, dream sheself, praise god, without sex and womb when sex is hell and womb is she to pay. So dancing an old man the castilian around this christmas living room my little sister and me get Ben to tell we any story he remember, and in between his own trail of conquests and pretty clothes, in between his never sleeping with a woman who wasn't clean because he was a scornful man, in between our absent query were they scornful women too, Liney smiled on his gold teeth.

(No Language 25)

In “No Language Is Neutral,” these conventions construct an enunciative space characterized not so much by a contestational dialogue with a “standard English” as by “standard English” utterances themselves that become submerged, appropriated, and placed in a subordinate position—an example of what Mary Louise Pratt terms “code-switching,” “the power to own but not be owned by the dominant language. Aesthetically, code-switching can be a source of great verbal subtlety and grace as speech dances fluidly and strategically back and forth between two languages and two cultural systems” (177). Look at how the reported speech becomes absorbed into the markedly different cadences and grammatical structures of the speaking voice in the following passage from “No Language Is Neutral”:

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.

(No Language 29)

By not directly citing the utterances spoken from the privileged position (“too black for it,” “you know darling”) but framing them within free indirect discourse, Brand's text at once relates a personal narrative of debasement and subordination, demonstrates the contingencies of power in determining authority in language, and performs a poetic act of resistance. And this is the fundamental problem with narrative-based readings of the text: they tend to grant the poetry a testimonial agency implicit in the two textual effects that I have discussed here, but they ignore the practical and transformative agency that it also demonstrates.

So far, I have placed the term “standard English” in quotation marks in what seems to me to be a necessary qualification. A “standard” tends to posit a hypostatized, homogeneous, rigid language around which heterogeneous tongues circulate—an illusion that might serve some purpose in language textbooks or for national broadcasters but that in practice cannot ultimately be realized. Even if we were to accept this standard as a broad, strategic formulation, where would we locate it? South London? Southwestern Ontario? The U.S. midwest? Are not all “standards” necessarily localized, contingent, and contested? As American poet Charles Bernstein has pointed out, “Brathwaite's nation language is as much a new standard to rally national spirit as it is a break from standardization” (7), and it thus plays a strategic role in specific decolonial movements of national self-determination. I also recognize that these terminologies of standard English and nation language are strategic and provisional, foregrounding the material differences in power between so-called First and Third World sites, enabling a sense of national solidarity with a commensurate sense of a shared, differentiated language and poetic tradition and aimed at privileging a traditionally deprivileged version of world English. However, since such a “standard” arises through a process of negation (common to all but particular to none), it cannot accommodate the particularities of cultural difference, not to mention the complications introduced by the notion of hybridity.

Maria Caridad Casas's sociolinguistic study of “No Language Is Neutral” offers a possible alternative to the terminologies of nation language and standard English, positing the empirical categories of Trinidad English Creole (TEC) and Non-Creole English (NEC) in her analyses of the code switching in Brand's text. Although based on empirical methods and assumptions, Casas's study also acknowledges the problems posed to this method by the poetic medium—not the least of which is that the written medium makes the codes much harder to identify. Casas attempts to account for such potential ambiguities in identification through the concept of a creole continuum, which develops when “a creole is in direct contact with its lexifier language” and through which a “wide range of variation arises that, over time, restructures both the creole and the lexifier language” (7). Given that hers is a sociolinguistic study, Casas often makes broad prescriptive statements about the responses of potential readers, claiming, for instance, that “there exists in the minds of readers idealized polar varieties that give meaning to variation, that tell readers ‘this is more TEC’ or ‘this is more NCE’; and these idealizations are quite invariable and fixed” (14). Yet she also acknowledges the specificities of poetic language and that the TEC code itself is poetically interrogated and transformed from within (she points out that “teeth edging truth” is a variation of the idiomatic “edge your teeth”—which refers to something unpleasant [36]). However pragmatic these sociolinguistic categories are (Casas's readings of Brand's poem through them are certainly provocative and illuminating), their rigid hypostatization of linguistic codes does not adequately allow for the text's socially transformative potential—that readers' understandings of “correct” or “standard” grammars and idioms, and the social value of those grammars and idioms, will necessarily shift during the reading, and rereading, process. The code-switching of this passage from the sixth poem of the series, for instance, could certainly be read as shifting along the creole continuum that Casas describes:

A woman who thought she was human but got the message, female and black and somehow those who gave it to her were like family, mother and brother, spitting woman at her, somehow they were the only place to return to and this gushing river had already swallowed most of her, the little girl girls drowned on its indifferent bank, the river hardened like the centre of her, spinning chalk stone on its frill, burden in their slow feet, they weeping, she, go on home, in futility.

(No Language 27)

The preposition in “those who gave it to her” is unexpected and thus implies a jarring switch in codes from TEC or nation language and NCE or standard English. On the other hand, we could also read the code-switching between grammars here as a manifestation of the overlapping consciousnesses of the present reflective narrator and her childhood self—the italicized “go on home” a citation from the past erupting into present consciousness.

A more adequate terminology, then, would take into account the particularities and differences between codes and readers, the ambiguities and ambivalences produced by the written medium, and the socially transformative potential of the antisystemic text, without attenuating the politics of history and place so crucial to “No Language Is Neutral.” Bhabha's essay “DissemiNation” is, in his own words, an attempt “to write of the Western nation as an obscure and ubiquitous form of living the locality of culture”:

This locality is more around temporality than about historicity: a form of living that is more complex than “community”; more symbolic than “society”; more connotative than “country”; less patriotic than patrie; more rhetorical than the reason of State; more mythological than ideology; less homogeneous than hegemony; less centred than the citizen; more collective than “the subject”; more psychic than civility; more hybrid in the articulation of cultural differences and identifications than can be represented in an hierarchical or binary structuring of social antagonism.

(140)

Shifting Bhabha's notion of “locality” into the more specific terrain of world Englishes, could we not describe the collision of varying linguistic registers in “No Language Is Neutral” as a dialogue between differing “anglocalities”?⁴ This is not meant to be a sort of liberal, relativist position in which all Englishes are equal (and thus neutral), widening the shadow of Walcott's green oak. Rather, the notion of anglocalities acknowledges the complexities introduced by the phenomena of diasporic communities and recognizes that the English spoken in anglo-North (of) America is itself both uncategorizably diverse and markedly different from the imperial “standard” of the queen's English—a standard that seems to be more useful as a conceptual straw dummy than as an accurate measure of the language's “official” grammar and pronunciation. The idea of anglocality also allows for difference within as well as between the Englishes spoken in the residue of the British Empire—accounting for the linguistic specificities of place, but without losing the tactical potential of Pratt's code switching. As Bernstein further points out, “English languages, set adrift from the sight/sound sensorium of the English people, are at their hearts uprooted and translated: nomadic in origin, absolutely particular in practice” (5).

In the end, then, my differences with the positions of Zackodnik or Casas seem to turn on a difference in terminologies: a reading of the poetry that takes into account the social reflexivity of language, of the material differences in power embedded in discourse, need not posit various world Englishes as discernible totalities: the codes to be switched are never static, their borders and contours never entirely locatable. The idiosyncratic particularities of language use—particularities of which poetry continually reminds us—allow for an endless “dialogic of differences” among various subject positions: gender, race, nationality, ethnicity, class, and sexuality.

In addition to a polyphonic collision of competing languages, “No Language Is Neutral” also establishes a contestatory dialogue between their corresponding geographic sites on the global grid. Just as the text demonstrates the differences in power and authority granted to certain languages, here it lays bare the disparities in economic and geopolitical power between the two localities:

                                                                                          … the taste of leaving
was already on my tongue and cut deep into my
skinny pigeon toed way, language here was strict
description and teeth edging truth. Here was beauty
and here was nowhere. The smell of hurrying passed
my nostrils with the smell of sea water and fresh fish
wind, there was history which had taught my eyes to
look for escape …

(22)

                                                                 It don't have nothing call beauty
here but this is a place, a gasp of water from a
hundred lakes, fierce bright windows screaming with
goods, a constant drizzle of brown brick cutting
dolorous prisons into every green uprising of bush.

(29)

The series of binary oppositions established here is further developed throughout the serial poem, including rural/urban, wild/developed, community/anonymity, subsistence/consumerism, warmth/cold, freedom/imprisonment, belonging/alienation, humour/solemnity, voice/silence, victimization/power, and the pairs of beauty/ugliness and nowhere/place. As Priestley-Brown puts it, in Brand's writing “Black third world culture is depicted as being at war with postcolonial white North American culture” (98), and, while the privileged term in most of these oppositions is usually associated with the Caribbean, it remains a site denied what the text establishes as its most crucial terms: place and power. While “No Language Is Neutral” sustains a sufficiently ambivalent tone and thus appears to deconstruct these binaries even as it establishes them (e.g., “one river dead and teeming from waste and alligators” [22]), it appears iteratively to reify an inherited—in fact widely commodified—construction of the Caribbean as paradisical but powerless. If “beauty” and “nowhere” are so firmly associated, then celebratory, descriptive passages such as

                                                                           … never to pass her eyes on
the red-green threads of a humming bird's twitching
back, the blood warm quickened water colours of a
sea bed, not the rain forest tangled in smoke-wet …

(28)

or

                              That little light trembling the water again,
that gray blue night pearl of the sea, the swirl of the
earth that dash water back and always forth …

(33)

might appear to reify the Caribbean as a purely aestheticized nowhere, a site that is not a place, absent of history.

Yet we could further argue that the text only constructs a site “absent of history” given Western or metropolitan criteria of history: linear temporality, rigorous archival documentation, or authoritative cartographies marked with proper names, for instance. Edouard Glissant, however, puts forward as part of his notion of antillanité an alternative, Caribbean-centred understanding of landscape as history:

La rapport à la terre, rapport d'autant plus menacé que la terre de la communauté est aliénée, devient tellement fondamental du discours, que le paysage dans l'oeuvre cesse d'être décor ou confidant pour s'inscrire comme constituant de l'être. Décrire le paysage ne suffira pas. L'individu, la communauté, le pays sont indissociables dans l'épisode constitutif de leur histoire. Le paysage est un personnnage de cette histoire. Il faut le comprendre dans ses profoundeurs.

(199)

As Debra L. Anderson explains, for Glissant “the sea and land/landscape are inseparable from Caribbean history. Man's [sic] relationship to the land becomes so important in his discourse that landscape becomes a ‘character’ in this story or history” (32). And landscape is personified in “No Language Is Neutral” as a heaving, howling register of the particular violence of this history: “Here is history too. A backbone bending and unbending without a word, heat, bellowing these lungs spongy, exhaled in humming, the ocean, a way out and not anything of beauty, tipping turquoise and scandalous. The malicious horizon made us the essential thinkers of technology” (23). Yet, despite Glissant's persuasive arguments for a different understanding of landscape and history, or Krishna Sarbadhikary's observation that, “For Brand and other Black women poets, landscape and nature often play an important part in fostering a sense of wholeness” (122), this emphasis on the physical landscape of Trinidad is not unproblematic given the colonial dynamic in which the text circulates. When a reviewer of No Language Is Neutral suggests that Brand writes “a new nature poetry in order to bring into the domain of Canadian literature, both visually and viscerally, the landscape from which … [she] derives meaning and inspiration” (Sanders 30), we cannot ignore the appropriative overtones of “bring into the domain of Canadian literature.” Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak maintains that “The national artist in the Third World has a responsibility not to speak for the nation in response to a demand made by this craving for intercultural exchange” (798)—that is, a responsibility to resist the urge to commodify the underprivileged space for consumption by a liberal audience in metropolitan centres. Such an act of commodification would be entirely complicit with the Multiculturalism Act's “cabinet of curiosities” approach to ethnicity. Does Brand remain a “national artist in the Third World”? If so, then does her text perform this act of commodification? I have been reading her work throughout this paper as occupying partial positions in both “worlds,” and the consumerist overtones of transitive verbs in passages in “No Language Is Neutral” such as “Like a holy ghost, I package the smell of zinnias and lady of the night, I horde the taste of star apples and granadilla” (31), seem to suggest a sort of transcultural “smuggling” of material difference. Brand's deployment of a Caribbean “nation language” could be read in a similar way; the “inherent danger” in using the “demotic” tongue, according to Sarbadhikary, “is that the audience interest may be predominantly nostalgic, rather than a concern for what is being said by the poet” (128).⁵

Toward the end of “No Language Is Neutral,” however, the speaker begins to question and eventually rejects this nostalgia as “a lie” (30, 33), and the text moves toward negotiating a space “between beauty and nowhere” (34), a negotiation that appears to be gradually developed out of a dialogue between here and there. One of the textual strategies for actualizing this dialogue is through the referential slippage of the deictic “here,” as in the line “Not a single word drops from my lips for twenty years about living here,” a line embedded in the eighth prose poem, which vacillates between frustrated silence about her current location (“This city, mourning the smell of flowers and dirt, cannot tell me what to say even if it chokes me”) and astonished alienation from her mother tongue (“I return to that once grammar struck in disbelief”). Spliced with such textual ambivalence, as well as site-specific references (Spadina Avenue, Bathurst Street, “the race conscious landlords” [31]), “No Language Is Neutral” addresses Toronto as much as Trinidad-Tobago. When I say “address Toronto,” I do not mean in the simply referential sense of a textual celebration of geographic specificities; I mean that in its contestational stance the text intervenes in the social discourses of that locality and that this intervention necessarily has a transformative effect. And this intervention is multiple: the text addresses a local set of social relations, but it also addresses a constellation of local audiences. In this reading, the contradictory utterances that conclude the final prose poem of the series—

                                                                                I have come to know
something simple. Each sentence realised or
dreamed jumps like a pulse with history and takes a
side. What I say in any language is told in faultless
knowledge of skin, in drunkenness and weeping,
told as a woman without matches and tinder, not in
words and in words and in words learned by heart,
told in secret and not in secret, and listen does not
burn out or waste and is plenty and pitiless and loves

(34)—

articulate a movement from an exiled, diasporic subjectivity to a restlessly hyphenated subjectivity, occupying the position of “synchronous foreignicity” that Wah describes. Although the text may appear to duplicate the logic of the Multiculturalism Act, the curatorial logic of the cultural mosaic in which difference becomes synchronically frozen, compartmentalized, and defused, the text's diachronic unfoldings and dialogic collision of global sites and languages ultimately critique this logic. If “an immigrant is an outsider whose difference is defined by his or her origins, whereas the ethnic subject's difference … is defined by the surrounding culture” (Kamboureli 208), then “No Language Is Neutral” manages to negotiate a space in excess of these offered positions—simultaneously and paradoxically demonstrating the porosity of national boundaries while documenting, and indeed contributing to, “a slowly emerging new polity of the space we have come to know as Canada” (202).

This rejection of nostalgia and ambivalence toward nation(alism) that Brand develops in “No Language Is Neutral” recurs in her work, as the following passage from Land to Light On suggests:

I'm trying to put my tongue on dawns now, I'm busy licking dusk away, tracking deep twittering silences. You come to this, here's the marrow of it, not moving, not standing, it's too much to hold up, what I really want to say is, I don't want no fucking country, here or there and all the way back, I don't like it, none of it, easy as that. I'm giving up on land to light on, and why not, I can't perfect my own shadow, my violent sorrow, my individual wrists.

(48)

At the risk of conflating the lyric voice with the authorial voice, this passage, occurring at the end of the title sequence of the volume, offers an even stronger position toward nation than that articulated in “No Language Is Neutral”: ambivalence appears to have shifted to refusal. Yet as literary texts continue to be deeply imbricated in nation-state structures, both here and abroad, a consideration of national contexts will remain necessary in approaching these texts critically. As Dickinson suggests, although Brand may indeed be refused a position of full citizenship, her poetry necessitates and works toward developing a differing—and I think enabling—position of citizenship. Such a position would be transnational, accommodating of difference, and radically democratic—akin to what Chantal Mouffe describes as “the articulation of an ensemble of subject positions, corresponding to the multiplicity of social relations in which it is inscribed” (376). Yet such a position of citizenship would continue to be circumscribed—at least judicially—by the state.

Anderson distinguishes between “locating” and “colonizing” a literary text: “rather than imposing foreign (Western) structures and values upon the text, location situates or embeds the text within its own social, cultural, historical, and political realities” (4). Yet Brand's work, as I have tried to demonstrate, poses a problem: in seeking to locate rather than colonize “No Language Is Neutral,” where do I choose to locate it? Locating this text cannot be done a priori but through the necessarily selective act of criticism, itself a located and locatable practice. My location of “No Language Is Neutral” has embedded it to a certain extent in Canada, a Western and metropolitan site. By situating Brand's work in this way, however, I may be running the risk of appropriating and absorbing it into a Canadian literature, suggesting a not-so-latent and perhaps pathological obsession with nationalist constructions on my part. As an academic and a literary critic, I am part of a state apparatus whose social effect is perhaps not unlike that of the metanarratives of Canadian state discourse, including the Multiculturalism Act. In her article “From Visions of the Other to Theories of Difference: The Canadian Literatures,” Barbara Godard points out that “Meaning develops within discursive fields agonistically, shaped and preceded by what it is opposing and so never existing in its own terms” (5). Insofar as the metanarratives of Canadian literature or the Multiculturalism Act offer discursive fields within which Brand's text agonistically produces new meanings, situating her work vis-à-vis these metanarratives remains productive. If, as I have suggested above, “No Language Is Neutral” can be viewed historically as a touchstone text of a period marked by challenges to a white Canadian cultural dominant, then its oppositional and transformative potential within the institutional apparatuses of that dominant and its production of new meanings have actually appeared to increase as the text's distance from its author has widened. Godard continues:

From their within-without positions, the writing of ethnic minorities troubles the homogeneity of the ethnocentrism of the singular discourse of power, works at its limits, on the margins, to interrogate its silences, absences, its politics of exclusion. It exposes boundaries, challenges the hierarchy of sites of discourse, forces the threshold and moves into the liminal, working the in-between, site of movement and change. The complexity of this double articulation arises from the fact that the discursive practices are both connected and disassociated: the logic of subject-identity that posits one subject for one discourse for one site or practice is confounded in this concept of a network of intersecting discourses where inside and outside are relational positions with respect to specific discourses not in subjection to a singular power. Through permutations and instabilities emerges the possibility of shifting the terms of the semiotic system itself, of conceptualizing an open system as a site of struggle rather than a closed system of binary oppositions organized on hierarchical lines that conceal the operations of power by naturalizing these differences as fact.

(5)

According to Godard's argument, by situating Brand's text within multiple sites, we destabilize the terms of its signifying practices as well as those of the wider semiotic system. White Canadian readers of “No Language Is Neutral” in a sense always “overhear” the text, since they certainly do not compose the text's target audience. It is because the text's socially transformative potential relies on its social hybridity that, while the text could and should be read as “Caribbean” (its cross-textual signs, theoretical underpinnings, and anticolonialist stance invite such a reading), I have located it to a large extent “here.” From this location, Brand's work can be seen as offering alternative technologies not only of ethnicity but also of nationality, and “No Language Is Neutral” can be seen not as the articulation of a placeless or alienated subject, or of a gentle reconciliation of competing and different languages and sites, but as a simultaneously performative and transformative intervention in a pair of anglocalities—localities in which the sutured limits of the nation, while remaining a major determinant of the political, economic, and cultural specificities of these localities, have sufficiently frayed to expose an ambivalent site where resistance may be voiced, located, and heard.

Notes

1. The penultimate epigram in Cardenal's collection, for instance, reads as follows:

   Yo he repartido papeletas clandestinas,
   gritado: ¡viva la libertad! en plena calle
   desafiando a los guardias armados.
   Yo participé en la rebelión de abril:
   pero palidezco cuando paso por tu casa
   y tu sola mirada me hace temblar.

   (25)

2. Brand's work is included in, among others, The Penguin Book of Caribbean Verse in English (1986), Poetry by Canadian Women (1989), Other Solitudes: Canadian Multicultural Fictions (1990), Making a Difference: Canadian Multicultural Literature (1996), and Eyeing the North Star: Directions in African-Canadian Literature (1997).

3. As Dickinson points out, this may have as much to do with the publisher of that text (McClelland and Stewart) as it does with any significant shift in the cultural dominant.

4. This position is similar to Bruce Robbins's notion of “discrepant cosmopolitanisms” (181), an attempt to recode the world's particulars in a way that exceeds a local/cosmopolitan binarism. I had originally considered the term “anglo-locality”; Susan Gingell, in an e-mail to me, suggested that I modify the term to the more mellifluous “anglocality.”

5. Indeed, Brand comments about No Language Is Neutral that “I didn't want to be party to white Canadian titillation at the exoticism of a Trinidadian language” (“In the Company” 367), demonstrating an acute awareness of potential cultural commodification. “I thought it important enough to wait until I could do something more with it than only use it for the minimal purpose of exoticizing it” she continues (367), suggesting that her larger political project in this book justifies and in fact exceeds this problematic.

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