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Dionne Brand

Dionne Brand Biography

Poet

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“I want to say something else about desire. I really do not know what it is. I experience something which, sometimes, if I pull it apart, I cannot make reason of. The word seems to me to fall apart under the pull and drag of its commodified shapes, under the weight of our artifice and our conceit. It is sometimes impossible to tell what is real from what is manufactured. We live in a world filled with commodified images of desire. Desire clings to widgets, chairs, fridges, cars, perfumes, shoes, jackets, golf clubs, basketballs, telephones, water, soap powder, houses, neighbourhoods. Even god. It clings to an endless list of objects. It clings to the face of television sets and movie screens. It is glaciered in assigned objects, it is petrified in repetitive cliched gestures. Their repetition is tedious, the look and sound of them tedious. We become the repetition despite our best efforts. We become numb. And though against the impressive strength of this I can't hope to say all that desire might be, I wanted to talk about it not as it is sold to us but as one collects it, piece by piece, proceeding through a life. I wanted to say that life, if we are lucky, is a collection of aesthetic experiences as it is a collection of pratical experiences, which may be one and the same sometimes, and which if we are lucky we make a sense of. Making sense may be what desire is. Or, putting the senses back together.”

DesireAesthetics
Book:A Map to the Door of No Return
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“The Door of No Return - real and metaphoric as some places are, mythic to those of us who are scattered in the Americas today. To have one’s belonging lodged in a metaphor is voluptuous intrigue; to inhabit a trope; to be a kind of fiction. To live in the Black Diaspora I think is to live in a fiction - a creation of empires, and also self-creation. It is to be being living inside and outside herself. It is to apprehend the the sign one makes yet to be unable to escape it except in radiant moments of ordinariness made like art. To be a fiction in search of its most resonant metaphor then is even more intriguing.”

ArtFictionSlaveryDiasporaBlack Diaspora
Book:A Map to the Door of No Return
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“un soir de guerre et ceux qui regardent parmi nous bouche bée voient la beauté devenir effroyable coucher de soleil, souffle de nuages gris aux stries rouges nous observons une maison qui brûle tout l'après-midi, toute la nuit toutes les nuits nous regardons un autre feu qui brûle Mardi Butler house Mercredi radio grenade libre Jeudi poste de police [...] à chaque bruit nouveau de la guerre dans la froide lumière de cinq heures du matin il manque quelque chose quelques parties du corps quelques lieux de ce monde une île, un endroit auquel penser Je marche sur un rocher d'un rivage de la Barbade cherchant où était grenade à présent le vol d un bombardier américain laisse une trace de viol dans la chambre de chaque réveil que devons nous faire aujourd'hui prêt à combattre couchés dans le couloir à les attendre la peur nous tient éveillés et nous fait rêver de sommeil”

Military Occupation
Author:Dionne Brand
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“Angie was a border crosser, a wetback, a worker in the immigrant sweatshop they call this city. On days like this I understand her like a woman instead of a child. Everybody thought she was a whore. She wasn’t. She tried to step across the border of who she was and who she might be. They wouldn’t let her. She didn’t believe it herself so she stepped across into a whole other country.”

ImaginationIdentityBorder CrossingCarlaAngieDionne BrandItalian CanadianWhat We All Long For
Book:What We All Long For
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“Books leave gestures in the body; a certain way of moving, of turning, a certain closing of the eyes, a way of leaving, hesitations. Books leave certain sounds, a certain pacing; mostly they leave the elusive, which is all the story. They leave much more than the words.”

WayBookStoriesBodyEyeMovingCertainSoundLeavingGesturesClosingElusiveHesitationPacing
Book:A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging
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