Dionne Brand - Critical Reception

Critical Reception

Many of the first critics and scholars to evaluate Brand's early work regularly framed her writing in discourses of Caribbean national and cultural identity and Caribbean literary theory. Barbadian poet and scholar Edward Kamau Brathwaite referred to Brand as "our first major exile female poet." Academic J. Edward Chamberlain argued that she is "a final witness to the experience of migration and exile" whose "literary inheritance is in some genuine measure West Indian, a legacy of Walcott, Brathwaite and others." Their gesture toward a literal border crossing, from the Caribbean to Canada, speaks to the increasingly profound engagement with the idea of her own and others’ shifting locations, both literal and theoretical, evident in Brand's work.

Peter Dickinson argues that "Brand 'reterritorializes' … boundaries in her writing, (dis)placing or (dis)locating the national narrative of subjectivity … into the diaspora of cross-cultural, -racial, -gender, -class, and –erotic identifications." These profound shifts in the way Brand conceptualizes national and personal affiliations to and boundaries around Caribbean and Canadian locations speak to what Dickinson calls "the politics of location cannot be separated from the politics of 'production and reception.'" Critic Leslie Sanders argues that, in her ongoing exploration of the notions of "here" and "there", Brand uses her own "statelessness" as a vehicle for entering "'other people's experience'" and "'other places.'" In Sanders’ words, "by becoming a Canadian writer, Brand is extending the Canadian identity in a way McLuhan would recognize and applaud." Her work, then, according to Dickinson, Sanders and others, has been instrumental in changing the way that Canadian literature is ultimately constituted. Nevertheless, Dickinson concedes, "Because Brand's 'here' is necessarily mediated, provisional, evanescent – in a word 'unlocatable' – her work remains marginal/marginalizable in academic discussions of Canadian literary canons."

In her book, Redefining the Subject: Sites of Play in Canadian Women's Writing, Charlotte Sturgess suggests that Brand employs a language—in the short story collection Sans Souci (1988) and the novel In Another Place, Not Here (1996), in particular—"through which identity emerges as a mobile, thus discursive, construct." Echoing Dickinson's theory that Brand's work both dislodges and disturbs the borders safeguarding narratives about fixed national identities, Sturgess argues that Brand's "work uses language strategically, as a wedge to split European traditions, forms and aesthetics apart; to drive them onto their own borders and contradictions." The work Brand's writing performs is, Sturgess insists, at least two-pronged: it "underline the enduring ties of colonialism within contemporary society;" and it "investigates the very possibilities of Black, female self-representation in Canadian cultural space."

Speaking specifically of Brand's considerable body of poetry, Italian academic and theorist Franca Bernabei writes in the preamble to Luce ostinata/Tenacious Light (2007), the Italian-English selected anthology of Brand's poetry, that "Brand's poetic production reveals a remarkable variety of formal-stylistic strategies and semantic richness as well as the ongoing pursuit of a voice and a language that embody her political, affective, and aesthetic engagement with the human condition of the black woman—and, more exactly, all those oppressed by the hegemonic program of modernity." On the back cover of the same collection, editor and critic Constance Rooke calls Brand "one of the very best in the world today", and goes on to "compare her to Neruda or—in fiction—to Saramago."