Dionne Brand - Writing Career

Writing Career

In Rivers Have Sources, Trees Have Roots (1986) Brand and co-author Krisantha Sri Bhaggiyadatta interviewed a hundred people from the Canadian Native, Black, Chinese, and South Asian communities about their perspectives of racism and how it has impacted their lives. From these stories and recollections of childhood to workplace experiences, the authors critiqued the existence and commonality of racism, disparities and resistance. They argue that two themes exist where racism prevails in the lives of the interviewees and these themes are through "the culture of racism" and through the structural and institutional ways. Consequently, economic hardship, lack of employment and career choices and opportunities are some of the experiences identified by the minority, ethnic groups and immigrants.

Brand recognizes that there are also different forms of struggles and visions to combat racism. This book attempts to give each individual a voice, an opportunity to speak about their personal and immigration stories as part of a historical validation and as part of a third in a series of anti-racism literature. Women and men spoke of their anger, resentments, and complaints of racial tensions of abuse, isolation, staring, name calling and being treated as different and inferior. Brand addresses how racism is used as a powerful tool to censor oppositional voices and she opposes the media report that racism occurs in isolated cases or unusual crisis.

The use of personal experience and ancestral memory can be found in Brand's writing strategies such as in a short story fiction, "St. Mary Estate", which is taken from Brand's book, Sans Souci and Other Stories, pp. 360–366, Brand begins the chapter "Maps of Memory: Places Revisited" by describing the colonial oppression that her fictional characters experienced in a place called "St. Mary Estate."

The narrator and her sister revisit the cocoa estate, the place of their birth and childhood and recall past experiences of racism and shame. The old place is filled with painful memories including the summer beach house that were used by rich 'white' people who the narrator refers to as "they" and whose big quarters were scrubbed and cleaned by her father who works as the overseer slave. The narrator recalls the beach house was empty two months of the year forbidden for them to use.

Through the narrative, Brand illustrates the discrimination and poverty issues because the families were cramped into their barracks made of thin cardboards with newspapers walls. Brand also employs various stylistic devices including the use of repetitive language and the use of anger and obscene language to expose the poor segregated quarters of slave barracks, overseer's shack, and estate workers barracks that depict the physical, social and psychological degradation endured by the slaves who were denied the basic human rights and freedom.

Other topics addressed in her poetry and novels include sexual exploitation of African women, and what Brand refers to as "a pandemic scourging the Diaspora" and declares, "We are born thinking of travelling back" which is suggestive of the individual and historic travelling and returning as experienced by her ancestors. As Brand writes: "Listen, I am a Black woman whose of ancestors were brought to a new world laying tightly packed in ships. Fifteen million of them survived the voyage, five million of them women; millions among them died, were killed, committed suicide in the middle passage."

Brand has received many awards and her ongoing intellectual contribution are appreciated by the Black communities and women who find inspiration in her social activism and her writing among other women writers of African descent as expressed by writer Myrian Chancy that she found "it possible ...to engage in personal/critical work which uncovers the connections between us as Black women at the same time as re-discovering that which has been kept from us: our cultural heritage, the language of our grandmothers, ourselves."