https://bombmagazine.org/articles/2024/09/16/dionne-brand-by-saidiya-hartman/
Dionne Brand by Saidiya Hartman
At once an autobiography of the reading self and a blistering critique of the “great works” of Anglophone literature, Brand’s latest book builds on her longstanding commitment to Black poesis.
September 16, 2024
For five decades, Dionne Brand has explored the boundaries of form, writing at the intersection of poetics and critical thought. As she writes in “An Ars Poetica from the Blue Clerk” (2017), she has strived “to produce a grammar in which Black existence might be the thought and not the unthought,” pressing at the limits of poetry and prose to uncover the critical “possibilities for Black existence, for being in the diaspora.”
Brand is the author of twelve books of poetry, six works of fiction, and six works of nonfiction. Her latest book, Salvage: Readings from the Wreck, continues this exploration of black existence and formal innovation in an autobiography of the reading self, a personal history of “how a reader is made [and] unmade.” In this insightful meditation on her formation as a colonial subject, Brand attends to the instrumentality of the novel and the regime of the aesthetic in the project of empire. Engaging with history and form, politics and aesthetics, Salvage approaches the novel as colonial pedagogy. Through a series of close readings from Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko (1688) to J. M. Coetzee’s Foe (1986), Brand uses the “artifice” of the autobiographical, inhabiting the history of literature as an intimate chronicle of her life and world. A life can be “destroyed” by books, Brand observes: novels, steeped in the imperial episteme, aestheticize and efface the violence that has made and unmade the captive, the wretched, the blackened, and the colonized. A life also can be remade by books. In the work of Gwendolyn Brooks, Wilson Harris, Toni Morrison, and John Keene, Salvage unearths the capacity of narrative to render black life as that “which exceeds the wreck.”
For Brand, black poesis—as social practice and creative invention—has unfolded as a centuries-long refusal of the given and a ceaseless practice of transfiguration. The possibilities of language are inseparable from the imperative to decompose the narrative of nonbeing. Such concerns have guided her longstanding inquiry in poetics and fiction. Her work has endeavored to retrieve black life from the register of pathology by restoring the “synesthetic space of our living,” the fullness of the sensorium. The task of the writer, simply put, is to find an exit from “the collapsed world” of empire and the “coloniality of form.” Through her employment of verbless grammars and nomenclatures, inventories and forensics, Brand transforms language into an open assembly that yields the possibility of conceiving existence anew.
Read an excerpt from Salvage: Readings from the Wreck in our latest issue.
Saidiya Hartman Reading Salvage, I was struck by the resonance of a set of questions, both conceptual and thematic, across the body of your work. The wreckage of modernity, the coloniality of being, the oceanic, and the politics of language and literature are the tributaries from early works like Winter Epigrams & Epigrams to Ernesto Cardenal in Defense of Claudia, Ossuaries, and The Blue Clerk. In Salvage, you return to these questions, meditating on the “great works” of Anglophone literature ranging from Robinson Crusoe to Mansfield Park, stressing the violence of these works and the need to trespass this canon in narrating the lives of black people. You state that the task of the writer is to “retrieve a life in the register of the social,” to “convey the sensorium of blackness,” to blow “life into the collapsed world of coloniality.” What is the relationship of Salvage to the wreckage? As with “Ruttier for the Marooned in the Diaspora,” nautical and maritime metaphors are central to articulating dispossession and survival in the wake of the slavery and exile. Wreckage is articulated variously, as the wreckage of coloniality, the wreckage of modernity, the wreckage of the Enlightenment project, and the wreckage of the vessels that brought us to these shores. I would describe Salvage as a reparative work, because it does offer a set of formal responses for attending to the wreckage. As you write, “the salvage is the life which exceeds the wreck.”
Dionne Brand One thing that marks the works that I’ve produced is an excavation of us from this thing, from these sets of relations that constantly occlude, bind, bury, or actively or violently prevent a certain kind of living. I’m constantly digging through the detritus of coloniality, because all it leaves is detritus. It buries you in detritus. It locks you into the one-notedness of itself and the absolute boundaries that it sets for you. However, you exceed these boundaries constantly; have always exceeded them. And the part of you that is more than these boundaries notices its enclosures. You’re not simply bound in the enclosure; you notice the enclosures constantly, and you’re always more than them. When you see the narratives that attend or reinforce the repository of that relation, that hold coloniality’s intentions, you can’t help but sometimes be alarmed or find it hilarious that it seeks to bind you in the smallness of its ideas, and that its ideas are so limited. Nevertheless, one must engage in this kind of tedious business of excavation. Sometimes you find yourself trying to dig your way out of the bullshit, basically. And then sometimes you find yourself in the mood for recovering your humor and your intelligence from it.
SH The word enclosure is key. The forms of your work—the nomenclatures, ruttiers, verso pages, epigrams, maps, inventories—enact this breaking out and existing beyond epistemic, political, and aesthetic enclosure, that is, the conceptual prisons that make it impossible to imagine the world in any other terms except those given and imposed. Your work has been characterized by this sustained attention to form, a metadiscourse on form, and the writing experiments with method and genre to think beyond the given. In Salvage, you employ the term forensics. Could you say more about your method and the relation of excavation—digging through the detritus of coloniality—to forensics?
DB The use of the multiple genres or genre-crossing started innocently. I began as a poet and then thought, What can I do to add the internal mechanisms of poetry to prose? I always had a distrust of linearity and linear structure, and I felt that poetry was much more expansive, much more open to philosophical meanderings to describe a life that had been enclosed in racist description. Blackness in such narratives, benign or malignant, could only appear in a particular form—either as abject or contesting that abjectness in some always failing way.
What also became apparent was the capacity for these various forms to be an analytic lens. Within each particular analytic lens, I would then consider what else might be an instrument for contemplating or looking through this life—hence the use of forensics or the inventory or the nomenclature. I’d also look to the other affective instruments of black life—reggae, calypso, jazz—that allowed one to jump and move quickly across planes of understanding to come to certain conclusions, the ones that black people in America have always had to come to in order to save their lives. They had to make a leap, and it’s the same leap as a metaphoric leap, a really quick leap into another form or shape.
These analytics get used in the business of figuring out how to destroy the enclosure, escape the enclosure. I’m always thinking about what analytic tools one might array against hegemony. Even though the material conditions might hold you down, they’re not representative of the aesthetic or intellectual conditions. That was the play, the possibility, and the thinking going on in what I call the sensorium of being alive and black—improvisatory moves on the impulse of rescue, moves against the dangers of coloniality and imperialism. I would ask myself, How can I access the width and breadth of the sensorium?
“The type of being illustrated in a literary text is a reflection of the type of being that exists in the material world. That production is very much tied up and interested in the relations we live in.”
SH Salvage is another elaboration of this analytic lens. Why now? I have an answer to this, but I don’t know if my answer would be the same as yours. In one respect, Salvage is a text that you have written across twenty-four books. The metacharacter of your work, as you have noted, always reflects on the very conditions of writing, the materiality and historicity of writing, the predisposition toward certain kinds of narratives and genres. In your poetry and prose, you never forget the literary as a mode of production or the aesthetic as a regime of power. That’s always there.
DB Tell me your answer! (laughter)
SH Well, important aspects of our intellectual formation are shared. One of those critical nodes is the Grenada Revolution. Another is the writing of Amílcar Cabral, the revolutionary leader and brilliant anti-colonial thinker from Guinea-Bissau. His speeches and essays were foundational to my thought, and his work appears as a critical intertext in your work too. Cabral’s beautiful lines appear across the corpus of your work, in the prose and the poetry. We also hear the prescience of Frantz Fanon’s words “our historic mission is to authorize every revolt, every desperate act” sounding again in your work. The last is the emergence of postcolonial studies: Salvage is in dialogue with Edward Said’s Culture and Imperialism and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s “Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism.” Ours is a different moment. We are in the wake of the postcolonial—the post no longer has critical purchase; we are all too aware that we exist in the stranglehold of coloniality.
Given this, the work of Salvage is not to educate us about the coloniality of the English canon but to think critically about the novel and narrative as the affective implements of empire. The “toxicity” of these foundational texts resides in the values and ideals, in the cultivation and transmission of taste. In short, the novel is sedimented with the history of slavery and empire, capitalism and dispossession. So what does it mean, as readers, to take in the world in this form? In Salvage, you reckon with the imperial narratives that have formed you and damaged you. A life animated by books is something that everyone may understand, but a life destroyed by books is the more complex, contradictory, mysterious proposition. You aptly note, books can animate and destroy you. I believe the note to writers is: Beware of the forms we have inherited. Other kinds of narratives also exist. Your readings of C. L. R. James and Gwendolyn Brooks and Wilson Harris and John Keene illuminate these other ways of writing and conceiving the world. Salvage offers a genealogy of reading, a forensics of the novel, and an interrogation of the building blocks of narration. That’s how I would answer it, but how would you?
DB What are those building blocks of narrative and how are they sedimented in the ways we write and therefore the ways we think? What is in attendance presently is a revanchism of imperialism, of raw, ugly racism that is boldly at the surface of European- and American-driven politics. The incredibly robust and violent resurgence of this narrative seemed to say something about the aliveness of that narrative, that it can still summon young, middle-aged, and old people of European descent. That, to me, was a sign that those ideas had not been destroyed entirely or had not been thrown completely into the cesspit of history. Within the elaborations of governing and living, they’ve been allowed to survive. So many scholars—including, as you’ve noted, Said and Spivak—have thrown an incredible amount of energy against them. But liberal democracy maintained their viability, even in the very ways in which we attack them. Which is to say that, to some degree, we still accepted them as credible, as aesthetically pleasing. These texts remain as part of the beautiful when they are, in fact, not beautiful at all. They are full of slavery, full of exploitation. Slavery and exploitation are on the bare skin of them.
The argument is often made that we are not in these texts—but we are in the texts. We are not excluded. In Salvage, I’m not talking about being excluded, I’m really concerned with how I’m included. The ways in which we were included are very much on the surface of the page. In William Makepeace Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, the person who opens the novel is a black man named Sambo, but we do not get the chance to look at him except through how he is located abjectly in that society as a joke. In Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, how does Mansfield Park come about? How does it exist? There’s this reglorification of those texts in a lot of Netflix shows, in new variations of nineteenth century texts with black people in them as main characters. Well, black people were always in Mansfield Park as slaves in Antigua. What if we were to begin there, rather than some call for inclusion?
I’m rereading these texts with the hope of abandoning them as aesthetic objects. When these texts were written, they were done so self-consciously as colonial objects. If they were being made as aesthetic objects, they were for the European bourgeoisie. In fact, these texts were created and encouraged because they told readers about the wonderful life that slave-owning, the eradication of Indigenous peoples, and violence allowed.
SH I really like that formulation: to reread these texts with the hope of abandoning them as aesthetic objects. Salvage clearly articulates the ways in which a colonial project, a settler project, even when it does not announce itself explicitly and politically, finds refuge in the categories of the aesthetic and the beautiful. Here the role of the novel is critical. You also look at the regimes of cognition and perception, taste and sensibility that produce the subject and fashion the human. You build on Sylvia Wynter’s essay “Novel and History, Plot and Plantation” and Simon Gikandi’s Slavery and the Culture of Taste, which brilliantly articulate the connective tissue between slavery’s regime of production and the cultivation of subjectivity and discernment. What does it mean that the taxonomy of values that undergirded racial slavery provides the compass for many of the texts upheld as great literary achievements?
DB These texts are followed. They existed then and exist now as examples of what to do. They are instructional. Whatever writer is writing in this moment, that’s the genealogy they follow for how to produce a novel—what shape to put them in, how to produce character, what a character might be—and often without paying any attention to the ideas they are reproducing. This isn’t without consequence, because the material conditions we live in are also being reproduced through literary texts. The type of being illustrated in a literary text is a reflection of the type of being that exists in the material world. That production is very much tied up and interested in the relations we live in.
SH Salvage brings to mind Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark, where she explored “American Africanism,” the structuring presence and absence of an Africanist persona in the shaping of US literature, and the myriad uses of this fabricated entity. In your engagement, it is the colonial other who gives shape and meaning to British self- fashioning. The forensics, the analysis and excavation undertaken, is not about the project of inclusion, which desires to step into that same regime of the subject and achieve recognition and visibility in identical terms. Bridgerton is an easy example. If there is an adjustment or shift in this colonial regime of representation, it is in the expanded hues of its cast, but all that it promises is the endless reproduction of the same. It’s the nightmare of inclusion: Yes, black and brown actors can extend and reanimate the imperial text, can resurrect aristocrats and slaveholders, endowing them with a new life. This is happening in the political field too.
DB Yeah. This is making me depressed. I mean, not that I’m not already. (laughter)
SH In Salvage, you write that the autobiography identifies “the subject who is supposed to be made, through colonial pedagogies in the form of texts—fiction, non-fiction, poetry, photographs, governmental and bureaucratic structures.” I want to ask about the relation between autobiography and the photograph, specifically the photograph taken when you were about four years old with your sisters and your cousin. This photograph is taken in the studio of Mr. Wong, and it is to be sent to your mother and your aunt who are becoming nurses in England. You describe the novel and the photograph as regimes of capture. At the same time, the photograph is very central to the autobiographical enactment of Salvage. It allows you to think about yourself in the third person, specifically the ways the autobiographical fabricates a person. Implicitly, you suggest the portrait is not a likeness, it is and is not you, but a decisive moment in the making of the colonial subject and an opening onto the structuring narratives that will determine your life. Yet it is also an opening and a way of upending ways of knowing and understanding things and negating particular scripts of the self. The frame registers a small resistance.
In a much earlier poem, “Blues Spiritual for Mammy Prater” in No Language is Neutral, you describe a photograph of Mammy Prater at 115 years old. In the poem, you write that she has been waiting for and anticipating the technology that might capture her. Can you describe your use of photographs in building the structure of Salvage? What is the place of the photograph as a capture and framing of life and sensory experience, as a placement of a subject in an order, a vertical scale of valued and devalued life?
“…the photograph or transaction cannot quite capture what they might be. It only captures what they are in a certain relation.”
DB You know, I’m not a visual artist nor a critic of visual art. But I’m taken by photographs and what they hold. In that early poem, what jumped out at me was how Mammy Prater’s figure in the photograph exuded a weight and patience, a knowledge about a future time when something might be recognized in the photograph. The poem talks about how she waited for her century to turn, until the technology of photography was ready to capture this something. It seemed to me that the statement she conveyed through the photograph was waiting to be understood by us in much later years. It could be understood in her time, but not sufficiently—not in in a way that could repay that pose. Only in the future could that pose be repaid by an understanding of what it took to sit there and be there.
In the case of Salvage, the photograph of the young girls—of me, my sisters, and my cousin—is a document of coloniality. It’s also a personal document and a passport to someplace else. It was made to be sent across the Atlantic to repay the sacrifices of the women who would receive it, women who were themselves transported in those same ships to be in service to England. And all of their knowledge about England had to be transported back, whether that would be in the form of money, experience, or the hope of return or the hope of our going. The photograph is an object of that traversal across the Atlantic.
SH It’s involved in the circulation of affect, of longing, of disappointment, of regret. But it seems that it’s also more than a document. The photograph might be able to push back against the narrative that encloses it. There’s a beautiful line: “She does not yet understand (but maybe she glimpses) the full-on violence of narrative. She is trying to be … to find the new medium.” The girl in the photograph is looking for a new medium.
DB Yes, the girls in the photograph are still not fully made; the photograph or transaction cannot quite capture what they might be. It only captures what they are in a certain relation. Their various attentions to the photographer and to things outside of the photograph give a small indication, perhaps, of discomfort with or anticipation of what is outside of the photograph.
What’s happening outside the making of that photograph is also anti-colonial struggle. That photograph is taken after Eric Williams writes Capitalism and Slavery and after his return to Trinidad. C. L. R. James had already written Minty Alley, but the girls in the photograph don’t know that yet.
So much is going on outside of the photograph—people are alive, other relations are being built. The British Empire might have a hold over the photograph and, to some extent, the girls in the photograph and the photograph’s recipients, but there is great foment outside of the photograph.
SH Toward the end of the book, you describe the beautiful blur the girls’ movement inside the photograph produces. This movement becomes a key point for thinking about what’s not arrested by the frame, as does Roy DeCarava’s the sound i saw, a beautiful example of “the synesthetic space of our living.” I deeply appreciate your approach to history, your critique of history, your creation of counter-histories, all of which are enabled by multiple registers of time. Your historical enactments are so rich because time itself is opened, sedimented, and marked by what has happened and what we don’t yet know. In Ossuaries, this temporal entanglement is about the last days of a current time, a future time, and a possible time. You’ve noted that your compositions, whether poetry, prose poems, or novels, are made up of more than what can be contained in a particular cultural or historical moment. In this respect, there is a meditation on the document and the archive, though not in any literal or direct way, precisely because of the temporal sensibility that’s at stake in the work.
DB I just think that time is always going on, in its frayedness. One only attaches a set of signposts—like one o’clock, three o’clock, whatever— depending on one’s interests, right? And those signposts are limited by the aspirations of the time master. But I’ve had to think about time differently to escape that arbitrariness or the regimen of it. As I see it, life escapes that regimentation all the time. It’s not in my interest or in the interest of black people to observe that regimentation—except as cautionary— because so much of what we live happens outside of that kind of time. Again, it’s a question of linearity and nonlinearity. Rather than attend to the qualities of time’s regimentation through processes that are outside of myself and uncontrolled by me, I decided to attend to the qualities of time that exist outside of capital.
In my novel At the Full and Change of the Moon, Kamena has to find his way back to a marronage, but he cannot recall how he got there the first time. This is because he got there the first time through attending to other emotions, other senses of apprehension. He listened for sounds, how his body felt. There was no wayfinding other than through those qualities of observation. That is time too. In some ways, he never finds his way back. The world isn’t linear; he doesn’t need to find his way there in order to find a plot to grow something, to make money, to have transactions with other human beings. He just needs to find his way there toward freedom. In this regard, time is about using certain perceptions to come to what one wants to be, what one desires. If we were to rely on the parameters of capital time to do that, we’d be nothing. One has to exist in the time outside of capital in order to observe oneself and capital—its actions in the world and how much it squeezes out.
SH It’s precisely in these seemingly disposable lifetimes outside capitalist accumulation and representation where possibility unfolds, where one gets closer to freedom or a happening. Certainly, with regard to Kamena and marronage, you don’t feel that there is a distinct place or territory of marronage. One experiences it as another dimension, as a different bundle of sense and perception. It feels like an interface of worlds as opposed to directional or spatial.
DB It isn’t particularly spiritual, either. When Kamena arrives at the marronage the first time, it is rescue and relief from the violence of accumulation. He is no longer a commodity. This is an entirely different set of relations. And so, it’s always this question: What is it I would be? Or what is it that I am?
SH What have I forgotten that I knew, so I can be there again? That’s the “full,” the return, the recursive character of it.
DB And so he always comes back to Culebra, the ghostly place with the disintegrated nuns, and he asks Bola, “Hold this for me.” What he tells her, as instructions to find the marronage, is completely useless in linear time. His directions are like this: When you hear a leaf fall in the middle of the center of a forest and hear three birds and the flap of a wing. It’s nothing within the regime of the usable, which compresses and makes small all of our perceptions and observations.
SH You attend to the toxins that are a part of the imperial narrative regime and the violence of linear narrative in Salvage, but you also address other possibilities for narrating black life through reflections on the writing of Harris, Brooks, James, and others. Can there be a narrativization of black life that’s not a reinscription of the enclosure or a refashioning of the master narrative?
DB Brooks’s novel Maud Martha is the most beautiful thing. You find this being, this narrator, who doesn’t allow the regime of narration that would enclose her to take over the story and determine how one narrates a black life. She sits in the story, that small, perfect novel, and just lives.
SH In Salvage, you say, beautifully, that Maud Martha is an example “of a narrative attending to its own expression, attending to describing its consciousness” and “unimpeded by the demand to locate itself adjacent to a spectator who wishes to dislocate that consciousness or make it inanimate and tangential.” It’s as if Maud Martha is operating in the paradoxical space of giving an account of oneself when it is impossible to give an account of the sort of self that I am.
DB Yes. You find it in every paragraph. It’s not ignoring the location that character finds herself in, but offering a description that doesn’t center the location. Maud Martha doesn’t locate herself there; she is located. She makes her own description of the world she lives in, not attending to reinscribing that as location at all. The spaces in Brooks’s language don’t bind Maud Martha to that placement. Maud Martha is the central observer.
“Rather than attend to the qualities of time’s regimentation through processes that are outside of myself and uncontrolled by me, I decided to attend to the qualities of time that exist outside of capital.”
SH Right. Do you want to say more about The Blue Clerk’s relationship to Salvage?
DB Over the course of the last many years, I’ve been thinking about what it is to write fully, to be fully in the world against all kinds of economies—the economies of publishing, the economies of writing, all these economies that we are inundated with now because all life on the planet is economic. (laughter)
SH The financialization of everything.
DB Every square meter of air. (laughter)
So what is it to write fully? The Blue Clerk came out through the making of the essay for The Black Scholar and is an iteration of the persona of the clerk, someone who is outside of these regimes, who is a collector of what the author cannot say and write—what the author thinks. The blue clerk is both sharp and bitter and wants to be uninvolved in whatever economies—affective and financial—the author belongs in. I think it’s probably true for every black writer that the transactional economies of academic or commercial trade publishing put a capitalist weight on the writing itself, and that capitalist weight is commanded by the ideas of a ruling class, if you will. Old-fashioned phrase!
SH Soon that phrase will be outlawed in the States. (laughter)
DB It’s the ideas of the ruling class that are melded into these economies. They tell you what you can and cannot say. This year, we’ve had a full sense of that—Gaza, genocide. Anyway, The Blue Clerk came out of that, this archive of what the author cannot say. The blue clerk wants to make a different language.
SH The clerk is an unconscious recording surface marked by particular histories and the guardian of the archive. The Blue Clerk provides a history of the book, as it raises the question, What is the book? It is an excoriating and humorous view of the author as a totally compromised figure, an indulgent persona with the inclination to wax poetically and philosophically.
DB Yes. The author is totally compromised. She gets shut down by the clerk. (laughter)
SH Right. The author is forced to inhabit the structure of her contradictions. There is an added layer of self-reflexivity about the book. The what-is-the-book is articulated in the discussion of the pages, what happens on the verso as opposed to the recto, the fiction of an end, and the role of the index in organizing and disarranging what the reader has encountered. The index is also a point for reflecting on the history and social forces that produce the book, the conventions that discipline and constrain it, that silence the author, that repress the complexities of existing in this brutal world, that produce falsity in the guise of tidiness. The index solicits and plays with the reader and suggests there are multiple pathways of reading. This multiplicity produces the quality of openness.
DB And even the index is an index of what. The index probably has an index too. That book may not have ever ended. In fact, the ending of the book, in terms of pages, was a capitulation to the author. So the clerk provided an index that troubles the idea of indices, that leads astray rather than guides, and further she places a verso that seems a repetition of an already written verso after the index by way of suggesting that the collection of versos has not come to an end. If anyone were to have made the mistake of reading this book in a linear fashion—I mean, I don’t know how you would have—the clerk says, If you in any way read this in a linear fashion, then here’s the index, it’s in the back, read it this way.
SH It activates the book in a way that impedes linearity after the fact. That index reminds me of another book that you discuss in Salvage that we both very much appreciate—A History of Bombing by Sven Lindqvist. It’s very frustrating to read that book because it impedes forward movement. The reader is trapped in the recursive structures of coloniality and capitalism. You read ahead only to be sent back to the beginning or to another event, to a reversal or origin and its decisive consequences. The endless variations of death and destruction and extraction and accumulation. Lindqvist’s book is also a forensics of the European imagination.
DB Oh, you led me to that book, and it was wonderful. I agree. What Lindqvist and my conversation with you gave me was a confirmation about the work of texts and fictional narratives in the world. Specifically, the work of European fictional narratives and what the writing establishment obfuscates in those narratives, what worlds it ingests and reproduces as normal, as natural, and what passes it gives itself about that reproduction. These narratives talk about art and an unassailability of art qua art, when in fact, art is wedded to the reproduction of certain social and economic structures. The mere proposal of “character” or “scene” is taken for granted as an aesthetic practice when, in fact, that is not a given and we are often reproducing that world, even if not consciously. Now, you can do that innocently if you like, but some of us can’t. I can’t give myself the excuse of the aesthetic when I know how bound up it is with the social and the economic. It’s quite a deliberate act on my part how I reproduce the world, and I think that is the case for many black writers.
SHI want to close with one last big, ponderous question. I know it’s kind of impossible to answer, but: How does narrative or the novel figure in the destitution of the colonial world? What might it bring forward or yield?
DB (laughter)
SH Just a small, small question. (laughter)
DB I think that narrative structure has to be worked the way our actual living is worked through and against the structure of capital. It cannot reproduce the structure of capital, that is to say, capital’s given forms or even its experimentations. Our lives always exceed the bounds of capital. We’re not the benefactors of that narrative’s political structure nor its literary structure. We lie as inert in the literary as we do in the political structure. There can be so much dishonesty when we put pen to paper, too, because of the awareness of the narrative regime and ruling ideas of the present. It’s beside those ruling ideas that you start to pen a paragraph. So how do you plan the paragraph honestly? Can I make a model of how I move in the world with how I make words in the world? How do you affect the structure of writing with the structure of your life?
ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER:
Saidiya Hartman is the author of Scenes of Subjection, Lose Your Mother, and Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments. She received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2019 and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2022. She is a member of the Royal Society of Literature, a University Professor at Columbia University, and a contributing editor at BOMB.
fall 2024 issue
Dionne Brand by Saidiya Hartman
At once an autobiography of the reading self and a blistering critique of the “great works” of Anglophone literature, Brand’s latest book builds on her longstanding commitment to Black poesis.
September 16, 2024
Dionne Brand. Photo © Clea Christakos-Gee.
For five decades, Dionne Brand has explored the boundaries of form, writing at the intersection of poetics and critical thought. As she writes in “An Ars Poetica from the Blue Clerk” (2017), she has strived “to produce a grammar in which Black existence might be the thought and not the unthought,” pressing at the limits of poetry and prose to uncover the critical “possibilities for Black existence, for being in the diaspora.”
Brand is the author of twelve books of poetry, six works of fiction, and six works of nonfiction. Her latest book, Salvage: Readings from the Wreck, continues this exploration of black existence and formal innovation in an autobiography of the reading self, a personal history of “how a reader is made [and] unmade.” In this insightful meditation on her formation as a colonial subject, Brand attends to the instrumentality of the novel and the regime of the aesthetic in the project of empire. Engaging with history and form, politics and aesthetics, Salvage approaches the novel as colonial pedagogy. Through a series of close readings from Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko (1688) to J. M. Coetzee’s Foe (1986), Brand uses the “artifice” of the autobiographical, inhabiting the history of literature as an intimate chronicle of her life and world. A life can be “destroyed” by books, Brand observes: novels, steeped in the imperial episteme, aestheticize and efface the violence that has made and unmade the captive, the wretched, the blackened, and the colonized. A life also can be remade by books. In the work of Gwendolyn Brooks, Wilson Harris, Toni Morrison, and John Keene, Salvage unearths the capacity of narrative to render black life as that “which exceeds the wreck.”
For Brand, black poesis—as social practice and creative invention—has unfolded as a centuries-long refusal of the given and a ceaseless practice of transfiguration. The possibilities of language are inseparable from the imperative to decompose the narrative of nonbeing. Such concerns have guided her longstanding inquiry in poetics and fiction. Her work has endeavored to retrieve black life from the register of pathology by restoring the “synesthetic space of our living,” the fullness of the sensorium. The task of the writer, simply put, is to find an exit from “the collapsed world” of empire and the “coloniality of form.” Through her employment of verbless grammars and nomenclatures, inventories and forensics, Brand transforms language into an open assembly that yields the possibility of conceiving existence anew.
Read an excerpt from Salvage: Readings from the Wreck in our latest issue.
Saidiya Hartman Reading Salvage, I was struck by the resonance of a set of questions, both conceptual and thematic, across the body of your work. The wreckage of modernity, the coloniality of being, the oceanic, and the politics of language and literature are the tributaries from early works like Winter Epigrams & Epigrams to Ernesto Cardenal in Defense of Claudia, Ossuaries, and The Blue Clerk. In Salvage, you return to these questions, meditating on the “great works” of Anglophone literature ranging from Robinson Crusoe to Mansfield Park, stressing the violence of these works and the need to trespass this canon in narrating the lives of black people. You state that the task of the writer is to “retrieve a life in the register of the social,” to “convey the sensorium of blackness,” to blow “life into the collapsed world of coloniality.” What is the relationship of Salvage to the wreckage? As with “Ruttier for the Marooned in the Diaspora,” nautical and maritime metaphors are central to articulating dispossession and survival in the wake of the slavery and exile. Wreckage is articulated variously, as the wreckage of coloniality, the wreckage of modernity, the wreckage of the Enlightenment project, and the wreckage of the vessels that brought us to these shores. I would describe Salvage as a reparative work, because it does offer a set of formal responses for attending to the wreckage. As you write, “the salvage is the life which exceeds the wreck.”
Dionne Brand One thing that marks the works that I’ve produced is an excavation of us from this thing, from these sets of relations that constantly occlude, bind, bury, or actively or violently prevent a certain kind of living. I’m constantly digging through the detritus of coloniality, because all it leaves is detritus. It buries you in detritus. It locks you into the one-notedness of itself and the absolute boundaries that it sets for you. However, you exceed these boundaries constantly; have always exceeded them. And the part of you that is more than these boundaries notices its enclosures. You’re not simply bound in the enclosure; you notice the enclosures constantly, and you’re always more than them. When you see the narratives that attend or reinforce the repository of that relation, that hold coloniality’s intentions, you can’t help but sometimes be alarmed or find it hilarious that it seeks to bind you in the smallness of its ideas, and that its ideas are so limited. Nevertheless, one must engage in this kind of tedious business of excavation. Sometimes you find yourself trying to dig your way out of the bullshit, basically. And then sometimes you find yourself in the mood for recovering your humor and your intelligence from it.
SH The word enclosure is key. The forms of your work—the nomenclatures, ruttiers, verso pages, epigrams, maps, inventories—enact this breaking out and existing beyond epistemic, political, and aesthetic enclosure, that is, the conceptual prisons that make it impossible to imagine the world in any other terms except those given and imposed. Your work has been characterized by this sustained attention to form, a metadiscourse on form, and the writing experiments with method and genre to think beyond the given. In Salvage, you employ the term forensics. Could you say more about your method and the relation of excavation—digging through the detritus of coloniality—to forensics?
DB The use of the multiple genres or genre-crossing started innocently. I began as a poet and then thought, What can I do to add the internal mechanisms of poetry to prose? I always had a distrust of linearity and linear structure, and I felt that poetry was much more expansive, much more open to philosophical meanderings to describe a life that had been enclosed in racist description. Blackness in such narratives, benign or malignant, could only appear in a particular form—either as abject or contesting that abjectness in some always failing way.
What also became apparent was the capacity for these various forms to be an analytic lens. Within each particular analytic lens, I would then consider what else might be an instrument for contemplating or looking through this life—hence the use of forensics or the inventory or the nomenclature. I’d also look to the other affective instruments of black life—reggae, calypso, jazz—that allowed one to jump and move quickly across planes of understanding to come to certain conclusions, the ones that black people in America have always had to come to in order to save their lives. They had to make a leap, and it’s the same leap as a metaphoric leap, a really quick leap into another form or shape.
These analytics get used in the business of figuring out how to destroy the enclosure, escape the enclosure. I’m always thinking about what analytic tools one might array against hegemony. Even though the material conditions might hold you down, they’re not representative of the aesthetic or intellectual conditions. That was the play, the possibility, and the thinking going on in what I call the sensorium of being alive and black—improvisatory moves on the impulse of rescue, moves against the dangers of coloniality and imperialism. I would ask myself, How can I access the width and breadth of the sensorium?
“The type of being illustrated in a literary text is a reflection of the type of being that exists in the material world. That production is very much tied up and interested in the relations we live in.”
— Dionne Brand
SH Salvage is another elaboration of this analytic lens. Why now? I have an answer to this, but I don’t know if my answer would be the same as yours. In one respect, Salvage is a text that you have written across twenty-four books. The metacharacter of your work, as you have noted, always reflects on the very conditions of writing, the materiality and historicity of writing, the predisposition toward certain kinds of narratives and genres. In your poetry and prose, you never forget the literary as a mode of production or the aesthetic as a regime of power. That’s always there.
DB Tell me your answer! (laughter)
SH Well, important aspects of our intellectual formation are shared. One of those critical nodes is the Grenada Revolution. Another is the writing of Amílcar Cabral, the revolutionary leader and brilliant anti-colonial thinker from Guinea-Bissau. His speeches and essays were foundational to my thought, and his work appears as a critical intertext in your work too. Cabral’s beautiful lines appear across the corpus of your work, in the prose and the poetry. We also hear the prescience of Frantz Fanon’s words “our historic mission is to authorize every revolt, every desperate act” sounding again in your work. The last is the emergence of postcolonial studies: Salvage is in dialogue with Edward Said’s Culture and Imperialism and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s “Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism.” Ours is a different moment. We are in the wake of the postcolonial—the post no longer has critical purchase; we are all too aware that we exist in the stranglehold of coloniality.
Given this, the work of Salvage is not to educate us about the coloniality of the English canon but to think critically about the novel and narrative as the affective implements of empire. The “toxicity” of these foundational texts resides in the values and ideals, in the cultivation and transmission of taste. In short, the novel is sedimented with the history of slavery and empire, capitalism and dispossession. So what does it mean, as readers, to take in the world in this form? In Salvage, you reckon with the imperial narratives that have formed you and damaged you. A life animated by books is something that everyone may understand, but a life destroyed by books is the more complex, contradictory, mysterious proposition. You aptly note, books can animate and destroy you. I believe the note to writers is: Beware of the forms we have inherited. Other kinds of narratives also exist. Your readings of C. L. R. James and Gwendolyn Brooks and Wilson Harris and John Keene illuminate these other ways of writing and conceiving the world. Salvage offers a genealogy of reading, a forensics of the novel, and an interrogation of the building blocks of narration. That’s how I would answer it, but how would you?
DB What are those building blocks of narrative and how are they sedimented in the ways we write and therefore the ways we think? What is in attendance presently is a revanchism of imperialism, of raw, ugly racism that is boldly at the surface of European- and American-driven politics. The incredibly robust and violent resurgence of this narrative seemed to say something about the aliveness of that narrative, that it can still summon young, middle-aged, and old people of European descent. That, to me, was a sign that those ideas had not been destroyed entirely or had not been thrown completely into the cesspit of history. Within the elaborations of governing and living, they’ve been allowed to survive. So many scholars—including, as you’ve noted, Said and Spivak—have thrown an incredible amount of energy against them. But liberal democracy maintained their viability, even in the very ways in which we attack them. Which is to say that, to some degree, we still accepted them as credible, as aesthetically pleasing. These texts remain as part of the beautiful when they are, in fact, not beautiful at all. They are full of slavery, full of exploitation. Slavery and exploitation are on the bare skin of them.
The argument is often made that we are not in these texts—but we are in the texts. We are not excluded. In Salvage, I’m not talking about being excluded, I’m really concerned with how I’m included. The ways in which we were included are very much on the surface of the page. In William Makepeace Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, the person who opens the novel is a black man named Sambo, but we do not get the chance to look at him except through how he is located abjectly in that society as a joke. In Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, how does Mansfield Park come about? How does it exist? There’s this reglorification of those texts in a lot of Netflix shows, in new variations of nineteenth century texts with black people in them as main characters. Well, black people were always in Mansfield Park as slaves in Antigua. What if we were to begin there, rather than some call for inclusion?
I’m rereading these texts with the hope of abandoning them as aesthetic objects. When these texts were written, they were done so self-consciously as colonial objects. If they were being made as aesthetic objects, they were for the European bourgeoisie. In fact, these texts were created and encouraged because they told readers about the wonderful life that slave-owning, the eradication of Indigenous peoples, and violence allowed.
SH I really like that formulation: to reread these texts with the hope of abandoning them as aesthetic objects. Salvage clearly articulates the ways in which a colonial project, a settler project, even when it does not announce itself explicitly and politically, finds refuge in the categories of the aesthetic and the beautiful. Here the role of the novel is critical. You also look at the regimes of cognition and perception, taste and sensibility that produce the subject and fashion the human. You build on Sylvia Wynter’s essay “Novel and History, Plot and Plantation” and Simon Gikandi’s Slavery and the Culture of Taste, which brilliantly articulate the connective tissue between slavery’s regime of production and the cultivation of subjectivity and discernment. What does it mean that the taxonomy of values that undergirded racial slavery provides the compass for many of the texts upheld as great literary achievements?
DB These texts are followed. They existed then and exist now as examples of what to do. They are instructional. Whatever writer is writing in this moment, that’s the genealogy they follow for how to produce a novel—what shape to put them in, how to produce character, what a character might be—and often without paying any attention to the ideas they are reproducing. This isn’t without consequence, because the material conditions we live in are also being reproduced through literary texts. The type of being illustrated in a literary text is a reflection of the type of being that exists in the material world. That production is very much tied up and interested in the relations we live in.
SH Salvage brings to mind Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark, where she explored “American Africanism,” the structuring presence and absence of an Africanist persona in the shaping of US literature, and the myriad uses of this fabricated entity. In your engagement, it is the colonial other who gives shape and meaning to British self- fashioning. The forensics, the analysis and excavation undertaken, is not about the project of inclusion, which desires to step into that same regime of the subject and achieve recognition and visibility in identical terms. Bridgerton is an easy example. If there is an adjustment or shift in this colonial regime of representation, it is in the expanded hues of its cast, but all that it promises is the endless reproduction of the same. It’s the nightmare of inclusion: Yes, black and brown actors can extend and reanimate the imperial text, can resurrect aristocrats and slaveholders, endowing them with a new life. This is happening in the political field too.
DB Yeah. This is making me depressed. I mean, not that I’m not already. (laughter)
SH In Salvage, you write that the autobiography identifies “the subject who is supposed to be made, through colonial pedagogies in the form of texts—fiction, non-fiction, poetry, photographs, governmental and bureaucratic structures.” I want to ask about the relation between autobiography and the photograph, specifically the photograph taken when you were about four years old with your sisters and your cousin. This photograph is taken in the studio of Mr. Wong, and it is to be sent to your mother and your aunt who are becoming nurses in England. You describe the novel and the photograph as regimes of capture. At the same time, the photograph is very central to the autobiographical enactment of Salvage. It allows you to think about yourself in the third person, specifically the ways the autobiographical fabricates a person. Implicitly, you suggest the portrait is not a likeness, it is and is not you, but a decisive moment in the making of the colonial subject and an opening onto the structuring narratives that will determine your life. Yet it is also an opening and a way of upending ways of knowing and understanding things and negating particular scripts of the self. The frame registers a small resistance.
In a much earlier poem, “Blues Spiritual for Mammy Prater” in No Language is Neutral, you describe a photograph of Mammy Prater at 115 years old. In the poem, you write that she has been waiting for and anticipating the technology that might capture her. Can you describe your use of photographs in building the structure of Salvage? What is the place of the photograph as a capture and framing of life and sensory experience, as a placement of a subject in an order, a vertical scale of valued and devalued life?
“…the photograph or transaction cannot quite capture what they might be. It only captures what they are in a certain relation.”
— Dionne Brand
DB You know, I’m not a visual artist nor a critic of visual art. But I’m taken by photographs and what they hold. In that early poem, what jumped out at me was how Mammy Prater’s figure in the photograph exuded a weight and patience, a knowledge about a future time when something might be recognized in the photograph. The poem talks about how she waited for her century to turn, until the technology of photography was ready to capture this something. It seemed to me that the statement she conveyed through the photograph was waiting to be understood by us in much later years. It could be understood in her time, but not sufficiently—not in in a way that could repay that pose. Only in the future could that pose be repaid by an understanding of what it took to sit there and be there.
In the case of Salvage, the photograph of the young girls—of me, my sisters, and my cousin—is a document of coloniality. It’s also a personal document and a passport to someplace else. It was made to be sent across the Atlantic to repay the sacrifices of the women who would receive it, women who were themselves transported in those same ships to be in service to England. And all of their knowledge about England had to be transported back, whether that would be in the form of money, experience, or the hope of return or the hope of our going. The photograph is an object of that traversal across the Atlantic.
SH It’s involved in the circulation of affect, of longing, of disappointment, of regret. But it seems that it’s also more than a document. The photograph might be able to push back against the narrative that encloses it. There’s a beautiful line: “She does not yet understand (but maybe she glimpses) the full-on violence of narrative. She is trying to be … to find the new medium.” The girl in the photograph is looking for a new medium.
DB Yes, the girls in the photograph are still not fully made; the photograph or transaction cannot quite capture what they might be. It only captures what they are in a certain relation. Their various attentions to the photographer and to things outside of the photograph give a small indication, perhaps, of discomfort with or anticipation of what is outside of the photograph.
What’s happening outside the making of that photograph is also anti-colonial struggle. That photograph is taken after Eric Williams writes Capitalism and Slavery and after his return to Trinidad. C. L. R. James had already written Minty Alley, but the girls in the photograph don’t know that yet.
So much is going on outside of the photograph—people are alive, other relations are being built. The British Empire might have a hold over the photograph and, to some extent, the girls in the photograph and the photograph’s recipients, but there is great foment outside of the photograph.
SH Toward the end of the book, you describe the beautiful blur the girls’ movement inside the photograph produces. This movement becomes a key point for thinking about what’s not arrested by the frame, as does Roy DeCarava’s the sound i saw, a beautiful example of “the synesthetic space of our living.” I deeply appreciate your approach to history, your critique of history, your creation of counter-histories, all of which are enabled by multiple registers of time. Your historical enactments are so rich because time itself is opened, sedimented, and marked by what has happened and what we don’t yet know. In Ossuaries, this temporal entanglement is about the last days of a current time, a future time, and a possible time. You’ve noted that your compositions, whether poetry, prose poems, or novels, are made up of more than what can be contained in a particular cultural or historical moment. In this respect, there is a meditation on the document and the archive, though not in any literal or direct way, precisely because of the temporal sensibility that’s at stake in the work.
DB I just think that time is always going on, in its frayedness. One only attaches a set of signposts—like one o’clock, three o’clock, whatever— depending on one’s interests, right? And those signposts are limited by the aspirations of the time master. But I’ve had to think about time differently to escape that arbitrariness or the regimen of it. As I see it, life escapes that regimentation all the time. It’s not in my interest or in the interest of black people to observe that regimentation—except as cautionary— because so much of what we live happens outside of that kind of time. Again, it’s a question of linearity and nonlinearity. Rather than attend to the qualities of time’s regimentation through processes that are outside of myself and uncontrolled by me, I decided to attend to the qualities of time that exist outside of capital.
In my novel At the Full and Change of the Moon, Kamena has to find his way back to a marronage, but he cannot recall how he got there the first time. This is because he got there the first time through attending to other emotions, other senses of apprehension. He listened for sounds, how his body felt. There was no wayfinding other than through those qualities of observation. That is time too. In some ways, he never finds his way back. The world isn’t linear; he doesn’t need to find his way there in order to find a plot to grow something, to make money, to have transactions with other human beings. He just needs to find his way there toward freedom. In this regard, time is about using certain perceptions to come to what one wants to be, what one desires. If we were to rely on the parameters of capital time to do that, we’d be nothing. One has to exist in the time outside of capital in order to observe oneself and capital—its actions in the world and how much it squeezes out.
SH It’s precisely in these seemingly disposable lifetimes outside capitalist accumulation and representation where possibility unfolds, where one gets closer to freedom or a happening. Certainly, with regard to Kamena and marronage, you don’t feel that there is a distinct place or territory of marronage. One experiences it as another dimension, as a different bundle of sense and perception. It feels like an interface of worlds as opposed to directional or spatial.
DB It isn’t particularly spiritual, either. When Kamena arrives at the marronage the first time, it is rescue and relief from the violence of accumulation. He is no longer a commodity. This is an entirely different set of relations. And so, it’s always this question: What is it I would be? Or what is it that I am?
SH What have I forgotten that I knew, so I can be there again? That’s the “full,” the return, the recursive character of it.
DB And so he always comes back to Culebra, the ghostly place with the disintegrated nuns, and he asks Bola, “Hold this for me.” What he tells her, as instructions to find the marronage, is completely useless in linear time. His directions are like this: When you hear a leaf fall in the middle of the center of a forest and hear three birds and the flap of a wing. It’s nothing within the regime of the usable, which compresses and makes small all of our perceptions and observations.
SH You attend to the toxins that are a part of the imperial narrative regime and the violence of linear narrative in Salvage, but you also address other possibilities for narrating black life through reflections on the writing of Harris, Brooks, James, and others. Can there be a narrativization of black life that’s not a reinscription of the enclosure or a refashioning of the master narrative?
DB Brooks’s novel Maud Martha is the most beautiful thing. You find this being, this narrator, who doesn’t allow the regime of narration that would enclose her to take over the story and determine how one narrates a black life. She sits in the story, that small, perfect novel, and just lives.
SH In Salvage, you say, beautifully, that Maud Martha is an example “of a narrative attending to its own expression, attending to describing its consciousness” and “unimpeded by the demand to locate itself adjacent to a spectator who wishes to dislocate that consciousness or make it inanimate and tangential.” It’s as if Maud Martha is operating in the paradoxical space of giving an account of oneself when it is impossible to give an account of the sort of self that I am.
DB Yes. You find it in every paragraph. It’s not ignoring the location that character finds herself in, but offering a description that doesn’t center the location. Maud Martha doesn’t locate herself there; she is located. She makes her own description of the world she lives in, not attending to reinscribing that as location at all. The spaces in Brooks’s language don’t bind Maud Martha to that placement. Maud Martha is the central observer.
“Rather than attend to the qualities of time’s regimentation through processes that are outside of myself and uncontrolled by me, I decided to attend to the qualities of time that exist outside of capital.”
— Dionne Brand
SH Right. Do you want to say more about The Blue Clerk’s relationship to Salvage?
DB Over the course of the last many years, I’ve been thinking about what it is to write fully, to be fully in the world against all kinds of economies—the economies of publishing, the economies of writing, all these economies that we are inundated with now because all life on the planet is economic. (laughter)
SH The financialization of everything.
DB Every square meter of air. (laughter)
So what is it to write fully? The Blue Clerk came out through the making of the essay for The Black Scholar and is an iteration of the persona of the clerk, someone who is outside of these regimes, who is a collector of what the author cannot say and write—what the author thinks. The blue clerk is both sharp and bitter and wants to be uninvolved in whatever economies—affective and financial—the author belongs in. I think it’s probably true for every black writer that the transactional economies of academic or commercial trade publishing put a capitalist weight on the writing itself, and that capitalist weight is commanded by the ideas of a ruling class, if you will. Old-fashioned phrase!
SH Soon that phrase will be outlawed in the States. (laughter)
DB It’s the ideas of the ruling class that are melded into these economies. They tell you what you can and cannot say. This year, we’ve had a full sense of that—Gaza, genocide. Anyway, The Blue Clerk came out of that, this archive of what the author cannot say. The blue clerk wants to make a different language.
SH The clerk is an unconscious recording surface marked by particular histories and the guardian of the archive. The Blue Clerk provides a history of the book, as it raises the question, What is the book? It is an excoriating and humorous view of the author as a totally compromised figure, an indulgent persona with the inclination to wax poetically and philosophically.
DB Yes. The author is totally compromised. She gets shut down by the clerk. (laughter)
SH Right. The author is forced to inhabit the structure of her contradictions. There is an added layer of self-reflexivity about the book. The what-is-the-book is articulated in the discussion of the pages, what happens on the verso as opposed to the recto, the fiction of an end, and the role of the index in organizing and disarranging what the reader has encountered. The index is also a point for reflecting on the history and social forces that produce the book, the conventions that discipline and constrain it, that silence the author, that repress the complexities of existing in this brutal world, that produce falsity in the guise of tidiness. The index solicits and plays with the reader and suggests there are multiple pathways of reading. This multiplicity produces the quality of openness.
DB And even the index is an index of what. The index probably has an index too. That book may not have ever ended. In fact, the ending of the book, in terms of pages, was a capitulation to the author. So the clerk provided an index that troubles the idea of indices, that leads astray rather than guides, and further she places a verso that seems a repetition of an already written verso after the index by way of suggesting that the collection of versos has not come to an end. If anyone were to have made the mistake of reading this book in a linear fashion—I mean, I don’t know how you would have—the clerk says, If you in any way read this in a linear fashion, then here’s the index, it’s in the back, read it this way.
SH It activates the book in a way that impedes linearity after the fact. That index reminds me of another book that you discuss in Salvage that we both very much appreciate—A History of Bombing by Sven Lindqvist. It’s very frustrating to read that book because it impedes forward movement. The reader is trapped in the recursive structures of coloniality and capitalism. You read ahead only to be sent back to the beginning or to another event, to a reversal or origin and its decisive consequences. The endless variations of death and destruction and extraction and accumulation. Lindqvist’s book is also a forensics of the European imagination.
DB Oh, you led me to that book, and it was wonderful. I agree. What Lindqvist and my conversation with you gave me was a confirmation about the work of texts and fictional narratives in the world. Specifically, the work of European fictional narratives and what the writing establishment obfuscates in those narratives, what worlds it ingests and reproduces as normal, as natural, and what passes it gives itself about that reproduction. These narratives talk about art and an unassailability of art qua art, when in fact, art is wedded to the reproduction of certain social and economic structures. The mere proposal of “character” or “scene” is taken for granted as an aesthetic practice when, in fact, that is not a given and we are often reproducing that world, even if not consciously. Now, you can do that innocently if you like, but some of us can’t. I can’t give myself the excuse of the aesthetic when I know how bound up it is with the social and the economic. It’s quite a deliberate act on my part how I reproduce the world, and I think that is the case for many black writers.
SHI want to close with one last big, ponderous question. I know it’s kind of impossible to answer, but: How does narrative or the novel figure in the destitution of the colonial world? What might it bring forward or yield?
DB (laughter)
SH Just a small, small question. (laughter)
DB I think that narrative structure has to be worked the way our actual living is worked through and against the structure of capital. It cannot reproduce the structure of capital, that is to say, capital’s given forms or even its experimentations. Our lives always exceed the bounds of capital. We’re not the benefactors of that narrative’s political structure nor its literary structure. We lie as inert in the literary as we do in the political structure. There can be so much dishonesty when we put pen to paper, too, because of the awareness of the narrative regime and ruling ideas of the present. It’s beside those ruling ideas that you start to pen a paragraph. So how do you plan the paragraph honestly? Can I make a model of how I move in the world with how I make words in the world? How do you affect the structure of writing with the structure of your life?
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Dionne Brand is the author of numerous volumes of fiction, poetry, and nonfiction. Her latest poetry collection, Nomenclature: New and Collected Poems,
won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Poetry. Her other collections
have won the Griffin Poetry Prize, the Governor General's Literary
Award, and the Trillium Book Award. Her works of nonfiction include Bread Out of Stone and A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging.
From 2009 to 2012 she served as Toronto's poet laureate, and in 2021
she was awarded a Windham-Campbell Prize for Fiction. She lives in
Toronto.
ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER:
Saidiya Hartman is the author of Scenes of Subjection, Lose Your Mother, and Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments. She received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2019 and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2022. She is a member of the Royal Society of Literature, a University Professor at Columbia University, and a contributing editor at BOMB.
