John Mitchinson’s

Zeitgeisters

Profiles of the people whose ideas are helping to shape the future

DIONNE
BRAND

Poet & Novelist

These are difficult times. The sense of being engulfed by a history one can’t control. The mounting atrocities of genocide and war. The sense of us sleepwalking into an irreversible natural catastrophe. The background throb of anxiety and dread. Behind this, too, is the intimation that our online lives are making things worse not better, flattening out the discourse rather than enriching it, polarising us in ways that undermine the very sense of agency it claims to foster.

It is often at these times of confusion and mental blockage that the universe seems to show a path forward and, for me, that has been the discovery of the work of Dionne Brand, a truly great and vital poet who, though she lives in Canada and was born on the Caribbean island of Trinidad, has spent her whole life in defiance of the narrow identifications of nationhood.

Brand is a poet of the black diaspora, now in her seventies. Reading her is to be forcibly reminded that our reality is constructed in, and through, language – and that it is in language that the real work of understanding begins.

Where to Start?

Dionne Brand has written more than 20 books of poetry, and six novels, won a plethora of awards, and was Toronto’s Poet Laureate from 2009 to 2012. She is also the author of a work of unclassifiable and gently incendiary non-fiction, A Map to the Door of No Return. That is where I would start, as it gives you a deep insight into her concerns and approach before plunging into the verse itself.