writersreadconcordia poetry, prose, reading, Uncategorized

Dionne Brand / Friday / 7pm

On Friday March 4th, Writers Read is pleased to host an evening with the renowned poet, novelist, and essayist, Dionne Brand. For Montreal, this is a once in a decade or perhaps even a once in a lifetime opportunity to be in the room with Brand, listening to her read and discuss her work.

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Dionne Brand’s writing is notable for the beauty of its language, and for its intense engagement with issues of social justice, including particularly issues of gender and race. Dionne Brand has published eighteen books, contributed to seventeen anthologies, written dozens of essays and articles, and made four documentary films for the National Film Board (Canadian Poetry Online). She has won several awards for her writing including the Governor General’s Award and The Griffin Poetry Prize. She is currently a Professor of English at the University of Guelph. Her most recent novel is Love Enough, which is set in Toronto.

In her new novel, Brand explores the enigmas of intimacy, which, like language, do not exist on neutral ground. Through the interconnected stories of four characters – June, Bedri, Da’uud, and Lia – [Brand] imagines the city of Toronto as a setting for pain, heartbreak, disappointment, and fear. –Quill & Quire

 

Dionne Brand will read at 7pm on March 4th 2016, at the York Amphitheatre (EV 1.605, 1515 St. Catherine Street W., Concordia University). This event is free and open to the public.

 

writersreadconcordia reading, Uncategorized

Dionne Brand in Montreal

It’s true. We have been waiting years, maybe a decade, maybe a lifetime, and the date has finally be confirmed. Dionne Brand will join us for a reading and discussion in Montreal at Concordia University.

WR_DionneBrand_info
Dionne Brand is a renowned poet, novelist, and essayist. Her writing is notable for the beauty of its language, and for its intense engagement with issues of social justice, including particularly issues of gender and race. Dionne Brand has published eighteen books, contributed to seventeen anthologies, written dozens of essays and articles, and made four documentary films for the National Film Board. Her latest novel is “Love Enough.”

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The Co-op Boostore will be joining us with copies of Dionne Brand’s books

coopbookstore

The Concordia Community Solidarity Co-op Bookstore is pleased to offer a viable alternative to the corporate structure, putting students’ best interests above and beyond our own bottom line. As a not-for-profit alternative to corporate bookstores, we are conveniently located right on Concordia’s downtown campus at 2150 Bishop Street in Montreal. Offering both new and used books, in addition to a wide variety of artisan consignments, we also boast the largest selection of sex and gender studies titles anywhere in Montreal.

writersreadconcordia poetry, prose, text

Lisa Robertson on Dionne Brand (2001/2013/2016)

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In another place, not here, a woman might touch
something between beauty and nowhere, back there
and here, might pass hand over hand her own
trembling life, but I have tried to imagine a sea not
bleeding, a girl’s glance full as a verse, a woman
growing old and never crying to a radio hissing of a
black boy’s murder. I have tried to keep my throat
gurgling like a bird’s. I have listened to the hard
gossip of race that inhabits this road. Even in this I
have tried to hum mud and feathers and sit peacefully
in this foliage of bones and rain. I have chewed a few
votive leaves here, their taste already disenchanting
my mothers. I have tried to write this thing calmly
even as its lines burn to a close. I have come to know
something simple. Each sentence realised or
dreamed jumps like a pulse with history and takes a
side. What I say in any language is told in faultless
knowledge of skin, in drunkenness and weeping,
told as a woman without matches and tinder, not in
words and in words and in words learned by heart,
told in secret and not in secret, and listen, does not
burn out or waste and is plenty and pitiless and loves.

from No Language is Neutral, Dionne Brand, (McClelland & Stewart)

How is it possible to inhabit a political environment that absolves itself of the responsibility to sustain life? For those constrained to the economic and racial margins, finding paths through a city or a language has always been a political act. This poem charts such fragile paths.

Here is language that honours the ethical impossibility of achieving a single position, and the necessarily vulnerable climate of that impossibility. In the face of irreparable injustice, the poem calls on the fragile dignity of the skin and the body, the fragility of the continuous present.

The title cites a line from Caribbean poet Derek Walcott’s Midsummer. Elsewhere, in his 1992 Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Walcott reminded: “The history of the world, by which of course we mean Europe, is a record of intertribal lacerations, of ethnic cleansings.” In such a world, “spiritual stubbornness, a sublime stupidity, is what makes the occupation of poetry endure, when there are so many things that should make it futile.” Dionne Brand is blessed with such spiritual stubbornness. Against the reductive and decisive expletives of mass-media language, her lines are thick, layered, and multivocal. They act out the self-interrogating dialectic of the dramatic soliloquy, rather than the symbolic clarity of the visual image. Like a soliloquy, they demand that we slow and extend the rhythm of our listening. There is no aesthetic consolation, no softening of the “hard gossip.” These lines ask us to enter into irreducible complexity as a form of attention.

Formally, that complexity expresses itself by pushing grammar beyond simple closure. From the fundamentally unstable ground “between beauty and nowhere,” “back there and here,” Brand crafts a descriptive density. Ambivalence flickers through it like a pulse. It negates as it names: “not here,” “not bleeding,” “never crying,” “not in words.” Out of this staccato negation, it forges the burning rhythm of the will to continue. But for Brand the will is not an accretion of power focused and exercised upon the other. Rather it quickens the register and resolve of perception as a meditative engagement with the world. Like “a girl’s glance” it gives the world its serious gorgeousness. And it shows the world as an irrevocable braiding of the sensual and the historical, a braiding repeated in the poem’s own stuttering patterns – “not in words and in words and in words learned by heart.”

“Each sentence realised or / dreamed jumps like a pulse with history and takes a / side,” Brand writes. What side, then, do her sentences take? The side that, in order to live, must continuously reverse and thus witness itself, like a breath, or a spinning coin. That willful recognition of fragility is resistance.

–Lisa Robertson

Originally published in the How Poems Work series in the Globe & Mail, September 22, 2001
poem from Brand, Dionne. No Language is Neutral, Coach House, 1990