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Where Is Here: Review of In Another Place, Not Here

Author: Dionne Brand
Category: Fiction
Format: Trade Paperback, 256 pages
Publisher: Vintage Canada
Pub. Date: April 29, 1997


In The Bush Garden: Essays on the Canadian Imagination, Canadian literary critic Northrop Frye reminds us that in Canadian consciousness, the question of “who am I?” is always deeply rooted in the question “where is here?” This has been the very question that has haunted Caribbean-Canadian poet Dionne Brand since her emigration to Canada in 1970, and she has always felt incongruous and out of place.

Dionne Brand, who has written several highly acclaimed volumes of poetry, was born in Trinidad and has lived in Canada since 1970, and she explores the socio-political and psychological transit between the Caribbean and Canada and, in the process, she gives expression to the complicated negotiations of those whose interior landscapes encompass both island and continent. For Brand, the socio-political and historic are essential ingredients in aesthetic expression. As Himani Bannerji remarks, “to read [Brand’s] poetry is to read not only about her but also about her people, her identification with their struggles both in the metropolis of Canada and the hinterland of the Caribbean.”

In 1996 Brand published her first novel entitled In Another Place, Not Here. The work is arranged around the interlocking stories of Elizete and Verlia, and it tellingly articulates a counternarrative of the Promised Land of the Canadian nation, the crux of which is that “here” for Afro-Caribbean immigrant women is simultaneously a “not here” but “another place.” I believe Bannerji’s remark can fully apply to her amazing first novel. The complexities and ambiguities of belonging saturate the poetic prose of the novel, which, through a rhythmic repetition of words and phrases, interweaves the past, present, and future desires of Elizete and Verlia with notions of belonging in both the Caribbean and Canada.

Brand draws upon her own Trinidadian background in depicting Elizete, a sugarcane cutter on an unnamed Caribbean island, and her developing romance with Verlia, a Marxist Canadian labour organizer. Verlia, too, is partly reflective of Brand's own experiences of immigration and social activism. The novel consists of two parts. The first part follows Elizete as she falls in love with the revolutionary Verlia. It begins in St. Vincent with her first memory of Verlia as Elizete looks up from cutting cane on the plantation where she works and that Verlia, a left-wing revolutionary, has come to reform into a cooperative. The two women become lovers and remain so until Verlia's death during the American bombing of the island, an event that characterizes it as Grenada although it is unnamed in the novel. The narrative then abruptly switches to Elizete in Toronto, where she has gone to find Abena, Verlia's former lover and fellow activist, to share with her the pain of Verlia's death. The second part recounts, in a more direct fashion, the life of Verlia. She immigrates briefly to Sudbury at the age of seventeen, then settles in Toronto to join the Movement, and finally she returns to the Caribbean to participate in the revolution. She returns to the Caribbean after fifteen years, although not to her home country, where she works as a socialist revolutionary on the Oliviere plantation and where she meets and falls in love with Elizete. The novel ends with Verlia leaping away from the sound of American guns over the edge of a cliff and into "another place" that is "not here"--a place that is "less tortuous, less fleshy."

Brand's first novel encompasses the colonial and postcolonial history of slavery and its consequences, and it articulates the anguish of oppression that white bosses perpetrate upon Afro-Caribbean domestic workers as well as the liberation of one of the women, who comes to terms with her lesbianism. Throughout the story, Brand employs a variety of fictional techniques such as moving from settings in the Caribbean to Toronto and back again, focalized through two distinct female protagonists, alternating between first and third person narration, using language that combines a lush participial Caribbean island language and a standard English idiom, and travelling back and forth in time and space and memory; she skilfully plays off the themes of home and exile and she further complicates dichotomies of race and gender with the issues of sexuality and class.

In Elizete, Brand offers us a character whose most urgent need is to acquire the words to describe the place in which she finds herself, as a means of claiming and then making her history. As a child, Elizete was given away by her family to be raised by a mean-spirited woman whose ancestor, Adela, was forcibly brought to the island from Africa. Adela was ''grieving bad for where she came from,'' Elizete recalls. In despair and protest, Adela refused to learn the names of the plants around her, or even to name her own children. She called the island “Nowhere.”

Both countering and appropriating Adela's history, Elizete invents a private language for the world she observes: ''tear up cloth flowers, stinking fruit tree, draw blood bush, monkey face flowers.'' When she arrives in Toronto, Elizete confronts another "nowhere" that she, too, cannot see clearly. Brand vividly conveys the impression of the city's wide streets and malls floating just out of reach for Elizete.

By contrast, Verlia had embraced Toronto years earlier as the place where she would re-create herself. Politics -- the black power movement of the 1970's -- became her means of reinvention and also a way to slough off the weight of historical and familial suffering. Her yearning to transform herself is partly an attempt to escape a legacy of grief and fear. Although her impulse toward flight will ultimately betray her, Verlia persists with stubborn resourcefulness in her attempts to articulate her world, even as she lives on in Toronto with the sense that there is another place -- no here, no home.

The heightened marginalization of Elizete and Verlia as women and lesbians means that they embody traumas that afflict the Caribbean immigrant psyche in general. Haitian Canadian critic Myriam Chancey argues that Canada's history of denial and erasure has affected "Black women in particular"; both their . and their colour exclude them from a world that defines itself as white and male. Because they are “Black and [have] nothing hanging between ... [their] legs,” Afro-Caribbean immigrant women exist as a subclass of the working class; they are a class unto themselves that Western societies “openly violate and denigrate.” The history of their coming here is one of exploitation, of serving in the homes of moneyed whites where it is understood that they have no right to speak. Abena's account of her mother's self-hatred testifies to the diminishment of these women, especially at the hands of white people, “whose toilets they had cleaned, whose asses they had wiped, whose kitchens they had scrubbed, whose hatred they had swallowed.”

Never feeling at home becomes a metaphor for not knowing who you are. Canada, specifically, is a not-home for the Caribbean immigrant. For Elizete and Verlia, home and belonging are deferred throughout the novel; they repeatedly desire to be someplace else. The sense of being “in another place, not here,” evokes desires for a better place; life is not manageable here, but it would be “in another place.”

Passionate in its attention to emotional nuance and visual detail, In Another Place, Not Here devotes itself to the problems women from the Caribbean encounter in Toronto's closed society. Brand explores the extent to which body is related to place through the novel's Elizete and Verlia, whose colour, gender, and lesbianism make the concepts of "home" and "here" problematic because her “home’ and “here” are necessarily mediated, provisional, evanescent – in a word, “unlocatable”. Her exploration of different notions of location, of what it means to be “here” and to write about “there” complicates a politics of location, and it takes the Canadian readers back to Fyre’s famously queried question again “where is here?” and further challenges them to give it a second thought.
_________________
Time is nothing but a disquiet of the soul

[[ericcoliu]]

Where Is Here: Review of In Another Place, Not Here

Author: Dionne Brand
Category: Fiction
Format: Trade Paperback, 256 pages
Publisher: Vintage Canada
Pub. Date: April 29, 1997


In The Bush Garden: Essays on the Canadian Imagination, Canadian literary critic Northrop Frye reminds us that in Canadian consciousness, the question of “who am I?” is always deeply rooted in the question “where is here?” This has been the very question that has haunted Caribbean-Canadian poet Dionne Brand since her emigration to Canada in 1970, and she has always felt incongruous and out of place.

Dionne Brand, who has written several highly acclaimed volumes of poetry, was born in Trinidad and has lived in Canada since 1970, and she explores the socio-political and psychological transit between the Caribbean and Canada and, in the process, she gives expression to the complicated negotiations of those whose interior landscapes encompass both island and continent. For Brand, the socio-political and historic are essential ingredients in aesthetic expression. As Himani Bannerji remarks, “to read [Brand’s] poetry is to read not only about her but also about her people, her identification with their struggles both in the metropolis of Canada and the hinterland of the Caribbean.”

In 1996 Brand published her first novel entitled In Another Place, Not Here. The work is arranged around the interlocking stories of Elizete and Verlia, and it tellingly articulates a counternarrative of the Promised Land of the Canadian nation, the crux of which is that “here” for Afro-Caribbean immigrant women is simultaneously a “not here” but “another place.” I believe Bannerji’s remark can fully apply to her amazing first novel. The complexities and ambiguities of belonging saturate the poetic prose of the novel, which, through a rhythmic repetition of words and phrases, interweaves the past, present, and future desires of Elizete and Verlia with notions of belonging in both the Caribbean and Canada.

Brand draws upon her own Trinidadian background in depicting Elizete, a sugarcane cutter on an unnamed Caribbean island, and her developing romance with Verlia, a Marxist Canadian labour organizer. Verlia, too, is partly reflective of Brand's own experiences of immigration and social activism. The novel consists of two parts. The first part follows Elizete as she falls in love with the revolutionary Verlia. It begins in St. Vincent with her first memory of Verlia as Elizete looks up from cutting cane on the plantation where she works and that Verlia, a left-wing revolutionary, has come to reform into a cooperative. The two women become lovers and remain so until Verlia's death during the American bombing of the island, an event that characterizes it as Grenada although it is unnamed in the novel. The narrative then abruptly switches to Elizete in Toronto, where she has gone to find Abena, Verlia's former lover and fellow activist, to share with her the pain of Verlia's death. The second part recounts, in a more direct fashion, the life of Verlia. She immigrates briefly to Sudbury at the age of seventeen, then settles in Toronto to join the Movement, and finally she returns to the Caribbean to participate in the revolution. She returns to the Caribbean after fifteen years, although not to her home country, where she works as a socialist revolutionary on the Oliviere plantation and where she meets and falls in love with Elizete. The novel ends with Verlia leaping away from the sound of American guns over the edge of a cliff and into "another place" that is "not here"--a place that is "less tortuous, less fleshy."

Brand's first novel encompasses the colonial and postcolonial history of slavery and its consequences, and it articulates the anguish of oppression that white bosses perpetrate upon Afro-Caribbean domestic workers as well as the liberation of one of the women, who comes to terms with her lesbianism. Throughout the story, Brand employs a variety of fictional techniques such as moving from settings in the Caribbean to Toronto and back again, focalized through two distinct female protagonists, alternating between first and third person narration, using language that combines a lush participial Caribbean island language and a standard English idiom, and travelling back and forth in time and space and memory; she skilfully plays off the themes of home and exile and she further complicates dichotomies of race and gender with the issues of sexuality and class.

In Elizete, Brand offers us a character whose most urgent need is to acquire the words to describe the place in which she finds herself, as a means of claiming and then making her history. As a child, Elizete was given away by her family to be raised by a mean-spirited woman whose ancestor, Adela, was forcibly brought to the island from Africa. Adela was ''grieving bad for where she came from,'' Elizete recalls. In despair and protest, Adela refused to learn the names of the plants around her, or even to name her own children. She called the island “Nowhere.”

Both countering and appropriating Adela's history, Elizete invents a private language for the world she observes: ''tear up cloth flowers, stinking fruit tree, draw blood bush, monkey face flowers.'' When she arrives in Toronto, Elizete confronts another "nowhere" that she, too, cannot see clearly. Brand vividly conveys the impression of the city's wide streets and malls floating just out of reach for Elizete.

By contrast, Verlia had embraced Toronto years earlier as the place where she would re-create herself. Politics -- the black power movement of the 1970's -- became her means of reinvention and also a way to slough off the weight of historical and familial suffering. Her yearning to transform herself is partly an attempt to escape a legacy of grief and fear. Although her impulse toward flight will ultimately betray her, Verlia persists with stubborn resourcefulness in her attempts to articulate her world, even as she lives on in Toronto with the sense that there is another place -- no here, no home.

The heightened marginalization of Elizete and Verlia as women and lesbians means that they embody traumas that afflict the Caribbean immigrant psyche in general. Haitian Canadian critic Myriam Chancey argues that Canada's history of denial and erasure has affected "Black women in particular"; both their . and their colour exclude them from a world that defines itself as white and male. Because they are “Black and [have] nothing hanging between ... [their] legs,” Afro-Caribbean immigrant women exist as a subclass of the working class; they are a class unto themselves that Western societies “openly violate and denigrate.” The history of their coming here is one of exploitation, of serving in the homes of moneyed whites where it is understood that they have no right to speak. Abena's account of her mother's self-hatred testifies to the diminishment of these women, especially at the hands of white people, “whose toilets they had cleaned, whose asses they had wiped, whose kitchens they had scrubbed, whose hatred they had swallowed.”

Never feeling at home becomes a metaphor for not knowing who you are. Canada, specifically, is a not-home for the Caribbean immigrant. For Elizete and Verlia, home and belonging are deferred throughout the novel; they repeatedly desire to be someplace else. The sense of being “in another place, not here,” evokes desires for a better place; life is not manageable here, but it would be “in another place.”

Passionate in its attention to emotional nuance and visual detail, In Another Place, Not Here devotes itself to the problems women from the Caribbean encounter in Toronto's closed society. Brand explores the extent to which body is related to place through the novel's Elizete and Verlia, whose colour, gender, and lesbianism make the concepts of "home" and "here" problematic because her “home’ and “here” are necessarily mediated, provisional, evanescent – in a word, “unlocatable”. Her exploration of different notions of location, of what it means to be “here” and to write about “there” complicates a politics of location, and it takes the Canadian readers back to Fyre’s famously queried question again “where is here?” and further challenges them to give it a second thought.
_________________
Time is nothing but a disquiet of the soul

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