酷我-北美枫

[ericcoliu]

Poetry Review of No language Is Neutral Written by Dionne Brand*

Category: Poetry
Publisher: McClelland & Stewart
Format: Trade Paperback, 56 pages
Pub Date: October 1998
ISBN: 978-0-7710-1646-2

Poetry is here, just here. Something wrestling with how we live.
Dionne Brand, "On Poetry", the last essay in Bread Out of Stone


Since her emigration to Canada in 1970, Dionne Brand has defended a number of Black, feminist, lesbian, and labour causes; she is a politically active woman warrior for the rights of marginalized communities, especially Black people and women. Brand is also a lesbian and frequently explores themes of gender, race, sexuality, and cultural imperialism in her writings in which she has frequently blended Standard English diction and Caribbean island language in order to foreground colonial pain, postcolonial struggle, and diasporic displacement. In her works published in 1990s, politics figures prominently and she has chosen language as the main source of contest in quest of her identification with the Black diasporic communities and the marginalized groups in Canada. She recognizes a need to deconstruct and reconstruct English, to explore the tensions between imperial and mother tongues, to construct a bilingual continuum of the idioms of her ruptured past and present home, and then to use it skilfully as an empowering medium for documenting the dissimilar yet overlapping worlds in which she find herself.

In 1990, Brand published No Language Is Neutral, a poetry collection which was nominated for the prestigious Governor General's Award, and it established her as a major Canadian poet. No Language Is Neutral comprises free verse and prose poems written in both standard English and Caribbean island language; it demonstrates how racism, classism, sexism and heterosexism affect speakers' attitudes toward the English language. Brand's own poetic archaeology begins with her intertextual dialogue with Derek Walcott's Midsummer, specifically part LII from which Brand's poem derives its title: “Have we changed sides / to the moustached sergeants and the horsy gentry /because we serve English. like a two-headed sentry / guarding its borders? No language is neutral, / the green oak of English is a murmurous cathedral /where some took umbrage, some peace, but every shade, all / helped widen its shadow. I used to haunt the arches / of the British barracks of Vigie.” (p. 506)

This poetic appropriation places her work in the new West Indian literary tradition, and it develops its identification with an oppositional, decolonial nationalist project at an explicitly formal level: “No language is neutral. I used to haunt the beach at / Guaya, two rivers sentinel the country sand, not /backra white but nigger brown sand, one river dead/ and teeming from waste and alligators, the other / rumbling to the ocean in a tumult, the swift undertow / blocking the crossing of two little girls except on the tied /up dress hips of big women, then, the taste of leaving / was already on my tongue and cut deep into my / skinny pigeon toed way, language here was strict / description and teeth edging truth. Here was beauty / and here was nowhere…” (p. 22)

The whole volume is divided into four parts: “hard against the soul,” “Return,” “no language is neutral,” and a continuation of “hard against the soul." The first part consists of the single poem "I," the title of which might be read either as the Roman numeral one or as the first-person voice; it is not until the final part comprising the poems "II" through "X," that the reader realizes that the first poem entitled I is part of a numbered series. The first poem opens, “this is you girl, this cut of road up / to Blanchicheuse . . .”; poem II continues, “I want to wrap myself around you here in this line so / that you will know something, not just that I am dying.”

The subject of this series of numbered love poems is plural and profligate; the woman refuses to position herself outside a discourse that has excluded her as woman, as lesbian, as Caribbean, as lover. Instead she disseminates her sexual identity through a diversity of discourses that results in surplus, proliferation, and excess: “It was as if another life exploded in my / face, brightening, so easily the brow of a wing / touching the surf, so easily I saw my own body, that /is, my eyes followed me to myself, touched myself / as a place, another life, terra. They say this place / does not exist, then, my tongue is mythic, I was here / before…” (p. 51) Like the discourses that fail to name her, the body of the woman in these love poems resists the singular cause and multiplies in excess of the poem’s ability to situate her.

The second part entitled “Return” consists of a sequence of poems in which the anxiety of the location is poignantly foregrounded. “So the street is there,” (p. 10) the speaker finds, but the women -- like “Phyllis” and “Jackie” – who have been imprisoned or killed in the interim are only “quite here.” (p.11) The speaker has retuned to a physical home place and reconstructs, in writing, the contradictory terms of her arrivals and departures since then: “ From here you can see Venezuela, / that is not Venezuela, girl, that is Pointe Galeote / right around the corner, is not away…” (p.15)

The third part, the title sequence of poems, proceeds to record further recollections of the speaker’s childhood on the island and of her grandmother, Liney, a former slave, whom she never met but whose image she assembles from her uncle's stories. She weaves Liney's unrecorded life into the beginning of her own history, which ends with her leaving the island: "As if your life could never hear / itself as still some years, god, ages have passed / without your autobiography now between my stories ..." (26). Brand constructs a “hertory”, both biological, through the speaker’s grandmother's life, and cultural and literary, through Walcott's image of the shadow cast by English; she does so between her speech and its enabling moment, the colonial experience of loss. She also exposes the imperialism of white feminist discourse, whose own empowering archaeologies do not reach out to a black slave woman such as her grandmother: “Liney, no one is interested in telling the /truth. History will only hear you if you give birth to a /woman who smoothes starched linen in the wardrobe /drawer, trembles when she walks and who gives birth/ to another woman who cries near the river and /vanishes and who gives birth to a woman who is a /poet, and, even then.” (p. 26)

Had Brand confined herself to a West Indian setting, she would have written expatriate poetry. Taking Walcott's line with her, Brand goes on to map the space of the city of Toronto. She redeploys it and translates it into a Canadian idiom: “I have come to know /something simple. Each sentence realised or /dreamed jumps like a pulse with history and takes a /side. What I am saying in any language is told in faultless /knowledge of skin, in drunkenness and weeping…” (p. 34)

The language border crossed here is invisible, but it exists, and the speaker's lines ring with the recollection of twenty years of Canadian experience. "Here is history too" (p. 23), the speaker has said earlier, reclaiming the history of slavery from the amnesiac vision that the seemingly eternal present of tropical beauty affords.

Walking in Toronto now -- before, she used to "haunt the beach at Guaya" (p. 22) -- Brand's speaker blazes trails in her new surroundings. She finds herself in a city whose streets are shaped by surveyors, and she reacts to its solidity by frantically moving around, looking for some plasticity: “I walk Bathurst Street until it come like home /Pearl was near Dupont, upstairs ... All that time taken up /with circling this city in a fever… This city,/ mourning the smell of flowers and dirt, cannot tell /me what to say even if it chokes me. Not a single /word drops from my lips for twenty years about living /here. Dumbfounded I walk as if these sidewalks are a /place I'm visiting…” (p. 30-1)

Footsteps in the city constitute a space of enunciation; they weave a social space that becomes home. Thus, throughout the title sequence of poems in No Language Is Neutral, Brand wrests speech from silence and home from alien places. Corresponding to the open beginning, there is a sense of incompletion at the end. The process of fashioning a self, a language, and a proper place remains incomplete; Brand does not romanticize a culture that may never earn the title of postcolonial.



Note:

The key ideas expressed in my reviews are inspired by and mainly drawn from Monika Kaup's seminal journal article on West Indian Canadian writing. She stresses that the themes of West Indian Canadian writing are emigration and immigration, the Caribbean land of origin and the Canadian future. The expatriate's return is the watershed pointing out the difference between them. Examples of writers are Austin Clarke, Dionne Brand and Neil Bissoondath.
_________________
Time is nothing but a disquiet of the soul

[[ericcoliu]]

Poetry Review of No language Is Neutral Written by Dionne Brand*

Category: Poetry
Publisher: McClelland & Stewart
Format: Trade Paperback, 56 pages
Pub Date: October 1998
ISBN: 978-0-7710-1646-2

Poetry is here, just here. Something wrestling with how we live.
Dionne Brand, "On Poetry", the last essay in Bread Out of Stone


Since her emigration to Canada in 1970, Dionne Brand has defended a number of Black, feminist, lesbian, and labour causes; she is a politically active woman warrior for the rights of marginalized communities, especially Black people and women. Brand is also a lesbian and frequently explores themes of gender, race, sexuality, and cultural imperialism in her writings in which she has frequently blended Standard English diction and Caribbean island language in order to foreground colonial pain, postcolonial struggle, and diasporic displacement. In her works published in 1990s, politics figures prominently and she has chosen language as the main source of contest in quest of her identification with the Black diasporic communities and the marginalized groups in Canada. She recognizes a need to deconstruct and reconstruct English, to explore the tensions between imperial and mother tongues, to construct a bilingual continuum of the idioms of her ruptured past and present home, and then to use it skilfully as an empowering medium for documenting the dissimilar yet overlapping worlds in which she find herself.

In 1990, Brand published No Language Is Neutral, a poetry collection which was nominated for the prestigious Governor General's Award, and it established her as a major Canadian poet. No Language Is Neutral comprises free verse and prose poems written in both standard English and Caribbean island language; it demonstrates how racism, classism, sexism and heterosexism affect speakers' attitudes toward the English language. Brand's own poetic archaeology begins with her intertextual dialogue with Derek Walcott's Midsummer, specifically part LII from which Brand's poem derives its title: “Have we changed sides / to the moustached sergeants and the horsy gentry /because we serve English. like a two-headed sentry / guarding its borders? No language is neutral, / the green oak of English is a murmurous cathedral /where some took umbrage, some peace, but every shade, all / helped widen its shadow. I used to haunt the arches / of the British barracks of Vigie.” (p. 506)

This poetic appropriation places her work in the new West Indian literary tradition, and it develops its identification with an oppositional, decolonial nationalist project at an explicitly formal level: “No language is neutral. I used to haunt the beach at / Guaya, two rivers sentinel the country sand, not /backra white but nigger brown sand, one river dead/ and teeming from waste and alligators, the other / rumbling to the ocean in a tumult, the swift undertow / blocking the crossing of two little girls except on the tied /up dress hips of big women, then, the taste of leaving / was already on my tongue and cut deep into my / skinny pigeon toed way, language here was strict / description and teeth edging truth. Here was beauty / and here was nowhere…” (p. 22)

The whole volume is divided into four parts: “hard against the soul,” “Return,” “no language is neutral,” and a continuation of “hard against the soul." The first part consists of the single poem "I," the title of which might be read either as the Roman numeral one or as the first-person voice; it is not until the final part comprising the poems "II" through "X," that the reader realizes that the first poem entitled I is part of a numbered series. The first poem opens, “this is you girl, this cut of road up / to Blanchicheuse . . .”; poem II continues, “I want to wrap myself around you here in this line so / that you will know something, not just that I am dying.”

The subject of this series of numbered love poems is plural and profligate; the woman refuses to position herself outside a discourse that has excluded her as woman, as lesbian, as Caribbean, as lover. Instead she disseminates her sexual identity through a diversity of discourses that results in surplus, proliferation, and excess: “It was as if another life exploded in my / face, brightening, so easily the brow of a wing / touching the surf, so easily I saw my own body, that /is, my eyes followed me to myself, touched myself / as a place, another life, terra. They say this place / does not exist, then, my tongue is mythic, I was here / before…” (p. 51) Like the discourses that fail to name her, the body of the woman in these love poems resists the singular cause and multiplies in excess of the poem’s ability to situate her.

The second part entitled “Return” consists of a sequence of poems in which the anxiety of the location is poignantly foregrounded. “So the street is there,” (p. 10) the speaker finds, but the women -- like “Phyllis” and “Jackie” – who have been imprisoned or killed in the interim are only “quite here.” (p.11) The speaker has retuned to a physical home place and reconstructs, in writing, the contradictory terms of her arrivals and departures since then: “ From here you can see Venezuela, / that is not Venezuela, girl, that is Pointe Galeote / right around the corner, is not away…” (p.15)

The third part, the title sequence of poems, proceeds to record further recollections of the speaker’s childhood on the island and of her grandmother, Liney, a former slave, whom she never met but whose image she assembles from her uncle's stories. She weaves Liney's unrecorded life into the beginning of her own history, which ends with her leaving the island: "As if your life could never hear / itself as still some years, god, ages have passed / without your autobiography now between my stories ..." (26). Brand constructs a “hertory”, both biological, through the speaker’s grandmother's life, and cultural and literary, through Walcott's image of the shadow cast by English; she does so between her speech and its enabling moment, the colonial experience of loss. She also exposes the imperialism of white feminist discourse, whose own empowering archaeologies do not reach out to a black slave woman such as her grandmother: “Liney, no one is interested in telling the /truth. History will only hear you if you give birth to a /woman who smoothes starched linen in the wardrobe /drawer, trembles when she walks and who gives birth/ to another woman who cries near the river and /vanishes and who gives birth to a woman who is a /poet, and, even then.” (p. 26)

Had Brand confined herself to a West Indian setting, she would have written expatriate poetry. Taking Walcott's line with her, Brand goes on to map the space of the city of Toronto. She redeploys it and translates it into a Canadian idiom: “I have come to know /something simple. Each sentence realised or /dreamed jumps like a pulse with history and takes a /side. What I am saying in any language is told in faultless /knowledge of skin, in drunkenness and weeping…” (p. 34)

The language border crossed here is invisible, but it exists, and the speaker's lines ring with the recollection of twenty years of Canadian experience. "Here is history too" (p. 23), the speaker has said earlier, reclaiming the history of slavery from the amnesiac vision that the seemingly eternal present of tropical beauty affords.

Walking in Toronto now -- before, she used to "haunt the beach at Guaya" (p. 22) -- Brand's speaker blazes trails in her new surroundings. She finds herself in a city whose streets are shaped by surveyors, and she reacts to its solidity by frantically moving around, looking for some plasticity: “I walk Bathurst Street until it come like home /Pearl was near Dupont, upstairs ... All that time taken up /with circling this city in a fever… This city,/ mourning the smell of flowers and dirt, cannot tell /me what to say even if it chokes me. Not a single /word drops from my lips for twenty years about living /here. Dumbfounded I walk as if these sidewalks are a /place I'm visiting…” (p. 30-1)

Footsteps in the city constitute a space of enunciation; they weave a social space that becomes home. Thus, throughout the title sequence of poems in No Language Is Neutral, Brand wrests speech from silence and home from alien places. Corresponding to the open beginning, there is a sense of incompletion at the end. The process of fashioning a self, a language, and a proper place remains incomplete; Brand does not romanticize a culture that may never earn the title of postcolonial.



Note:

The key ideas expressed in my reviews are inspired by and mainly drawn from Monika Kaup's seminal journal article on West Indian Canadian writing. She stresses that the themes of West Indian Canadian writing are emigration and immigration, the Caribbean land of origin and the Canadian future. The expatriate's return is the watershed pointing out the difference between them. Examples of writers are Austin Clarke, Dionne Brand and Neil Bissoondath.
_________________
Time is nothing but a disquiet of the soul

[Champagne]

[[Champagne]]

[ericcoliu]

[[ericcoliu]]

[Lake]

Eric, are you in the profession of book reviews? It is so long, and must've taken you a lot of time. Much admiration.

[[Lake]]

Eric, are you in the profession of book reviews? It is so long, and must've taken you a lot of time. Much admiration.

[ericcoliu]

[[ericcoliu]]

[星子]

I was only seventeen but I already knew that to live freely in the world as a Black woman I would have to involve myself in political action as well as writing."
----profound, the same may to Chinese immigrants
_________________

[[ANNA]]

I was only seventeen but I already knew that to live freely in the world as a Black woman I would have to involve myself in political action as well as writing."
----profound, the same may to Chinese immigrants
_________________

[ericcoliu]

In an interview with Democracy Now's host Amy Goodman, which aired on December 24, 2007, on the 50th Anniversary of Jack Kerouac’s On The Road, Allen Ginsberg’s Howl and Poetry As Insurgent Art, Ferlinghetti read an excerpt from his new book entitled Poetry as Insurgent Art, which fully articulates two key issues on poetry writing: what are poets for our world and what is the use of poetry:


"I am signalling you through the flames. The North Pole is not where it used to be. Manifest Destiny is no longer manifest. Civilization self-destructs. The goddess Nemesis is knocking at the door…

What are poets for in such an age? What is the use of poetry? If you would be a poet, create works capable of answering the challenge of Apocalyptic times, even if this means sounding apocalyptic. You have to decide if bird cries are cries of ecstasy or cries of despair, by which you will know if you are a tragic or a lyric poet. Conceive of love beyond .. Be subversive, constantly questioning reality and the status quo. Strive to change the world in such a way that there’s no further need to be a dissident. Read between the lives, and write between the lines. Be committed to something outside yourself. Be passionate about it. But don’t destroy the world, unless you have something better to replace it.

If you would snatch fame from the flames, where is your burning bow, where are your arrows of desire, where your wit on fire?

The master class starts wars. The lower classes fight it. Governments lie. The voice of the government is often not the voice of the people.

Speak up, act out! Silence is complicity. Be the gadfly of the state and also its firefly. And if you have two loaves of bread, do as the Greeks did: sell one with the coin of the realm, and with the coin of the realm buy sunflowers.

Wake up! The world’s on fire! "

Yes, “be subversive, constantly questioning reality and the status quo. Strive to change the world in such a way that there’s no further need to be a dissident. Read between the lives, and write between the lines. Be committed to something outside yourself.”

In my view, Ferlinghetti’s view on politics of poetics is in line with that of Dionne Brand.

Poetry is here, just here. Something wrestling with how we live.
As 非马先生 wrote in 写在墙头上-- 美国的抗议诗, posted at
http://coviews.com/viewtopic.php?t=35346&sid=a111d9fa3e9dd54e77b485c225e3ef6d

"it is heartening to know that he [Ferlinghetti] is still a champion of conscience."
_________________
Time is nothing but a disquiet of the soul

[[ericcoliu]]

In an interview with Democracy Now's host Amy Goodman, which aired on December 24, 2007, on the 50th Anniversary of Jack Kerouac’s On The Road, Allen Ginsberg’s Howl and Poetry As Insurgent Art, Ferlinghetti read an excerpt from his new book entitled Poetry as Insurgent Art, which fully articulates two key issues on poetry writing: what are poets for our world and what is the use of poetry:


"I am signalling you through the flames. The North Pole is not where it used to be. Manifest Destiny is no longer manifest. Civilization self-destructs. The goddess Nemesis is knocking at the door…

What are poets for in such an age? What is the use of poetry? If you would be a poet, create works capable of answering the challenge of Apocalyptic times, even if this means sounding apocalyptic. You have to decide if bird cries are cries of ecstasy or cries of despair, by which you will know if you are a tragic or a lyric poet. Conceive of love beyond .. Be subversive, constantly questioning reality and the status quo. Strive to change the world in such a way that there’s no further need to be a dissident. Read between the lives, and write between the lines. Be committed to something outside yourself. Be passionate about it. But don’t destroy the world, unless you have something better to replace it.

If you would snatch fame from the flames, where is your burning bow, where are your arrows of desire, where your wit on fire?

The master class starts wars. The lower classes fight it. Governments lie. The voice of the government is often not the voice of the people.

Speak up, act out! Silence is complicity. Be the gadfly of the state and also its firefly. And if you have two loaves of bread, do as the Greeks did: sell one with the coin of the realm, and with the coin of the realm buy sunflowers.

Wake up! The world’s on fire! "

Yes, “be subversive, constantly questioning reality and the status quo. Strive to change the world in such a way that there’s no further need to be a dissident. Read between the lives, and write between the lines. Be committed to something outside yourself.”

In my view, Ferlinghetti’s view on politics of poetics is in line with that of Dionne Brand.

Poetry is here, just here. Something wrestling with how we live.
As 非马先生 wrote in 写在墙头上-- 美国的抗议诗, posted at
http://coviews.com/viewtopic.php?t=35346&sid=a111d9fa3e9dd54e77b485c225e3ef6d

"it is heartening to know that he [Ferlinghetti] is still a champion of conscience."
_________________
Time is nothing but a disquiet of the soul

[fanfan]

Yes, no language is neutral. As Edward Said stressed in his groundbreaking work entitled Orientalism, what is important is the position and power of those being depicted in the literary work.

To read her poetry is to read not only about her but also about her people. Her identification with their struggles both in the metropole of Canada and in the hinterland of the Caribbean.

-- Himani Bannerji
_________________
Don't imitate me;
it's as boring
as the two halves of a melon.

[[FFFFFF]]

Yes, no language is neutral. As Edward Said stressed in his groundbreaking work entitled Orientalism, what is important is the position and power of those being depicted in the literary work.

To read her poetry is to read not only about her but also about her people. Her identification with their struggles both in the metropole of Canada and in the hinterland of the Caribbean.

-- Himani Bannerji
_________________
Don't imitate me;
it's as boring
as the two halves of a melon.