A Reckoning

An instructive prologue to Salvage, Dionne Brand’s first non-fiction book in two decades, is A Map to the Door of No Return, from 2001, for it is here that readers can find key emblems, transactions, and tropes that have dominated the consciousness of this author, an exceptionally gifted voice of the Black diaspora. Oceans, maps, and doors are featured as ways of exploring the relevance and nature of identity and belonging in a culturally diverse and changing world.

The poet Derek Walcott once wrote that “the sea is history,” to which Brand would add that oceans are their own sovereignty. To look into their waters is to look into the world; their immensity is bigger than feelings. They have been used as channels for journeys, just as maps are ways of finding places and destinations. Metaphorically, doors are a means of entering or exiting places we wish to know or pass through. Doors can be spiritual spaces with psychic significance. But, as Brand puts it concisely, to have one’s belonging or identity lodged in metaphors is akin to “voluptuous intrigue.” It is “to inhabit a trope; to be a kind of fiction.” For her, to live in the Black diaspora is “to live as a fiction — a creation of empires, and also self-creation.” This means “living inside and outside” of oneself. It is a claim that many immigrants and exiles could support with empirical evidence.

Brand was born in Trinidad and Tobago, a former British colony, where one of the strongest voices of news and propaganda was the BBC, “a door to ‘over there,’ ” as she previously put it, “the door to being in the big world.” But it was also a treacherous door. “Through the BBC broadcasts we were inhabited by British consciousness. We were also inhabited by an unknown self. The African.” Brand’s schooling in literature (in her birthplace and later in Canada) was typical of British colonial education: works by Daniel Defoe, Aphra Behn, William Makepeace Thackeray, Jane Austen, the Brontës, and Jean Rhys but scarcely any by Black or subaltern writers. This double inhabitation (the British quite traceable; the African largely unexplored) is palpable in Salvage, where she addresses the wreckage of empire in a fervent, complexly didactic manner, blending history and cultural criticism, while using autobiography and literature as artifacts invested with political import.

The book begins with two paintings of ships and water: the Eritrean American artist Ficre Ghebreyesus’s Solitary Boat in Red and Blue, a luminous depiction of a boat, ethereal in appearance, “moving with all haste, languor and possibility,” and the Spanish Mexican surrealist Remedios Varo’s Exploration of the Sources of the Orinoco River, a metaphorical critique of overconsumption and exploitation. As Brand contends, the so‑called New World began with voyages, but she’s not interested in “centuries-old wrecks, popular in literature, that emanated from what was called the voyage and the adventure”; her focus is not on those “where gold and treasure are lost; not those wrecks from that violent age, whose treasures are still sought today by modern adventurers with ‘scientific methods.’ ” Rather, she’s interested in fraught human cargo and the loss of “small vessels that move people and their precarity across the Mediterranean, the Strait of Gibraltar, the Atlantic and the Gulf of Mexico.” These latter-day shipwrecks, “attended by border and security regimes,” speak to the “loss of lives,” and the salvage in these instances is of “bodies, small possessions, wallets, cell phones, T‑shirts, raincoats, jackets, keys to houses and rooms, sodden papers, only valuable to the ones who lost their lives. And to those who wait for word of their safe landing.” Brand describes a Tunisian fisherman who finds dead bodies caught in his nets rather than fish — in one case, a baby’s body. “These lives were/are animated by need and want, and not by adventure,” she writes. “These lives were/are destroyed by need and want and the adventures of totalizing forces, of multinational arrangements, oil concessions, cocoa concessions, lumber concessions, mineral concessions, toxic waste concessions, and electronic waste concessions.” This potent political incantation and indictment leads to Brand’s essential point that the earlier shipwrecks “contained the precarious too — the enslaved.”

Brand’s metaphor of wreckage is really the literature of empire: the books that are sanctioned as canonical, though shadowed by a history of brutal enslavement, oppression, and murder — a shadow that’s treated differently in the “novels in Black Traditions” that Brand seeks out. “A world is always ending in these books,” she observes. “A world is about to begin in these books, or about to be forestalled; about to, but not guaranteed to, ‘be’ in these books.” Brand’s own world is a library where the “monopoly of interpretation,” to borrow from Fredric Jameson, is based on narratives established and consolidated by colonial models and therefore foreclosed to Black experience and traditions in their own right. She argues against a Western canon “that had surely tried to excise, by enclosure and confinement, Black experience in the Atlantic world by continually reproducing only white bourgeoise experience as ‘meaning.’ ” Focusing on the dyad of “civilized” and “savage,” she exposes “inanimate” Black bodies in the canon. She is concisely brilliant in her explanation of how romantic racism or romantic racialism is “the ascription of ‘positive’ stereotypes to a group of people in which their difference (from white people) is valorized instead of pathologized,” while also maintaining that “the racial romantic is a site of ‘illicit’ white pleasure, and desire.” For her, “the wreck is the library itself, and the salvage is the life which exceeds the wreck.”

Brand uses memoir to refashion cultural criticism, starting with a black and white photograph of herself as a child of about three or four, in the company of two sisters and her closest cousin. All the girls have white ribbons in their hair, and the picture (taken by a Mr. Wong, whose surname harks back to indentured Chinese labourers in the Caribbean) was to be sent to her mother and aunt in England. “England is in the air at home,” Brand recalls. “England is as much the recipient as my mother and my aunt; and for England, standing behind my mother and my aunt, we must make a good appearance. They arrived in London under the impression that they, too, had to make a good appearance, so that they and we would be accepted and acceptable.” The all too common wish among the colonized is to resettle in Blighty, as can be clearly seen in books by authors as diverse as V. S. Naipaul, Wole Soyinka, George Lamming, Sam Selvon, C. L. R. James, and Austin Clarke.

Brand’s reckoning with coloniality can be unyieldingly sweeping, as when she writes, “Colonialism is such a pessimistic discourse, especially for the colonized — it is full of hopelessness about one’s future, about one’s daily appearances.” Whereas Walcott eludes polarities and asserts that racial hybridity and colonial education could lead to a wider notion of the self, Brand offers no such moderation. Her sharp readings and rereadings of the canon become an act of anti-colonial, socialist forensics. She admits to what she had missed in earlier readings of Thackeray’s Vanity Fair: Miss Swartz (“the rich woolly-haired mulatto from St. Kitt’s”) and Sambo (the Black servant beside the fat family coachman, whose main task is to ring the bell at the entrance to Miss Pinkerton’s academy for young ladies). Brand duly notes these comic characters, along with Loll Jewab (an Indian servant sometimes depicted as a yellow-eyed, white-toothed devil), as subsidiary caricatures in a parody of aristocracy, while criticizing Thackeray for not acknowledging the slave trade. In “counteracting the toxicity of colonial narrative,” where the exceptional Black figure (think Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko) is heroic only when of assistance to white imperialism, she rescues many submerged truths, especially the biases of Daniel Defoe and others from the long period of European domination.

As her collected poems in Nomenclature show, Brand is full of passionate conviction, energy, relentless drive, and lyrical skill, with her polemical tone foregrounding political ideology. In Salvage, she demonstrates that the history of narrative forms (as seen, especially, in Defoe, Thackeray, Austen, and the Brontës) has been shaped by the evolution of capitalism, with the language of the “inanimate” bound up with sums, accounts, and economic advantage. In the process, Brand makes pragmatic use of such thinkers as Friedrich Engels, Édouard Glissant, Edward Said, Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, and Simon Gikandi.

Brand constructs her own cultural archive, turning to twentieth-century novelists (Edwidge Danticat, Toni Morrison, Patrick Chamoiseau, J. M. Coetzee) and non-fiction writers (Glissant, Said, Gikandi, Rinaldo Walcott) for expansive elucidation, acknowledging that all writers are of their own time and place while also attacking those who don’t conform to her own beliefs. This is evident in her castigation of Coetzee’s Foe, which falls into what the literary critic Alison Glassie terms “the Robinsonade, the genre of literary fiction spawned by Defoe’s novel and thematically indebted to the travails of its eponymous castaway.” Brand rightly praises Chamoiseau’s Crusoe’s Footprint, a Creolized version of the classic, informed in part by the meditations of an African castaway who adopts the name Crusoe. Her admiration is based principally on Chamoiseau’s undoing of the hierarchical relationship between Crusoe and Friday. But she lambastes Coetzee on several points, especially for using a white woman (Susan Barton) to reprise the Crusoe story with a racial stereotype, in which Friday has his tongue cut off, rendering him unable to narrate his own story outside the racist schema of white power. Here, Brand does not adequately take into account that Coetzee’s parable issues from such muteness and that Crusoe’s footprint is washed away even in Chamoiseau.

There is an existential irony at the end of Brand’s book, where she describes her childhood home in Trinidad and how Caribbean architectures “come out of slavery.” Acknowledging that the ending of James’s Minty Alley has always informed the way she looks into houses when she passes them at night, she identifies with Haynes, the protagonist, standing outside the house in Minty Alley, “taking only a small part in the cut and thrust, in the passions of life. Except, as narrative.”