IN HER SOLITUDE
For most of us, at least if we're lucky, the words "you
can't go home again" suggest nothing more traumatic than
a kind of thwarted nostalgia. Or they suggest Thomas Wolfe's
You Can't Go Home Again, a novel he wrote as a response to the
people in his home town who'd been enraged to encounter themselves
(or characters they imagined to be themselves) in his books.
For the descendants of those tragic Africans who were kidnapped
and brutally sold into slavery in the Americas, however, the
fact of their not being able to "go home again" is
marked by an infinitely more ironic series of rejections. Now
that they are no longer Africans--never mind the violence and
injustice of how this came to be--they are persona non grata
in Africa.
Is
it any wonder, then, that Dionne Brand, a passionately thoughtful
descendent of African slaves, should write, in her latest
book, A Map to the Door of No Return, of her difficulty in
asking for help? "I compose my plea," she writes,
'then I agonize about the composition--is it too brief, is
it too long, is it overweening, is it too dignified to warrant
sympathy? When I am sure...I approach the telephone three
or four times. Sometimes this last process takes a whole day,
sometimes two. I wait again to see if I cannot do without
what I need. Does it really matter? Can I not find another
way? Is asking for help really the only thing I can do?"
In
some ways these emotionally affecting words tend to misrepresent
a writer whose work is ignited by the bracing tyrannies of
a poet. Given the choice between a metaphor and a simile,
Brand will choose a metaphor every time. And in spite of her
tendency to ask anxious questions, there's nothing tentative
about how she writes. Her writing is swift, declarative. As
it is in this evocative description of old (Canadian) snow:
"It is rusty and muddy and oily; it's so old some of
it is stone."
Alone
in her little house far out in the country, where she lives
among neighbours who love "country music's lonesome and
outlaw tenors", Brand scrutinizes "each window's
drama of trees and sky", and on summer nights she lies
"in the very, very dark of the country, the smell of
pine and cedar around me, the very quiet of the bush pressing
in, and I listen till I fall asleep."
In
a book that is part literary exegesis, part notebook, part
history lesson, part war reportage, part tirade, I found the
most personally revealing sections to be the most compelling.
Brand goes deeply into her longing for solitude, even into
her own longing (and need) to be a recluse. She meditates
on the relevance and nature of identity, on her Caribbean
childhood, on flame trees that are "at their torrid best
in the dry season."
She
is also bravely candid about other writers: J.M.Coetzee, Paul
Theroux, and V.S. Naipaul, among them. Of V. S. Naipaul writing
on India, she remarks that he carries within him a "crushing
dislocation of the self which the landscape does not solve."
There are also many writers and reviewers who see Naipaul
as spiteful, but Brand sees him as "spitefully sorrowful."
"It
is not the job of writers to lift our spirits," she writes.
"Books simply do what they do. They sometimes confirm
the capricious drama of a childhood living room. When you
think you are in the grace of a dance, you come upon something
hard." Brand comes upon something hard when she reads
J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace. Defining Coetzee's style as having
moved from allegory to journalism, she finds Disgrace to be
stereotypical and startlingly racist.
She
then pits Disgrace against Toni Morrison's Paradise, a book
she greatly admires. Of Morrison she writes, "hers is
a purposeful, spacious, urgent language." But isn't this
exactly the problem with Morrison's language? It is too purposeful,
too strategically urgent, "too lushly complicit with
the rapture she is describing," as James Wood so brilliantly
remarked in The Broken Estate. Brand's critique of J. M. Coetzee
is another matter, and even though I'm a fan of Coetzee's
extraordinary memoir, Boyhood, I still have to concede that
she's onto something when she lambastes Disgrace. This astringent
and withholding novel is often curiously manipulating and
stereotypical, while at the same time it offers too many mysteries
that annihilate or circumvent meaning, powerful though it
still clearly manages to be..
Even
though I don't always agree with her, Brand's writing on writers
makes me wish I could read her on other writers whose material
might be of interest her: Jamaica Kinkaid's Lucy; Austin Clarke's
The Origin of Waves; Nadine Gordimer's The Late Bourgeois
World; the poetry of Derek Walcott. "Why does someone
enclose a set of apprehensions within a book?"she asks.
"Why does someone else open that book if not because
of the act of wanting to be wanted, to be understood, to be
seen, to be loved?" These words have the ring of an epigraph;
they have the epigraph's alluring instruction. They also have
the introductory cadence and metaphorical concerns of a
"beginning", and it's startling, even in a book
that has as many beginnings and endings as this book has,
to encounter them so deep within the narrative.
I
was grateful for so much that's original and memorable in
A Map to the Door of No Return. But as a reader who is also
a writer, I worry that Brand has squandered material that
might better have been saved for a more consistently incendiary
work.
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