Tanya Batson-Savage, Freelance Writer
All eyes are on the stage during Friday's 'Two the Hard Way' with Lincoln Kwesi Johnson and Amiri Baraka at the fifth annual Calabash Literary Festival, in Treasure Beach St. Elizabeth on May 27. - PHOTO BY CLAUDINE HOUSEN
POET, NOVELIST and essayist Dionne Brand was among the authors served up on the last day of the fifth Calabash International Literary Festival in Treasure Beach, St. Elizabeth. Born in Trinidad, Brand lives in Canada, where her latest work of fiction, What we all Long For, has received widespread acclaim. Her other works of fiction include In Another Place Not Here and San Souci and Other Stories. Brand has produced eight volumes of poetry, including A Land to Light On and Thirsty.
Tanya Batson: You are Trinidadian by birth, but have been living in Canada since 1970. Do you believe that the pleasures of exile are worth not living in your homeland?
Dionne Brand: I wouldn't call it exile really, or pleasures per se. Because the world is small and we are no longer far distances away. I left Trinidad when I was a teenager. I went to the University of Toronto and when I graduated and decided to be a writer it became clear that I had to stay abroad to do that. I wanted to experience the world, to travel and so on and Toronto was a great vantage point. And more, I would say that I became an adult there. I grew up there. So affinities grew also. I prefer to think of myself as inhabiting the literary, the imaginative space of these two places where I've lived.
TB: Which writers have most influenced your writing?
DB: It's hard to say. So many Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Pablo Neruda, Alejo Carpentier, Martin Carter, Wilson Harris, Ana Akhmatova, Sonia Sanchez, Gwendolyn Brooks, Adrienne Rich, Aime Cesaire, Kamau Brathwaite, Derek Walcott and theorists like Angela Davis, Walter Rodney and CLR James. I could go on and on.
TB: Poetry, fiction and essays are very different forms of expression. What does each medium mean to you? Do you find that they are born in different places and motivated by different things?
DB: I think you're right there. Great way of putting it. Poetry for me is the foundation. It always strives for the most complex meanings, even though it can produce the most simple lines.
TB: Have you ever written anything that surprised you, whether in the way it turned out or in the way readers have interpreted it?
DB: I think that every book I've written surprises me in some way. And I suppose that's why I write, so that I can discover something. I don't always know where I'm going in a work, or, if I think that I do, the things I find out along the way change the trajectory of the story in the case of the novels. And in the case of the poetry I'm forced to push myself further than I thought in terms of the unravelling of some philosophical question.
TB: What role do you believe the Caribbean Diaspora has in developing literature in the Caribbean, if they have any?
DB: I don't know that we can talk of a role in that way. Any writing anywhere can tell us something about our condition as human beings. Those of us who write and live outside the Caribbean can only reflect that and only respectfully and tentatively say we know anything about the immediate living in the Caribbean. My absence from the Caribbean I can only record as absence. But absence, it seems to me, is a feature of Caribbean psyche - as in the absence of Africa which permeates its history. So I can summon up parts of that psyche in my work. But my task, or any creative writer's task, may not be to pin down or codify a particular place, region as a kind of bureaucratic/administrative act. Nor to take part necessarily in a canon-making enterprise. Others will do that to the good or to the bad. My job is to create, imagine etc.. Where it all falls is up to the reader.
TB: Does your own autobiography figure in any of your fiction or poetry? Does it have a tendency to come through greater in either poetry or fiction?
DB: Not necessarily. So much happens in the act of writing. You may start off with a sliver of autobiography, but it changes into so much more with the addition of image, time, contemplation, imagination. With the exception of one short story called 'Photograph', none of my work is autobiographical. Are all my works signs of how I think and what I think about? Yes. Do they all represent my particular personal life or history? No.
TB: You have directed four documentaries. Are you interested in either writing or directing feature films?
DB: No. Film is not really my surface. The documentaries were fine and worthy, but I was not comfortable in the medium of film. I'm too text-bound.
TB: Your most recent work, 'What We All Long For' has been described as a 'hymn to youth and life in the city'. Do you find the description apt?
DB: I do, actually. You know, I went around the city asking people what they longed for, because one of my characters is a visual artist and wants to make an installation of the multiplicity of the city. People actually stopped and answered me and it was as if they had been waiting for the question. Toronto, as you know, is an emerging city, a city of many diverse communities which do not live discreetly from each other as in cities like say New York or Chicago. So I was interested in the interactions of young people who were born in the city to parents who were born elsewhere.
TB: Your work expresses great concern for blackness and women, do you ever find that it is all too much?
DB: Yes, I do find it is all too much sometimes. But then I think what else would I be doing? I think it is a great opportunity doing what I do. It's a boon really. I get to work creatively, I get to think through things that haven't been thought; work on subjects that haven't been expressed.
