Dionne Brand\'s Environmental Poetics

Cheryl Lousley

Dionne Brand’s Environmental Poetics ABSTRACT

RÉSUMÉ

Le langage de la nature, omniprésent dans la poésie de Brand, est souvent interprété comme une métaphore du lieu, où les politiques de l’identité, du chez-soi et de l’appartenance sont négociés. Cependant, les sites où se déroulent les politiques d’inclusion et d’exclusion sont présents et dynamiques dans la poésie de Brand. On propose ici que l’attention portée au monde de la nature reflète un engagement éthique et politique envers les intersections complexes entre l’injustice sociale et la dégradation environnementale, intersections qui sont retracées ici par les thèmes du paysage, du territoire, de la cartographie et de la planétarité au sein des quatre recueils de poésie suivants : No Language Is Neutral (1990), Land To Light On (1997), thirsty (2002) et Inventory (2006). Dans ces poèmes, la nature devient le monde vécu quand elle est ressentie par le mouvement corporel plutôt qu’exhaustivement cartographiée; quand elle est décrite par les sons plutôt que fixée par le regard; et quand elle est reconnue comme une foule d’ami‑e‑s et d’étrangers. L’amour pour la nature exprimé dans la poésie de Brand rend fort pénible l’écart entre le lieu, l’appartenance et la justice. En soulignant si soigneusement les relations d’amour et

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The language of nature that permeates Dionne Brand’s poetry is often read as a metaphor for place, a site from which the politics of identity, home and belonging are negotiated. But the places through which the politics of inclusion and exclusion are enacted are alive in Brand’s poetry. This essay reads her attention to the living world of nature as an ethical and political engagement with the complex intersections of social injustice and environmental degradation, as traced through the motifs of landscape, territory, cartography, and planetarity in four poetry collections: No Language Is Neutral (1990), Land To Light On (1997), thirsty (2002), and Inventory (2006). In these poems, nature becomes the lived world when experienced through bodily movement not totalized cartography, when voiced in sound rather than pinned down by the gaze, and when recognized as a multitude of both friends and strangers. The expression of love for nature makes the disjuncture between place, belonging, and justice so painful in Brand’s poetry. In marking so carefully the relations of love and power that bind and rupture identity and place, Brand shows how necessary but difficult is the task of making the places we live in actually liveable.

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de pouvoir qui resserrent et écartent les thèmes d’identité et de lieu, Brand démontre combien il est nécessaire, mais difficile, de rendre vivables les endroits où l’on vit. KEYWORDS: Dionne Brand; ecocriticism; nature; poetry; environmental justice;

black Canadian poetics; planetarity; feminism; landscape; place

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The language of nature that permeates Dionne Brand’s poetry, from the sea and sand of No Language Is Neutral (1990) to the stars and snow of Land To Light On (1997), is often read as a metaphor for place, a site from which the politics of identity, home and belonging are negotiated. But the places through which the politics of inclusion and exclusion are enacted are alive in Brand’s poetry, and her attention to the living world of nature can be read as an articulation of an ethical and political stance directed towards environmental as well as social issues. In the wake of historical materialism and poststructuralism, it became routine for nature to be scorned in contemporary critical thought as the emblem and ideological tool of essentialism, whereby historically specific practices and identities are rendered immutable or universal (see Fuss 1989 and Soper 1995 for overviews). But, as Bruno Latour (2004) argues, the social constructionist denunciation of “nature” as a discursive obfuscation of history can support the evasion of ecological realities, such as climate change, including the ways in which environmental hazards, risks and benefits are unequally distributed. Developing a more theoretically robust approach to nature is important for adequately engaging with the complex intersections of social injustice and environmental degradation. It is also crucial for appreciating more fully the ecological relations (which include not only place, space and territory but also landscape, botany and ecology) central to Brand’s poetics. I build on the emergent body of Brand criticism to argue that Brand’s multivalent and ambivalent articulations of identity and place are echoed and supported by multivalent evocations of nature. The risk of turning to nature as ideological escape from society or history is weighed against the risk of reducing or instrumentalizing life to capitalist profit or political struggle. Rather than settling on one side or the other—history or nature—Brand repeatedly unsettles their opposition, revealing slavery history embedded in landscape in No Language is Neutral and mapping the human and nonhuman relations that produce our ubiquitous commodities in Inventory. Most significantly, Brand’s poems recognize that the question of nature is not only technical, nor only political, but also ethical, challenging us to consider how to value life or the bios as a whole, how to value our emotional attachments to particular places and how to recognize the distinct life-worlds of other species. There is a strong ethical sensibility among feminist environmental theorists which can help illuminate Brand’s environmental poetics. Val Plumwood (2005) argues that the critique of “naturalization” as ideological deception so necessary for feminist

politics needs to be complemented by a critique of constructions of human subjectivity that reduce the nonhuman to matter and background, much as the lives and labour of women, people of colour, slaves and colonial subjects have been historically positioned as background to the accomplishments of Euro-American white men. Plumwood (2005) describes how “the One or Man of Property is able to assume the contribution of nature in the form of a continuing support base for production, accumulation, and renewal but to deny it in failing to recognize and allow for nature’s reproduction and continuation” (30). Plumwood argues instead for the promotion of “mutual flourishing” of human and nonhuman life (30); a concept that echoes Chris Cuomo’s (1998) notion of an “ethic of flourishing” that recognizes how one’s own well-being is related to the well-being of others, human and nonhuman, individually and ecosystemically (62–90). For these feminist thinkers, arguing for the intrinsic value of nature is parallel to—and must be intertwined (though not equated) with—arguing for the intrinsic value of women’s lives. As Stacy Alaimo (2000) shows, the long-standing fear that any feminist articulation of concern for nature repeats the derogatory association of women and nature fails to appreciate the diverse articulations of nature by feminist writers over time in different sociopolitical contexts and repeats the designation of nature as “passive matter, there for cultural consumption” (12).

Our landscape is its own monument: its meaning can only be traced on the underside. It is all history. — Édouard Glissant, Caribbean Discourse

History, trauma and mourning are central to the title sequence of Brand’s No Language is Neutral (1990), which, as identified by George Elliott Clark (2000) and Jason Wiens (2000), begins as a response to a passage in Derek Walcott’s Midsummer. With the line “no language is neutral,” Walcott notes the ambivalence of language yet sides with British English through imagery of the English landscape: “the green oak of English is a murmurous cathedral” (quoted in Wiens 2000: 83). Since Raymond Williams’s incisive critique of how labouring people are rendered absent in the English country house poem, it is conventional to see landscape as the form of nature that evacuates politics and history. Williams (1973) describes how agricultural fields, when seen from the prospect of the country manor as an expanse of verdant nature, are depicted as if they produced a bountiful harvest of their own accord. The land fulfills the Edenic dream of a “self-yielding earth” (Williams 1973: 57). When peasants do appear, they are blended into the landscape, as if their bodies are part of the “self-yielding” natural order. Represented as landscape, the land is not a place of work nor even ecological community but a view, and a view from a position of distance and power: a landscape is opened or exposed to a viewer who can assess its “prospects,” in both meanings of the word (149–50).

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Landscape

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W. J. T. Mitchell (2002) reads the power relations of landscape beyond the borders of the British Isles and into the mechanisms of European imperialism. But in doing so, Mitchell (2002) also insists on a more nuanced appreciation of landscape “simultaneously as imperial and anticolonial”: Landscape might be seen more profitably as something like the “dreamwork” of imperialism, unfolding its own movement in time and space from a central point of origin and folding back on itself to disclose both utopian fantasies of the perfected imperial prospect and fractured images of unresolved ambivalence and unsuppressed resistance. (Mitchell 2002: 10)

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As sites of contestation over meaning, landscapes can be imagined in multiple ways, and from multiple subject positions. Landscape as ambivalent site of imperialism and resistance is central to Roy Osamu Kamada’s (2002) ecocritical reading of Walcott’s poetry, and which I extend to Brand’s. Kamada suggests that Walcott seems to share many themes with other nature poets in representing a human encounter with a natural world. The crucial difference is that nature is not only personal but also historical in Walcott’s poetry: “Walcott, also writing about a sublime landscape, is unable to detach that landscape from its history of colonialism and all the attendant consequences of that history” (Kamada 2002: 208). Walcott does not separate the appreciation of landscape from historical knowledge (nor scorn aesthetics in favour of history); rather, he presents the self-in-nature as a historical self in a historical landscape: The landscape he writes about is necessarily politicized; his own subjectivity implicated in both the natural beauty and the traumatic history of the place; he must directly acknowledge the history of St. Lucia and the Caribbean, the history of diaspora, of slavery, of the capitalist commodification of the landscape, and the devastating consequences this history has on the individual. (Kamada 2002: 209)

Kamada (2002) argues that Walcott historicizes landscape through melancholy, whereby the traumas of the past continue to haunt the self and landscape of the present. In “No Language is Neutral” Brand deepens the sense of ambivalence toward both language and landscape by shifting between multiple linguistic registers and physical places, settling on no one place or position. As Kamada (2002) argues of Walcott’s poetry, landscape is not so much opposed to history in Brand’s poem, but inextricably and ambivalently linked to the task of remembering historical trauma as well as to articulations of postcolonial subjectivity. In a place where centuries of black labour and settlement were oriented toward commodity export rather than nation-building, the landscape where people worked, suffered and died becomes, as Glissant suggests in the epigraph above, the only “monument” to the past, just

as the Atlantic Ocean stands in for the absent gravestones marking the millions who died in the Middle Passage. The speaker “haunt[s] the beach at / Guaya” (Brand 1990: 22), the Trinidadian locale she has emigrated from, and that landscape haunts her. The speaker recalls the people whose slave labour produced the colonial sugar harvest by tracing their silence and enslavement in the landscape itself. For them, the landscape is not distant but so close as to be stifling and imprisoning; the landscape facilitates the enslavement of people: “Hard-bitten on mangrove and wild / bush, the sea wind heaving any remnants of / consonant curses into choking aspirate” (23). The sea wind that steals the breath and hopes of the people mirrors the “twang, falsettos of whip and air” that enabled slave owners to hold “slaves between their stone / halters” (23). But just as the masters could not completely hold people down, the slaves’ voices are not completely smothered by the wind, nor traces of their presence completely overgrown by the lush bush. The landscape remains haunted by its slavery history: “people does hear things in this heliconia peace / a morphology of rolling chain and copper gong” (23). The spectacular, opulent beauty of heliconia flowers, possible muse to poets, tribute to the sun, could deceptively lull the viewer into peace and ease, but attentive ears catch the cries of history and violence.

Feminist geographer Doreen Massey (1994) suggests that “Toni Morrison’s writing, especially in Beloved, undermines for ever any notion that everyone once had a place called home which they could look back on, a place not only where they

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Peter Dickinson (1999) calls attention to the homonym “hear”/“here” in the subsequent poem sequence, “Hard Against the Soul,” suggesting that it enacts a calland-response dialogue with the lover, and, citing Teresa Zackodnik, an articulation of identity in a “dialogic of differences” (165-6). The repetition and juxtaposition of “here” and “hear” is also evident in “No Language is Neutral” where the “here” of landscape is made to “hear” the past yet lingering sounds of oppression and resistance. The emphasis on sound and voice in the landscape is contrasted with landscape as a form of gaze and view. The speaker hears but refuses to see. She has learned to look away from the land: “there was history which had taught my eyes to / look for escape even beneath the almond leaves fat / as women” (22). The gaze cannot rest on the landscape, not even on the prospect of its fertility, but must look elsewhere, into an abstract beyond: “Here was beauty / and here was nowhere” (22). The ocean is but “a / way out and not anything of beauty, tipping turquoise / and scandalous” (23). Édouard Glissant (1989) describes this alienation from the land as the historical culmination of forced labour in the Caribbean: “The land is not yet loved. The freed slave prefers the area surrounding the towns, where he is marginalized, to working for himself on the land. The land is the other’s possession” (160). Even when the land is no longer literally owned by the other, it remains the site/ sight of historical oppression; the entitled view of landscape remains inaccessible, too burdened by history.

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belonged but which belonged to them, and where they could afford to locate their identities” (166). A similar sense of painful unsettlement—a gap between identity, home, and place—can be found in Brand’s poem. The speaker struggles not only with the impossibility of the gaze as possession, but also the gaze as love: history “turned my eyes against the water even as love / for this nigger beach became resolute” (Brand 1990: 22). It is not that the speaker, in Glissant’s terms, does “not yet love” the landscape (as if the memory of slavery will gradually fade with time); rather, she finds her love for the landscape is a painful denial of black subjectivity. The opening lines of the sequence describe the speaker at the beach where the sand is “not / backra white but nigger brown” (Brand 1990: 22). The words simultaneously claim the beach for black Trinidadians and show it to be a stinging reproof, a mirror which reflects self-contempt. Like Frantz Fanon’s (1967) description of the alienation from one’s body that racism enacts—when, being seen and named as black, he becomes conscious of his body as a betrayal of the self—the speaker in Brand’s poem experiences the landscape as a betrayal of the self. If this place is “nowhere,” then identifying with it makes you “no one,” a self-negation confirmed with each look. To stay is death, the speaker learns from the weeping woman who was her mother and did not mother, since “even / being born to her was temporary” (Brand 1990: 22). The beach, too, is a liminal, temporary space, not a home. It is not a place where one belongs; it is just the speaker’s only foothold on land, a swath of beach between the two rivers that speak her destiny: “one river dead / and teeming from waste and alligators, the other / rumbling to the ocean in a tumult” (22). She cannot acknowledge the woman as mother, nor the land as home. Raymond Williams (1973) insists on recognizing the importance of love for landscape, especially the place where one is born. In tandem with his critique of the way the operations of capitalism are hidden through the naturalized landscape, Williams (1973) examines the capitalist disruption of affective relationships to place. He acknowledges that for those without the means to choose where to live, one’s home “can become a prison: a long disheartening and despair, under an imposed rigidity of conditions” (Williams 1973: 107); why the sea-wind bites and chokes during the era of Caribbean slave plantations in Brand’s (1990) poem; why the weeping woman finds only “brutal green meaning” in the landscape (27). But there is also the challenge for many people of “how to go on living where they are” (Williams 1973: 106): I know this personally: not only because I had to move out for an education and to go on with a particular kind of work; but because the whole region in which I was born has been steadily and terribly losing its people, who can no longer make a living there. (Williams 1973: 106)

Paul Gilroy (1991) argues that Williams’s appreciation for the culture of settled communities leads him to echo right-wing racists in excluding black immigrants from the British nation and identity (48). But the rural-to-urban migration that

Williams (1973) describes within the United Kingdom is similar to the post-war migration of Caribbean people to England, France and North America that the speaker in Brand’s poem learns as a girl that she too must join. It is not only the weight of colonial and slavery history that prevents her from appreciating the landscape, but the associated post-colonial economic dependencies. It is “nowhere” (22), a backwater, because it holds no potential in the post-colonial capitalist economy. Although Massey’s (1994) and Gilroy’s (1991) concerns about the articulation of identity through place are valid, Brand’s poem also marks the dangers of giving no value to the communities that develop over time in particular places. To reject rural Trinidad as “nowhere” and to always look away is to perpetuate an imperial look at a place merely for its export prospects, and to turn oneself into another export commodity. Instead, by continuing the parallel with Dickinson’s (1999) reading of lesbian love in “Hard Against the Soul,” we can read “No Language is Neutral” as an address to a beloved, where the beloved is the land and sea. But it is only once abandoned that the landscape is seen, and lovingly seen and remembered by the speaker, pitying her disoriented self:

She lingers on the beauty before so quickly refused, evoking a lush and living place that quickens the blood as does the sight of the lover. As the reader’s eye follows “red-green” to “blood” to “rain forest,” the place comes alive as a set of relationships or tangled threads of love and nature. But the gaze is a sign of the speaker’s distance and nostalgia: …truth is not important at one end of a hemisphere where a bird dives close to you in an ocean for a mouth full of fish, an ocean you come to swim in every two years, you, a slave to your leaping retina, capture the look of it. It is like saying you are dead. This place so full of your absence. (33)

The place was already full of her absence from the historical legacies of slavery and colonialism; but in leaving, she has betrayed the place she loves: first in abandoning it, and then in trying to “capture” it through her “look”, to possess it, to enslave it to her memory. Returning is to find the place going on without you, the beloved indifferent to your love; when longing turns into nostalgia, that humming and twitching rainforest is deadened into a view.

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…never to pass her eyes on the red-green threads of a hummingbird’s twitching back, the blood warm quickened water colours of a sea bed, not the rain forest tangled in smoke-wet, well there it was. (Brand 1990: 28)

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The final line of “No Language is Neutral” is “loves” (34), the emphasis of the whole sequence thereby placed on love—love as the verb, the action of continuing to love the place despite the pain. In the final poem of the sequence, as the speaker dreams of a place where “a woman might touch / something between beauty and nowhere, back there / and here” (34), she forgoes the possessive gaze and its crippling nostalgia and embraces the partial identification and connection of touch and speech. The choking sea-wind of the second poem is reversed when the poet keeps her “throat / gurgling like a bird’s” (34). She positions herself as part of the natural landscape: “I / have tried to hum mud and feathers and sit peacefully / in this foliage of bones and rain.…I have tried to write this thing calmly / even as its lines burn to a close” (34). This love and identification is an effort; it is incomplete and unfulfilled as she burns with anger and loss due to the layers of displacement and alienation. Not only an unmarked monument to the historical enactment and resistance to colonialism, slavery and female oppression, landscape is evoked ambivalently as a space of painful absence and self-negation and an unattainable object of desire. To deny and dismiss this love of nature and place is to accept the alienation from the land imposed by colonial and capitalist regimes. Indeed, it is the speaker’s burning desire for her beloved land and sea that shows how painfully history haunts the present. TOPIA 34 46

Territory Asserting a presence of blackness in Canada, or more bluntly, staking out territory. — Rinaldo Walcott, Black Like Who?

Landscape as an aesthetic, or more broadly as “a medium of cultural expression,” both solidifies and resists territory, which is land as claimed by a particular group of people (Mitchell 2002: 14). Jonathan Bordo (2002) argues that the landscape painting of the Group of Seven functions to naturalize white Canadians’ claim to the territory of Canada by presenting an empty, uninhabited wilderness; Canada as terra nullius. The landscape picture exalts wilderness while “simultaneously legitimizing…terrain violently seized, dispossessed of its indigenous inhabitants, and reconstituted as territory” (Bordo 2002: 294). As William Cronon (1996) argues in his essay “The Trouble with Wilderness,” wilderness is not nature in an original state, but the desire to present a particular landscape as if never touched by people: “In virtually all of its manifestations, wilderness represents a flight from history” (79). Wilderness plays a pivotal role in constructing Canadian national identity because it simultaneously references yet erases white British settlement history: white settlement is taken to be the historical moment when wilderness is transformed into modern and urban space. Wilderness therefore symbolizes a space outside colonial and modern history—and outside the politics of race and nation—even as it is a creation of it. An alternate grounding for Canadian national identity is multiculturalism, which, quite opposite to wilderness, is spatialized as an

urban form (see Razack 2002; Teelucksingh 2006). Rinaldo Walcott (2003) argues that Brand moves Canadian literary tropes beyond “‘survival’ in a barren landscape” through her attention to the urban landscape (51). I argue that her inscription of blackness in rural areas and wilderness is as provocative, since non-urban landscapes tend to function metonymically to represent the territory of the nation as a whole.

In the long poem Land to Light On (1997), Brand confronts the symbolic significance of landscape in the exclusion of non-white immigrants from the Canadian nation. The poem begins with racist misogyny cutting the speaker off from the new landscape she has come to: If you come out and you see nothing recognisable, if the stars stark and brazen like glass, already done decide you cannot read them. If the trees don’t flower and colour refuse to limn when a white man in a red truck on a rural road jumps out at you, screaming his exact hatred … and he threatens, something about your cunt. (I ii: 4)

Much like the island wind and sea that imprisoned in “No Language is Neutral,” the landscape of rural southwestern Ontario refuses the speaker. She cannot read the landscape; it, in turn, refuses to be “read” by her. The death that winter brings to the trees, smothering all colour under whiteness, is likened to the rejection of self that white racism effects. The imagery of whiteness as both landscape and racism recurs in section XIII: “these white roads, snow / at our throats, and at the windshield a thick white cop” (73). The repetition of white links white privilege to the landscape. The police officer, like the “redneck” in the truck, polices territory

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Williams (1973) notes that in the English language “‘country’ is both a nation and a part of a ‘land’; ‘the country’ can be the whole society or its rural area” (1). Regardless of how many people actually live in rural areas, it often remains a nation’s symbolic “heartland” (Creed and Ching 1997: 14); in settler colonies, rural areas are the buffer between wilderness and city, and as such the site of the nation’s history—a space where the transformation of wilderness into national territory is still evident. Moreover, as the cosmopolitan site of the city shifts from being an “immigrant” or “multicultural” space into post-national “diasporic cities,” the more the national will be seemingly located outside the city altogether (Burman 2006: 102). Thus even as the urban becomes central to reading literatures and identities in Canada, it is imperative to theorize race and diaspora across the range of articulations of territory and landscape. As M. Nourbese Philip et al. (1997) point out in a conversation about race and rural Canada, presuming that people of colour only inhabit Canadian urban space unwittingly repeats the racist formulation of a pastoral desire to contain “pollution” to the cities and maintain the “purity” of the land/nation/nature (see also Di Chiro 1996).

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through identity, determining what bodies belong in rural space on the basis of race, gender and sexuality. The speaker calls attention to the power of the gaze in enforcing “white” space: “The snow-blue laser of a cop’s eyes fixes us” (73). She and her companions—“Three Blacks in a car”—are marked as outsiders by his white gaze on their black skin (73). The speaker explicitly links their racialized exclusion to a white inscription of the land as terra nullius: Something there, written as wilderness, wood, nickel, water, coal, rock, prairie, erased as Athabasca, Algonquin, Salish, Inuit…hooded in Buxton fugitive, Preston Black Loyalist, railroaded to gold mountain, swimming in Komagata Maru…are we still moving? Each body submerged in its awful history. (XIII: 77)

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The land becomes “wilderness” when Aboriginal presence is “erased.” Moreover, that historical erasure is likened to the erasure of black history in pre-Confederation Upper Canada and to the erasure of Chinese and Indian presence in Canadian history and nation-building. In historicizing “wilderness” as whiteness, the speaker marks the danger of seeing the “white space” of rural Canada as empty and ahistorical. Just as the scream from the red truck and the laser blue eyes of the white cop show the landscape to be racialized territory, the poem exposes wilderness as a claiming of territory for the sake of resource exploitation, which, like Aboriginal dispossession, is hidden under the cultural belief in wilderness as untouched nature. When land is stripped of history, it can be rendered as a storehouse of raw materials open for the taking, what Martin Heidegger (2000) described as seeing nature as “standing reserve” (322). Sophia Forster (2002) argues that the list “wood, nickel, water, coal” represents the “identitarian logic” of essentialism that also underpins racism: each item in the list is made equivalent because seen only as resource (167). In other words, the speaker is likening racism to resourcist and territorial approaches to nature. Katherine McKittrick (2006) similarly notes how “one of the many ways violence operates across gender, sexuality, and race is through multiscalar discourses of ownership: having ‘things,’ owning lands, invading territories, possessing someone” (3). For ecofeminist and environmental justice theorists, the significance of this parallel is that resistance to the essentialist logic of racism and the racial exclusions of national narratives should also involve re-conceptualizing the relationship to the land, and resisting its inscription as territory and resource (see Plumwood 1993; Di Chiro 1996; Cuomo 1998). Forster (2002), however, reads nature in Land to Light On as the emblem of essentialism. She suggests that “Brand most often uses discourses of the natural in order to essentialize.…Since essentialism naturalizes its objects, it is appropriate that Brand’s oppressive forces are envisioned at times as a literal force of nature” (Forster 2002: 169). I argue that Brand presents a more ambivalent stance toward

nature in Land, critical of how nature is deployed to naturalize territorial claims and national identities but cautious not to thereby dismiss the living or nonhuman worlds. The view of the land as resource for the nation is contrasted with the speaker’s approach to the land as living world in part II, when the scream from the red truck is a claim on space that leaves her in a contradictory state of attentiveness to nature: I can hear birds waking up by four a.m. and the hours between three and five last a whole day. I can hear wood breathe and stars crackle on the galvanized steel, I can hear smoke turn solid and this house is only as safe as flesh. I can hear the gate slam, I can hear wasps in my doorway, and foraging mice, there’s an old tree next to my car and I can hear it fall. (II iv: 11)

Rinaldo Walcott (2003) describes black people in Canada as living in an ambivalent state of belonging and not-belonging: “The impossibility of imagining blackness as Canadian is continually evident even as nation-state policies like multiculturalism seek to signal otherwise. The simultaneity of being here and not being here is, in effect, an in-between position” (48). Walcott argues that in mapping this ambivalent space, Brand’s writing is distinguished by its refusal of nostalgia for a past or home, insisting instead on a “politics of its present location,” which quite literally traces and claims the locations of black and lesbian presence in Canada by “staking out territory” (48). I would like to expand Walcott’s reading by suggesting the ambivalence in Brand’s poetry extends beyond her subject’s feelings of belonging and notbelonging in the nation to her subject’s ambivalence about re-enacting the claims of territory as a form of writing over nature, not just history. The speaker’s curse in Part V, “I don’t want no fucking country, here / or there and all the way back” (V

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The repetition of “hear” reflects the speaker’s fear, grown into a paranoia that she is surrounded by lurking threats. Even the house is not safe because she is vulnerable as a lone black woman in the open, isolated rural area. But what she “hears” for the most part are not violating threats but the land itself. Her fear makes her especially attuned to the sounds of nature, not just to animals like the birds or the mice, but the very breathing of the trees, suggesting recognition of a land that is alive. Poem iv ends with the threat of “the crush of boots and something coming” but what comes, at the opening of poem v, is not the racist white man but a spectacular comet: “A comet, slow and magnificent, drapes the north sky / but I cannot see it, cannot allow it” (II v: 12). She finds herself inhabiting a living world, which, as in “No Language,” she hears despite an inability to look. In both poems, the gaze as a form of territorial claim is contrasted with the relationality of sound: “the mechanics / of a hummingbird less blazing than the whirr” (Land XII: 69).

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vi: 48), is read by most critics as a rejection of the exclusionary politics of nations and nationalisms that are so explicitly enacted in the white Ontario countryside. “Land,” too, is read primarily as a metaphor for nation, when the speaker declares, “I’m giving up on land to light on, and why not” (V vi: 48). But if we read “land” and “country” as also referring to the physical terrain we inhabit, and which it is quite impossible to abandon (despite the hubris of modernity), then the “in-between position” Walcott (2003) describes takes on an additional layer of ambivalence. The desire articulated in “No Language is Neutral” for a place of belonging has turned to a refusal to land or belong anywhere in Land, and yet the notion of never “landing,” of perpetually floating in the air unencumbered by identities or nation-states or gravity, is as pernicious as any nostalgia. The speaker has landed; landed in a physical place—an ecological place—not just a socio-political space. Even as her access to that place is curtailed by nationalist policing of rural territory, she comes to hear the life around her anyway; and even as she represents the “assertion and insertion of a black presence” in rural space (Walcott 2003: 50), she resists repeating a territorial claim to nature as resource or property.

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A young girl can legitimately take possession of a street, or an entire city, albeit on different terms than we may be familiar with. — Katherine McKittrick, Demonic Grounds

The long poem thirsty (2002), which shifts from the rural landscape to the Toronto cityscape, presents another example of what I am arguing is Brand’s claiming of place while resisting territorialization. McKittrick’s (2006) comprehensive study of black geographic thought provides a useful basis for this argument because she insists on recognizing the physical, and not only symbolic, dimensions of space and place in black writing and theory. McKittrick (2006) argues that black subjects have often been deemed “ungeographic”: black people are often restricted to or absented from particular places but rarely seen as contributing to the construction or mapping of physical space (x). McKittrick (2006) shows how black female subjectivity is intertwined with “acts of expressing and saying place” (xxiii), but in ways that are often, to repeat the epigraph above, “on different terms than we may be familiar with” (ix). McKittrick argues that black women’s geographies especially resist claims to transparent and totalizing knowledge of place; instead, black women bring geographical experiences into expression through their particular bodies, histories, and voices. I extend McKittrick’s reading of black human geography to insist that space be understood not only as the physical grounds for human life, but also as a living realm. Places are alive—with human subjects and nonhuman beings—and it is Brand’s attentiveness to life that contributes to her resistance to a geographical practice of territorialization in Land and thirsty.

The ever-present smog suggests the poem is an elegy to the memory of Alan and the memory of nature; the loss of this black man is related to these other losses in the city. The city is an “urban barracoon” (VIII: 11) where lives are stifled because the very air is toxic—with racism and exhaust fumes: “breathing, you can breathe if you find air” (VIII: 11). The land, air and water that support the life of the city is pushed out of sight and out of mind: “Every night the waste of the city is put out and taken away / to suburban landfills and recycling plants, / and that is the rhythm everyone would prefer in their life” (XXXII: 62). Black men, too, appear to be treated like detritus to be cleared away. A landscape of death prevails in the “strip malls of ambitious immigrants” (VIII: 11), part of a normalized acceptance that the immigrant is not really permitted to live in this place: “We live here / but don’t think that we’re going to live like people here!” (XX: 37). The poem echoes with what it terms “conditional sentences about conditional places” (XX: 37): “‘If we were home. / I would…’ as strong a romance with the past tense as with what is / to come” (XX: 37). If racial exclusion means living in Canada feels like a “conditional sentence,” only provisionally accepted, then giving in to that sense of not-belonging leaves the immigrant living a deferred life in a city only seen as a temporary stop, a “conditional place” that does not matter. Oscillating between nostalgia for “what they choose to remember” and ambition for a better life, these

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Jody Mason (2006) finds that thirsty presents a hopeful embrace of the city, the poem moving from an initially despondent view of the city as “a ‘mordant’ and unwelcoming refuge” to “a site for exploring what ‘another kind of world’ or the ‘arrival of a future’ could look like” (797). The city is a refuge from the racist violence and unsettling landscape of Land. In an explicit reference to Group of Seven progenitor Tom Thomson’s Burnt Country (see also XX: 36), the speaker declares, “That north burnt country ran me down / to the city, mordant as it is” (III: 5). The city she finds is moribund, lifeless on first impression, full of “broken things” (I: 1) like the “the shrinking lake” (I: 1) and the “smashed night birds” who fly into skyscraper lights (I: 1). As in Land, the poem associates the death of nature with the erasure of Aboriginal presence: “smog braids the city where sweet grass used to” (XXXII: 62). But the poem also intertwines diasporic experience and the plight of nature. Alan, dying on his doorstep after being shot by police, is another of these “broken things.” His crumpled body is compared to the cultivars of his garden: “clematis cirrhosa and a budding grape vine he was still / to plant when he could, saying when he had fallen, ‘…thirsty…’” (II: 4). The word “thirsty,” which gives the poem its title, is preceded and followed by ellipses. The word indicates desire and anticipation, a life wanting and planning to live, to grow, to bloom; the ellipses keep this desire incomplete and indecipherable, even as Alan turns into a symbol for a beleaguered black community when “his chest flowered stigma of scarlet bergamot” (XII: 21). Thirsty mourns the many lives cut short and stifled, including the birds, the lake, Alan, and Alan’s widow, whose “face was waterless” after years of domestic joylessness and violence (XXI: 38).

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immigrants are “buried in…suburbs undifferentiated, prefabricated from no great / narrative, except cash” (XX: 36). With no affective attachments to the place, the land holds value only as property and capital. As a result, much like Alan’s thirst for life and beauty is shot dead, the living earth is smothered in the scramble for development: “unflagging dreariness dries the landscape, meagre oases of woodland / fight gas stations and donut shops for any thing named beauty / …This suburban parching would dry bog” (XX: 36). Alan’s thirst mirrors the thirst of the drained and denuded land—both strive for life and beauty.

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Thirsty suggests that flourishing is undermined by the “conditional sentences” that devalue both people and places, but the poem nevertheless embraces the cosmopolitan possibilities of the diasporic city. The title phrase is reinterpreted with a page break to suggest the bustling promise of life in the city: “Alan fell down whispering, ‘…thirsty…’ // which is to say, human. I did hear the city’s susurrus, / loud, wide, promising, like wine, obscurity and rapture, / the bright veiled Somali women hyphenating Scarlett Road” (XXI: 39– XXII: 40). Murmurs of life, hyphenated identities bring the streets to life with conversations in new, hybrid languages: “At the Sea King Fish Market, / the Portuguese men have learned another language. ‘Yes / sweetie, yes dahling, and for you only this good good price.’ / This to the old Jamaican women” (XXII: 40). The lines act like streets that bridge multiple diasporas, the cacophony a spontaneous emergence of new formations. Toronto’s famed cultural and linguistic diversity is directly linked to its urban infrastructure and density: “The tunnel breathes in the coming train exhaling / as minerals the grammar of Calcutta, Colombo, / Jakarta, Mogila and Senhor do Bonfim, Robeira Grande / and Hong Kong, Mogadishu and the alias St. Petersburg” (XI: 20). The subway provides a constantly moving yet common ground for this multicultural conflux; the plurality of grammars the precious ore that makes the city work. For all the joy the multicultural crowds suggest, there is no seamless intersection of diversity and justice, nor immigrant opportunity and ecological sustainability. Thirsty resists the rhythm of death by presenting a “politics of the present location” (Walcott 2003; 48), breaking the “conditional sentence” by committing to the here and now. The poem itself enacts a form of inhabitation by functioning as a cartographic exercise, “writing the biographies / of streets” (XXII: 40). The speaker moves into the city by mapping its “small streets” (IV: 7) and mundane crossroads: “the bank to one corner, the driving school on another, / the milk store and the church” (II: 3). It is a cartography of the every day, and one that resists re-enacting the exclusionary claims of territory because based on moving in the public spaces that bring one together with strangers. Each character is associated with transit: waiting for trolleys, riding buses and subway cars or joyfully riding a bicycle: “a bicycle, / a sparrow of light, and meter, velocity itself ” (X iv: 18). The physical movement through the city brings an openness to possibility and engagement with life in its various, unexpected forms, human and non-human: “you feel someone brush against you, / on the street, you smell leather, the lake, / the coming leaves,

the rain’s immortality” (XXX: 57). The speaker herself is a stranger to Alan, Julia and Chloe, the figures who haunt the poem. She is someone who merely “brushes against them” in the street: “I don’t remember that frail morning, how / could I? No one wakes up thinking of a stranger” (XIII: 22). Against the “feral amnesia” (XV: 24) that allows us to forget the garbage carried away in the night, or the unknown lives ended in snap flashes of racist violence, the poem presents the possibility of the city as a meeting point of strangers, brought together only through the random encounters of shared space, where many might cultivate “some thing of beauty,” allowing ourselves and the land to flourish.

Planet The bloodstained swirl of the planet stuns us without our realizing it. — Édouard Glissant, Caribbean Discourse

The discourse of cosmopolitanism has emerged as a response to the limitations of nationalism, multiculturalism and globalization. Striking a path between fetishized local identities and a homogenizing universalism, cosmopolitanism is a worldly view that engages in conversation across differences, striving not to transcend difference, nor freeze difference into static identities; it potentially enables what Kwame Anthony Appiah (2006) terms “ethics in a world of strangers,” the subtitle

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The grief for the stranger that the speaker feels in thirsty is extended beyond both city and nation in Brand’s long poem Inventory (2006) as a form of ethical and political response to the violence and destruction occurring across the planet. The television screen makes the speaker “the wars’ last and late night witness” (III: 21); witness to the unknown and unnamed victims of the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan without leaving her living room. Similarly, the ecological desolation of the city in thirsty—its smoggy air, desiccated wetlands, meagre woods, and garbage piles—is extended to a planetary scale in Inventory: “the forests we destroyed, / as far as / the Amazonas’ forehead, the Congo’s gut” (I: 7). This destruction is “everywhere” (I: 7); it stretches across the continents, across the mythic maps of pristine origins and jungle interiors. Re-appropriating the cartographic imposition of the human figure upon the landscape, the poem imagines the planet itself as a fleshy, humanlike body; it is “this shorn planet,” a body clipped bare and naked through deforestation (VI: 85). Alive and breathing, it is the personified Gaia, the mythological Greek goddess of the Earth, given an ecological aura in climate scientist James Lovelock’s (1979) “Gaia hypothesis,” which posits the planet as a self-regulating system that maintains the conditions for life. Just as Land to Light On leverages the double meanings of “land” and “country” to refer to both the nation and the physical terrain, Inventory evokes the language of “planet” to suggest both the physical Earth that all living creatures share and a cosmopolitan vision of citizenship that recognizes obligations to others unlike ourselves.

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to his book Cosmopolitanism. As with other theoretical approaches to transnational identities, cosmopolitanism has developed with little reference to the global challenges posed by environmental issues and movements. Paul Gilroy (2004) and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (2003) both turn, albeit in different ways, to the language of “planetarity” in order to situate their post-national visions of ethics and politics partially within an ecological context. In After Empire, Gilroy (2004) advocates a version of cosmopolitanism, which he terms “planetary humanism” (4), that incorporates an environmental justice sensibility: “The world becomes not a limitless globe, but a small, fragile, and finite place, one planet among others with strictly limited resources that are allocated unequally” (83). Gilroy proposes that the planetary perspective can evade the parochialism of nationalism, racism and identity politics, without adopting the triumphalism of globalization. Spivak (2003), like Gilroy, is wary of the totalizing language of globalization, which, she argues, also appropriates the living Earth: “Globalization is the imposition of the same system of exchange everywhere….The globe is on our computers. No one lives there. It allows us to think that we can aim to control it. The planet is in the species of alterity, belonging to another system; and yet we inhabit it, on loan” (72). Spivak’s notion of the planet recognizes human ecological dependency without either subsuming the human to the natural, nor striving to better manage nature through science and technology. The planet is both other and here; both foreign and home ground. Inventory demonstrates how the in-between position of the racialized diasporic subject enables a planetary perspective that avoids totalization or the presumption of universality. The poem traces injustices across global relations of consumption and production with the example of the cell phone. Instead of enabling communication between distant places, the cell phone materially links strangers who remain strangers to one another: there are cellphones calling no one, no messages burn on the planet’s withered lungs all that koltan from Kahuzi-Biega, the landslides, to carry nothing. (III: 41)

The Gaian imagery of a living, breathing planet whose lungs “wither” as tropical forests are lost is localized and historicized with the reference to coltan mining in Kahuzi-Biega, a Democratic Republic of Congo national park. Used in light-weight electronics like cell phones, coltan has fetched high prices on the world market since the late 1990s, helping to fuel the civil war in the Congo and involving thousands of people working in the illegal mining operations and mining trade under violent and dangerous conditions (Report 2001). With no safety equipment or infrastructure, miners, who include children, can be buried alive in landslides triggered by their digging. The image of the cell phone “calling no one” and “carry[ing] nothing” is a bitter indictment of the willful ignorance induced by commodity fetishism. The labour, land and materials that produce the cell phone,

and the forests lost in consequence, are so easily rendered invisible. Consumers in the global north are linked materially to the global south, but no message is passed between them. Throughout the poem, the victims of poverty, dangerous work and military and state violence are strangers; unlike Alan in thirsty, they are not even named. Brand mimics and exposes the mass media’s depersonalizing effects by using the form of an inventory, a list or catalogue of things, to detail global suffering. Nameless, not identified by nation or race, only rarely by gender or age, the victims are reduced to their victim status: “let us all deny our useless names in solidarity” (V: 78). Only the number, method, and place of death is named and particular: by malaria, by hemorrhagic fevers, by hungers, by fingerprint, by dogs and vigilantes by arrests near the tunnel, in arrest by La Migra in Brewster County, Hidalgo County, Dona Ana County, and Zapata County. (III: 39)

The poem traces social, economic and ecological relations across the planet, while resisting portraying the planet merely as a space of human habitation. The planet is repeatedly pictured as a living, vulnerable body, complete in itself, and the poem explicitly frames ecological destruction as an ethical imperative. The speaker mourns “the trees we peeled of rough butter, / full knowing, there’s something wrong / with this” (I: 7). By using “we,” the speaker includes herself and the reader in an ethical community, demanding that “we” acknowledge our beneficiary status in relation to

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Method replaces narrative: there are no persons, only agents and acts. Nations, too, are absent, though their borders policed. Places are localized as cities, neighbourhoods and rural counties. Our interpellation as witnesses and beneficiaries is therefore premised not on some shared citizenship, nor even humanity (there are no persons here), but on the television screen that constructs a shared planetary space: “in documentaries, in liquid surfaces, / in oceanic blue screens, in disappearances in / the secret seas of living rooms here” (III: 39). Inventory exemplifies Arjun Appadurai’s (1996) argument that media technologies have enabled post-national or global forms of subjectivity. Spatial distance and time lag can no longer provide the excuse of ignorance for inaction; geographical distance is erased so that “all this became ordinary far from where it happened” (III: 22). However, the lack of personal relationship, cultural identification or state accountability creates such political and ethical distance between people that the constant stream of death is normalized. The speaker, alone, rejects this widespread complicity: when “everyone grows perversely accustomed, / she refuses” (III: 29). By insisting on an ethical response to strangers who remain strangers, Brand, like Spivak (2003) and Gilroy (2004), appears skeptical about closing that distance by denying difference, but similarly finds a planetary rather than national framework necessary for adequately accounting for our responsibilities.

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ecological exploitation undertaken in remote places. The poem suggests it is not knowledge of this exploitation that is lacking, but acknowledgement of its ethical dimension—that, however inadequate our inherited moral philosophies may be, we “full[y] know” that it is wrong. Recognizing nature for itself, as well as for our own flourishing, is the central theme of the long poem’s final section. Given the poem’s detailed inventory of political violence, the turn to nature may appear escapist, a means of fleeing from history into the welcome embrace of a holistic, innocent Gaia. But this turn to joy as an ethico-political stance finds a precursor in Brand’s (1994) essay “This Body for Itself,” which describes Brand’s choice to speak about black women’s sexual pleasure rather than the acceptable topic, “poetry and politics.”

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Claiming one’s body for itself cannot be taken for granted by women, especially black women, who have so long been positioned for others—their bodies owned by others, their bodies working for others, their bodies nourishing others, their bodies pleasuring others. Brand (1994) does not merely place the black woman’s body at the centre of her political struggle; rather she argues that bodies are more than mere objects or symbols in the contest over power: “I was bothered that this woman might be me or my aunt or my mother or my grandmother and part of her might be missing, part of her she might enjoy for herself. I was worried that she might not want to be a symbol for any writer’s pain, mine included” (30). To recognize the “body for itself ” therefore also means “to have fun just so, by itself ” (31). The fight for freedom must ultimately be about enabling flourishing of our complete selves and bodies, just for us, just for the sake of pleasure. Nature, too, has largely been positioned for others, in both material and symbolic terms. As the corporeal imagery of “Amazonas’ forehead” reminds us (Brand 2006 I: 7), the Earth has long been represented as a female body, which, as Carolyn Merchant (1980) argues, has functioned to make the Earth appear available for conquest and exploitation. Recognition of nature “for itself ” and not solely for human consumption can therefore be seen as parallel to and intertwined with recognizing the intrinsic value of women’s lives and bodies. And yet, for the sake of women and nonhuman beings, we will want to also respect our quite significant differences, or risk repeating the identitarian logic that nature is a set of similar things (see Sandilands 1999). Inventory brings together these two ethical imperatives when the speaker lyrically reclaims the bodily joy of being alive in a living world. In the final section of the poem, the speaker remembers “the flight and dive of pelicans, the scent / of sandalwood and the scent of mangoes” (Brand 2006 VII: 90); her list is playful, textured, and sensuous. Dance and music is remembered alongside sleep and waking; the involuntary and natural celebrated alongside the art and choice of moving our bodies, “weighed down / only by the revolutions / of the earth’s incandescence and gloaming” (VII: 93). The flourishing of her own body is shown to be related to the flourishing of nature, each for itself. Self-reflexively recognizing the risks of a lyrical embrace of nature, the poet, at first, disavows any aesthetic appreciation of nature in light of ecological destruction,

turning from the “sweet life of green oranges” to the extraction of coltan, admonishing “forget it, we can’t speak of nature in that breath any more” (III: 40). “Let us not invoke the natural world,” she continues, “it’s ravaged like any battlefield, like any tourist / island, like any ocean we care to name” (42). The seeming redundancy of comparing the “natural world” to “field,” “island,” and “ocean” links ecological degradation with the devastations of war, global tourism and the Middle Passage. But it also marks the differences so loosely gathered under the label “nature.” These differences are given exuberant name in Part VI: the banded pitta, the mangrove pitta, the bulbul, the iora, the red-naped and scarlet-rumped trogon, the fire-tufted barbet, flame back, philentoma, the rufous-throated wren babbler… (85)

In letting the lips and tongue play over each name—culminating with “the alliterative blue-bearded bee-eater” (VI: 85)—the poem savours each species’ colourful particularity: “you see, they’re saying, what would it be without birds” (85). In sharp contrast with the absence of human names and voices, the “birds of the world” (85) are named, and the speaker admonishes the reader to “listen to all the laughing thrushes, / striated, white throated, orange headed, all” (86), simultaneously insisting on the diversity and the presence of these strangers. TOPIA 34

In adopting the cataloguing impulse of the inventory, the poet risks establishing nature yet again as a standing reserve, a treasure chest of biodiversity or aesthetic pleasures. But here the subjective perspective of the lyrical voice undermines the totalizing gesture of the end-of-season inventory, when the storekeeper tallies up all his possessions: “armadillos, morrocoys and one-inch pandas, / all different, don’t be mistaken, they’re not simple, / not as simple as the ways to kill them” (VII: 96). The speaker interjects in the middle of her list to ridicule the notion that the poetry of nature is either escapist or essentialist, teasing, “but let’s leave nature for a while / how can we, yes, let’s not essentialize the only / essential thing, it doesn’t work, it fails often” (96). In place of a generic or essentialized “nature,” the speaker names specific names; in adding to her list “something edible in a desert, or perhaps / the inedibility of deserts” (92), she recognizes the landforms for themselves, not just for their use or for the aesthetic pleasures they bring her. The Earth provides nourishment, yet is more than what it is for us: “The physical world…[has] its own inventory of time, of light and dark” (III: 46). The speaker recognizes the planet as both home and foreign ground, a meeting place of strangers, human and nonhuman.

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Conclusions The figure of the stranger that appears in thirsty and Inventory can be read as the culmination of Brand’s ambivalence toward collective identities, especially identities naturalized through reference to race, gender and territory. The appearance of the stranger keeps a city—or the planet—from being totally known or owned by oneself or one’s own. By defining the city and the planet as gathering points for strangers, the diasporic and racialized subject’s sense of not-belonging is extended to everyone, and becomes the tentative basis for a limited identification and empathy. But Brand’s poems also speak passionately for the importance of a sense of belonging, and mark the dangers of giving no value to communities that develop over time in particular places. The yearning absence of a sense of home or belonging the emigrant expresses in No Language, where the gaze on the landscape becomes a violent denial of self, is mirrored in the deadened cityscape in thirsty, which remains but a temporary stopping point for those immigrants who can never feel they belong.

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Brand navigates these tensions through ambivalent articulations of nature—nature as the living world that we inhabit, and which can so easily be mobilized aesthetically to naturalize (or de-historicize) identity, power and territory. On the one hand, Brand resists naturalization by historicizing landscape and by mapping the physical spaces of experience and commodity exchange. On the other hand, Brand resists reducing nature to a symbolic abstraction or a resource for the nation or self. In “No Language is Neutral,” Brand shows a landscape haunted by history (and therefore a monument to that history), and yet more than history; the landscape holds personal meaning and memory not reducible to its role as a historical symbol. And, as the place and species naming of Inventory demonstrates, to recognize the intrinsic value of the nonhuman is not to de-historicize places under the sign of a universal “nature,” but rather to situate black diaspora in ecological histories and geographies that include more than humans. Throughout Brand’s poetry, nature is never only a symbol for something else; Brand writes the land and the ocean, the trees and the flowers, each also for their own sake, an ethical stance that parallels her lesbian-feminist commitment to “write this body for itself ” (Brand 1994: 31). Nature becomes the lived world when experienced through bodily movement not totalized cartography, when voiced in sound rather than pinned down by the gaze, and when recognized as a multitude of both friends and strangers. Indeed, it is the expression of love for nature that makes the disjuncture between place, belonging, and justice so intensely painful in Brand’s poetry. In marking so carefully the relations of love and power that bind and rupture identity and place, Brand shows how necessary but difficult is the task of making the places we live in actually livable.

Acknowledgements Some of the material in this article was first published in “Witness to the Body Count: Planetary Ethics in Dionne Brand’s Inventory,” in Canadian Poetry 63 (Fall/Winter 2008): 37–58. References

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