Reconstruction Vol. 13, No. 3/4

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At the Full and Change of the Moon: The Passing Down of Cultural Memory in the Black Diaspora / Anh Hua

Keywords: Feminism; Literature; Race & Ethnicity

<1> Referring to the Holocaust, James Young argues that historians mistakenly make a forced distinction between memory and history, where history is defined as that which happened and memory as that which is remembered of what happened. This leaves no room for the survivor’s voice and the survivor’s memory of the events, whose value is lost to the historians. James Young is interested in bridging the gap between a survivor’s “deep memory” and historical narrative, how to remember the past as it passes from living memory to history (276-277). Historical inquiry, for Young, is understood as “the combined study of both what happened and how it is passed down to us” (283). Instead of creating a gap between what happened and how it is remembered, Young proposes that we can benefit more by examining “what happens when the players of history remember their [pasts for] subsequent generations” (283). Like James Young, Dionne Brand imagines how the subjects of history, the slaves and their descendents, remember their past for subsequent generations. Brand attempts to understand what happened during slavery and how slavery is passed down to us. In this article, I will examine how Afro-Caribbean Canadian writer Dionne Brand reflects on the cultural memory of slavery in her novel At the Full and Change of the Moon. Brand, in her interest in exploring the psychic and material aftermath effects of slavery, is concerned with cultural memory – memory constructed from cultural forms, particularly the recollection of events of which we may not have first-hand experience and knowledge (Misztal 158).

<2> The history of slavery, like that of the Holocaust, poses an important ethical question: how to remember or memorialize slavery when live witnesses are dead, how to move from individual voice to collective voices, how to move from an era of active witness to history (Douglass and Vogler 4). Dionne Brand evokes memory “as a way to critique the totalizing mode of conventional historical discourse, and to venture more boldly into historicism,” by examining the “transgenerational trauma” of slavery as a “social glue” which holds groups together on the basis of race and gender (Douglass and Vogler 6, 10, 12).

<3> The cultural trauma of slavery is the collective memory that grounds the identity formation of a particular people – the Black Diaspora. Slavery is traumatic, a “primal scene” which can unite all Diaspora Afro-Caribbeans, whether an individual remembers or deliberately or unconsciously forgets it. Slavery is the root of an emergent collective identity and an emergent collective memory. The history of slavery distinguishes the Black Diaspora from other diasporas and dispersed communities (Eyerman 1). Today, slavery exists as a cultural trauma or collective memory rather than an individual experience or an institution. Ron Eyerman defines cultural trauma as follows: “As opposed to psychological or physical trauma, which involves a wound by an individual, cultural trauma refers to a dramatic loss of identity and meaning, a tear in the social fabric, affecting a group of people that has achieved some degree of cohesion” (2). Slavery has effected a dramatic loss and tear in the social fabric of African slaves and their descendents. The cultural trauma of forced servitude and nearly complete subordination found in slavery no doubt has impacted the lives, memory, fragmented history, pain and survival of slave descendents.

<4> At the Full and Change of the Moon begins with Marie Ursule, queen of a slave secret society Sans Peur, planning a mass suicide as an anti-colonial revolt on the island of Trinidad in 1824. Marie Ursule cannot, however, bring herself to kill her young daughter Bola, who is sent away with the child’s father Kamena to a safer place on the island. Dispersed across the globe, including the Americas, Europe and the Caribbean, Bola’s descendants are haunted by the traumas, desires and resistances of their ancestors. The novel traces the six generations of Marie Ursule’s descendants to tell their life stories of dispossession, displacement, resistance, fragmented history and memory in the Black Diaspora.

<5> At the Full and Change of the Moon can be termed what Angelyn Mitchell calls “liberatory narratives” (4). Liberatory narratives are contemporary novels that engage the historical period of chattel slavery in order to provide models of liberation for those who were formerly enslaved and the descendants of slaves. They are conscious of its antecedent text, the slave narrative (Mitchell 4). Liberatory narratives such as At the Full can reveal to the readers not only what slavery was like but also what slavery felt like. They can produce “a release of this historical pain and shame” (Mitchell 21). Liberatory narratives permit readers to go beyond the events of slavery to imagine the feelings and thoughts of enslaved and free Black people. They can create a memory and space for meeting and understanding a different time and place which, then, allows comprehending of the interconnection of oppression and resistance in our time and space. They can destabilize and revise the master narrative of colonial history producing “‘curative domains’ where healing may take place through discursive acts” (Mitchell 17).

<6> What is curative about Brand’s literary imagination is her deliberate rewriting of slave history to tell of the resistance, empowerment, will, agency and desire of Black women. To revisit the cultural memory of slavery is to rewrite the history of slavery, to recognize the moments, narratives and acts of slave resistance. In North America and the Caribbean, stories of slave uprisings were deliberately erased from official colonial and neocolonial history because they questioned the myths of the docile slave and of slavery as a “benevolent institution.” Patriarchal accounts of slavery, by both colonial and postcolonial discourses, also eliminated narratives of female rebels and leaders. By depicting the memory of these rebel women such as the character Marie Ursule, who is based on a historical figure Thisbe, Dionne Brand shows that: “The memory of these women served as a weapon against slavery and, if kept alive, their memory may continue to be a catalyst to resistance against types of oppression mirroring master-slave relations, such as colonization and discrimination on the basis of race, gender, and religion” (Agosto 2). Challenging the monolithic grand narrative of Western modernist historiography, Dionne Brand offers “a revision that consists of inscribing in ‘official’ history the memory of those women who fought against slavery and oppression and risked their lives in the process” (Agosto 3). Dionne Brand is aware that memory is a critical part of history and it should be validated and incorporated into history. She recognizes that according memory of oppressed social groups the status of history can exert liberating potential in modern and postmodern societies.

<7> The issue of slavery in twentieth-century North America exists like “a Mobius strip on which remembering and forgetting twist endlessly in the collective national consciousness” (Mitchell 3). The history of slavery is what Toni Morrison refers to as “the site of memory” for Black Diaspora women, men and children. She observes that no slave society in the world wrote more or thought more about its own enslavement, yet the interior lives of the slaves remain veiled and unexamined. Her project as a Black Diaspora feminist writer is to fill in, expand and complement slave autobiographical narratives, through the use of cultural memory and imagination, to recover a difficult past or history (Morrison). Dionne Brand, in her novel, is performing a similar act. She expands and fills in the nearly lost or misrepresented history of slave experiences through cultural memory and imagination. At the Full can be what Toni Morrison calls a literary text of “rememory,” “the process of remembering not only what one has forgotten but also what one wants to forget and cannot” (Mitchell 12). At the Full is a “rememory” of slavery and its psychic, embodied, and material effects.

<8> Unlike Paul Gilroy’s Black Atlantic that excludes Black women’s experiences as “transatlantic voyagers,” Dionne Brand’s novel traces “a transgressive gendering of diaspora identifications” with Black women at the discursive center (Garvey 491). Marie Ursule is described as “queen of rebels, queen of evenings, queen of malingering and sabotages,” who was punished by the slaveholders for attempting a slave uprising in 1819 (5). Her sentence was to receive “thirty-nine lashes, to have an ear cut off, and to have an iron ring of ten pounds weight affixed to one of her legs, to remain thereon for the space of two years” (14). That iron ring on her ankle recalls a traumatic embodied memory of plantation slavery: “…the memory of that ring of iron hung on, even after it was removed.” “A ghost of pain around her ankle” like a phantom limb “choreographed her walk and her first thoughts each day” (4). That image of Marie Ursule with an iron ring around her ankle culturally haunts the descendants of slaves, of the trauma of forced servitude. Here, the body of a female enslaved character reveals that slavery and oppression can be engraved on women’s bodies.

<9> Yet Marie Ursule is the queen of rebels, queen of anti-colonial revolts. She passionately and quietly plans a mass suicide for the Sans Peur by collecting “woorara,” a poisonous plant, which the Caribs had told her was quick and simple. By organizing the mass suicide and sparing the life of her daughter Bola, Marie Ursule commits a dual resistance. Marie Ursule ends the misery of slavery for the slaves on Mon Chagrin estate, and she provides for Bola a chance for future freedom and the possibility of a matrilineal Diaspora genealogy. Marie Ursule, thus, represents both tragic death and the utopia hope of the end of brutality.

<10> Characters like Marie Ursule challenge both slavery and patriarchy, yet their stories were erased by official history. All slave revolts were written out of history, but the accounts of women rebels in particular were displaced by both Western modern historiography and patriarchy, because rebellious female slaves were a threat to slavery and its underlying patriarchal system. Recording the history of slavery through women is crucial for subsequent generations, particularly for Black Diaspora women and young girls. Such “memory of resistance” can inspire “strategies for liberation against pervasive oppression” (Agosto 9). As Noraida Agosto argues: “Validating the memory of slaves tenaciously fighting a system that threatened to undo them not only underscores the enslaved self’s dignity but shows that the dialectics of oppression and resistance are at the marrow of history” (6). At the Full encourages readers to participate in the reconstruction of history to validate the memories and life stories of silenced accounts. It is an example of literary texts that: “…empower the oppressed by granting ‘colonized’ memory the status of history while energizing history with memory” (Agosto 20).

<11> In this novel, Dionne Brand takes historical fragments, moments and characters she found in historical documents and everyday life to reconstruct cultural memory via literary imagination. For example, the character Marie Ursule is based on the historical figure Thisbe who in 1802 was hanged, mutilated and burnt, her head spiked on a pole, for organizing a mass suicide by poisoning on an estate. At her death sentence, Brand’s Marie Ursule repeats the words of the historical Thisbe: “This is but a drink of water to what I have already suffered” (24). Using historical fragments, cultural memory and imagination, Brand reveals Marie Ursule’s act of mass suicide as a complex and contradictory one, an act of freedom and of death, an act of heroism and of great despair, an act of hope and of horror (Walcott and Sanders 24).

<12> The book, Dionne Brand reminds us, is not a historical novel, for as a work of fiction, it is guided by “how imagination is long, and open” (Walcott and Sanders 22). Although history “hovers” or “overwhelms” the twentieth-century descendants in the rest of the novel as well as the readers, once history is translated into fiction, it becomes something else (Walcott and Sanders 24). It is important to remember that Dionne Brand is not interested in writing history or sociology. She begins by entering the historical archive or history proper and discover a void, a displacement, a silence, or an absence – the history of Black and colored women. Recognizing the imaginative work in historiography, she takes personal and collective memory as strategies to rewrite history proper through creative narratives and imageries. Fragments of history, translated into imagination and creative writing, become both reconstruction and invention of cultural memory. Women of color writers like Dionne Brand must take fragments of history to rewrite a new story, to invent or rewrite a new cultural memory because the stories or histories of their communities have been unrecorded or displaced.

<13> Just as there are multiple variegated experiences of slavery, there are multiple resistances to slavery. While Marie Ursule chooses mass suicide to escape from slavery, Bola and Kamena have different life directions. Bola does not recall slavery or the resistant act of Marie Ursule, save that Marie Ursule is her mother who sings to her. Bola represents, as Johanna Garvey notes, “the matriarch of Brand’s Atlantic vision” and “the counterpoint to mass death.” Through Bola’s descendents, Brand moves the readers into “a larger diasporic space, a Caribbean Atlantic not only Black but Asian and European, as well.” Brand’s version of Black Diaspora space and identification claims “a different matrix – a literal and figurative womb, a passage that leads both to displacement and to a larger potential space of re-membering” (Garvey 492).

<14> If Marie Ursule does not expect her descendants to remember slavery and her act of rebellion, she knows Bola will “add the rest, all beginnings, all catastrophes, like lust” (22). Bola embodies the vastness of the sea and the fluidity of water. Marie Ursule decides to spare Bola’s life because she saw the sea and the future of possible descendents in Bola’s eyes:

This is what Marie Ursule had seen in her child’s eyes, the sea, and a journey to be made that melts the body. She had seen the child in the sea…. There in the sea, in the middle of Bola’s eyes, Marie Ursule saw skyscrapers and trains and machines and streets…. Her heart came like water in her hand and her face splintered in faces of coming faces, and she knew that if it was the future she was looking at, then she was keeping this crazy child from it if she took her along. (44-45)

<15> Marie Ursule saw in Bola’s watery eyes her fierceness to embrace life and the possibility of future freedom for Black Diaspora descendants: “[Marie Ursule] saw the big ragged map of the world. She saw something fierce in Bola, a need to strain the ocean between her teeth…she saw Bola swimming into the future until she was bloated like a sea thing” (47). Here, the ocean is not a site for recalling the traumatic memory of the Middle Passage, but a safer home space, vast and powerful enough to hold the dispersal of the Black Diaspora. The ocean is the fluid interstitial space that connects the diversity and differential history and geography of the transnational Black Diaspora subjectivities. Bola, in a sense, plays the role of the biological and mythical matriarch of the Black Diaspora, watching over her children and grandchildren from a distance. Brand, however, does not romanticize the diaspora experienced by Bola’s descendents. The female and male characters experience suffering, dispossession and great despair as the on-going legacy of slavery and colonization, whether they remain on the island of Trinidad or migrate across the sea to other geographical homes.

<16> If Bola unknowingly seeks freedom by embodying the ocean as a freer space of potential connection and female desire, Kamena moves towards resistance by his repeated attempts to relocate the maroon settlement of Terre Bouillante. Kamena is located on the periphery of Marie Ursule and Bola’s matrilineal diaspora genealogy. His destiny is to be “marooned to his last direction.” Unlike Bola who moves with pleasure and freedom outward and forward to the sea, Kamena moves inland, away from the sea, backwards in time and space, unaware of the present. Kamena is unaware of the proclamation of freedom or the Abolition laws. As Johanna Garvey notes, Kamena “remains caught in memories of the Middle Passage and seeks the maroons, lost in his conflicting and ultimately useless directions until he fades into the landscape. Brand suggests that although the traces of trauma cannot be erased, to follow such a path could become a futile attempt to stop time” (493). Kamena, caught by the memories of the past, is unable to look forward, becoming as ghostly as the two Ursuline nuns. In his melancholic compulsive-repetitive search for the maroons, he returns each time to Bola with “less of himself than before,” “leaving traces of himself in each trace and gully he wandered” (58). Trapped in the traumatic memory of the Middle Passage and unable to “work-through” the collective grieving and loss, Kamena says to Bola: “Do we arrive already empty, cut of everything already, knowing no remedy will ease the drift of our soul, how heavy, how like the sea our tears is; some of us do not recover from the sight, the wound of our heavy black bodies sinking in water” (59). For Bola, the sea becomes a place for embodied freedom and self-possession; for Kamena, the sea becomes a site of heavy Black bodies sinking in the Atlantic water.

<17> Marie Ursule, in her moment of death, summons a “bad memory” to guide Bola to safety, to Culebra Bay, the convent where the two Ursuline nuns first enslaved Marie Ursule and then sold her to the plantation owner (40). The nuns Mere Marguerite de St. Joseph and Soeur de Clemy have been deceased for years when Bola arrives to Culebra Bay, yet their presence remains as incorporeal figures of dust and decay. Gradually their ghostly shapes dissipate, as Bola reclaims Culebra Bay as her home, which is later settled by those fleeing from slave plantations.

<18> Bola, “who was Marie Ursule’s vanity and whose eyes wept an ocean and who loved whales,” embodies female lust, feelings, senses and the impatience for suffering and sadness. She represents female self-autonomy, asserting an empowering sexualized Black female body and social-natural space. Bola’s lust for men leaves her with over a dozen children some of whom she keeps and others she gives away. Bola “spread[s] her children around so that all would never be gathered in the same place to come to the same harm” (198). She acts on her own female desire, disrupting the dichotomy of virgin/whore and the definition of Black women as desexed and degendered “breeders” under slavery. Men are not erased in her multi-generational family but paternity is subsumed into Bola’s space of sexuality and matriarchy (Garvey 494). Bola’s sexual partners have ethnic and geographical origins not only from the island of Trinidad but also Venezuela, India, Africa and elsewhere. Her children and grandchildren not only live in Culebra Bay but also in Terre Bouillante, Curacao, England, Amsterdam, New York and Toronto. Bola’s family network and relations represent the diversity and multiplicity of Black Diaspora subjectivities, histories and cultural geographies. She also challenges prescribed kinship structures by refusing to be possessed by marriage license and motherhood of “legitimate” offspring (Garvey 495). Some of her children are not properly named but referred to as: “the one unrecalled,” “the ones left in the sea,” “the one she made in the dry season,” “the one she washed out with lime,” “the one who stole her footsteps…who left and found Terre Bouillante without looking,” and so on. Brand thus problematizes conventional patriarchal genealogy by depicting a fragmented genealogy headed by two important female ancestral figures. Marie Ursule represents the distant mythical origin, providing inspiration for her descendents with her act of rebellion against the colonizers, as well as a melancholic echo of tragic suffering and rootlessness as an effect of transatlantic slavery. Bola represents a commitment to the local and the future. As a free Black woman, Bola mothers diversity in her children by giving them multiple mixed ethnic backgrounds and life directions. Bola’s larger-than-life character casts a shadow and presence over the descendants of the Black Diaspora. Her presence haunts her descendents through familial and collective memory (Cuder-Dominguez 69). Pilar Cuder-Dominguez suggests that Dionne Brand in this novel successfully balances two opposing forces: “On the one hand, by using the myth of origins conveyed by the black ancestor, she has built in her novel the trope of race as kinship. On the other hand, she counteracts the essentializing quality of this myth with the opposite pull, the actual lives of descendants dispersed all over the globe” (70).

<19> By refusing to homogenize Black Diaspora identity while still recognizing the importance of race as kinship, Dionne Brand reveals that cultural identity is not transparent and unified but is a cultural and historical production, never complete, always in process (Hall 222). Like Stuart Hall’s argument in “Cultural Identity and Diaspora,” Dionne Brand shows that Black Diaspora cultural identities are implicated not only by racial similarities but also by the “critical points of deep and significant difference.” Black Diaspora cultural identities perform “ruptures and discontinuities,” difference and multiplicity, and they undergo constant transformation as a result of different histories, cultural geographies and experiences (Hall 225). Through her representation of Bola’s descendants, Brand constructs this diversity and difference found in Black Diaspora cultural identities as an effect of “Global Diasporas” (Cohen). Bola’s descendants live out hybrid spaces and identities, as some of her children and grandchildren are mixed-race subjects. Brand also reveals that gender, ethnicity, class, sexuality, geographical location, personal history, and nationality can create a cultural map of variegated life paths and sutured stories.

<20> While the first two chapters evoke the history of slavery and how various ancestors dealt with the trauma of slavery in different ways, the rest of the novel depicts the contemporary Black Diaspora and how various descendants are affected by racism, sexism and class inequality, and are haunted by the historical trauma of slavery. In the chapter “Tamarindus Indica,” the narrative tells the story of Samuel Sones, a grandson of Bola and Rabindranath Ragoonanan, who came to the island to work as an indentured laborer on the sugar cane fields. Brand uses the metaphor of the tamarind tree, a tree that Samuel sat under each day, to represent both Samuel’s mixed African-Indian heritage and his “sourness” or bitterness as a result of self-loathing and life disappointment. Samuel contemplates how the tamarind tree arrives on the island and reveals the possibility of its double origins: “A tree perhaps brought here from Africa in the seventeenth century. Probably brought here by his great-great-grandmother, as a seed in the pocket of her coarse dress. Probably held in her mouth as a comfort. Perhaps then germinating in her bowels. How the tree came to stand in his path he really did not know” (73). Or the tree may have arrived with his grandfather from India: “More native to India, such a tree would have traveled this way” (74). Samuel chose to sit under the tamarind tree particularly because of “its sour fruit and spindly dry branches, its unnoticeable flower and its dusty bark” (96). The tree represents his failure, bitterness, disappointment, loneliness, and quietude in life.

<21> Samuel’s self-loathing is the result of internalized racism and the partial erasure of his mixed-race background, the aftermath of colonialism. His personal heritage reveals the beginning of a partial cultural erasure: “The name of his grandfather, Rabindranath Ragoonanan, was buried under illegitimacy of some kind or another, and any Indian traces in him were sun-sweated to tightly curled hair. The name and the physical signs lay dormant and unattended, unremembered, as those traces were both unimportant and a liability” (76). As a mixed-raced colored man, Samuel’s tragic error is that he equates whiteness with “true” manhood and class status, which leads to his self-erasure. He aspires to have white approval by way of assimilation and he wishes “to disappear into the English countryside with a milk-white woman…like a man who was on the edge of a book page, overlooking a field and a milk-white woman” (86). This aspiration for white privilege and class status was instilled by his envy for the affluent life of De Freitas, whom Samuel naively took as his role model. His envy for white middle-class masculinity thus leads to his downfall and his subsequent “failures around masculinity” (Walcott and Sanders 25). Aspiring to cultural belonging via white assimilation, Samuel Sones decides to join the military service, to fight for the mother country Great Britain under the West India Regiment in Palestine. When the ship disembarks at Liverpool, Samuel kisses the ground, taking a handful of soil and put it in his pocket. He imagines himself as an Englishman returning to the mother country of Great Britain. His fantasy is, however, dampened by a new disillusionment. Instead of improving their situation and being repaid for their military service, men of color soldiers like Samuel must learn the difficult lesson of continual estrangement and racism on the battlefield. In a letter sent to his mother, Samuel writes: “We are treated neither as Christians nor as British citizens but as West Indian ‘niggers’ without anybody to be interested in us or look after us” (87). When De Freitas appears as a commanding officer and gives Samuel orders reminding him of his oppressed status as a result of their differential race and class relation, Samuel strikes De Freitas out of anger. Dismissed for misconduct, Samuel returns home in disgrace and bitterness, betrayed by the man he admires and emulates. Only the tamarind tree with its shade gives Samuel some small comfort because “it forgave him and punished him for being an Englishman” (86). As Johanna Garvey suggests: “In Samuel’s story we recognize the destructive effects of colonialism on the individual who subscribes to its standards of manhood and learns to equate manliness with whiteness. Ultimately, there is no home space for such a broken human being, who in his alienation wanders a repeated path to and from this tree that represents his ruptured heritage” (497).

<22> Many of Bola’s descendants are portrayed as broken, loss, dispossessed and displaced in some ways as a psychic and material result of slavery, colonialism, racism and capitalist patriarchy. For example, Eula’s brother Carlyle (or Priest) leaves Trinidad for a job picking fruit in Florida, and ends up being involved in the more lucrative trade of drug dealing. Caught and imprisoned in the INS camp, Priest meets Adrian. They are cousins who look like twins yet do not know that they are cousins. Priest is described as one of those people who can “make borders invisible,” living in “the damp and hungry interstices of real life,” “bobbing and weaving, dipping and diving around big people and bigger life” (167). Knowing that the good life was not meant for him, even if he steals for it, Priest sets out “to trawl the bottom of life” with a “so fuck it” attitude. What gives him momentary power and survivor angst is his attempt to get from people what he can, and to exert a violent power over the women in his life including his timid wife Gita and his more resilient sister Eula. Constrained by a life of poverty in the Americas, Priest apparently is trapped in a cycle of male violence and criminality, yet he will survive nevertheless by whatever means.

<23> Adrian Dovett, described as “a soft man,” migrates from Curacao to the United States and then to Amsterdam. Living as a “leech” off of his sister Maya in Amsterdam, Adrian is plagued by his own misery. Suffering the material and psychological effects of racial and class oppression, Adrian haunts the Dam Square with colored men lost like him: “A debris of men,” from Curacao, Surinam, Africa, “going nowhere like him, trying to figure out the next bit of money, the next laugh, the next fix” (180). To temporarily relieve himself or his cultural unbelonging and impoverishment, and the cold and dampness of Amsterdam’s racial-cultural climate, Adrian imagines and recalls his homeland Curacao and the sea to sooth his “racial melancholia” (Cheng xi) and personal and historical pain. As a figure of desolation and homelessness, Adrian is plagued by a life of aimless wandering in the Dam Square, with no upward mobility or a sense of family and community. The last image we have of Adrian is of his exhausted, fragile body on the kitchen floor, throwing up an ocean.

<24> While her male characters like Samuel, Priest, Adrian and Emmanuel Greaves are portrayed as failed masculinity, Dionne Brand depicts her Black Diaspora female characters with more self-empowerment, particularly self-possession through female sexual desire. In “A Sudden and Big Lust,” the narrative tells of the African-Hispanic Cordelia Rojas who is overwhelmed by female desire when she turns fifty: “[Lust] had burst in her mouth like a fat orange, the gushes of juice bathing her chin and splashing into her eyes” (99). In her marriage with her second cousin Emmanuel Greaves, “a quiet, decent and devoted man,” Cordelia is clearly the more dominant of the two, even in their lovemaking (99). Cordelia’s new lust for herself engulfs her body and domestic space like an oceanic wave: “She needed to break her own body open and wring its water out toward the ends of the room so that she was not in a room and not riding Emmanuel Greaves but riding the ocean’s waves, her flesh coming off like warm bread in her fingers and floating out to sea” (107). Like her great-grandmother Bola with her life-affirming lust and desire, Cordelia, “burst[s] from her own seams,” discovers and reclaims “the enjoyment of her body clear and free” (121). She recalls her father terrifying her body with his threat of sexual assault, and her mother finding her body an enemy. She remembers the woman in Socorro who aborted the baby from her body, placed there by the boy upstream, with his hurtful and burning passion. In her fiftieth year, Cordelia reclaims her agency and desire via memory: “She had gone to her window with a sudden remembrance of pink shells and Culebra Bay. She had not meant to remember…. The vigor she had used all these years to contain her memory, to clean her house and maintain her children, had turned on her. She was greedy for everything she had not had” (121). What Cordelia wants and gets is the impulsive passionate affairs with Kumar Pillai, the ice-cream-freezer man, and Yvonne, the seamstress. Here, Dionne Brand queers the female diaspora body with a fluid bisexuality outside marital conjugal relations. This narrative rewrites the trauma of slavery by reminding us that women’s bodies and self-possessed sexuality can heal personal and historical wounds. Female sexuality is used to carve out a social and cultural space of liberation, to break free from the confines of domestic space and domestic female reproductive roles.

<25> According to Coco Fusco, the history of slavery is a past that “wraps itself around the tales of our beginnings,” a “historical memory” that slave descendants like herself live with “as both a psyche and a bodily experience” (xiii, xv). She notices that: “the annihilation of family structure, the mutilation, and the severing of the body from will are real traumas at the root of black experience in the New World” (Fusco xiv). The Middle Passage marks “the dehumanization, ungendering, and defacing of Black persons,” a process that effects “a literal and figurative marking of colored flesh as commodity” (Fusco 5). Coco Fusco observes that:

Black people’s history in the New World begins with a scene of the actual mutilation, dismemberment, and exile of their bodies. Neither men nor women could assume their symbolic or legal roles as gendered subjects, or as members of a reproductive unit, since enslaved black men could not pass on their name to their progeny and black women did not have a maternal right to their offspring. Black people’s entry into the symbolic order of Western culture hinged on the theft of their bodies, the severing of will from their bodies, the reduction of their bodies to things, and the transformation of their sexuality into an expression of otherness. (5)

<26> Because of the public spectacle of the Black body on the Auction Block in the history of slavery, Black writers and artists are aware of a strategic dilemma – how to transform nudity and eroticism from symbols of debasement into signs of power (Fusco 6). How to represent Black body and sexuality without it being consumed as commodity and spectacle of racial otherness? I find that Dionne Brand is successful at reclaiming the Black female body and sexuality for her characters, colored female readers, and feminist communities, while still commemorating the cultural memory of slavery and Middle Passage. Through her characters such as Cordelia and Bola, Brand seems to tell us that while some Black subjects may be haunted by the trauma and historical pain such as slavery, other Black subjects not only experience traumas but also pleasures. Cordelia, like Bola, is able to transform her sexuality and Black body, reclaiming subjectivity, agency, will and desire.

<27> If Cordelia is able to reclaim her sexuality outside the boundaries of female domesticity and heterosexual marriage, such reclamation and transformation is much more ruptured and complex for Maya as a sex worker in the Red Light District of Amsterdam. In her Red Light District window, Maya daydreams and recalls homeland Curacao as a melancholic echo of loss and nostalgia to help her psychically escape her present material and geographical condition. As a sex worker, Maya is aware of the complexity of sexual oppression and men’s sexual violence towards women. Maya discovers that sex was lethal. As a sex worker, she must ward off “violence even from the meekest-looking men” (210). In her window, Maya can feel and read these men who pay her for sex: “She could feel their anger disguised in a smile or smirk; their grave joy at the thought of someone to overpower, someone to order around. Take that off, give me this, do it here, they would say, never succumbing to themselves but wishing her to succumb” (210-211). To ward off “the violence behind the window,” Maya attempts to create a sense of domesticity to her tableaux. Yet, she knows that domesticity is anything but a space of safety. As Maya imagines, women who married men “puttered and puttered at domesticity,” to keep themselves busy with cooking and cleaning “so they themselves wouldn’t cut a throat, and perfumed themselves so as not to smell their own fear and rage” (212).

<28> To escape the “heaviness” of her father’s oppression, Maya immediately left the island of Curacao the moment her father passed away. She sought for “weightlessness and limpid sound,” and mistakenly thought she could find more freedom in the Red Light District windows of Amsterdam (218). Rather than achieving financial freedom, her life as a sex worker lead to men exploiting and controlling her sexual body, including her pimp Walter who constantly reminds her: “That pussy is mine and you don’t sell it or show it or even wash it without I tell you” (222). When Walter discovers that Maya has been seeing a Flemish man on the side, their argument leads to a violent struggle that shatters her window. Leaving that life of sexual violence behind for marriage to her Flemish lover, Maya attempts to forget her life as a sex worker, yet her child, who is flooded with too much understanding and knowledge, haunts her, making her remember. Her daughter is flooded with understanding outside her experience and this troubles and haunts Maya:

Maya doesn’t like to look at her child. She sees too much understanding there, plain like water or hot tea. It is as if the child is flooded in whatever she, Maya, is feeling at the moment, and Maya is afraid of feeling nothing or revealing everything. So sometimes the little girl is flooded in crimson and the weight of a man falling… and then she is flooded in glass cases and windows…. She is drenched in things her mother will never tell her. (225-226)

Just as the descendants of slaves are haunted by the collective memories of slavery, Maya’s daughter is haunted by Maya’s tragic and difficult life experiences. Brand shows us that traces of sexual and cultural traumas can haunt, and thus interconnect, intergenerational relations.

<29> Out of Bola’s multiple descendants, Eula, mother of the second Bola, is most reflective about memory, forgetting, exile, and the violent dispersal experienced by slaves and their descendants. In her attempt to survive in the global city of Toronto, Eula struggles with psychic estrangement caused by racism, displacement and migration. In a letter to her deceased mother, she writes: “I am living in a city at the end of the world, Mama. It is rubble. It is where everyone has been swept up…all of us are debris, things that a land cleaning itself spits up. It is the end of the world here” (238). In a melancholic tone of loss and separation, Eula attempts to bridge the past and the present, “the distance of water and of lives” between the Caribbean space of “back home” and her present geographical home in Toronto (229). Her separation from her mother and her daughter Bola, who reside in Terre Bouillante, echoes many Caribbean migrant women’s experience of severed family ties and relations as a consequence of economic migration.

<30> As a minority woman whose stories and memories are frequently displaced, Eula is aware of the danger of historical amnesia. She writes: “History opens and closes, Mama…. I think we forget who we were…. All the centuries past may be one long sleep. We are either put to sleep or we choose to sleep” (234). To resist this tendency to forget one’s history and cultural heritage, Eula attempts to remember by writing a letter to her deceased Dear Mama. What she remembers is the enslavement and bondage of her ancestor Marie Ursule “with her iron ring, limping through forests… the thudding of her ring on wood and stone…” (236). Later she recalls that: “…Marie Ursule loved us and sent us to the future because she could not hold us, and in turn we could not hope to hold our own lives together and that was her art and ours” (253). As a descendant of slavery, Eula like other Black Diaspora subjects must live out the effects of slavery, the trauma of loss and violent separation. She reflects and mourns how some descendants of slaves must live out “[a] whole broken-up tragedy,” “scattered out with a violent randomness” (258). Desiring a single line of ancestry to heal that violent separation and dispersal of families and communities as a result of the Middle Passage and chattel slavery, Eula laments:

I would like one single line of ancestry, Mama. One line from you to me and farther back, but a line that I can trace…. One line like the one in your palm with all the places where something happened and is remembered. I would like one line full of people who have no reason to forget anything, or forgetting would not help them or matter because the line would be constant, unchangeable…. Something to pull me back. I want a village and a seashore and a rock out in the ocean and the certainty that when the moon is in full the sea will rise and for that whole time I will be watching what all of my ancestry have watched for, for all ages. (246-247)

<31> There is an apparent contradiction in Eula’s comment since this line of ancestry with a traceable beginning, a place and a name, is offered by Brand in the genealogical family tree found at the beginning of the novel. Eula’s desire for a solid family genealogy, a recovery of familial and collective memory, and a cultural and physical place to claim belonging is, however, difficult to achieve. As Brand’s genealogy reveals, forced dispersal and fragmentation, rather than solid family genealogy, characterize the Black Diaspora. Brand attempts to heal the wounds of forced dispersal, the trauma of slavery and Middle Passage, by weaving an interconnection of lives, stories and cultural memories to create a web of imaginative belonging.

<32> Brand’s novel reveals, through the lens of history, that: “the distant past (the sufferings of and resistances of slavery, the colonization of the Caribbean) is layered onto the more recent past…to produce a vivid sense of overlapping and interlinked histories” (McCallum and Olbey 160). Her literary imagination invokes that “the past haunts the present, marking the living with the consequences of other times” (McCallum and Olbey 161). Moments and actions of resistance in the past, such as Marie Ursule’s mass suicide and Bola’s reclamation of the local and the future, can in Walter Benjamin’s words, “fan the spark of hope in the past” to the present and the future for those with mute suffering (255). “The past can be seized,” writes Benjamin, “only as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again” (255). What he suggests is that our present moment must recall and extract a crucial moment from history to inspire and to guide contemporary political struggles and resistances. In her novel, Dionne Brand does extract crucial historical moments – the resistant act of Marie Ursule and Bola’s sense of freedom and female desire – to fan the spark of hope to the present and future generations, to inspire contemporary political struggles. Yet, Brand also tells of an important lesson in the novel. Such resistant acts of the past cannot inspire and affect contemporary struggles if the Diaspora descendants cannot remember or recall the heroic and tragic roles and stories of their ancestors. Eula, who recalls fragmentary memories of Marie Ursule, is well aware of this danger of historical amnesia, of descendants unable to remember or deliberately forget the experiences and stories of their ancestors.

<33> To resist historical amnesia found in both the North American public culture and the Black Diaspora community, Dionne Brand depicts the psychic and material effects of slavery for both the slaves and free Blacks. In her writing, she attempts to protest past and present dehumanization and subordination, in order to explore the self-creation and self-transformation of Black women and men under extremely oppressive conditions. In her representation of enslaved and free Blacks, Brand portrays subjects of agency, particularly her depiction of Black women. She seems to tell us that “denying the possibility of such agency to the enslaved and recently freed constrains our own sense of agency in the late-twentieth and early twenty-first centuries… we need to imagine those ancestors as psychically free if we are to imagine ourselves as psychically free” (Keizer 17). Dionne Brand offers visions of agency, witnessing and healing that replace colonial historical narratives with a counter memory, as a move to break the legacy of silence and amnesia in the North American public culture. Brand interweaves past, present and future by conjuring up stories that comment on the social conditions of colonized and postcolonial women and their communities, as well as attempt to destroy colonial historical discourses and to transform postcolonial gendered subjectivity. She moves us into a cultural space of psychic and embodied decolonization challenging violence against women and minorities, racism, sexism, global capitalist patriarchy, and the history of slavery.

Works Cited

Agosto, Noraida. Michelle Cliff’s Novels: Piecing the Tapestry of Memory and History. New York: Peter Lang Publishing Inc., 1999.

Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. Trans. Harry Zohn. Ed. Hannah Arendt. New York: Schocken, 1969.

Brand, Dionne. At the Full and Change of the Moon. Toronto: Vintage Canada, 1999.

Cheng, Anne Anlin. The Melancholy of Race. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.

Cohen, Robin. Global Diasporas: An Introduction. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1997.

Cuder-Dominguez, Pilar. “African Canadian Writing and the Narration(s) of Slavery.”Essays on Canadian Writing 79 (Spring 2003): 55-75.

Douglass, Ana and Thomas A. Vogler, eds. Witness and Memory: The Discourse of Trauma. New York and London: Routledge, 2003.

Eyerman, Ron. Cultural Trauma: Slavery and the Formation of African American Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.

Fusco, Coco. The Bodies that Were Not Ours and Other Essays. London and New York: Routledge, 2001.

Garvey, Johanna X. K. “‘The Place She Miss’: Exile, Memory, and Resistance in Dionne Brand’s Fiction.” Callaloo 26.2 (2003): 486-503.

Hall, Stuart. “Cultural Identity and Diaspora.” Identity: Community, Culture, Difference. London: Lawrence and Wishurt, 1990. 222-237.

Keizer, Arlene R. Black Subjects: Identity Formation in the Contemporary Narrative of Slavery. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2004.

McCallum, Pamela and Christian Olbey. “Written in the Scars: History, Genre, and Materiality in Dionne Brand’s In Another Place, Not Here.” Essays on Canadian Writing 68 (Summer 1999): 159-182.

Misztal, Barbara A. Theories of Social Remembering. Philadelphia: Open University Press, 2003.

Mitchell, Angelyn. The Freedom to Remember: Narrative, Slavery, and Gender in Contemporary Black Women’s Fiction. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2002.

Morrison, Toni. “The Site of Memory.” In Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary Cultures. Ed. R Ferguson et al. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1990. 299-305.

Walcott, Rinaldo and Leslie Sanders. “At the Full and Change of CanLit: An Interview with Dionne Brand.” Canadian Woman Studies 20.2 (Summer 2000): 22-26.

Young, James E. “Between History and Memory: The Voice of the Eyewitness.” In Witness and Memory: The Discourse of Trauma. Ed. Ana Douglass and Thomas A. Vogler. New York and London: Routledge, 2003. 275-283.

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