Dionne Brand

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Dionne Brand
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Biographical Sketch

• 1953 Born in Trinidad
• 1970 immigrated to Canada
• 1970s-80s community worker in Toronto
• 1983 Information Officer for the Caribbean
  Peoples Development Agencies and the Agency for
  Rural Transformation in Grenada
• 1997 won the Governor Generals Award for Poetry
  and the Trillium Award for Land to Light On
• A communist who believes in equal distribution of
  wealth and ending exploitation
• Founded and edited Our Lives, Canadas first
  black womens newspaper

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Brand--Writer and Filmmaker

• Fore Day Morning (1978)
• Earth Magic (1978)
• Primitive Offensive (1982)
• Winter Epigrams and Epigrams to Ernesto Cardenal
  in Defense of Claudia (1982)
• Chronicles of the Hostile Sun (1984)
• Rivers Have Sources, Trees Have Roots(1986)prose
• Sans Souci and other Stories (1988)
• No Language is Neutral (1990)
• No Burden to Carry (1991)--editor
• Sisters in Struggle (1991)--film
• Long Time Comin' (1993)film
• Listening for Something (1996)--film
• In Another Place, Not Here (1997)--novel
• Land To Light On (1997)
• At the Full and Change of the Moon--novel

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Major Issues and Themes

• the experience of existing on the external
  frontiers of the Caribbean diaspora, issues of
  personal and national identity, her experience as
  a lesbian, colonial oppression and its
  consequences on the colonial subject,
  multiculturality reflected in a multicultural
  identity, and the immigrant experience in Canada.
  Her self-articulation is an act of liberation,
  breaking the silence and giving voice to the
  silenced and marginalized people of her world.
  Carmen Lassotta

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OyaGoddess of Thunder and Cemetery
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• Oya is the divinity that guards the cemetery.
  More specifically she protects the souls of the
  departed as they journey onward. Oya is viewed
  as a warrior with great strength. She stands
  well on her own, but is usually in the company of
  her counterpart Shango. Oya is also recognized
  for her psychic abilities which manifest in the
  winds. She is the deity of the storm and
  hurricanes. Oya is often seen as the deity of
  death, but upon deeper realization, she is the
  deity of rebirth as things must die so that new
  beginnings arise. (27)
• Baba Ifa Karade, The Handbook of Yoruba
  Religious Concepts

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Prayer to Oya

• As powerful as the strong wind,
• More fierce than the storm,
• Oya guards my soul against the many fingers of
  evil.
• Help me to rest upon the earth free from strain
  and undue frustration.
• Oya, warrior of the wind, let not our land be
  overrun with destroyers.
• Let us not die in pain and sorrow.
• Extend your weapon to protect us from
  destruction.
• Oya, may we live and die to live again.
• Oya, may our lives be long and our death short.
• The
  Handbook of Yoruba Religious Concepts (58)

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Blossom

• Do you find the story fantastic? If so, why?
  Are the characters believable or stereoptyed?
• Why does Blossom marry Victor?
• Why does Brand invoke the Yoruba orisha Oya in
  Blossom? Are there any similar attributes
  between Oya and Blossom?
• What is the significance of Blossoms dream of
  fighting with suffering?

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Brand and Black Tradition

• Brand writing for the absence (of writings about
  black people)conscious efforts to create a black
  diasporic tradition the new wave of Canadian
  writing (270)
• "What some white reviewers lack is the sense of
  what literature that is made by Black people and
  other people of colour is about. If you read my
  work, you have to read Toni Morrison, you have to
  read Derek Walcott, Rosa Guy, Jean Rhys, Paule
  Marshall, Michael Anthony, Eddie Brathwaite, and
  African writers and poets...Bessie Head. I don't
  consider myself on any margin, on the margin of
  Canadian Literature. I'm sitting right in the
  middle of Black Literature, because that's who I
  read, that's who I respond to" (Books in Canada,
  October 1990 14).

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The Origin of Blossom

• That story is based on fact I met this woman
  running a basement speakeasy in her house, and
  she had run the speakeasy for years and years.
  She was a Jamaican woman without a single tooth
  in the front of her mouth, and she would throw
  people out who were drunk. Also one day I saw an
  old man xeroxing something. I thought I'd read
  over his shoulder and it was all these little
  potions he was preparing for people. He was an
  obeah man and that was obeah gone modern tech.
  It's interesting how our people could come here
  and adapt things that used to work for them
  somewhere else so that they work for them here
  too. Interview with Frank Birbalsingh

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Blossom and Afircanism

• Going back to the African past for strength She
  had to dig into that past of hers which she
  retained she became an Obeah woman because that
  was one the things that black people in the
  Americas managed to retain, some sense of a past
  that is not a past controlled by those things
  that seem to control her now. (273)
• Oral style in Blossom

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Blossom the Woman Warrior

• Blossoms buoyancy (276)
• Fighting against white racism (264)sexual
  assault from the white master and the distrust of
  the white mistresspicketed against the white
  oppressionslogans from the black power movement
  (264)

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Blossom and Gender Issue

• Not only criticizing (white) mencloseness to
  girl friends but gets cheated by Fancy Girl (the
  pyramid scheme)
• Once deserted by a man (263)
• Loneliness, hard workresigning to traditional
  thinking about love relationship (267)
  resignationbut takes initiative in choosing her
  mandecide to take Victor--later fighting against
  Victors exploitation (265-6)

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Blossoms Fight with Suffering

• Personification and allegory (269)a battle with
  oppression, against black sufferingfighting with
  hate and triumphs
• Death and rebirthgetting into Oyas wombdance
  of Freeness
• Blossom becomes Oyas priestess and speaks in
  tongues