Dionne Brand untangles questions about truth and justice in new book, Salvage | Canada Voices

History is like the ocean, with its unexamined depths. There is capital-H history, and there is the intimate scale of one’s own journey through time; in both cases there are mysteries, rivers leading to oceans, journeys made and failed, travellers and treasures lost to the sea.

“Maybe it was about tonnage,” Dionne Brand says, over iced coffees on a recent August afternoon. I’ve just asked her why the shipwreck is such a strong motif in Salvage, which examines colonial-era English literature and a life spent reading its heirs. The book is the first work of non-fiction from the poet – who has won both the Griffin Poetry Prize and a Governor-General’s Award – since 2001′s A Map to the Door of No Return. In the gap between the two essay works, Brand has written eight books, delivered and published two book-length lectures, been awarded the Windham Campbell Prize for her long career and been invested in the Order of Canada.

“Maybe it was about the Atlantic,” she says of Salvage, “that trans-Atlantic trade that reshaped the world. And therefore what all that cargo was, what it filled and what it evacuated. The new world begins in that moment, those huge ships hauling human cargo. Also, the beginning of that kind of ship. The moment that kind of capital begins.”

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The word “salvage,” of course, means to save or rescue from a wrecked ship. Brand’s latest book looks at the terrible period of colonial enslavement and exploitation and considers what was canonically saved and, crucially, all that was lost to the wreck. Brand weaves analyses of William Thackeray’s Vanity Fair (1848), Daniel Defoe’s The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1719), Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park (1814), and Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko (1688) with a backward glance at her own life, at becoming a reader and writer.

Salvage, however, is explicitly not an autobiography – even if the sections have titles such as “An Autobiography of the Autobiography of Reading.” In the text, Brand warns: “When I use autobiographical, it is artifice. … Where it appears, it will have been pored over, turned over, refashioned as art, made theoretical through those processes.” She delivers on her promise.

Most autobiographical elements here are transformed into data points for her larger analysis, such as a photograph taken in 1954 or ‘53, when Brand was a child in Guayaguayare, at the southeasternmost edge of Trinidad. The portrait depicts her two sisters, her cousin and herself; the little girls are instructed to smile for a picture that will be sent to England, where their mothers are working as midwives. Brand parses the image as a text, holding it up to the light and trying to see everything there: “This porous portrait is full of multiple autobiographies: Mr. Wong, the photographer, probably traces his family to Chinese indentured labour – from 1846, or perhaps even as far back as 1806 … ; the children, whose history goes back to the period of Arawak/Carib extermination and the enslavement and transportation of their families from West Africa to the New World.”

There are glimmers, however, of something beyond literary analysis, artifacts that occasion writing closer to the directness of experience. Another photograph, of her young mother astride a bicycle in England, gives Brand reason to reflect on how prevalent cyclists are in her own body of work as a novelist and poet, despite never having herself learned to ride a bike. In her searing critique of Robinson Crusoe’s position in the canon as a text worth constant revisiting, constant salvaging, Brand parenthetically remembers her own narratively significant footprints, a source of childhood joy: “(On the beach at Guaya, it was a game with what we called the sea, which was the Atlantic ocean. This game involved having our footsteps washed away. We would run toward the receding tide, put our footprints on the sand and run away as the tide came to claim them again.)”

In person, Brand reiterates her stand against the merely autobiographical. “I’m not interested in it,” she says with a smile. Her work here is in artfully untangling questions of truth, and of justice. “From which angle is this to be attended to?” she says. “So one lives their life. Yeah. Everybody will live their life. A life to be told perhaps, but you do that with friends or something.” A pause. “But a life to be examined, now, that’s another thing. So I’m not interested in the linear structure of a person taking themselves from A to B to C, through what they think is a life, choosing those objects that they feel are pivotal points.” For her, the act of writing, of reading, is non-linear, non-narrative. She writes: “Destiny has a closed narrative shape, it is a told tale, but time is much more suggestive.” So her work here suggests and queries.

One of the principal questions Brand asks, directly and indirectly, throughout Salvage is how the legacy of colonial resource extraction and exploitation shaped the world we live in and the books we exalt: “We have run into something. What? And who is ‘we’?”

The question of “we” pervades the book; at times Brand uses “we” in the way most readers are accustomed to, as a way of marking out a general, or normative, experience. But that normative “we” can create exclusions and isolations, like the ones Brand herself felt as a young Black Caribbean immigrant in her undergraduate days at the University of Toronto. In Salvage, she creates a separate group from the normative “we,” using “a reader like me” when, for instance, she remembers reading Mansfield Park for an English lit class: “If you are a reader like me, you may not have noticed this mention of Antigua until quite late in your reading, though the length and tediousness of the work may have made your eyes cross – especially then, in university.”

Sometimes Brand will abandon the “we” entirely, preferring simply “I” or, provocatively, “this reader,” as when she interrogates the impulse in French-Martinique author Patrick Chamoiseau’s 2012 novel Crusoe’s Footprint (trans. 2022) to recast Crusoe as an existentialist everyman for modern readers: “In his notes at the end of his book, Chamoiseau remarks: ‘It’s sad: Defoe’s Crusoe was a slave trader.’ But this reader asks, why is that sad? … I am not sad that Crusoe was a slaver. I am sad that I have had to read him as the universal human.”

Just once does she use “a Black reader like me”: “If we say that these imperialist texts have an untouchable status as objects of aesthetic value and if we say that literature cultivates the human … then the experience of a Black reader like me cannot be anything but the cultivation of a continuous dread.”

“That refrain is deliberate. I’m looking to disaggregate whoever that ‘we’ is. I wanted to say that the reader is active, a reader is an active thing, not a passive receptor of something called story, but an active and interested being,” Brand says, as our second round of coffees arrive. “The act of reading is emotional and it’s physical. It harnesses all kinds of energies. It’s not a passive act at all.” She pauses, raises her glass. “If there is passivity, even that passivity is political. So I want to make the distinction between a certain kind of reader who reads these texts passively – or is handed the benefit of that passivity.”

In literature, writers both inherit and build the world. Salvage does not argue for doing away with the past, abandoning the canon, but looks at what can be brought to the surface if a reader (like Brand) plumbs the depths. She finds that the colonial attitudes present in Defoe and other writers from the long period of European exploitation, slave trading and domination are not something astute readers can merely look away from; these writers cannot be excused for their unexamined beliefs simply because, as the saying goes, it was another time. “Well, yes,” Brand says. “And what you receive from that time are the stories of the victor.”

In Salvage, Brand writes toward “another archive we might explore, an archive of the intellectual life and human activity that somewhat contemporaneously addressed questions of humanism and silence.” She draws out non-fiction examples in Letters of the Late Ignatius Sancho (spanning 1768-1780) and Quobna Ottobah Cugoano’s Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil and Wicked Traffic of the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species from 1787. “There are conversations going on at the very time those novels are taking place,” she says. “There are other texts in contention – they don’t survive in the same way because they’re not triumphant, but they exist. There was an argument going on in that moment too, against those systems.”

Brand’s work continues the argument with elegance and verve.