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2000 Voicing grace: Radical utopian politics in Dionne Brand's "No language is neutral" and "bread out of stone"

Garrett, Brenda

Garrett, B. (2000). Voicing grace: Radical utopian politics in Dionne Brand's "No language is neutral" and "bread out of stone" (Unpublished master's thesis). University of Calgary, Calgary, AB. doi:10.11575/PRISM/13957 http://hdl.handle.net/1880/40590 master thesis

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Voicing Grace:

Radical Utopian Politics in

Dionne Brand's No Laneuaee is Neutral and Bread out of Stone

Brenda Garrett

A THESIS

SUBMInED TO THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES

IN PARTIAL FULFILMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE

DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS

DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH

CALGARY, ALBERTA

AUGUST, 2000

O Brenda Garrett 2000 National Library Bibliotheque nati~nale of Canada du Canada Acquisitions and Acquisitions et Bibliographic Services services bibliographiques 395 Wellington Street 395, rue Wellington OttawaON K1AON4 Ottawa ON KIA ON4 Canada Canada Your lYe Vme referenm

Our lVe Norre retersnu,

The author has granted a non- L'auteur a accorde une licence non exclusive Licence allowing the exclusive permettant a la National Library of Canada to Bibliotheque nationale du Canada de reproduce, loan, distribute or sell reproduire, prgter, distribuer ou copies of ths thesis in microform, vendre des copies de cette these sous paper or electronic formats. la forme de microfiche/film, de reproduction sur papier ou sur format electronique.

The author retains ownership of the L'auteur conserve la propriete du copyright in this thesis. Neither the droit d'auteur qui protege cette these. thesis nor substantial extracts &om it Ni la these ni des extraits substantiels may be printed or othenvise de celle-ci ne doivent Btre imprirct; reproduced without the author's ou autrement reproduits sans son permission. autorisation. ABSTRACT

There have been attempts to locate the work of Dionne Brand within a fracturing post-colonial post-structuralism. This thesis, however, locates her not within the post- structuralist imaginary, but within the romantic imaginary. Brand's romantic project is to

voice grace, to voice her authentic self beneath her own overriding politic, by reflecting that self in landscape. In the process, she creates a utopian space. This utopia is not an escapist, transcendent, universal, romantic Utopia, but is a radical political utopia -- the

struggle to create and maintain an alternate centre in the here and now. one centre among

many in the field of resistance. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

My thanks to the University of Calgary's Department of English, Faculty of Humanities, and Faculty of Graduate Studies for providing Funding and support while I completed my

M.A. Degree. A particular thanks to Dr. Pamela McCallum for taking on the supervision of this project and for her expert guidance.

I am also grateful to the administrators. faculty and staff of the University of Calgary at

Red Deer College Collaborative BA Program for their encouragement and understanding while I completed this project.

And finally, thank you to friends and family for their support and for their patience while

I cancelled engagements, ignored the telephone and neglected to keep in touch. A special thanks to Darcy Garrett for his companionship and assurance, always. TABLE OF CONTENTS

.. Approval Page ...... 11 ... Abstract ...... 111 Acknowledgements ...... iv Table of Contents ...... v List of Figures ...... vi .. Epigraph ...... v~i

PREFACE From Being Place to Becoming Place ...... 1

CHAPTER 1 Anxiety of Place: Being Placed ...... 11 1.1 htroduction ...... I1 l .2 Speaking from the Contact Zone: Fracturing the Subject ...... I4 l .3 Beyond the Contact Zone: Uniting the Subject ...... 21 1.4 Conclusion ...... 36

CHAPTER 2 Making Bread out of Stone: Creating a Radical Utopian Politic ...40 2.1 Introduction ...... 40 2.2 Not Enough: Utopia from System to Desire to Struggle to Action ...... 41 2.2.1 Traditional Utopia: Utopia as System ...... I 2.2.2 Levitas and Moylan: Desire and Struggle ...... 53 2.2.3 Althusser: Utopia as Action ...... 71 2.3 Making Bread Out of Stone: Nourishment Out of the Void ...... 93 2.4 Conclusion...... 98

CHAPTER 3 How Was it for You?: Becoming Place ...... 100 3.1 Lntroduction ...... 100 3.2 No Language is Neutral: Wilderness Sel E ...... 101 3.3 Hard Against the Soul: Re-solving the Sublime Beauty Dialectic ...... 118 3.1 in Another Place: The Highest Bliss ...... 134 . . CONCLUSION Livmg. Moving. Being ...... 152

Endnotes ...... 162 References ...... 164 Appendix A: Map of Tmldad...... 169 LIST OF FIGURES

Figure I . Encounters Between Cultures on the Contact Zone ...... 12

Figure 2 . Representationally Existing on the Contact Zone ...... 17

Figure 3 . The Utopian Contact Zone ...... 101 EPIGRAPH

Ln another place. not here. a wonian might touch something between beauty and nowhere. back there and here. might pass hand over hand her own trembling life . . . Dionne Brand No Lanrlr~aeeis Neutral

[. . .] hence the highest bliss That tlesh can know is theirs -- the consciousness Of Whom they are. habitually infused Through every image and through every thought And all afi'ections. by communion raised From earth to heaven. from human to divine: Hence endless occupation for the Soul. Whether discursive or intuitive [. . .I W illiarn Wordsworth The Prelude, Book 13 PREFACE

From Being Placed to Becoming Place

Nature never did betray The heart that loved her. -- William Wordsworth "Tintem Abbey"

Poet and activist Dio~eBrand begins and ends No Language Is Neutral with a depiction of herself and her lover as utopian place structurally creating a circular text. But if we rearrange the text to follow a chronological order. it begins with a map of the relative positionality of the poet's past subjectivity. She writes:

N3 language is neutral. I used to haunt the beach at

Guayn. two rivers sentinel the country sand. not

backra white but nigger brown sand, one river dead

and teeming from waste and alligators. the other

rumbling to the ocean in a tumult [. . .I. (22)

Brand's point of departure is her childhood home Guayaguayare on the Caribbean island of Trinidad. (See Appendix A: Map of Trinidad.) Here, the poet locates herself as placed on the beach. confined on all sides by ocean. rivers and an unnavigable interior. The basic question is how does Brand move from being placed to becoming place?

There have been attempts to situate Brand within a fragmenting post-colonial post-structuralism. Teresa Zackodnik asserts that "Rather than ~ttem~~tingto resolve the ambivalent tension between self and other within, and between self and others outside,

Brand privileges a dialogic of differences that makes a space for multiple voices and discourses" (1 08-209). Charlotte Sturgess, too, locates Brand in a fragmenting post- structuralism. Of Brand's Sans Souci, she asserts:

[. . .] the multiple displacement in the narrative, the conflict of discursive

modes, the 'tunnelling' voice which is a fbnction of a subject of speech

spoken though by symbolic dispersal, can but invite on to the stage of the

representation an authorial presence of multiple transgressions -- Dio~e

Brand, the lesbian feminist black Trinidadian Canadian. (314)

This thesis instead argues that Brand's subject is not to be found in a fragmenting "post- colonial imaginary" (Sturgess 2 14), but rather in a return to the authenticating romantic

imaginary -- to the re-presentation and resynchronization of self and landscape beneath an overriding and redeeming politic and the resulting creation of a self-centred utopia.

In "Bread out of Stone." an essay about the construction ofa docun~entaryfilm and book of oral histories in which elderly Black women represent themselves, Brand

gives a glimpse of the complex relationships among the divisions of "Black." "woman"

and "lesbian:"

I'm working on a film. It is a film about women in my community. I've

dreamt this film as a book. dreamt it as a face, dreamt it at a window. I am

editing it on the Playas del Este; a woman's face, old and a little tired,

deep brown and black, creased with everything that can be lived, and calm,

a woman's face that will fade if I do not dream it, write it, put it in a film. I

write it, try to make everyone else dream it, too; if they dream it, they will

know something more, love this woman's face, this woman I will become,

this woman they will become. I will sacrifice something for this dream: 3

safety. To dream about a woman, even an old woman, is dangerous; to

dream about a Black woman, even an old Black woman, is dangerous even

in a Black dream, an old dream, a Black woman's dream, even a dream

where you are the dreamer. Even in a Black dream. where I. too. am a

dreamer, a lesbian is suspect; a woman is suspect even to other women.

especially if she dreams of women. (Bread 13)

To love women enough to dream of authentic Black women. to represent authentic Black women in film or fiction. Brand must sacrifice her safety. her shelter among other women and other Black women. She gives up one sacrifice (the sacrifice of her lesbian self in either contact zone) for another (her shelter). She writes that when the Black female heterosexual interviewer on the film project begins to question an intervirwee's husband. asking him to represent them, Brand speaks up by asking the woman "How was it for you?" asserting the need for and giving the right to the woman to speak for herself, to represent her self. Brand writes, "'How was it for you?' A simple question about a dream at a window. [. . .] In the Black gauze of our history, how was it for you? Your face might appear if I ask this. I would ask you this whatever the price. I am not afraid of your voice"

(Bread 18). Brand knows that if she can publicly dream authentic Black women's lives, if she can represent Black women in relation to their own centre, they will recognize themselves and each other and in the process unite the fragments into a whole. But, without the unifying discourse that she is hoping to create in the film, she is never able to represent her entire subjectivity at once but must always be content with juxtaposing the components against one another. Brand's dream is that in the film and the oral histories, 3

Black women will recognize and love themselves and in recognizing themselves create an authentic self in relation to a different centre.

And the women do recognize themselves. "The night of the first showing, fifteen hundred people come to see the film," Brand writes, "The theatre crackles with their joy; they recognize themselves" (20). But this recognition is juxtaposed against. "In the oral histories and in the film, the women say this day I did this, this day Idid that, this day I did 'days work,' this day I took care of things. and well, we got along all right you know.

The depression wasn't so bad for us, we were used to hard times. But I ~.orked,just like a man, oh yes" ( 19). The women themselves are taking part in the hatred of women, their imaginations stifled by the myths of the strong Black woman. their standards set by male standards. In response to her sacrifice. Brand feels, "the full rain of lesbian hate. It hits the ground, its natural place. Lr mixes with the soil ready with the hate of women, the contempt for women that women, too. eat" ( 19). She writes, "For me, it pushes up a hoary

blossom sheltered in race. I will smell this blossom I know for many years to come" (19).

Brand describes the hatred of women and of lesbian women as an ancient organic unity. It

is a systematic whole that requires all parts in order to exist. And because Black women

are always wary of how their reaction to Black patriarchy has the potential to "throw

Black men to white men" (13), race shelters and protects this cultivated blossom of

lesbian hate. For Brand, the lesbian Cragment is both suffocating and liberating. She

writes that this blossom of lesbian hate "will push up everywhere and sometimes it will

smother me" (19-20). In the cutting room with the other women on the project, she says,

her race will be '%ut fiom" her and her sexuality will be "cut into" her (1 9), it will take 5 her over as the only Fragment, her difference. But this fragment is also liberating. Women loving women can break the systematic unity. the cultivation of this hatehl blossom.

In the film. the oral histories and in her poetry, Brand's project is to representationally unite her fragments. She asserts, "I am a woman and Black and lesbian. the evidence of this is inescapable and interesting" (20). Although she may not be able to completely recognize herself in the self-pottraits of the old women, she claims all these fragments as parts of herself. As she has said earlier, "Since these things are inseparable. and since I do not wish to be separated from them. I own them and take on the responsibility of defending them. I have a choice in this" ( 13). In making the decision to own her inseparable fragments. in uniting them within her own subjectivity and taking on the responsibility of defending them. she finds agency and coherence.

In Sacrificial Loeics. Allison Weir advocates the need for coherent self-identity

and for commitment to an overriding politic in the pursuit of agency. She writes, "The

experience of lack of self is the familiar dark side of a culture characterized by increasing

pressure for self-identity under conditions of increasing fragmentation. But the other side

of this pressure and this fragmentation is a fieedom of conscious sel'detennination, and a

capacity for analysis" (187). In other words, in attempting to turn away from both fixed

social positions and born increasing fragmentation, modem subjects must take on the

responsibility of defining their own meaning. According to Wier, the way from

fiagmentation to self-identity is found in sustaining and reconciling multiple identities

(1 86). These reconciiiations are not to be achieved through ''the imposition of an identity

which excludes or represses differences," or through a denial of connection with others, 6 but rather through an acceptance "of dependence on and independence from others, which underlies a capacity to recognize when my meaning differs from others' meaning. and when my identity is bound up with the identity of a particular or general We" ( 1 86). She argues:

The development of self-identity requires the cognitive capacity to reflect

on who I am and what matters to me. and to organize diverse identities.

and identity-attributes, into some sort of meaningful narrative or

constellation. It also requires the practical, existential capacity to discover

and detine and commit to what matters to me. to my meaning. while

remaining flexible and open to change. To some extent. all of this depends

on an ability to resolve particular differences and conflicts into more

general meanings. ( 187)

Weir defines self identity as the capacity to resolve diverse identity differences and this capacity for resolution can only occur under an ovemding politic, a commitment to what

matters. This commitment necessarily leads to coherence by adding a common thread to a

subject's actions and leads to abstraction and exclusion as subjects realize their similarity

within community and their diflerence and separation from others.

This abstraction and exclusion, this recognition and appreciation of difference is

absolutely necessary if one is to avoid becoming hegemonic and universal. In "Resisting

Autobiography: Out-Law Genres and Transnational Feminist Subjects," Caren Kaplan

argues that an anti-hegemonic feminism must articulate differences as accurately as

possible, but it must also find "intersections and common ground" (1 16). In order to not 7 result in creating its own hegemonic conventions, there must always be "a distinction [. .

.I between 'home' and 'coalition;' a difference between the safety net of similarity and familiarity and the difficult but necessary terrain of diversity and unfanliliarity" ( 13 1 ). In the voicing of an authentic self beneath an overriding politic, there must always be non- hierarchical distinctions between home and coalition -- similarity and difference, allowing for the expression of all others.

Kaplan argues that traditional Western autobiography has taken part in the

"literary construct ion of 'home,' a process of generalizing the particular, fabricating a narrative space of familiarity, and crafting a narrative that links the individual to the universal" ( 130). Western autobiography has been homogenizing and exclusionary. One way to combat this exclusion is to recall and express non-normative experiences (l30), to dislocate discourse in ways that speak alternate selves within altemate communities. In this way, autobiography becomes '"place,' a safe location to keep crucial. culturally specific memories" (13 1). This creation of an altemate place through cultural autobiography is what Brand hopes to accomplish. In the essay "Bread out of Stone," she discusses the empowering potential of the autobiographical film representation of the elderly Black women. Within stories like those of these old Black women may be found a reflection of an authentic self, a unifying and sheltering grace beneath an overriding politic. Brand writes, "I [. . .] look into these old women's eyes, try in ten-minute episodes to spin the thread between those eyes and mine [. . .] to sew a patch of black, rich with moments and the things never talked about in public: Black womanhood" (15).

Brand describes her interview conversations with the old women as threads joining the 8 eyes, specularly uniting interviewer and interviewee while the discourse creates a patch of

Black over the void. Stories are created within and support ideology, and colonial stories including stories about the other have created a vision of the world that supports the hegemonic power structure. In re-presenting and re-creating these silenced stories of

Black womanhood a more empowering. authentic ideology can be voiced. Brand writes.

"But here, balancing on this thread [. . .] is something that says we do not need to leave ourselves stranded, we can be whole and these old women need us to do something different, that is why they are telling us this story" (16- 17). The film interviews and stories. the conversations with the old Black women. are conversional. converting marginalized md disempoweringly fractured subjects into authentic selves by placing them in relation to each other and to an alternate interpellating absolute other, a whole authentic spoken subject found only in discourse about themselves, their actions and their community.

It is expressing other voices and their alternative narratives of actions that makes literature an oppositionally political and ideological force. In this way, poets can begin to

"heal the word wounded" and unite the "word/image equation" in a way that will reflect a more authentic, as in empowered and representing rather than disempowered and represented, self (Philip 26). However, for Brand, creating the self-portraits of the women results in the marking of her sexuality as her smothering fragment and the silencing of her lesbian voice in the cutting room. Failing to create her entire reflection in the film, she is

unable to continue integrating all parts of herself. Unable to hlly counter Lesbian hate and

silencing, she is also unable to counter the hatred, silencing and fragmentation of women, 9 in particular Black women. She is left Fragmented and spends the last few paragraphs writing about being a Black woman. But she is still dreaming of an authentic, coherent reflection of herself. She writes:

Coming home from the Playas del Este, hugging the edited oral histories.

there is always something more to be written, something more important.

You are always ahead of yourself. There is always something that must be

remembered, something that cannot be forgotten. something that must be

weighed. There is always, whether we say these things today or tomorrow.

or whether silence is a better tactic.

[. . .] There is an unburdening, uncovering the most vulnerable parts of

ourselves, uncovering beauty. possibility. Coming home from the Playas

del Este ... (23)

Writing from Cuba, a geographic location where a Black Marxist such as Brand should find community and place, she ironically finds alienation as a woman and as a lesbian.

She ends the essay alluding to a future construction of a whole subjectivity. of not only the image of the strong Black woman, but also of Black woman's beauty and possibility, a home to which she can retreat from the struggle. Whereas the cultural contact zone is a place of coalition and difference, a place for the strong Black woman, utopia is the home place, a place for self-affirming relationships, for Black women to love Black women.

Brand constructs a utopian space by appropriating the romantic tradition and reflecting her alternate subjectivity onto the landscape. This re-presented landscape creates a political utopia -- an island to retreat to horn the contact zone, a shelter for 10

herself and others in the struggle. Here. an altemate community can find what the poet calls "grace." a sense of connection and authenticity. Unlike the romantics. Brand is not

interested in a universal apocalypse, but engages in creating a radical political utopia, a

stepping out from under the current ruling ideology and maintaining an alternate centre.

Her articulation of what has been silenced creates estrangement, pointing the spoken

subject towards different conditions of lack and desire than those which keep the

hegemonic system moving forward.

Brand's estranged and inverted representation is created in relation to her

overriding politic of authenticity and wholeness for her Black lesbian subjectivity.

Perhaps not surprisingly considering the differing genres. this politic is more evident in

her book of personal essays, Bread out of Stone, published in 1994, than in her book of

poetry, No Language is Neutral, published in 1990. In Bread out of Stone, she clearly

demonstrates her social activism. As Brand asserts, "Essays are a popular form. they're

both personal and political. There were things that needed to be said about the society in

which I've lived for the past 25 years which 1 didn't see expressed anywhere else in my

writing" ("Conversation" 14). In her essays. she returns to more overtly express the

groundwork on which she has built her utopia in No Language Is Neutral, published four

years earlier. As each text supports the other, we will look at both in some detail. CHAPTER 1

Anxiety of Place: Being Placed

I wish every black kid the revolution of culture and politics 1 was growing up in. When you grow up black anywhere in the Western world. there is an uneasiness ... an anxiety of place. It is as if there is nothing behind you. So when you hear people putting pieces into place, you recognize it as the "something" that was absent. --- Dionne Brand "Poets in Limbo"

1.1 Introduction

Ln Imperial Eves: Travel Writing and Transculturation, Mary Louise Pratt looks at transculturation. or the cultural collision within colonial encounters, and how the cultures involved affect and are affected by the other on the contact zone. She defines "contact zone" as :

[. . .] often synonymous with "colonial frontier." But while the latter term

is grounded within a European expansionist perspective (the frontier is a

frontier only with respect to Europe), "contact zone" is an attempt to

invoke the spatial and temporal copresence of subjects previously

separated by geographic and historical disjunctures, and whose trajectories

now intersect [. . .I. A "contact" perspective emphasizes how subjects are

constituted in and by their relations to each other. It treats the relations

among colonizers and colonized [. . .] not in terms of separateness or

apartheid, but in terms of copresence, interaction, interlocking

understandings and practices, often within radically asymmetrical relations

of power. (7) 12

Carehl to stress that the contact zone is not a neutral but rather a lirninal space caught up in relations of power and politics between the colonizers and colonized. Pratt situates colonial encounters in an overlapping space through which the cultures affect and are affected by each other. We can picture this interaction as follows in Figure I.

Fig. 1. Encolrnrers Bmt~eenClrltzrres o)~the Conroct Zone.

Here we have two overlapping circles, A and 5. where B is the colonizer and A the colonized. The overlap, C, is the contact zone. The arrows on the diagram represent cultural exchange through the contact zone, or transculturation. and the arrow from B to

A is larger to represent the assimilation of the colonized by the colonizer. However. there is also a second arrow representing colonial appropriation and importation of aspects of the colonized culture. The importance of transculturation fiom A to B is that even if what

is appropriated is removed from any authentic cultural embeddedness and meaning other than conquest, it can be part of a later reclaiming of the overtaken culture.

Abena Busia argues that in colonial literature, Afican woman is created out of a

distorting, muffling and empty space. She writes: 13

The African woman is conjured up out of a void, a fissure or space out of

which there can be for her no coherent or comprehensible language: not

because it cannot be uttered. but be,:ause [. . .] her ian~tngeeither cnnnor

be heard or ccrnnot be zrndersrood -- and it is this singular factor which has

had bearing on the representation of black women in imperial discourse.

(emphasis original 88)

This represented, incomprehensible, non-coherent subjectivity is a sign of representationally existing solely within the contact zone.

The Black woman. as other, is fictionalized in relation to hegemony. and where she makes sense, where she can find an authentic subjectivity. is defined as nonsensical. silenced. But this silencing does not mean that Black women have been silent. Rather.

Busia argues that they have gone unheard. She asserts, "the systematic refUsa1 to hear our speech is not the same thing as our silence. That we have hitherto been spoken of as absent or silenced does not mean we have been so. [. . .I Our supposed absence of voice becomes, in the end, paradigmatic of the incomplete and incompletable nature of imperial cultural conquest" ( 103). The fact that these others have been silenced rather than been

silent is an important distinction emphasizing that there are other ways of being in the

world than those acknowledged by hegemony. Voicing Black women's existence in a way that can be heard and understood has the effect of exposing the constructedness and

incompleteness of the ruling ideology. Thus, "native women can never be permitted to

speak; for 'any challenge to the prevailing order of fantasy is a political struggle"' (Busia

100). These other voices, voices that are not white, are not male and are not heterosexual, I4 surviving within the heterogeneous, contradictory chaotic nature of ideology. permit a skewed way of seeing, an alternate perspective. Voicing the other creates an estrangement, exhibits contradiction and points to the impossibility of mapping an entire reality. Expressing this alternate ideological perspective is a political act aimed at fracturing the unified power of hegemony. In her autobiographical work, Brand sets out to challenge fantasy with fantasy. utopia with utopia, in order to tear down the hegemonic myths that both repel her into and then conjure her out of the void and to rebuild her own empowering representational space around her coherent authentic self.

1.2 Speaking From the Contact Zone: Fracturing the Subject

As Trinidadian-Canadian poet Claire Hams remarks in her essay "Poets in

Limbo:"

A successfbl slave state requires people exiled From the authentic self.

Thus laws aimed at the destruction of language and culture. National,

cultural and family groupings were deliberately disbanded. their members

scattered; Afican religions and ceremonies were banned and a reductive

version of Christianity imposed. Dehumanization became an essential part

of the daily life of the enslaved. New names were imposed, languages

were banned, rape and murder became the normal perks of ownership.

(1 16)

A successful slave state requires that people be separated from anything that could 15 accurately reflect their experience of and actions in the world, in other words. from their authentic selves, From those selves that can only exist in area A.

Harris asserts that even today, almost two hundred years since the end of slavery, the concerns of Black women writers in Canada "seem to turn on the question of authenticity. How to be true to the black self; to the female self [. . .I" (1 16). She defines authenticity as a self, a subject not always represented by others. a subject at home in language. able to re-present herself, her experience as well as her desires. Harris's authentic selves are pre-given. but unlike an essentialist self, they are prrgiven only in the sense that they exist before and must assert themselves through hegemonic discourse.

Speaking of Trinidadian-Canadian Black women writers such as Dionne Brand. Nourbcse

Philip and herself, she goes on to say, "Our challenge as poets is to restore the sense. the ability to perceive, of the real self, to use language, image and form in original ways in service of this goal" (1 18). The project of these writers is to use the tools available, to restore the ability to perceive a sense of the real self, to restore the sense of self that can and should be present in any empowering language, history and ideology. In other words. to make language, image and form reflect and represent their authentic selves. '

According to Harris, for the Black woman. the question of authenticity revolves around being true to the female self, as well as the Black self. In their search for authenticity, Black women must counter the parallel silencing of authentic wnmen's histories and subjectivities. In her title poem. 'No Language Is Neutral," Diome Brand searches for any representation of her Black female ancestors, whom she amalgamates into a single woman and names her "Liney." Until Black women can authenticate their 16 own subjectivity, Brand can only find evidence of Liney through the recollections of others. particularly Black men. She writes:

So is there 1 meet

she in a recollection through Ben. son, now ninety.

ex-saga boy and image, perhaps eyes of my mama,

Liney daughter. I beg him to recall something of my

mama. something of his mama. The ninety year old

water of his eyes swell like the river he remember

and he say, she rvns a slcgar cake, nveer srveer

sweet. Ylrh rrz~rrrzcz! Thnr girl \vns n sllgnr coke! (24)

Woman's life esists outside of formal and linguistic representation and becomes unrepresentable in any way other than that which supports patriarchy and its definition of woman. Authentic female subjectivities have been silenced by being written over, repeatedly represented in relation to the centre.

To Harris's concerns of how to be true to the authentic Black and female selves,

Brand could add "how to be true to the lesbian self," how to reflect accurately lesbian experience and desire. Whereas authentic Black subjectivities have been erased and repressed by being removed from their cultures and languages, and authentic female subjectivities have been mired in over-representation in relation to a disempowering centre, authentic lesbian subjectivities, and in particular Black lesbian subjectivities, have been silenced by being ignored, rarely acknowledged in relation to the centre. Ln "This

Body For Itself' Brand speaks of the silencing of Black lesbian women. Speaking of "Zamies." or Caribbean Black lesbians, she asserts:

What made me interested in these women was the insistence in the culture

that they did not or don't exist and that they did not craft our sexuality and

therefore our history. Perhaps they do not appear because they are

inconvenient. [. . .I In the construction of the neo-colonial classes through

gender and privilege, such sexual leakages are inconven irnt. unsectrn 1y :

they do not conform to the structures for complete control and exploitation

of women within these classes. (Bread 48)

The lesbian is silenced because she represents the breakdown of one of the essential binaries that Western culture rests on. that of the heterosexual male/female relationship.

She gives us other possibilities. the idea that perhaps things should and could be different.

Because of the racism inherent in Western culture. Blacks in America can never completely assimilate, can never exist in area B. And because of patriarchy, women and lesbians can also never authentically exist in area B. Representationally. these othered groups exist only within the marginal contact zone. See Figure 2.

Fig. 2. Representationally existing on the Contact Zone These marginalized Black, lesbian and female others, cut-off from their authentic subjectivities, disempoweringly Fragmented and repelled from the sense enforcing hegemonic centre. can now be represented in ways that ideologically reflect the coherent eurocentric Self. that must be made clear here is that although silenced, represented and defined in ways that buttress the centre and disempower her, woman, the woman of colour, or lesbian woman still e-rists and has something that needs to be voiced outside of those representations and definitions.

In an interview with Dagmar Novak. Brand asserts that when self-authenticating images are not present in literature. the "literature means to erase you or to kill you" and that in response to this "you write yourself' (273). To express her estranged authentic self. her non-normative experience, she needs a larger reality. And. as Busia argues, there are alternatives. Although the onslaught against their humanity was overwhelmingly effective at severing Blacks in the Americas from their African cultures and languages, and therefore their authentic selves. it was not complete. Like Saharan dust, traces of

Africa found its way into and settled on colonial languages, the practice of Christian religion, the construction of Caribbean cultures. Blacks in the Americas have been resistant. Black culture has persisted and not only by that which has influenced and been appropriated within hegemony; it has also expressed itself on its own terms.

It must be noted that colonial languages are not the only available languages.

Nation Language, a heteroglot contact language developed between the various languages of the colonizers and colonized of the Caribbean, has become a dialect of its own.

Although considered improper in the emcentric hierarchy of languages, which has the 19 effect of silencing it in relation to the hegernonic centre, Nation Language still allows for the expression of an altemate, Black-centred subjectivity and history. However, with its appropriation of colonial languages, it still contains the racism inherent in those languages. And it is highly patriarchal. Not only colonized by eurocentrism, but also by patriarchy, Brand cannot rely on Nation Language alone to express her authentic female and lesbian subjectivity.

Another sign of resistance in Western Black culture is Black Caribbean literature.

When Brand was growing up there were writers such as V.S. Naipaul. George Lamming and Derek Walcott. As Harris explains, "These books [. . .] were important out of all proportion. Haphazardly, as we read them. they suggested interpretations of life. of the past. somewhat opposite to what we were being taught in our very proper colonial schools. We began to understand dimly that language created worlds" ( 1 18). But most

Black writers were male and although they wrote about issues of Black culture and produced altemate images of Black life, they were patriarchal and often gained a voice

(and it must be emphasized, access to colonially controlled publication) by representing themselves in ways that reinforced the cultural hierarchy. (See below for a discussion of

Brand's reaction to Walcott.)

Authentic Black women were to be found elsewhere. In private places such as commonplace actions and the language of everyday, in memory and the oral tradition,

African women's stories and myths wound their way offering alternative narratives, other images of self. As Kathleen Renk argues, Black women's storytelling tradition offers both

"a protection and a cure" (109). Brand says of her grandmother, "She was an excellent 20 story teller, she entertained us nights when the electricity failed or when we children begged her for another soucouyant story ... now when I think of these stories at night and my grandmother. I realize they made me an image of me ... I'm still working towards"

(Harris 1 17). In Bread out of Stone, Brand describes how her grandmother's soucouyant stories created altemate images exhibiting the inverted reality of Black women in

Trinidad:

Using her stories like food, she filled us up with legends of flying

women who inhabited the billowing darkness. As if letting out the day,

rearranging the world, she in her nightly cadences would set the events. the

real meanings of the world right. The blunt edges of the days. the brutality

of want, she would set to their dialectic. their causes and their redemption.

Every child where I was born heard these stories but what I remember

about her stories of the soucouyant and la jablesse, women so unlike her,

is how they drove her voice to its most guttural and its most honeyed. (32)

Both through what she tells and through what she does (through the act of telling),

Brand's grandmother re-creates alternate images of Black women's lives. Brand's

grandmother tells soucouyant stories, stories of an old Black woman who shucks her skin

and flies through the night as a ball of bright light to suck people's blood, and she tells

stories of la jablesse, a half-woman, half-beast who seduces men to their death under the

cover of night. These stories tell of vilified, yet mythical, feared, yet empowered,

sexualized, yet sexual Black women. While reinforcing patriarchy's image of Black

womanhood, these double-voiced and dissembling stories also provide alternate 2 1 narratives, expand the imagination. They carry within themselves a different world view. the whispering hail of an altemate absolute other. Telling them is a political act. As

Harris asserts, "These stories saved our imaginations" ( 1 17) -- these stories and their tellers. Brand is working towards stepping into both the empowered subject positions of the mythical female figures in her grandmother's stories and the subject position of story teller, of the keeper and creator of subject positions, that is exemplified by her grandmother.

However. Brand is not only Black and woman. but also lesbian. and it is the patriarchally unacknowledged lesbian fragment that most allows her to remove herself

from the contact zone. She says, "For us, women loving each other, there could be no heterosexual fantasy. and there is no lesbian fantasy. You've got to make whatever your going to have" ("Language" 16). The landscape of women loving women is difficult to reconstruct in any way that reflects the patriarchal centre; therefore it is ignored. and in

being silenced it is difficult to represent within area B. But by being denied, it is open to

interpretation, not yet written over. And, like Busia's Black women, Black lesbian

women have been silenced, not silent. By billowing out this history and this language,

Brand can begin to represent the landscape of Black lesbian desire as it reflects her own

centre. This as yet hegemonically unrepresented landscape can be the location of an

altemate sheltering space.

1.3 Beyond the Contact Zone: Uniting the Subject To represent comprehensibly her entire subjectivity, particularly as a Black lesbian. Fractured and silenced from even Harris. Philip and Busia's Black woman, Brand must begin from where she has been placed. from the contact zone. One of the effects of living in her contact zone, with as it were "nothing behind you," is that in order to represent herself, she must employ autoethnography. According to Mary Louise Pratt,

"autoethnography" refers to "instances in which colonized subjects undertake to represent themselves in ways that engage wirh the coionizcr's own terms. If ethnographic texts are a means by which Europeans represent to themselves their (usually subjugated) others. autoethnographic texts are those the others construct in response to or in dialogue with those metropolitan representations" (7). With no sheltering sense-making area A, to speak and be hecird nr all. Brand must engage with the colonizer's terms in the contact zone. and to engage with the colonizer's terms will continue to place her in relation to the sense-enforcing, reductive, silencing centre. To voice her authentic self, she must begin with the hegemonic traditions available, but she must also move away from them.

Taking up the question of how to voice an authentic self, Claire Harris asserts one of the hegemonic traditions that Caribbean women writers can both employ and redeploy is romanticism. In "Poets in Limbo," speaking of herself, Brand and Nourbese Philip,

Black women writers whose formative years were spent in Trinidad studying the

"inimical" British syllabus, learning English folk songs, and memorizing Chaucer through to Arnold (1 17), she asserts, "We remain, therefore, poets whose sense of the art is essentially rooted in the English tradition. When we turn away, that is what we tum from. What we turn to we have essentially to make ourselves" (1 18). Located in limboi 23 these writers must both write to and against a eurocentric literary canon. Therefore, when

Harris asks, "So what does Wordsworth have to do with us?" of course she is referring to their imagination being limited by a eurocentric education: but. she states also that "Apart

From his general influence on English poetry, our work illustrates the fact that. lacking a

sense of authenticity, we seek wholeness in the landscape" (I i 8). Like Wordsworth. the project of these writers is to voice a sense of an authentic self at home by reflecting that

self in the landscape.

Harris asserts. "A close reading of these poets reveals that landscape is not

description merely. but often guide and entrance to a sense of wholmess" ( 1 18).

Landscape is a representation of our relationship to the neutral real and can be r~nployed

to voice a different interpellating relationship with an altemate absolute other. Whereas

reality is impermeable. landscape is semi-permeable. A polarized lens, landscape can be

both a mirrored reflection of the ideology at the centre of language, and a semi-permeable

barrier that allows passage of unconscious nonsense into the conscious sense of an

alternate centre. Like the landscape around her, Brand exists, she is real. However, also

like landscape. her existence takes place in an ideology and a language that censor and

distort her. Following Wordsworth, she dislocates the alienating conventions of her

cultural moment by reflecting her authentic self, created in relation to her radical utopian

politic represented by her and her community's coherent absolute other, in an

ideologically utopian reconstruction of landscape. By bouncing her signifiers off reality.

off experienced but unarticulated - or differently articulated - landscape, she alters the

signified and therefore the signifier in a chain of signification. Brand creates a new 24 symbolic landscape, new seditious metaphors.

We can see how she appropriates the romantic tradition by juxtaposing her texts to Wordsworth's spiritual autobiography. The Prelude. This appropriation of ronlantic landscape to express her subjectivity links her work with Black male post-colonial poet

Derek Walcott. in particular his "Midsummer LII" from which she takes her title.

However, Brand's work differs from Walcon's in her insistence on expressing her authentic subject. her refusal to fragment or sacrifice any part of herself in the quest for unity.

As described in the prehce. Brand begins her title poem with a description of herself located on the beach. restricted on all sides by rivers. ocean and the unnavigable interior. This cartography is a symbolic mapping, an ideological representation of her past poetic subjectivity's relative positionality. The two rivers are a potential means to navigate the entire island, yet they guard her passage in all directions -- most importantly to the ocean, all-encompassing dominant ideology and history, and to the interior, her unarticulated subjectivity. They symbolize the languages available to the poet. English and Nation Language. As Teresa Zackodnik points out. the river Pilate is English (195). It is named after Pilate. representative of the Roman colonizers, who not only condemns

Jesus, King of the Jews, but then blames the Jews for his crucifixion. The river

PilateEnglish rumbles to the ocean in a tumult -- echoing Matthew 2724: "When Pilate

saw that he could prevail nothing, but that rather a tumult was made. he took water, and washed his hands before the multitude saying I am innocent of the blood of this just

person: see ye to it." English, like Pilate, attempts to demonstrate its neutrality and wash its hands of its colonizing effects.

For Brand the river of English silences those it does not serve by sweeping them into the ocean or leaving them drowned on its "indifirent bank" (27). Even those little girls who do cross "on the tied up dress hips of big women" (72) have nowhere to go. The children taunt the narrator's mother at the river: "and go where, lady, weeping and go where" (27). However, the river does allow passage to the ocean -- "a way out and not anything of beauty" (23).English offers those who are colonized under it a voice, but because it is the language that supports the hegemortic ideal. it is a voice constructed on their absence -- a fractured voice that silences.

Zackodnik writes, "Standard English. then. presents itself as a unitary language of homogenous experience; those whose experience falls outside its construction of sameness are denied and othered by and in it" ( 196). In her depiction of English as a disempowering and Fracturing force, Brand engages with the older generation of male

Black Caribbean writers. Brand's view of language contrasts sharply with the Derek

Walcott passage from which she takes her title. In "Midsummer Ln," Walcofi writes:

[. . .I Have we changed sides

to the moustached sergeants and the horsy gentry

because we serve English, like a two-headed sentry

guarding its borders? No language is neutral;

the green oak of English is a murmurous cathedral

where some took umbrage, some peace, but every shade, all,

helped widen its shadow. (506) 26 Whereas Walcott asserts "no language is neutral" almost apologetically, as an explanation for the necessary effects English has had on its others, Brand takes the statement that "no language is neutral" as a banner around which to rally oppositional forces to a centripetal language. Walcott sees English as an oak tree, a cathedral. where all who enter help to cast its shade. As Susan Gingell writes, "The virtuoso variations worked with umbrage, shade and shadow reveals how secure Walcon is at verbal play beneath 'the green oak of

English.' rehsing to take sides in his confidence that he is adding to the breadth of shadow that oak casts" (50).As Gingell points out, Brand wrote in a review of Walcott that he "is a poet who has been picked up by the western intelligentsia as the poetic genius of the third world [. . .]. He has appealed from the beginning to foreign critics and foreign needs. Poetry is history and ideology. and Walcott's figure in the Caribbean plays to the belief that colonization brought civilization, brought culture" (44). Brand agrees that no language is neutral. but for her English is not an overshadowing oak, but rather a drowning, tumultuous river contributing to the colonizing forces of dominant ideology,

Those outside of English are not assimilated, but fractured and silenced by a language which attempts to be neutral.

Centripetal, hegemonic English denies and repels other(ed) subjectivities. Yet, it can also be a means to articulate those other(ed) subjectivities. In an interview with

Books in Canada, Brand states:

Walcott and I come from different generations and different genders; the

English language that he wants to claim is not the same one that I want to

claim. The one that 1 want contains the resistances to how that language 27

was made, because that language was made through imperialism, through

the oppression of women. As women and as peoples of colour we write

against that language. The more power we acquire to speak and act and so

on, the more we change that language. (1 5)

Although discourse and language have an effect on her subjectivity, Brand is not made through language, but rather has the agency to make and alter language. She does not want to discard English. but because no language is neutral, she wants the English language to accurately reflect her different experiences and actions in the world. to reflect a self and a history different from the one on otter fiom hegemony.

Whereas Walcott serves as a split subject. a "two headed sentry," guarding the borders of the one language of English, Brand keeps the subject whole and instead creates two sentinel rivers which guard her borders and keep her representationally situated on the fragmenting contact zone. Brand's second river is dead and teeming from waste and alligators. A dead river is stagnant, leading nowhere. Yet this river is teeming, or pregnant/overflowing fiom the possibilities it holds which are silenced and wasted by dominant culture. The description of this river as dead. teeming and full of alligators creates a menacing image of suppression. Like the river Pilate which drowns little girls and leaves them on its indifferent banks, this river, too, is a place girls should stay away from. It is full of other(ed) possibilities and is cut off fiom the ocean and silenced. This is

Nation Language. Created as a contact language between slaves and their colonizers, it is silenced by dominant culture as being an ungrammatical appropriation of colonial languages. Like the colonial languages from which it is composed, it is patriarchal and racist. The poet describes her mother as:

A woman who

thought she was human but got the message. female

and black and somehow those who gave it to her

were like family, mother and brother. spitting woman

at her [. . .]. (27)'

Between those who speak Nation Language and dominant culture. it is silenced by colonization: within the population who speaks it. it silences those outside patriarchy. For

Brand, a woman and lesbian, this river ofiers no escape.

Walcott senreshis single language as a split subject and Brand attempts to speak her whole subject from between two languages which censor her. However. Wi Iliam

Wordsworth gives us an image of the fully interpellated romantic poet as "river fish"

(Brand & 25), as completely at home and able to navigate his authentic self. In his autobiographical long poem, The Prelude, Wordsworth also employs the image of rivers to represent a means of self-navigation. Rivers follow him through life, appearing now and then, like muses, granting the poet enabling inspiration. Although Brand employs rivers to symbolize restrictive languages. Wordsworth's rivers symbolize not language, but his imagination, his nonsensuous connection to both divinity and humanity, the resolver of the sublime beauty dialectic. For Wordsworth, it is not language that enables his navigation of his authentic self, but imagination.' In the fmal book of The Prelude,

Wordsworth writes of the imagination:

This faculty hath been the feeding source Of our long labour: we have traced the stream

From the blind cavern whence is faintly heard

Its natal murmur; followed it to light

And open day: accompanied its course

Among the ways oE'Nature. for a time

Lost sight of it bewildered and engulfed.

Then given it greeting as it rose once more

In strength. reflecting from its placid breast

The works of man and face of human life;

And lastly from its progress have we drawn

Faith in life endless. the sustaining thought

Of human Being, Eternity. and God. ( 14.193 - 205)

Through the image of the river, Wordsworth demonstrates bow his imagination has developed and moved with him through life, From a child in the womb who faintly hears the river's murmur, to the babe who has an imaginative and filial connection to nature as a son to a mother, to a man who in turning to reason turns his back to nature and the imagination, and finally to himself as he is now, a man who dedicates himself to nature and the imagination for their ability, when synchronized, to reflect unifying grace, to reveal his authentic self.

Wordsworth's river of imagination enables him to navigate his entire self. In

Brand's symbolic map of subjectivity, this means Wordsworth can freely move around his landscape. And he does. Most often positioning his subjectivity within the island of 30

England's interior spaces, From here he travels to and from the shore and even crosses the channel to travel more or less unhindered in Western Europe. Brand, however. emphasizing that her rivers are not an easy means to navigation, has a divided identification with them. Each holds out the possibility of a voice but each also stands as sentry to the interior.

The interior of Brand's island is the hesemonic unconscious. the void. the sublime. It symbolizes "nonsense" or that which cannot be articulated in either language,

Brand's subjectivity as woman. Black and lesbian. This "nonsense" is the autobiography that Brand is attempting to write:

In between, Liney, in between

...... -1

The ric rac nlnning of your story remains braided in

other wars, Liney, no one is interested in telling

the truth. History will only hear you if you give birth to a

woman who smoothes starched linen in the wardrobe

drawer, trembles when she walks and who gives birth

to another woman who cries near a river and

vanishes and who gives birth to a woman who is a

poet, and, even then. (26)

The name Liney recalls "lineage," or the lines of family back to a common ancestor. It refers to Brand's sisters, mothers, aunts and cousins back to the original, mythic first slave woman. Black women have been silenced and must be found in between, in the 3 1 contact zone. between the lines of history, of language, of literature, until the current

Liney, Brand, becomes a poet with the potential to write her own story with her self at the centre, in between. Brand's autobiography articulates an alternate subjectivity for herself and for all the Lineys who come before and afier.

As Hirnani Banneji writes, "To read [Brand's] poetry is to read not only about her but also about her people" (47). Brand's articulation of her experience voices the sublime. the c~ilturalunconscious, and educates desire for her political utopia. an ideal other than the hegemonic absolute other. Her voicing of what has been silenced creates estrangement. pointing the spoken subject towards different conditions of lack snd desire than those that keep the hegernonic system moving forward. Brand's autobiographical narrative long poems express her unconscious. or "therepository of all the experiences and desires that cannot be identified with the symbolic realm and its laws of citationality, those calls to take up normative subject positions" (Smith 20). Any attempt to express the unconscious is also an attempt to undermine the reductive symbolic order that polices its boundaries as well as the hegemonic ideal absolute other that created it. Brand's alternate possibility undermines the foundations of the eurocentric/patriarchal subject and has the potential to stall the development of subjectivity and send it on another trajectory towards an alternate ideal -- for herself and for her collectivity. To articulate the whole of her subjectivity becomes a politicai action -- the personal (autobiography) becomes the political (articulation of possibilities other than the dominant).

Contextualizing her interior "nonsense" is the ocean, symbolizing the hegernonic ideology and history that work with language to create normative subjectivities. History, 32 ideology and language have a symbiotic relationship; each constructs the other. History and ideology as abstract concepts are restricted by the language they rely on to speak them and language is supported in its supposed "neutrality" by its ideology and its history.

At the moment, the ocean is mostly eurocentric and patriarchal, fed by and feeding colonial languages (and, therefore, the colonial imagination) in a relationship which silences and drowns those it does not serve.

Brand, in depicting the ocean as history, answers to Walcott's poem "The Sea is

History." In Frontiers of Caribbean Literature in English, Walcott states of his poem:

When somebody asks you where is your history or where is your culture.

or what have you done. the question comes from a presumption of people

who believe that history represents achievement: it can therefore be

chronicled successively by epochs as a record of achievement [. . .]. These

people have a destiny. They feel that they are produced by history, and

therefore can dominate it. [. . .] So if somebody asks me, as a Caribbean

person: "Where is your history?" I would say: "It is out there, in that cloud,

that sky, the water moving." And. if the questioner says: "There's nothing

there," I would say: "Well, that's what I think history is. There's nothing

there." The sea is history (24).

Reacting against the colonial concept of historical progress, Walcott locates history in an

unconcerned neutral seascape. Brand does not argue that history is a way to dominate and

colonize the past and therefore the future. But she would not agree that outside of this

colonizing impulse "There's nothing there." On the contrary, she writes: [. . .] the sea wind heaving any remnants of

consonant curses into choking aspirate.

No language is neutral seared in the spine's unravelling:

Here is history too. (23)

"Aspirate" means to draw by aspiration or suction and is most often related to the act of breathing out. "Aspiration" also means desire. As Zackodnik asserts, Brand is commenting on how slaves were forcibly stripped of their languages as if the languages were suctioned out of their lungs into the ocean wind (1 96) -- but Brand is also commenting on the way their replacement languages deny their subjectivity and leave them desiring a disempowering. hollowing and silencing ideal. Here is history too. but not the colonizers' version of a neutral, progressive history. This history is symbiotically related to Nation Language -- a language where, for colonial slaves, "hush was idiom"

(23) and still today "a morphology of rolling chain and copper gong / now shape this twang, falsettos of whip and air i rudiment this grammar" (23). Brand directly confronts

Walcott when she writes, "Is steady hurt I feeling / when old talk bleed, the sea don't have branch you / know darlingtt(29). The eurocentric combination of history and language doesn't have a branch under which she can find peace.

As a symbol of ideology and history, the sea can not be neutral nor unified, but must also contain submerged centribgal contradictions, must also be full of other possibilities. In Books in Canada, Brand remarks:

No Laneuaee Is Neutral was like a journey, like a memory of when

language became possible, changed, through that experience of 34 colonization. So the poem starts somewhere back then -- about how a

people, if they got transported to a distant place where they no longer had

names for things, how they began to name anything, how they began to say

anything, and how, faced with incredible brutality, how they did not refuse

to say, and what they did say of that experience. There's an image in the

poem of standing near the sea and looking out into great possibility, but

endless hopelessness, too. ( 16)

The sea is both what separates these transported people from their home, from themselves, and what can reconnect them it is a part of what keeps Brand located on the beach, a centripetal force of containment. But it is also a source of possible inversion. of utopia. Submerged within that sea are all the centrifugal voices. all possible histories and fittures.

For the most part, Wordsworth depicts the sea as background and according to

Brand's symbolic construction of landscape, this would indicate his solid foundation within history and ideology. He does not see the ocean as constraining but rather as an extension of himself, flooding over the globe, reinforcing the accuracy of his single, universal world view. He does, however, give us an image of the sea as a source of alternate possibility, as inverting the flawed human world. But rather than containing numerous possibilities, his sea contains only the apocalyptic one promised by God. In

Wordsworth's sea shore dream in book V, a Bedouin races to bury the knowledge of reason and intuition, symbolized by a stone and shell, which themselves symbolize books of science and of poetry. The stone and shell, the howledge of reason and intuition 35 contained within books, must be buried in order to save them from the destructive deluge of the prophesied apocalypse. Poetry is associated with the book of intuition. with the

shell. which has the *'power / To exhilarate the spirit and soothe" (108)even though this

is the book that has prophesied the flood that will be its, and their, destruction. In this

passage, Wordsworth is lamenting the loss of everything human in the apocalyptic

inversion to a divine edenic paradise. Poetry. like traditional systematic utopia,

prophesies its own end -- an end which Wordsworth both desires and laments. Whereas

Wordsworth's prophetic sea is the source of only one hegemonic single possibility -- the

one set out for man since the beginning of time and prophesied in poetry -- Walcott's sea

is empty. But for Brand, Walcon's ahistorical postcolonialism is as silencing and as

hegemonic as Wordsworth's single possibility. To allow for multiple voices. a heteroglot

ideology, Brand's sea is Full of multiple possibilities.

Like Wordsworth, Walcott too is able to navigate his interior spaces. not on rivers

but on the "leaf-wet roads" of his head (506). In "Midsummer Ln." locating his past

poetic subject on St. Lucia, he writes, "I used to haunt the arches / of the British barracks

of Vigie" (506). Brand, however, locates her past poetic subject on the Trinidadian sea

shore. Directly parallelling Walcott, she positions herself on a black beach, declaring: "I

used to haunt the beach at I Guaya [. . .I" (22). Walcoa haunted the soldiers' barracks of

the colonizers, perhaps desiring contact with authority and England. Brand, on the other

hand, positions her self on the beach between the interior "nonsensical" jungle and the

"sense" making ocean, observing the rivers of English and Nation Language, neither of

which allow for complete expression of her subjectivity. Created by the movement of 36 oceans and rivers, beaches are the deposits left behind from the erosion of the interior land into the sea. Brand's beach is the liminal part of her. created, regulated and appropriated by ideology, history and language. She describes her beach as "not / backra white but nigger brown" (22). "Backra" is Nation Language and refers to a white slave owner. Its etymology is believed to come fiom "back" and "raw" -- the physical results of white authority enforced with a whip (Pawka). Wanting to remove herself from the authority of England, she locates her subjectivity on a brown beach. However, the beach

is also "nigger brown," it is the silencing and reductive difference she is forced to express. Positioned on a beach between the rivers of English and Nation Language, she speaks fiom a contact zone between authority and silence. a conscious reductive sense

and emancipating yet unconscious nonsense.

1.4 Conclusion

Claire Harris, realizing that as a Black woman she is representationally located in

limbo between the nonsensical sublime and the sense-making beautihl, prefaces her

essay "Poets in Limbo" with a quote from Wordsworth's The Prelude, "Fostered alike by

beauty and by fear" (1 15). Here Wordsworth begins his extended discussion of his mind,

like the romantic landscape, being oppositionally nurtured by both the beautiful and the

sublime, the civilizedlcultured and the feared nativehaturd. Hams ends her essay with,

"Liminality, the space between two worlds, is a place of paradox. A "realm of pure

possibility whence novel configurations of ideas and relations may arise.' A potent space 37 of creativity and fullness" (1 25). In an essay discussing the position of Black women writers in Canada and commissioned for A Mazing Space, a book about Canadian women's writing, she describes Black women writers in Canadian women's literature as

"in !imbo," as working within and between two worlds. Although this is an accurate metaphor, it is expressed in the isolated and narrow situation of Black women writing within Canadian women's literature. In this essay, Harris' space between two worlds is narrowed to race and necessarily leaves out gender (Harris 12 1).

"Limbo," apart from meaning a place or state between two worlds. is also a

Catholic term meaning the place for souls that are removed from Earth yet barred from heaven because they have not received God's unifying grace through Christian baptism.

In relation to the hegemonic centre. multiply marginalized subjects, like these fragmented souls. are in a place of in between, removed from area B. yet barred from area A. But unlike the "privileged" si(gh)t(e) of iiminality between two worlds (such as that hoped to be found by Derek Walcott), these "others," rehsed the unity of grace beneath a self- reflecting ideal absolute other, are in a state of representational semi-existence in the contact zone. "Limbo," is also a West Indian dance where the dancers bend over backwards to walk beneath a steadily lowered stick. These Black women poets are often forced to bend over backwards, "to dissemble" (NN 27), as it becomes increasingly difficult to publish any kind of truth outside of the dominant ideology in Canada. Hams realizes the impossibility for Black women to find unity in relation to a eurocentric centre, to find a reflection of self in romanticism's constructed, narrow landscape. She prefers to leave the dialectic between beauty and the sublime mostly unresolved and 38 instead argues that the only effective responses to the whitewashed and ignored Black experience in the West is surrealism and fact ( 124).

Surrealism is part of the fantastic genres that signal the silenced. It indicates the presence of the unconscious in the realm of the conscious. Brand, too, employs surrealism as she textually positions herself on the contact zone. She begins and ends "No Language

Is Neutral" with the image of the poet on a surrealistic beach. placed between the sublime and the beautiful, between the c(h)oral chuckle of male voices in the hegemonic sense making ocean and the nonsensical, chaotic, repelled interior. Because she is intent on writing her entire self, she is in limbo between multiple worlds, affected by compound

forces. But if she remains in limbo. she will never express her entire subjectivity at one time. Because of her representationally non-coherent multiple subjectivity. Brand is always writing from multiple contact zones, multiple positions of liminality. In "Bread out of Stone" we see that as she represents part of her subjectivity to one audience, the other parts are necessarily sacrificed. She articulates the complex dialogic and dialectic

relations between self and other found on the contact zone -- what Mae Gwendolyn

Henderson refers to as "a dialectics/dialogics of identity and difference" ( 16 1 ).4

Henderson asserts complex subjectivities, because of their liminality between multiple

combinations of self and other both internally and externally, must learn to adapt, disrupt

and revise language, to "speak in tongues" (1 50) in order to communicate across multiple

contact zones. She claims: "It is this subjective plurality (rather than the notion of a

cohesive or fractured subject) that, finally. allows the black woman to become an

expressive site for a dialectics/dialogics of identity and difference" (1 6 1). Agreeably, the 39 plurality of complex subjects does give them unique ways of seeing and expressing idectity and difference. However, this dialectics/dialogics continues to leave complex subjects negotiating subjectivity in relation to various other centres. As Henderson asserts, "[. . .] the objective of these writers is not, as some critics suggest. to move from margin to centre, but to remain on the borders of discourse, speaking from the vantage point of the insidedoutsider" ( 160). But, to remain on the margins is to remain marginal. always represented in relation to the other and never to the self. One solution is to move from the margins, not to the hegemonic cectre, but to one's own centre -- to create an area

A, separate from area B, yet because of what is shared with dominant culture, connected through the contact zone. Not content with the open dialectic of surrealism to express her complex subjectivity, Brand insists on a polemical and inverting radical utopian political agenda, on writing from her own space and not only indicating but also navigating the unconscious, her authentic self. Utopia and its use of estrangement can voice actions that are outside hegemonic order, create alternate idezls or absolute others, and stretch our imagination. It is in the silenced, unspoken, ignored yet authenticating, estranging and pre-existing actions of being woman, Black and lesbian and their inseparable interactions, that Brand can begin to create something radical in her own utopian space, begin to write herself CHAPTER 2

Making Bread out of Stone: Creating a Radical Utopian Politic

The world as it stands, produced by the long history of domination. is an inverted one. Both with sword and pen the people of the colonized nations have been reduced to the status of objects, their subjectivity distorted or simply negated. And it is this inverted world that must be set back on its own base; the negation must be negated. -- Himani Bamerji Fifty Caribbean Writers

2.1 Introduction

Kim Stanley Robinson writes. "Utopia has to be rescued as a word [. . .] In a way, it's an antidote or a response to postmodernism, to post-modemism's fragmentation. anomie, apoliticism, stupidity, quietism. and capitulationism [. . .I" (56). By adding a politic to post-modem dislocations and estrangements, utopia decentres and then recentres ideology, voicing an altemate authentic yet non-hegemonic coherence to the subject, to the community and to history.

Because she has no authenticating space, Dionne Brand's autobiographically- based poems employ the utopian form to express her skewed and silenced reality and to begin to replace the culture stolen From her by colonialism. In expressing the cultural unconscious through the utopian form, Brand also delineates the utopian place, an imaginary landscape that allows for the reflection of an altemate sense-making. demonstrating there are other ways of being in the world. This voicing and creation of home through landscape is an appropriation of the romantic apocalyptic project. Like the utopian romantics, she employs landscape to reflect a redeeming vision of herself at the 4 t centre, of herself as both subject and Subject. Unlike the romantics, Brand's utopian landscape is not intended to create universal recognition, but rather to be one centre among many. This utopia is neither a separate isolated space nor a dominating and repressive space. Rather it is an alternate shelter, an area A that reflects, voices, and empowers the actions of Brand's community in the here and now.

2.2 Not Enough: Utopia from System to Desire to Struggle to Action

2.2.1 Traditional Utopia: Utopia as System

The term "utopia" was coined by Thomas More. usually cited as the father of utopian studies. when he published his Utopia in Latin in 15 16. He created the word as a pun. "Utopia" could come from either the Latin "eutopia,' the good place, or "outopia," the no place. The ambiguous meaning of the word persists. Is utopia the possible perfect society or is it the impossible escapist dream?

More may be the father of utopian studies, but utopias existed long before their ambiguous label. The Viking Valhalla, home for warriors who died honorably in battle; the Egyptian afterworld that could only be reached by following the rules of the Book of the Dead; and the Christian heaven to be reached by following the word of God are but to name a few. And even Eorn these few it can be demonstrated that utopia is related to and can be used to control our actions. But utopia is not only the reward for living the good life, however that may be defined, on a faulted earth. Throughout history, it has also been located on Earth in either another place, another time or another zone. And these various 42 utopian locations influence utopia's stimulus and social control. For instance, the earliest

Hebrew prophets believed the Kingdom of God would eventually be brought to bear on

Earth through political process and when it later became difficult to believe in any kind of progress towards heavenly perfection, prophecy turned to divine intervention (Levitas

18). Deliverance to the rnille~iumof peace and the Messianic Kingdom on Earth would happen through miracle, either collectively at some point in the future. as in

millennialism, or individually in the present, as in chiliasm (Levitas 70). Eventually. the

Kingdom on Earth was reconceived as a spiritual. otherworldly heaven. This shift from a

belief in the progress of mankind towards the perfect society to a belief in the necessity of

divine intervention and/or an otherworldly spiritual heaven appears to locate the good

place in the no place. The idea of a universal heaven or Utopia achieved by divine grace,

a healing forgiveness for those sins that divide the soul, but can not be reached by those

beyond redemption, is a highly conservative form of social control. aimed at keeping

subjects subjected to the centre, to God and to God's word. Anticipation of a different life

for future generations is removed and along with it the impetus for dynamic social

change.

But utopia has also been theorized as located on another Earthly geographic

location, something already existing to be searched for, or stumbled into, places such as

the Greek Atlantis or the Spanish El Dorado. This concept of utopia fuels ages of

exploration and colonization. As such, this was the concept of utopia prevalent in Europe

during the sixteenth to the nineteenth-centuries. From Thomas More to Charlotte Perkins

Gilrnan, utopia is pictured as the pocket anomaly, the perfect society is located not in the hture but in another yet-to-be discovered location on earth. However, as European exploration encircled the globe and possible locations for utopias, fictional or real, disappeared, the pocket utopia was replaced with the ideal commonwealth, the description of the end point of the progressive evolution of liberal humanist society. Like the early Hebrew prophets who were attempting to establish their new religion, the proponents of the ideal commonwealth believed utopia was the end result of mankind's current social progress. Not surprisingly. this was a common form of utopia during the solidifying late Romantic and Victorian eras, the time when industrial capitalism was establishing itself as the means to a perfect future.

But ideal commonwealths, while seeking to understand the world, had no real answer to how to change the world (Levitas 34). So utopia transformed from descriptive to educative; its function was no longer to describe the perfect society but to educate desire towards the perfect way of life (Levitas 34). Attempting to escape the alienation of the subject in society, these educative utopias demonstrated alternate ways of being in the world. This emphasis on the relationship between material experience and utopia can be seen in Karl Marx's call for a radical break with history to establish a disalienating socialism and in the experimental colonies of the utopian socialists. But, even before

Marx, the relationship between alternate experiecce and utopia can be seen in the romantics' literary reaction to a disempowering neoclassicism and to the alienating industrial revolution.

The romantics embraced the power of the transcendent imagination to rescript the world. Not coincidentally, the English Romantic period occurred alongside the catalytic 44

French Revolution, the repressive reaction to the Napoleonic wars. and the unrest of the lower and middle classes brought about by the social and economic changes of the

Industrial Revolution. Many saw the French Revolution as the answer to these centripetal and centrifugal social, economic and political pressures. Some even described the beginning of the revolution as the violent heralding of the millennium of peace ending in humanity's return to the edenic life of Adam and Eve, as spoken of in the book of

Apocalypse (Abrarns "Romantic" 15). The Revolution would redeem history, would invert the inversion and return humanity to its proper and original place in God's universe. But, when the revolution resulted in the guillotining of thousands. Napoleon crowning himself emperor and France invading the Rhineland and the Netherlands. many could no longer see it as a means to peace and equality in Europe, let alone on Earth. The original revolution lost its agent of transformation and for those who opposed the direction it was taking, there was nothing left but the dream. wishful thinking, and not willfbl action. Unable to give up hope, the romantics turned from revolutionary political to passive ideological action, asserting that the mind of man, through imagination, can

revealhecreate eden on Earth, a disalienating universal home place centered around the

romantic subject's material experience.

The romantics write of experiencing this unity and authenticity in chiliastic

moments. According to Ruth Levitas, the chiliast is concerned with the individual leap

over into ecstasy. She quotes Mannheim's proposition that, "The only true, perhaps the

only direct characteristic of chiliastic experience is absolute presentness [. . .I. For the

real chiliast, the present becomes the breach through which what was previously inwards 35 bursts out suddenly, takes hold of the outer world and transforms it" (7 1). This breaking through into ecstasy can only be brought about through "Kairos" or '"fulfilled time, the moment of time which is invaded by eternity.' and distinguished from progress or

'perfection or completion in time"' (Levitas 7 1). As liberal humanists. the romantics. products of their cultural moment, write of progress and destiny, but as revolutionaries, they were also preoccupied with chiliastic moments of fillfilled time. They believed these

moments to be indicators of an edenic Utopia available to man on Earth through alternate

perception, a perception currently available to those few prophetic individuals who

periodically had access to this heightened experience.

Wordsworth depicts his chiliastic experience of the world in The Prelude, when

he asserts:

There are in our existence spots of time,

That with distinct pre-eminence retain

A renovating virtue ...... -1

that give

Profoundest knowledge to what point, and how,

The mind is lord and master -- outward sense

The obedient servant of her will. (12.208-223)

As a young man, Wordsworth senses a connection to the glorified beauty of nature, but as

an adult, after his estranging involvement in the French Revolution and resultkg adoption

of a more liberal ideology, he realizes how his mind can alter reality to create a self- 46 reflecting landscape. The redeeming and authenticating effects of the mind's creative power are depicted most clearly in "The Prospectus." where he writes:

Paradise, and groves

Elysian, Fortunate Fields -- like those of old

Sought in the Atlantic Main -- why should they be

A history only of departed things,

Or a mere fiction of what never was?

For the discerning intellect of Man,

When wedded to this goodly universe

h love and holy passion. shall find these

A simple produce of the common day. (47-55)

For those who recognize its chiliastic power. the human mind, or imagination. can synchronize with God's universe to re-create heaven on Earth.

The chiliastic romantic poets become prophets, responsible for spreading this revelation, for chanting ''the spousal verse / of this great Consummation" that will awake

"the sensual from their sleep / Of Death" ("Prospectus" 56-6 1). But, perhaps because of the failure of the revolution to materialize a fitting political agent of transformation, this ideological transformation is seen as an individual task. Although Wordsworth traverses this faulted earth and "Must hear Humanity in fields and groves / Pipe solitary anguish

("Prospectus" 76-77) he claims, "... even these/ Hearing, I be not downcast or forlorn!"

("Prospectus" 82). Where Wordsworth finds Fortunate Fields and groves Elysian, others

find anguish and disalienation. He repeats this assertion at the end of The Prelude where 47 he writes to Coleridge that even though the rest of mankind "to ignominy and shame / By nations sink together" (438-439). he and Coleridge "shall still / Find solace" (439-110).

This individual, chiliastic utopia is an escapist vision. and although he writes that as

"Prophets of Nature" (446), they become redeemers of mankind: " Joint labourers in the work !(Should Providence such grace to us vouchsafe) 1 Of their deliverance" ( 12.443-

115), it is deliverance through singular transcendence not through any real communal change in the conditions of existence.

Because the aim of the romantic subject is unity with the entire universe including all of mankind. the poet, although a heightened and therefore e~iled(separated) individual, is seen to differ from regular man not in kind, but in degree. Wordsworth proclaims. "[. . .] the poet is chiefly distinguished from other men by a greater promptness to think and feel without immediate external excitement. and a greater power in expressing such thoughts and feelings as are produced in him in that manner. But these passions and thoughts and feelings are the general passions and thoughts and feelings of men" ("Preface" 172). The poet perceives and dispels a universal consciousness.

How can he, the exiled individual, reveal his heightened awareness to the rest of humanity? Wordsworth answers in his "Preface to Lyrical Ballads:" "[ulndoubtably with our moral sentiments and animal sensations, and with the causes which excite these; with the operations of the elements and the appearances of the visible universe [. . .I" ( 173).

He expresses his alternate perception through his universally shared experience of the landscape. Nature is depicted as sharing the feelings and emotions of the observing poet

(and therefore all of mankind), as intimately connected with the mind of man. And, 48 conflated into one entity, the human mind and the outside world have the creative power

(formerly allotted to God alone) to unmask paradise and reestablish heaven on earth creating a disalienating home for the romantic subject. But as we will see, romantic unity with ideological landscape, commrlnion between the representation of the external world and the mind and experience of man. is in reality a reflection of the interpellated and interpellating hegemonic subject. In other words, the romantic poet imposed his own politic on reality to create self-reflecting landscape.

One can see why an activist and poet such as Brand would be attracted to the romantic tradition. She. too. has grown up in a revolutionary world -- Trinidad's hdeprndence Movement, the Black Consciousness Movement, the Lesbian and Gay

Rights Movements, the Feminist Movement, the Cuban Revolution, and the communist revolution in Grenada. And like the romantics, she has seen some of these revolutions fail and even when they succeed, fail to deliver all that was promised.

Brand first participated as an activist in the Black Consciousness Movement in

Canada, despite feeling that it was patriarchal, propagating, in fact relying on, the oppression of Black women. In "Nothing of Egypt,- an essay in Bread out of Stone, she writes:

So in my generation the pimps at the Le Coq D'Or, dressed in Afios and

morning coats, inverted the Black revolution, exploiting women Black like

them, telling them that they were Black men and the world was against

them and we Black women had a duty to help them get over, as desperate

as we were to find a place to get over ourselves. [. . .] Le Coq D'Or offered 49

us romance [. . .I. We drank that elixir offered Black girls [. . .]. (1 1 1)

In their search for a sense of authenticity, Black women are instead offered the patriarchal elixir of romance, the impossible utopian promise of the possibility of inclusion and wholeness in restrictive, distilled subject positions.

Because this was not enough, Dionne Brand returned to the Caribbean in 1983 to take part in the New Jewel Movement's communist revolution in Grenada, hoping to create a unifying place by establishing both Black and women's emancipation in the new state. She comments that perhaps it was not clear to her when she left to join the revclution, but she always felt "[t]hat it would be possible at the end to break the image of the strong Black woman we always hear about in the struggle for everyone else but herself' (135). For Brand the revolution is not only a political overturning but also an inversion of Black patriarchy. She asserts: "Revolutions do not happen outside of you, they happen in the vein, they change you and you change yourself, you wake up in the morning changing. You say this is the human being I want to be. You are making yourself for the future, and you do not even know the extent of it when you begin but you have a hint, a taste in your throat of the warm elixir of the possible" (1 38). In Grenada, Brand comes out as a lesbian (Kirchhoff C4). She tastes the elixir of other possibilities than those on offer and as a Black woman loving Black women, she finds a way to break the patriarchal image of Black womanhood.

Parallelling the events of the French Revolution, the revolution in Grenada turned on itself and the People's Revolutionary Army overthrew the People's Revolutionary

Government, killing the leader, Maurice Bishop. The resulting potential for a military 50 dictatorship created an opportunity for the West to declare the revolution a threat to democracy and one week later. American troops invaded Grenada, restoring the pre- revolution government. Brand returned to Canada. She describes how the revolution has changed her perception of a reality overlain by ideoiogy :

Sometimes you go to bed at night and lie in your bed in the comer of some

room. and just before sleeping the room seems larger. the distance to the

door longer and your body smaller than it is, and you try to refocus your

eyes to the room's right proportions, but it doesn't work and staring longer

only mlrkes the room bigger. It is some kind of optical trick that your eyes

play on ycu, and you realize that if not for some tissue in your retina

correcting everything, regulating your looks. you would see tile world

differently, or the world is different if not for that. So when I came home

the world looked like this and I woke up the next morning and it kept

looking this way and I was glad and held on to this look. (1 34)

Brand's experience in Grenada as a Black lesbian has exposed the illusion of ideology and given her an alternate vision. In the revolution she realizes that in order to break the image of the strong Black woman, she must struggle for release from all oppression and operate for her "own human self" (1 38). Like Sojourner Truth, Brand realizes that she must have "nothing of Egypt" on her (141), nothing of oppression; she must exit the door of "the house of bondage" as Black, as woman and as lesbian (1 41 ). Even though the

Revolution ended with the invasion by American troops, she asserts:

Just this thought, nothing has power over me, causes you to change even 5 1

more. In a strange way the revolution is complete in you and you can do

anything. What's more, it says you must turn over completely, everything

is in question. No matter how far you thought you had gone, there is

further. Nothing of Egypt on me. Heading for a revolution is heading for

your true self. ( 14 1 )

The political revolution failed. but Brand's ideological inversion has released her From the hegemonic centre and given her an alternate politic through which to impose order on reality.

Centering her gaze on herself, her perceptions become accurate. "The true length of the room appears" ( 110).She writes:

Things fell away, the slough of patriarchal life, the duty of female

weakness, the fear that moves it, the desires grafted to it. And when the

morning came that the American air planes were in the sky. this

knowledge had become tougher and tougher, toughening in the shape of a

woman who was me and whom I desired and ... I dreamed off. looking at

the door of the room. ( 142)

The impossibility of the Grenadian revolution. not only the impossibility of the

Americans ignoring the construction of another communist state in the Caribbean, but also the impossibility of the revolution disalienating a Black lesbian, leads Brand to dream of other doorways, other ways out of her restrictive subject position. Brand again:

"In a hallway on the morning when the American air planes come and you are a muscle crouching in on itself you think of all the reasons why you are in the struggle and so, yes, of course you disappear from a certain life, you are released into another, and you do not call anyone to explain because the world is new and there are no lines to talk across"

(113). Brand does not only dream of doorways out of the house of bondage, she moves through them to the other side.

For Brand and Wordsworth, the violence of revolution is the most sublime and fearful experience. Both could have lost their lives. And out of that fear, both learn that the highest priority must be grace. a self-reflective authenticating connection with others and with place. After the revolution. Wordswonh also finds himself transported to another place. He writes:

I seemed about this time to gain clear sight

OFa new world -- a world, too, that was fit

To be transmitted. and to other eyes

Made visible [. . .I. (1 3.369-372)

Wordsworth's interpellation with others who share his ideology and that relationship's reflection on the landscape through the force of the imagination reveals a different world.

Following his conception of himself as prophet. he declares he must share this Utopia.

Failing to create a utopian space through a political revolution, Brand like the romantics, instead turns to an imaginary place where she can be representationally whole.

But once she is released to the other place, she is silenced in this space. There are no lines to talk across as the complete interpellation she finds with her lover "mutes prose"

40). Brand, unable to accept the continuation of disalienation in her cultural moment, also returns as prophet from her potentially escapist and silenced other place to search for lines 53 to talk across, to demonstrate ways to cross over, the map to and means to navigate home.

She appropriates the romantic tradition of combining material experience with the force of the imagination and creates a version of the romantic chiliastic utopia by reflecting of her authentic self in the landscape of Trinidad. However, rather than the static and universal Utopia espoused by the romantics, she creates a radical political utopia, based on her desire for authenticity but created out of struggle and action, one of many within the field of resistance activists. As H Nigel Thomas asserts. she is a prophet of the people. a "communal" as opposed to universal artist (60).

2.2.2 Levitas and Moylan: Pesire and Struggle

In The Conceot of Utooia, Ruth Levitas examines the relationship between desire and utopia. Obviously, there are a number of ways to approach utopia. as cultural blueprint, religion, education, escapism, and critique to name but a few. In the past, there has been no consensus as to what constitutes utopia. which, according to Levitas, has not resulted in the peaceful co-existence of the various utopian scholars, but rather has resulted in the competition to justify each of the various areas as THE proper study of utopia, the rest being utopian, in the colloquial sense of the word. Levitas describes the competitive nature of utopian studies as "less a hundred flowers blooming than a number of weeds seeking to colonize the same habitat" (1 80). Unlike a well-tended garden where plants are cultivated to reach their full potential, utopian studies has become choked with weeds, each attempting to claim the field for themselves.

In an effort to unify the broad field of utopian studies, Levitas attempts to create a new definition. Realizing any defmition will have the effect of imposing an orthodoxy and narrow the field of study, she reaches for a broad definition, one which will encompass all the variations in utopia's content. form and function. Looking for the thread that unites the wide range of utopian scholarship. and which will encourage more and different questions, Levitas hits upon the element of desire, or more specifically. "the expression of desire for a better way of being" (8). The key to this definition of utopia is that it not only encompasses ideal commonwealths. utopian socialism. utopian literature, and the work of utopian theorists, but it also opens the field of utopia to include other inscriptions of desire (Levitas 8). and in particular to this thesis, feminist desire. It is

Levitas' broad definition of utopia which allows for Brand's texts to be viewed through the Frame of utopian theory. Tom Moylan, like Ruth Levitas. is also concerned with the perceived disappearance of utopia as an oppositional force. His main focus in Demand the Imoossible is on the revisionist literary utopias of the 1960's and 1970's. which he names "critical utopias." (In particular, he looks at Samuel Delaney's Trouble on Triton,

Joanna Russ's The Female Man, Ursula K. LeGuin's The Dispossessed, and Marge

Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time.) According to Moylan, the critical utopias once again unite utopian desire with hope by breaking utopia flee from the confines of Western ideology and creating a common ideologeme that both reflects and guides the real actions of resistance activists.

Both Levitas and Moylan argue that utopia has been caught up in ideology: that the utopian impulse (Moylan) or utopian desire (Levitas) is not declining but heavily present within current ideology and the capitalist construction of needs and satisfactions.

in other words, utopia does not exist in a binary good vs evil relationship with ideology, 55 but rather the two have a dialectic relationship. By constructing our concept of selfhood, ideology pervades all cultural expression (Moylan 18). Thus, we must, as Moylan and

Levitas argue, see utopian discourse as not only pulling against. but also embedded within ideology. Levitas argues that, in fact, utopia as expressions of desire for a better way of life can be found in literature. politics, advertising, science and technology, law, business etc. And, in an effort to counter the myth that opposifional utopias, or utopian alternatives to the ruling class, are declining because none seem to be rallying the forces of opposition, Lrvitas splits hope from desire, claiming utopia does not need to be realistic or within our grasp to be expressions of desire. Even unrealizable utopias

function as critical commcntzry on society and as such oppositional utopia is still present within contemporary utopian (in both senses of the word) texts such as Sally Miller

Gearhart's The Wandereround, and Samuel Deiany's Trouble on Triton.

What Levitas perceives as disappearing is not utopia, the desire for a better way of

life, but the hope that oppositional desire can become reality. She ends her book with:

If utopia arises from desire, the transformation of reality and the

realization of utopia depend upon hope, upon not only wishfbl thinking

but will-full action. The presence of hope affects the nature of utopian

expression; but while utopia may keep alive the sense that the here and

now is unsatisfactory, and can contribute to the belief that it might be

otherwise, it is not the source for hope. If utopia is not to remain 'draped

in black', that hope must be recovered - the hope that we may collectively

build a world of peace, justice, cooperation and equality in which human 56

creativity can find its full expression. The dream becomes vision only

when hope is invested in an agency capable of transformation. The

political problem remains the search for that agency and the possibility of

hope; and only if we find it will we see our dreams come true. (200)

Like the romantics with the French Revolution and Brand with the revolution in Grenada, what the contemporary cultural moment has lost. according to Levitas, is the agent of transformation not the desire for change.

According to Moylan. utopia and ideology have an even deeper relationship. In order for a subject to act passively within a system. especially within a system that exploits the subject. the individual must be offered the possibility of satisfying his or her socially-constructed (yet perceived as real) needs in return for "willing" behaviour consistent with the ideology. This method of ideological adherence "first. taps the utopian impulse as the key motivation to cooperate and, then, manages, defuses, and channels that impulse into the limited satisfactions offered by the dominant social formation" (Moylan,

1 9). Mo y lan argues rei fication and exploitation have concealed the actual social relations and structures which carry on the exploitation and domination. Desire and hope appear to have again been split apart; utopian desire enslaved within the system, and not knowing where or how to attack the concealed exploitive social relations, the oppositional strength of utopia has been commodified and sold back as a pleasurable (yet sometimes critical) diversion for a passive audience (Moylan 8).

But. in Moylan's argument for a dialectic relationship between utopia and ideology, utopia is not only kept alive within Western ideology, but because of Western 57 ideology's inability to satisfy all the desires of its subjects, utopia is still available as an oppositional force. Capitalist ideology relies on utopia to keep its subjects passive but in its need for growth, in its need to constantly create new dissatisfactions in order to expand the system. it cannot ever totally satis@ the socially constructed needs of its subjects.

Capitalism has not been able to contain its own utopian impulse. And, in its need to restrict the subject's desires to that which reproduces and expands the relations of production, capitalism creates narrow. restrictive, alienated subjectivities whose desires for that which cannot be reduced to financial exchanges have neither been able to be satisfied nor completely silenced by hegemony, erupting now and again irl the contradictions of ideology. Therefore. in capitalist ideology there will always be that other utopia, spawned by the disparity between needs and satisfactions, and ready to say. "Not enough."

h her novel In Another Place Not Here, Dio~eBrand demonstrates the agency found in the ability to recognize and say that the world on offer is not enough. The two main characters in the novel are. in many ways, polar opposites. Elizete is grounded, connected to the past and desires inversion. Verlia is ethereal, drawn to the hture and desires revolution. Verlia, symbolizing the utopian impulse, voices the words "not enough" and gives Elizete, symbolizing a grounded connection to history and place, the ability to recognize that life can be different. Elizete reacts to these estranging words:

It seemed to be her voice saying it too [. . .] what was interesting about

Verlia was what she suggested, abandoning the certainty of hardship, not

because life had become better but because you recognized its compulsion, 58

that beat beat of it which you did not control and one day you said, not

enough, not enough at all. She liked [. . .] the word's dark illumination.

She liked the threat of them. breaking apart everything she thought steady

and even desired but which came apart as not hers at all as soon as these

words were said. (102)

The ability to say "not enough" enables Elizete to invert the reductive patriarchal world and to go on re-naming the landscape according to her own perspective. It is in the midst of this ideological re-presentation of the world that Abena and Elizete find the space to tell their redemptive histories and answer the question "How was it for you?." But. this concept of utopia is obviously different from its traditional sense. Elizete points out that she abandons the certainty of hardship. "not because life had become better." not because her desires were satisfied, but because she recognized the ideology she was immersed within as not her own. This recognition motivates her to voice her own ideology through her depiction of landscape. This voicing creates utopia, not as the perfect place, but as the more enabling other place.

Pamela McCallum and Christian Olbey assen, "The significance of In Another

Place Not Here for an ongoing dialogue on cultural and political resistance may lie not so

much in its utopian moments, powerful though they are, but in the articulation and

exploration of the persistent markings of the past on the present" (178). They argue the

novel's politic lies more in its materiality, its historicity and political activism than its

utopian visions. Moylan's concept of the critical utopia, however, gives us the ability to

draw history and activism into the utopian vision. 59

By recognizing that utopia can demonstrate restrictive hegemonic ideology as not enough, Moylan is able to counter the myth that utopia has disappeared and to exhibit how, once again. utopia opens an oppositional space where desire can unite with hope and find an agent of transformation. Moylan argues that the critical utopias of the 1960's and 70's, liberate "utopia from its enclosure and collaboration within ideology" so its

"subversive impulse can be re-appropriated as an instrument of opposition" (20). Critical

utopias are, Moylan explaitls. critical in the "sense of critique -- that is expressions of oppositional thought. unveiling, debunking of both the genre itself and the historical

situation. As we11 as 'critical' in the nuclear sense of the criricicnl mass required to make

the necessary explosive reaction" ( 10). In this definition, we can see both desire and hope.

The former in the critical utopias' sense of critiquing the historical situation and the

recognition that there must be a better way of life and the latter in the allusion to a new

agent of transformation in the metaphor of critical mass. However. Moylan's definition

also mentions the critical utopias' critique of the utopian genre itself, changing the genre

from a diatribe on system, to a call for struggle.

Utopia (traditional, critical and political) works through estrangement. By

describing a society where the perceived problems of the current world are solved or in

the process of being solved, utopia focuses on its cultural moment in a displaced manner.

Moylan gives us Darko Suvin's description of utopian estrangement as "a formal

inversion of significant and salient aspects of the author's world which has as its purpose

or telos the recognition that the author (and reader) truly live in an axiologically inverted

world" (33). In other words, by inverting its cultural moment, utopia underscores the problems of that moment by giving us an alternate vision where the historical contradictions are resolved, exposing the ideological myths that make the world appear to

be static and "as it should be." Utopian estrangement gives us the ability to see the world

as it is as not enough. Seen in this light. utopia becomes more than its content, more than

a description of a better place. As a tool to create estrangement, utopia in fact leads back

to history.

According to Moylan, utopia's relationship to the cultural moment is found in its

idrologeme or its alternate system of values that overturn the ethically and morally upside

down world. In this way, utopia becomes "an ideological critique of ideology" (38)

wherein the altemate values and solutions exhibit, even if we don't agree with the content

of the specific utopia. that perhaps things should and could be different. If we look at

utopia, not as a system, not as to whether or not we agree with its solutions, not as to

whether or not we could live happily in its imagined spaces, but rather as a polemic, as a

response to the historical contradictions of its cultural moment, utopia can operate

without "premature closure" as an indication of "unlimited contradiction" in opposition to

the homogeneity of the ruling ideology (Moylan 38-39). As a symbolic resolution of the

contradictions in its generating society, the importance of the utopian process is not found

in its content, but rather in the act of imagining solutions. Moylan claims: "To write

utopia is to indicate what cannot yet be said within present conceptual language or

achieved in current political action. To write utopia is to perform the most utopian of

actions possible within literary discourse. The form is itself more significant than any of

its content" (39). The utopian form signifies not enough, that although this limited reality 6 1 appears to have been unshakably solidified, it is impossible to map an entire reality and there are always alternatives to be found within the imagination's solutions to the contradictions of history.

So, utopia, like Elizete's renaming of the landscape, or as we will see, Brand's description of her utopian space in the beginning of No Laneuaee Is Neutral. works through estrangement, or the displaced vision of the world which underscores the inverted values and ethics leading to the alienation of the subject in the cultural moment. hverting/overtuming the inversion of values. utopia creates an alternate value system as expressed in the ideologeme. which. not by its content but purely by its existence, exhibits the fact that there are alternatives outside the narrow limits of the reigning hegemony. However, at this point it must be recognized that we are still talking about the desire at the heart of utopia and not hope, as Levitas defines it. In other words. both in the theory and Brand's work, there is still no agent of transformation, no action that can be taken to chart the course of history towards a more utopian horizon.

According to Moylan, this emphasis on action and transformation is where the critical utopia moves away from the traditional literary utopia. Realizing that its vision can become co-opted and consumerized by ideology, or denied by being classified as impossibly "utopian," critical utopia no longer presents a static society whereby its content becomes its evaluative measure. Instead, realizing the impossibility of perfection, the critical utopia presents the utopian society in a less static, more revolutionary light.

System persists but is negated by the emphasis on the political and personal revolutionary actions of the protagonist, highlighting the importance of action on both the individual 62 and the communal level. By presenting a society in process, critical utopia exhibits the idea that there is no Utopia, that the content of utopia can and should be continually altered. In this way, the binary relationship between the evil cultural moment and the good utopian society is both underscored (in the depiction of a better life) and broken down (in the emphasis on action and process as opposed to a static system).

It is through the actions of the protagonist(s) that the ideologeme is portrayed.

According to Moylan. ideologeme "carries with it the dual sense of idea. of concept~lalor belief system, and of ncrioj~.of a narrative of appropriate class action" (49). The ideological value system of the ideologeme results from, and is discovered by the reader through, the actions of the members within the utopian society. The common ideolo,ueme in Moylan's critical utopias is activism and the disalienation of the subject. Coded within the radically revolutionary actions of the protagonist is an "exploration of the utopian impulse and the ensuing strategies and tactics taken by a human subject [. . .] able to carry on the anti-hegemonic tasks aimed at bringing down the prevailing system and moving towards a radically new way of being" (Moylan 49). As Moylan claims:

[. . .] these texts are as much concerned with the discrete process of

consciousness raising and political engagement as they are with iconic

social images. Indeed, a powerful realism is brought to utopian fantasy as

the radicalizing process at both micro/personal and macro/public levels is

traced in characters who realize their oppression. find the solidarity of

collective opposition, and take radical steps in their personal and political

lives to destroy the realm of necessity and make room for the realm of freedom. (205)

Through the ideologeme expressed in the actions the protagonist(s), critical utopia becomes a proponent of struggle rather than system. As Moylan declares. "Where utopia as system can only be passively wished for, utopia as struggle can be taken on in the willed effort to transform the social system" (50). Rejecting the totalized system, critical utopia modifies the systemic utopian impulse to create a revolutionary narrative that opposes enclosing systems of any kind. Critical utopias revive the systemic. static utopian impulse. and then in an effort to ensure they are not appropriated and co-opted within the ideological system of the cultural moment. or that they themselves do not become hegemonic and universal. they deconstruct that very impulse through the privileging of the political and personal actions of the disalienated empowered protagonists. Critical utopia "negates static ideals, preserves radical action and creates n nelrtral space in which opposition can be nrticltlated and received' (ernphasis added Moy Ian 5 1). In their deconstruction of the traditional utopian impulse, moving from an emphasis on system building to that of struggle in the revolutionary activities of the protagonist, these texts break utopia out of its collusion with Western ideology, where it keeps subjects passively consuming, and give to their cultural moment an alternate historical narrative based on autonomous yet collective action, once again uniting desire and hope within the actions of, what for Moylan is the agent of transformation, the collective anti-hegemonic bloc. or field of resistance activists.

The anti-hegemonic bloc. borrowed from Antonio Gramsci, is defined as a variety of autonomous oppositional movements grouped around the various value systems of 64

feminism, ecology and self-management in the economic, political and ideological levels of social structure. Moylan argues. "The demands of this new bloc include the end to

male supremacy and the emancipation of women. the restoration of the autonomy of

nature. the self-management of the workplace and living space. and the liberation of

racial. ethnic and linguistic groups" (208). Of particular interest to Moylan's theory of

utopia is the ideological oppositional movement, which he argues to be the most

promising locus of change. In what Moylan calls the "emerging automated, post-

industrial. post-scarcity social order" ( 1 1) of Western capitalism the question may no

longer be that of class struggle at the point of production but becomes instead one of

"moral" leadership in the creation and division of socially constructed need. It becomes a

question of ideology. Not able to be contained in a single party discourse, the demands of

the bloc. centred around the various "moral leaderships" and proposed constructions of

need, must remain anti-hegemonic, "so that the deep and deserving differences are

permanently guaranteed (208). The ideological glue that holds the field of resistance

activists together is the idea that competing ideoiogies can become, like Levitas' vision

for utopias. less like weeds attempting to colonize the same habitat and more like one

hundred flowers blooming.

The politic that unites and is at the heart of the utopian impulse within these

movements is the common desire for freedom and the permanence of difference. This

utopian impulse must resist closure both in its preconceptual descriptions and on-going

construction of the future. As Moylan suggests, "There can be no Utopia, but there can be

utopian expressions that constantly shatter the present achievements and compromises of 65 society and point to that which is not yet experienced in the human project of fulfilment and creation" (28). Critical utopian expression becomes preconceptual images ofthe not- yet which contain within the ideologeme. based on the actions of the protagonists. the steps needed to begin the process towards utopia. Once again. desire is united with hope and an agent of transformation found in the pem~anentlydynamic and unappropriable field of resistance activists. Utopia again takes its place somewhere over the horizon. seditiously swaying the ideological flowers within the field of resistance as they blend and separate, altering the colour and composition of our cultural moment in ways that first pre-conceptually represent and then move us towards the pull of the not-yet.

Levitas. writing four years afier Moylan's Demand the Impossible. argues that

Moylan's critical utopias are not only ambiguous in form and content but also in their inscription of a real agent of transformation. She writes:

The issue of how dissatisfaction and even articulate criticism are converted

into oppositional and transformative action is [. . .I far from simple.

However, Moylan assumes a connection, since many of the writers of

critical utopias are actively involved in politics, mainly in those

movements which would be identified as part of the 'new social forces'

and particularly from the women's movement. [. . .] But the issue is the

effect of the text upon the reader, not the relationship between the text and

the author. [. . .] But even if the text operates effectively in terms of the

education of desire, this will not automatically be read off into political

action. Desire must be transformed into hope, the wish for change into the 66

will for change and the belief that there is an agency available to execute

it. ( 174)

Here. Levitas is clearly speaking of the impossibility of an oppositional, idealized. humanist utopia in the present fragmented cultural moment -- of a vision ofan ideal future that affects the reader, drawing him or her into the political battle to establish the vision in the here and now. This is the idea of utopia famously expressed by Oscar Wilde:

"A map of the world that does not include utopia is not even worth glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing. And when Humanity lands there, it looks out, and seeing a better country. sets sail. Progress is the realization of utopia" (Levitas 5). The wish is foilowed by and obviously guides the will.

But Moylan begins to give us a different concept of utopia and the relationship between ideological wishful thinking and will-full action. According to Moylan, the bloc is "engaged in the task of opening up oppositional spaces in the social fabric From which fbrther subversion of the system can be launched" (28). It exists within the imaginary space of what Moylan calls the "plebian public sphere," "a contradictory and non-linear space which unites the fragmented experiences of the opposition movements. The plebian public sphere is a liberated cultural and ideological zone seized from the totalized society born which the anti-hegemonic forces can attack the present and move openly toward an emancipated and radically open future" (28). Pan of the role of the critical utopias is to voice this sphere of political opposition in the here and now. Remember, besides its primary function of creating estrangement and educating desire through its pre-conceptual image of the not-yet, "[tlhe critical utopia [. . .] creates a neutral space in which 67 opposition can be nrriczrlated and receives' (emphasis added Moylan 5 1 ). Within the ideologeme of critical utopia, created and discerned out of the actions of the protagonist(s) is a dialogue on the oppositional actions of the anti-hegemonic bloc.

Critical utopias not only guide but also ofien metaphorically express current oppositional actions. They not only educate desire for the not-yet. and for some, instigate political action, but also provide, for the attentive reader. an arena where current oppositional actions can be metaphorically voiced within a system that needs to keep them silent. It is no coincidence that the writers of critical utopia are often activists then~selvesbecause critical utopia is a way for them to open a dialogue of opposition with others in the struggle, a space from which to speak and in which to be heard. Moylan's critical utopias are in part a dialogue on action and not only their authors but also many of their readers may have already been and continue to be politically active, particularly in their cultt~ral moment of 1960's and 70's America.

It is obvious from Levitas' comments on the ambiguity of the critical utopias;

From her search for a single, unified agent of transformation; and from her idealized idea of oppositional utopia, that the pre-conceptual images found in Moylan's utopian texts are not her vision of a utopian future. She claims:

Whereas Moylan sees the critical utopia, with its Bagmentary structure and

ambiguous content, as a positive development in terms of utopia's

transformative potential, the reality is othenvise. The ambiguity of utopia

is not merely exploratory and open, it is also disillusioned and unconfident

[. . .I. The presentation of alternative futures, multiple possibilities and 48

Fragmented images of time reflects a lack of confidence about whether and

how a better world can be reached. ( 196)

Caught up in the ambiguous content of the critical utopias, Levitas misses Moylan's point that there can be no oppositional master discourse. that in order to hnctio11as an oppositional force utopia's anti-hegemonic spaces must remain open to and respect the difference of all possibilities. To not always remain anti-hegemonic would be to risk being dismissed and silenced as impossibly utopian. or to be appropriated within the hegemonic social order. or worse when the goal is disalienation. to establish a restrictive and reductive hegemony of one's own.

Unlike the romantics. both Levitas and PloyIan agree there will never be Utopia. thar there will always be a gap between needs and satisfactions resulting in utopian desire as subjects realize the world is not enough. However. Moylan and Levitas do not agree on the effect this will have on the function of utopia. Levitas argues that because this gap and how or whether it is hypothetically solved is always a cultural effect, "[. . .] societies will differ both in the extent to which a gap between needs and available or potential satisfactions is experienced, and in the extent to which there are cultural hypotheses about the potential closure of this gap, as well as the nature of these hypotheses" (1 83). Because the gap between needs and satisfactions and the kind and number of utopias created out of that gap will vary between societies, there can never be a single, universal Utopia nor a universal utopian impulse. She takes great pains to distinguish between her concept of utopian desire and the utopian impulse, the idea of which she believes to be "intimately bound up with essentialist definitions of human needs and human nature" (1 8 1). 69

According to her. the idea of a utopian impulse, or utopian propensity. indicates the belief in some ultimate universal Utopia in relation to which the content of all other utopias will be judged. And because she cannot locate a strong agent of transformation. she also dismisses the idea of a utopian impulse as a force that moves us ever closer to perfection.

Instead, she splits desire From hope and substit~itesher concept of passive utopian desire for the active utopian impulse.

Moylan, however, argues for the active utopian impulse. Reversing Levitas' logic.

Moylan asserts it is because there can never be an ultimate universal Utopia that the utopian impulse will eternally exist within the utopian process. He claims, quoting

Michael Ryan, "The utopian imp~ilsewhich can never be satisfied or enclosed helps to preserve 'the role of uncertainty. the modifications imposed by diverse situations and different contexts, the need for inclusion. rather than exclusion, of variables, the wisdom of choosing policies over monolithic programs, the impossibility of mapping a whole reality"' (2 12). Once Freed tiom its collaboration with capitalist ideology, and because of the impossibility of mapping an entire reality, utopia must remain anti-hegemonic, and to remain anti-hegemonic, utopia must remain in process. It is in this way that the content of utopia can remain constant. not as Utopia but as the multiple utopias or "moral leaderships" within the struggle of the field of resistence activists, allowing for the eternal continuation of the utopian impulse. The ambiguity is the utopia.

Moylan begins to discuss utopia as action through critical utopia's relation to the cultural moment by its opening up a dialogue for the actions of the field of resistance activists; however, in his constant descriptions of utopia as "prefigurative" (209)' as 70

"preconceptual figures of hope" (203), as "anticipat[ing] the historical moment which its critique of reality urges" (40) Moylan is obviously still primarily concerned with utopia as a description of an ideal future to be worked towards. He writes, "Within this broad anti- hegemonic opposition. the critical utopian novels [. . .] help to express the imagined and emerging social fom~sthat pull the struggle forward" (co~phasisadded 2 10). Although utopia can be used to metaphorically describe present anti-hegemonic actions, it is still mainly concerned with guiding those actions to some kind of inconceivable ideal future.

This is not yet a radical utopian politics. not yet the struggle to create and maintain an alternate centre in the present. But utopia not only voices imaginary and emerging solutions to historical contradictions. Utopia is also one way to voice the centrifugal ideologies that push against hegemony. In its development from system to struggle. utopia can now be used as a tool to open the present historical situation to alternative narratives and subject positions in the present. In other words, it can become a radical utopian politics.

Unlike Moylan's critical utopians, Brand can not be content wirh indicating the

"possibility" of other ways of being. According to Moylan, the utopian form signifies that it is impossible to map an entire reality and that there will always be alternatives to be found in the imagination's solutions to the contradictions of history. He asserts, "The form itself is more sipnificant than any of its content" (39). For Brand. however, both form and content are vital. Utopian form because it allows her to voice the unconscious through estrangement and inversion and content because this unconscious is her non- normative life, her autobiography. The narrator asserts in section 7 of "Hard Against the Soul:"

still I must say something here

something that drives this verse into the future,

not where I go loitering in my sleep,

not where the eyes brighten every now and again

on old scores. now Imust step sprightly. I dreamless. (t& 43)

Unlike Moylan who sees critical utopia as pulling history forward, Brand's utopia drives history into the future. It is not something used for consolation only. not a nostalgic dream, not even a generic indication of other possibilities. Her utopia is the expression of her authentic self. Brand is dreamless, as earlier she has declared that "to be awake is /' more lovely than dreams" (7). Utopia allows her to dislocate discourse and create a cultural autobiography despite her lack of a representational area A. Rather than poststructurally fracturing the subject in order to exist within a single Western ideology like Walcott, Brand employs utopia to fracture ideology, enabling her to express her whole subject. Like Elizete from in Another Place Not Here, Brand begins to rename the landscape in a way that reflects her authentic self. Utopia becomes an altemate ideology, an alternate representation of her relationship to reality. She returns to the romantic belief in the possibility of a disalienated and whole subject to be located in a chiliastic utopia and expressed through an altemate reflection of self in landscape. But. whereas the romantic goal was a utopian apocalypse, a universal eden, Brand's radical political utopia is a part of the field of resistance activists -- one centre struggling among many.

2.2.3 Althusser: Utopia as Action 72

In his essay. "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses," Althusser discusses the heteroglot and contradictory nature of ideology and the forms it expresses itself within, the Ideological State Apparatus, or ISAs. The separate LSAs often have contradictory ideological demands on subjects and often contain as well as the present ruling ideology both the remnants of past ideologies and rumblings of hopeful future ideologies. And, Althusser writes. "[. . .] it is ultimately the ruling ideology which is realized in the Ideological State Apparatuses, precisely in its contmdicrions" (emphasis added 139). Not only are the separate ideologies of the various ISAs contradictory. but the ruling ideology, which the forms function to uphold. itself contains the necessary contradictory myths needed to keep subjects willingly functioning in the exploitive infrastructure -- the base for the entire structure of the State. These ideological contradictions can only be observed from outside the ideological frame, such as from a completely separate ideology, from one contradictory ISA to another, or from the separate perspectives of the social formation's centripetal and centrifugal ideological groups, those working to keep the posited ruling ideology firmly in the centre and those working to voice other possibilities.

Control of the ISAs is necessary to the acquisition and maintenance of state power

but because they are riddled with contradictions, control of the ISAs is always strained.

Because of these contradictions, the centrifugal class struggle, like the centripetal class

struggle, can €id expression in the forms of the ISAs. Thus the contradictory and unruly

ISA's can be both the stake and the site of the fight for state power (Althusser 140).

However, although the class struggle can be observed through the ISAs, can take place in 73 the ISAs and is for power over the ISA's, it must be rooted elsewhere, in the experience of the heavily masked and exploitive conditions of the infrastructure. Only by being rooted in material experience. as opposed to being rooted in ideology. the imaginary representation of their relationship to that experience, can the separate centripetal and centrifugal groups perceive contradictions and manipulate the ISAs, one side struggling to keep the conditions masked, the other to expose them. One way to alter the social formation is to sabotage the reproduction of the conditions of production in the ISAs, to sabotage the ruling ideology. This is the function of oppositional utopia, which through its estranged idrologeme. its combination of an altemate value system and narrative of action. is an oppositional ideology. Utopia's expression of an alternate ideology exposes the cultural unconscious and demonstrates alternate possibilities.

Althusser asserts that ideology should be divided into ideology and ideologies; the difference being that whereas ideology has no history, ideologies are historical and always express class positions ( 150). Along with the theory of historical ideologies, which are found in the ISAs of the State, is a theory of ideology in general, which must be common to all ideologies, past, present and future. Ln which case. a theory of ideology in general cannot be historical. In other words, "ideology in genera1 has no history," in the sense that it has "a structure and a functioning such as to make it a non-historical reality i.e. an omni-historical reality" (Althusser 15 1). Much like how the content and form of

individual utopias are historically determined but the utopian impulse is always omni-

present, the content and forms of ideologies will change over historical time, but there

must always be an ideology in general. 74

Relating the concept that ideology in general has no history to Freud's etemal unconscious, Althusser asserts that the idea that "ideology has no history, can and must

(and in a way which has absolutely nothing arbitrary about it, but, quite the reverse. is theoretically nrcessar).. for there is on organic link between the two propositions) be related directly to Freud's proposition that the trnconscio~rsis eternal, i.e. that it has no history" (emphasis original 152). Here, he is saying two things: one, the concept of ideology having no history can be understood in the same light as the unconscious being etemal, and. two. the propositions that ideology having no history and the uinconscious being etemal are organicall;., systematically, related to one another. Of the first point,

Althusser asserts that if "eternal" is defined as omni-historical. always immutably present. then ideology. which has no history. is also eternal. Just as the general unconscious is etemal (the unconscious will always exist). yet the individual unconscious is historically determined, so general ideology is omni-present while the ideologies of individual cultural moments outline the historical class struggle. Of the second point, Althusser asserts, "[. . .] the etemity of the unconscious is not unrelated to the eternity of ideology in general" ( 152). Ideologies, functioning beneath the ruling ideology to keep the ruling class in power in an hegemonic system, interpellate subjects into alienating and reductive subject positions which support the state. Although the class in power, its ideology, the available subject positions. the State and the IS As may change dramatically, the fimction of ideology in general is immutable. Althusser defines ideology as "a representation of the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence" (1 52).

Ideology is not a true representation of the real world, but rather a representation of our 75 imaginary relationship to the real world -- a relationship which is necessarily filtered through a pre-existing ideological representation. Reality is mediated by ideology. While the content of the various ideologies can change, the function of ideology in general remains the same. This representation of the imaginary relationship of the individual to the real is the immutable function of ideology in general and it has the effect orcreating the unconscious or that which is not allowed in the ideological representation of the subject's imaginary relationship to the real.

There can be no single ideological map of entire reality. Any ideology is rlecessarily reductive, creates its own alienating unconscious. This eternal existence of the unconscious was something the Romantics could not understand. In an effort to escape the alienation created by neoclassicism and industrialism. the romantics, whose subjects partially exist outside the area B of their own cultural moment, attempt to draw the unconscious into the consciousness of the centre. Like Brand, they attempt to speak their authentic selves: however. unlike Brand, they desired unity with the entire universe.

Nature, including the subject, was split. This split was seen as an extension of the neoclassic era's sublime beauty dialectic which included on one side "beauty," the good place: culture, consciousness, spirituality, and on the other side, the "sublime." the no- place: raw mortal nature, the unconscious, the wilderness. Whereas the romantics could easily understand and unite with the beautiful, the side representing the conscious

spiritual mind of man, they had a harder time understanding and uniting with the sublime,

their experience of that which was outside themselves. Yet, to take their place in the

systematic whole of a united universe they had to mend this split. They needed to synthesize the dialectic.

This synthesis is Wordsworth's goal in The Prelude. Formally his text can be divided into two sections: books 1 - 6 depicting the progression and growth of his love of nature and books 7 - I4 depicting his realization of the divinity of the mind of man. Both sections tell the same life story, but with different emphasis. These two opposing influences are synchronized at the end of each section, the end of book 11parallelling the end of book 6. At the end of book 6, he writes:

Our destiny. our beings hean and home.

Is with infinitude, and only there:

With hope it is. hope that can never die.

Effort and expectation. and desire.

And something evermore about to be. (603-608)

Man's destiny is with progress and traditional utopia, a wish that guides the will, with constant striving for perfection, aiming for the summit. But the soul's destiny is for peace, for beauty. Wordsworth juxtaposes the being's drive with:

Under such banners militant, the soul

Seeks for no trophies, struggles for no spoils

That may attest her prowess, blest in thoughts

That are their own perfection and reward,

Strong in herself and in beatitude. (609-6 13)

Whereas to be human is to strive for perfection, to be divine is to recognize one's own perfection. Sublime and beauty are represented by reasoned, experiential, suffering being 77 and the imaginative. transcendent beautiful soul. These oppositions must be brought into harmony to achieve synchronisity with the universe and Wordsworth writes of this amalgamation beneath a single politic: "Tumult and peace. the darkness and the light -- !

Were all like workings ofone mind" (6.635-636). As M.H. Abrarns points out in a footnote, Wordsworth accomplishes synthesis through the power of love "for there fear ends" ( 14.163). However, of love Wordsworth claims:

This spiritual Love acts not nor can exist

Without Imagination, which. in truth,

Is but another name for absolute power

And clearest insight. amplitude of mind.

And Reason in her most exalted mood. ( 14.188- 192)

Wordsworth asserts the need for universal reasoned imagination, his alternate creative ideology, and "intellectual Love" (14.207), his interpellating connection with others, to come together and transcend the sublime beauty dialectic and lead to "Faith in life endless, the sustaining thought / Of human Being, Eternity, and God" (14.204-205).

Imagination and love, once combined, will conquer fear and lead to faith in the sustaining creative thought of eternal unity. What is missing here, what makes this "universal" re- presentation beneath beauty possible. is the unconscious, the differently perceived world outside of romantic experience, the repelled sublime. This transcending non-sensuous love is not a neutral synthesis but a resolution firmly on the side of spiritual, reasoned, bbcivilized"and "civilizing" culture -- of beauty. The romantics unavoidably failed to unite with the entire universe. By asserting the sublime was something to be conquered, 78 to be deciphered through their civilizing imagination, they further separated themselves from and projected their spiritual subjectivity on to it, effectively closing themselves off

from any reality outside area B.

This artificial resolution can be demonstrated through the English landscapes of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Broadly. there were three general categories of

English landscape: the highly cultivated and structured formal gardens, usually located

close to the manor: the quickly disappearing dangerous wildemess, usually kept as far

from the manor as possible: and in between, both literally and categorically. the

increasingly large area set aside for industrialized fields and, for the wealthy. popular

English country gardens, vast acres of cultivated nature. It was in this middle ground, this

contact zone, particularly within these vast private parks. that the subject could

experience the sublime from the safety of civilization. This sublimated landscape is a

reflection of the cultivating ideology expressed in the sublime formal garden. an ideology

centred in the manor house, as it is imposed on the sublime. the wilderness.

This association of "sublime" with both the civilized formal garden and the

uncivilized wilderness can be explained through its multiple and contradictory meanings.

The noun "sublime" refers to the feared, the unknown, the unreadable wildemess. This

sublime is subliminal. "sub" meaning beneath and "liminal" meaning threshold. It is

outside sensory and rational understanding and, as such, easily written over. re-presented.

As an adjective, sublime has come to mean its opposite within the dialectic. The adjective

"sublime" means something of overwhelming spiritual, intellectual or moral standing,

something which inspires awe, in essence, the epitome of beauty. Thus, both the 79 wilderness outside the garden and the formal centre of the garden can be "sublime." This contradiction can be explained in the meaning of the verb "sublime." which means to convert something to something of higher worth. The romantic cultural moment was subliming the landscape. elevating it to the level of the spiritual by sublimating it, re- presenting it according to the ideology of the centre and repelling all else to the frontier and beyond.

Not surprisingly, this conversion is also occurring in the romantic subject. The subject's incomprehensible fear and pain is sublimed, becomes a "needhl part" in the creation of a "calm existence' (1 319-350).In this world view, pain and fear are necessary correlations to love and joy. all apart of "that peace !Which passeth understanding" ( 14. 116- 127). Romanticizing suffering, Wordsworth ends up idealizing those who suffer most. expressing:

Sorrow, that is not sorrow. but delight;

And miserable love, that is not pain

To hear of, for the glory that redounds

Therefrom to human kind, and what we are. (13.236-249)

He will speak of man, not as the ideal, noble gentieman, as "block / Or waxen image"

(8.299-300), but as common, true, everyday man, as "men as they are men within thclliselves" (13.226). Speaking of man, "in truth / And sanctity of passion," he will cause b3ustice"to "be done, obeisance paid / Where it is due' (13.235-248). In his neoclassic cultural moment, this depiction of common man and his pastoralized existence is

Wordsworth's liberal activism. In a complete reversal of the action and reason he tumed 80 to during the revolution, he instead prescribes peace. No longer focussing on changing the circumstances of the lower classes, he instead idealizes them as the supreme example of

Christian suffering. Paradoxically. although the mind has the power to create infinite possibilities, the ideal is still waiting for divine intervention.' Writing at a time when the lower classes were gaining social, economic and political power, the romantic idealized representation of Christian suffering becomes a means for the centre to write/control the subject positions of the disempowered in a way that both satisfies their need for representation, and yet silences anything that might be actively threatening. In other words. the lower classes were being written over.

The resulting valorization of suffering is what Brand is working to negate in her reaction to the subject position of the strong Black woman, a subject kept in place by glorifying her resilience. Speaking of how Black women survive in the Caribbean. in particular her grandmother and her aunts. she says:

Although [their survival] was a sign of resilience and forbearance and

strength. it wasn't a sign of power. That's what they were missing. They

could forbear. uphold or be strong; they could try to find ways out of their

difficult situation, and control their internal lives; but the power to

absolutely burst out of that wasn't there. ("Diome" 134)

Although Black women can and should have courage and strength on the contact zone,

what they must also have is self representation outside the influence of the hegemonic

centre, a way, as Brand puts it "to burst out" of area B.

What the romantics could not understand, and what Brand understands fully, was 8 1 that because there must always be an ideology manipulating individuals into subjects, there will always be the unconscious, that which is denied, repressed, silenced in the process of becoming a subject. By hnnelling individuals into historically related subject positions. ideology in fact creates the unconscious. It is ideology that allows, in fact demands, that the conscious be conscious and the unconscious be repressed. Ideology and the unconscious are not only co-eternal, but also co-dependent.

If ideology and the unconscious are co-eternal and co-dependent. what must be added to this concept is utopia, as that which both helps to interpellate individuals into subjects thereby creating the unconscious and that which can voice the unconscious. the repressed and silenced. within ideology. As Moy Ian argues. the utopian impulse. too. is eternal. Oppositional utopia "in general," as estranged expressions of repressed desire

(unsatisfied needs which do not support the social formation), voices alternate ideologies and narrates other actions, interpellates different subjects than those which keep the hegemonic system moving forward.

These alternate ideologies are further connected to alternate actions in that according to Althusser, "the 'ideas' or 'representations', etc., which seem to make up ideology do not have an ideal [. . .] or spiritual existence. but a material existence" (155).

In fact, the idea of the spiritual existence of ideas only exists within the current moment's

"ideology of the 'idea' and of ideology" (1 56). The conception that ideas have a spiritual, transcendent existence above and guide the real actions of subjects results from the ideology of ideology that asserts that ideology and a consciously chosen belief in its ideas are what govern our actions. According to the ideology of ideology, an individual weighs 82 all her options and choses to believe in the ideas of the ruling ideology and in doing so. willfully takes part in the ISAs in ways that support her freely chosen belief (Althusser

157). In the context of utopia. the ideology of ideology asserts that wishful thinking should result in will-f~rllaction.

Althusser writes that the ideology of ideology must "recognize that every 'subject' endowed with a 'consciousness' and believing in the 'ideas' that his 'consciousness' inspires in him and fieely accepts. must 'nct according to his ideas,' must therefore inscribe his own ideas as a free subject in the actions of his material practice" ( 1 57). If the subject does not act according to his ideas, then, as Althusser states, "'that is wicked"'

(157). Or in the case of utopia. if the utopia does not cause the subject to act in ways that move the subject towards utopia. that utopia is escapist, or according to Ruth Levitas. hopeless. The ideological representation of ideology thus explains why contemporary utopia has been believed to be an ideal hture to be worked towards and Althusser's inversion of the ideology of ideology, that ideology exists in material actions. explains how utopia as system can become utopia as action.

Overturning the ideology of ideology, Althusser asserts that ideology has a material existence. Ideology does not exist as an idea in our consciousness governing our actions, but rather within the practices and rituals within the ISAs. He remarks, "[. . .] an

ideology always exists in an apparatus and its practice, or practices. This existence is

material" (156). ideology arises out of the material and limited actions of subjects.

Althusser argues the ideas of the subject exist within the subject's actions, or practices, that are governed over by the rituals existing within the ISAs. He asserts, "Kneel down, 83 move your lips in prayer, and you will believe" ( 158). Ideology exists always already, always before we do, in the allowable practices and rituals of an apparatus, and in limiting our actions within rituals within the forms of its apparatuses. it inserts us within already existing and restrictive subject positions according to the direction of the ruling ideology. Vital to the smooth hctioning of any exploitive social formation is that its subjects act passively -- that these subjects believe they are acting according to their own beliefs. that they have consciously chosen to follow the ruling ideology, that they always come first and foremost before their willing acceptance into freely chosen subject positions (.4lthusser 169). Ln other words, what is vital to capitalist exploitation is the ideology of ideology, the ruling ideology's representation of the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence. It inserts us into these positions all the while, and at the same time, convincing us we are in charge of our own fate. For those who are firmly within its grasp, ideology conceals contradictions and. like the Lacanian mirror, presents an image of an illusory total, coherent, co-ordinated subject (a Self or an

"I") worthy of and wishful for interpellation within the available subject positions of the social formation.

Ideology is eternal. Because the structures of ideology always already exists before we do, because we are never born into the real world, but rather, are born into an

ideological representation that overlays the real world, the relationship between

individuals and their real conditions will always be imaginary/mythica~fictional.If our

relationship to the real conditions of existence necessarily has to be imaginary, a

hegemonic system can manipulate that imaginary relationship to support its ruling ideology and repel that which does not support it to the realm of the unspeakable unconscious. In other words, ideology not only mediates but can also manipulate our relationship to the real in ways that support the ruling class. However, this imaginary relationship to the real conditions of existence does not necessarily have to support the ruling class. It can be oppositional, even anti-hegemonic and non-hierarchical. This voicing of alternate actions and creation of altemate representations of our imaginary

relationship to the real is the immutable function of oppositional utopia in general.

In the current cultural moment. subjects are inrerpellated into the always already

in a way that supports the ideology of ideology, in a way that most subjects internalize

their restrictive subject positions. According to Althusser. it is through the category of the

subject that we take part in "the rituals of ideological recognition, which guarantee for us

that we are indeed concrete, individual, distinguishable and [. . .] irreplaceable subjects"

(161). In other words, it is through the category of subject that we take part in the

ideology of ideology, believing ourselves to be whole, complete, potentially ideal "l's",

each a Self. These subjects are created through their relationship to what Althusser calls

"absolute others" or "absolute subjects." Absolute others are imaginary representations of

ideal subjects (subjects "par excellence" (1 671) created out of and supported by the texts,

communications, practices, rituals, ceremonies, etc. of the individual ISAs. They function

to gather individuals around them, seducing individuals to emulate them, thereby

recruiting individuals to become subjects, cut-off fiom the unconscious, that which does

not reflect the ideal. These images, which always pre-exist us, ask us to emulate them in

our everyday actions which will in turn support the ideology of the ruling class, in 85

relation to which the absolute others are modelled. Through the material practices. texts, communications ect. of the [SAs. these images converse with us. interpellating us into their spoken subject positions in the always already.

For the most part, the interpellation process works, and it works because it is

based on ideal images. We are continually interpellated and re-interpellated because these

images are always better subjects than we are according to theidour ideological point of

view. Althusser writes:

[. . .I the structure of all ideology. interpellating individuals as subjects in

the name of the Unique and Absolute subject is specztlnr. i.e. a mirror-

structure. and ClOz~biyspeculary: this mirror duplication is constit~itiveof

ideology and ensures its functioning. Which means that a11 ideology is

cenrred, that the Absolute Subject occupies the unique place of the Centre.

and interpellates around it the infinity of individuals into subjects in a

double mirror-connexion such that it szibjecrs the subjects to the Subject,

while giving them in the Subject in which each subject can contemplate its

own image (present and fbture) the gziarantee that this really concerns

them and [the Subject]. (168)

Individuals are thus interpellated as subjects, are called to take up subject positions, to

become spoken subjects acting within the forms of the ISAs in relation to the central

absolute others. These subjects are subjected to the absolute other by the necessary

reflection of its image. But, according to Althusser, these subjects, like Brand's film

representation of Black womanhood in "Bread out of Stone," recognize themselves in its 86 ideal image. It reflects back! Subjects become selves, become an "I" in the narrow and limiting conversional conversation with the ideal absolute other. This conversional conversation is potentially a conversation between two "I's," both identical, both absolute subjects. both aligning the speaking subject with the spoken subject. When one achieves the status of one's absolute other. the interpellating conversional conversation will be complete, a conversation between two 1's. both divine. Although never ideally achieved. this interpellation results in what Althusser calls the "absolute guarantee" that everything is as it was meant to be (169). The result. says Althusser. is that:

[. . .] the subjects 'work', they 'work by themselves' in the vast majority of

cases, with the exception of the 'bad subjects' who on occasion provoke

the intervention of one of the detachments of the (repressive) State

apparatus. But the vast majority of (good) subjects work all right 'all by

themselves', i.e. by ideology (whose concrete forms are realized in the

Ideological State Apparatuses). They are inserted into practices governed

by the rituals of the ISAs. They 'recognize' the existing state of affairs,

that 'it really is true that it is so and not otherwise', and that they must be

obedient to God, to their conscience, to the priest, to de Gaulle, to the

boss, to the engineer [. . .I. (169)

But, ideology does not only offer reassurances that everything is as it should be and that if subjects behave everything will be all right i.e. as it should be and not worse. Ideology, by

functioning through the ideal images of its absolute others, also guarantees that everything can be better than it is. Co-opting utopia, ideology convinces us that the harder 87 we try, the closer we can come to the impossible ideal and uniting the two I's, the better our life will be. that if we act in ways that support our believed-to-be consciously chosen beliefs. we can progress towards co-opted utopia itself. But, in this hierarchical social

formation, capitalist Utopia can never be reached because the reality that is imaginarily represented within ideology and its images of the ideal is the reproduction of the relations

of production which are. in the last instance. hierarchical relations of exploitation.

Although unable to label it as such, the romantics were attempting to establish

Althusser's specular interpellation with their own absolute other. Transcendent

imagination and the subliming of the subject enables them to share the centre with God.

thus, to find there a complete retlection of self. creating a self-reflecting subjectiSubject.

By placing a representation of themselves at the centre, unity is created through

Althusser's quadruple interpellation. Althusser writes:

The duplicate mirror-structure of ideology ensures simultaneously:

1. the interpellation of gindividuals' as subjects;

2. their subjection to the Subject;

3. the mutual recognition of subjects and Subject, the subjects'

recognition of each other, and fmally the subject's recognition of

himself;

4. The absolute guarantee that everything really is so, and that on

condition that the subjects recognize what they are and behave

accordingly, everything will be all right [. . .I. (1 68-69)

With an ideal image of themselves at the centre the romantics find a reflection of self in 88 the absolute other's reflection of the romantic subject. They also find reflections of themselves in similar subjects. Althusser describes this three part interpellation as

"universal recognition" (169), everyone recognizes their similarity to each other and to the centre and agrees that if they remain similar and in their prescribed subject positions. everything will be as it should be. By inserting an idealized image of themselves in the centre, the romantics experience universal recognition, creating what they believe to be universal unity. But, co-opting utopia within its hegemonic universalism, the romantic ideal presents itself as the One, the only whole and authentic Subject. This entire construction of the romantic authentic self is then he~emonicallyrepresented-reflected in landscape.

All landscapes, not only English gardens. are a reflection of the ideology at the centre. They are constructs of the culturally tethered imagination. Simon Schama argues in Landscapes and Memory, "Landscapes are culture before they are nature; constructs of the imagination projected onto wood, and water and rock (6 1). The real world exists but because we can never unproblematically engage with reality, we make it over, re-present it as landscape. In this way, landscape, like history, like subjectivity, is ideological, is a cultural construct of the always already draped over reality. As ideology, it is not a representation of the real, but is a representation of our relationship to the real as it is governed over by the centre. It is a reflection of ourselves.

The romantic poet is seen as unique yet as one who can speak to all, as one of a

kind, yet universal, himself both subject and Subject. He becomes an interpellating absolute other, a subject par excellence. With romantic MadGod at the centre 89 interpellating the romantic poet into an enabling subject position. reflecting his authentic self. and the entire interpellary relationship being reflected in the landscape, the universe appeared unified but it was an illusion. Even though they were inserted within the centre to allow for the expression of their authentic selves. the romantics were still split subjects.

A universal conversional conversation can never be complete because there is always difference as well as similarity. coalition as well as home. In their quest for inclusion. for universal grace, individual romantic experience was universalized in an attempt to avoid exclusion. In "The Preface," Wordsworth says of the poet:

He is the rock of defence of human nature; an upholder and preserver,

carrying everywhere with him relationship and love. In spite of difference

of soil and climate. of language and manners. of laws and customs. in spite

of things silently gone out of mind and things violently destroyed, the poet

binds together by passion and knowledge the vast empire of human

society, as it is spread over the whole earth, and over all time. The objects

of the poet's thoughts are everywhere; though the eyes and senses of man

are, it is true. his favourite guides. yet he will follow wheresoever he can

find an atmosphere of sensation in which to move his wings. Poetry is the

first and last of all knowledge -- it is as immortal as the heart of man.

(171)

Poet becomes prophet, and in the end, equivalent to the holy spirit itself, flying out over the void and transforming the world in his own image, dispelling universal grace and redemption to mankind. The poet binds together the empire of human society in his image. but lost is any recognition. any appreciation of difference. Narrowed to one reigning perspective. all others were hegemonically repelled to the sublime. As the dialectic is narrowed, subjects are narrowed and representationally cut off from "othered" experience. ironically creating even greater fragmentation. Without an appreciation of difference, an understanding of exclusion as well as similarity, the romantic era ends with the sublimated subject removed from any experience outside that reflected by the absolute other -- an ironically alienating end to a movement that began in an attempt to unite with the universe.

The construction of these narrowed allowable subjects results in the repelling of

Brand's unassirnilable Black lesbian subjectivity to the void. It results in her lack of landscape. lack of an ideological retlection of self in the hegemonic construction of the world. Although it resulted in her silence, she still appropriates the romantic tradition to voice her authentic self and employs a utopian landscape to express her alternate ideology.

Part of utopia's role in the reproduction of the conditions of production was outlined by Moylan's dialectic relationship between utopia and ideology and the idea that utopia keeps us wishing for that which will support the system and in doing so keeps us willfully acting in ways which sustain the exploitive class structure. But utopia has an even larger role within ideology. Co-opted utopia is what creates and maintains the ideal absolute subjects that interpellate us into supportive subject positions. And oppositional utopia is what can offer us alternate subject positions.

As was said, oppositional utopia can be used to sabotage the reproduction of the 9 1

imaginary relationship of individuals to the real. Oppositional utopia creates estranged visions of our ideological world. allowing us to step outside our ideologies and see them

for what they are, see them as not enough. But. more than a critique, utopia can also be employed to voice the negative and the marginal. the silenced desires and actions of the cultural unconscious. To create these estr'mged utopian visions. one must somehow be

able to view ideology from outside to expose its contradictions. And yet to voice its

critique, utopia must also be able to speak from within the ideology it is critiquing. Thus

oppositional utopia is a form available to complex subjects esisting within the contact

zone. These complex subjects can observe ideology from outside, in the unconscious area

A, and yet can also voice their centrifugal observations from within. in the contact zone.

Utopia as ideological opposition to ideology can give us a glimpse of a different

governing ideology and an alternate always already. interpellating us into different subject

positions. Utopia, too, mediates reality. It gives us an alternate imaginary relation to the

conditions of existence.

Because of traditional utopia's emphasis on system and its necessary radical break

with history that could never be hlly outlined as a means to its utopian Future (for

instance, the dream, the journey, the impossible revolution. the divine intervention that

brings about Utopia). in other words the lack of an agent of transformation, this

differently interpellated subject has traditionally only existed within the pages of the text.

Utopia's alternate subject positions could never exist in the present. But once we see

ideology not as a transcendent idea but rather as existing in material actions, we can see

how a radical utopian politics begins to draw the new subject out beyond the pages of the 92 text, into a revised imaginary relation to the conditions of existence. It is in Althusser's insistence that ideology exists in material actions that we can find the key to a radical political utopia, the existence and maintenance of an alternate empowering centre. Within any ruling ideology, particularly a hierarchical ruling ideology that depends on the artificial construction and representation of the "others" of the ruling class. interpellated into disempowered fragmented subject positions, binary opposites to its proper and whole interpellated subjects, there will always be those whose actions. practices and rituals do not support the ruling ideology. These subjects already function under alternate ideologies in relation to alternate absolute subjects. For the most part. these people are silenced.

They are Funnelled into highly restrictive, negative, fragmented, marginalized and disempowered subject positions. Their alternative actions are repressed. their voices go mostly unheard. But utopia. as expressions of alternate desire and as the metaphorical expression of altemate actions creating the ideologeme, can voice the existence of these others in a self-empowering yet relational dialogue. Thus, again it is no surprise that the

authors of Moylan's critical utopias are themselves members of the various marginalized

communities that comprise the field of resistance. Oppositional utopia is the form that

can voice an already existing skewed reality. And yet by emphasizing struggle and action

over system, it does so without creating hegemonic conventions. Utopia can voice both

"home" and "coalition." Here, fmally is radical political utopia. When we see ideology as

present in our actions, wishful thinking, the expression of oppositional desires and actions

despite the repression of the hegemony, is itself a will-full action. 2.3 Making Bread out of Stone: Nourishment Out of the Void

It is in the struggle that Brand comes into her whole self. and in coming into her whole self and her utopian desire to create a location where that self can "be," she also comes into the reason. the absolute necessity. for her writing. tn her essay. "Bread out of

Stone," she discusses the relationship between her activism and her writing. She comments on her difficulty finding the time to write when there is "active" work left to do. She writes that she went to Grenada because she "decided that writing is not enough.

Black liberation needs more than that. How. I ask myself. cqn writing help in the revolution. You need your bare hands for this. [. . .] I wish I were a farmer" (Bread 12).

Brand wishes she could do something less ideological, more real. more actively involved in day-to-day struggle for survival: however. she interestingly employs the image of a fmerto represent her desire. [n the image of farmer is both the image of hands-on nourishing labour and the image of the cultivator, the ideological sublimer of nature.

Through her writing, Brand offers other images of the silenced sublime. Wanting to construct altemate images of Black womanhood than those on offer in the contact zone, she realizes the absolute need for and material effect of answering "How was it for you?"

And in answering, Brand, like the farmer, creates nourishment from the ground. She makes bread out of stone, something pliable and healthhl out of something apparently solid and barren.

Brand symbolizes her ideological work to create her altemate radical utopia with the performance of the prohibited divine miracle of turning stone into bread. Jesus, 94 starving and lost in the wilderness, when tempted by Satan to make bread out of stone, and prove he is both man and God, subject and Subject, refuses by answering, "It is written THAT MAN SHALL NOT LIVE BY BREAD ALONE, BUT BY EVERY

WORD OF GOD" (Luke 411).Filled with the grace of the Holy Spirit. Jesus carries the sustaining Word of God with him from the centre into the wilderness. thus inverting the sublime. Because he has an interpellating relationship with a self-authenticating absolute other reflected in and inverting the wilderness. Jesus does not need to turn stone into bread to redeem and nourish his authentic self. Luke describes the inverting and redeeming force of God's Word on the sublime:

[. . .] the word of God came unto John [. . .] in the wilderness. And he

came into all the country about Jordan, preaching the baptism of

repentance for the remission of sins: As it is written in the book of the

words of Esaias the prophet, saying, THE VOICE OF ONE CRYING IN

THE WILDERNESS,PREPARE ETHE WAY OF TKE LORD, MAKE

HIS PATHS STRAIGHT. EVERY VALLEY SHALL BE FILLED, AND

EVERY MOUNTAIN AND HILL SHALL BE BROUGHT LOW; AND

THE CROOKED SHALL BE MADE STRAIGHT, AND THE ROUGH

WAYS WLLBE MADE SMOOTH; AM) ALL FLESH SHALL SEE

THE SALVATION OF GOD.(3:2 - 3%)

Through the word of God, both flesh and landscape are inverted from impure and

uneven states to that of pure, straight, navigable sameness in the light of the Christian

centre -- are redeemed. Compare this to Wordsworth's description of the wilderness at the end of book 6. where he first writes of resolving the dialectic. He describes the surrounding forest as "The immeasurable height / Of woods decaying, never to be decayed," tile waterfalls as "stationary blasts." and "Winds thwarting winds" (631-628).

He. too, negates the wilderness to create redeeming sameness -- is preparing the way for the new romantic lord who will construct the world through the workings of "one mind"

(6.636).

However, not all tlesh is redeemed or redeemable. God's unifying grace is not available to all. John the Baptist calls to the people of Jordan, "Bring forth therefore fruits wrthy of repentance and begin not to say within yourselves. We have Abraham to our father: for I say unto you. That God is able of these stones to raise up children unto

Abraham. And now also the axe is laid unto the root of the trees: every tree therefore which bringeth not forth good fruit is hewn down. and cast into the fire" (Luke 3:8 - 3:9).

John warns the people of Jordan to repent, for God can condemn them all and raise new children of Abraham from the stones on the ground, can turn stone into flesh. But God's grace is not universally available, some are beyond redemption. Because God's healing grace is not available to all souls. there is. must be. a judgement made. Heaven, Utopia. being reached by judgmental and unaccountable divine grace is a highly conservative form of social control which keeps subjects subjected to the pre-existing centre. As with the romantic interpellation with the subjecdsubject, only those who can reflect the absolute other have access to grace, can be whole and navigate their authentic self through God's word, the rest are cast into the fires of the sublime.

The conservative idea of healing grace only being available to some, requires the 96 concept of other. There burfor the grnce of Godgo I. This graceless state of otherness is not only reserved for simers, those who will nor reflect the centre, but is also imposed on those who can nor reflect the centre. As a girl in Guaya, Brand remembers the people.

"sitting quietly in the midday heat of that town in my childhood. saying, 'Something must happen, something bound to come.' They were waiting, after waiting for crop and pay, after waiting for cousin and auntie, after waiting for patience and grace, they were waiting for god" (Bread 2 1). Unable to reach a state of grace in this lifetime. they have internalized the romantic representation of suffering and the Christian idea of passive apocalyptic redemption in the future, the idea that if they just wait and be good subjects, divine intervention will ensure the meek inherit the earth. But. the promise of apocalyptic redemption does nothing to change the real conditions of existence. Brand realizes she cannot wait for divine intervention, but must insist on intervention in the divine. She must create her own empowering centre that can reflect her authentic self, exhibiting there are other ways of being in the world.

In "Bread out of Stone" she gives us the image of her mother, unable to feed her children even sugar water, opening her mouth and asking, "Look inside! Aaah! You see anything in there? You want me to make bread out of stone?" (2 1 ). And the adult Brand answers, "In my mama's mouth. I saw the struggle for small things" (2 1). Brand uses sugar metaphorically to represent grace. Sugar was the main product of the slaves in the

Caribbean whose labour created it so it could be exported to Europe and America to make life palpable and the slave traders and plantation owners rich.6 in the Christian eye,

Blacks could be indentured into slavery, could be beaten, raped, and murdered in the 97 process of creating sugar because they were not worthy of God's grace and redemption.

But slaves were not only forced to create sugar for whites. By being labelled "other," they were also forced to finance the very idea of grace that granted wholeness to whites and ideologically enabled the slavery, dehumanization and resulting fragmentation of Blacks.

Therefore, Brand equates sugar and grace, both products of Black slavery and dehumanization.

Brand and her mother cannot be filled with the Holy Spirit and carry God's white male subliming and inverting Word with them into the wilderness. They cannot live by

God's Word alone. Instead, Brand takes to performing miracles and making bread out of

stone, proving she, too. is both subject and Subject. Brand knows that it is only by

working through tile language, through writing, that she can heal the \+lord image equation

and with it her fragmented soul. Only by responding to "How was it for you?" can she

redeem herself and grant herself grace, a self and community beneath an empowering

absolute other. In Brand's novel In Another Place Not Here, the main character Elizete

begins her story with the words, '.GRACE. IS GRACE, YES. And I take it, quiet, quiet,

like theifing sugar" (3).7 The grace of Verlia's and Abena's company allowing Elizete to

speak and be heard in her own language, in her own space, in self-empowering

interpellation is something Elizete has to steal, like slaves would have to steal sugar if

they wanted to enjoy its sweetness. Through her writing, Brand tells her own story and

reveals her own whole authentic self. Brand steals sugar; not content with waiting for the

Christian redeemer, she grants herself the healing wholeness of grace beneath her own

centre. Writing this unsilenced authentic self image beneath an alternate ideal is making 98 bread out of stone, nourishment out of the void. Then stone, language -- and by extension culture, subjectivity and history, becomes pliable.

2.4 Conclusion

As a triply marginalized subject. Brand's subjectivity is silenced, fractured and

disempowered within the hegemonic system. her ideologically non-conforming actions

repelled to the unconscious. However. she is always whole. As a Black lesbian many of

Brand's actions do not follow the actions set out in the availabie subject positions of the

ISAs. Therefore, her subjectivity is fractured from outside herself by the ruling ideology's

limiting and restrictive allowable rituals and practices within its ISAs. By voicing those

actions, by voicing the realities of her existence and her altemate oppositional desires, she

gives us an ideologerne, an inverted, estranged altemate representation of reality and

narrative of appropriate action. Re-ordering the contradictions found in ideology and

producing an altemate map, a politically utopian space. a self-centred imaginary

ideological zone, Brand grants herself representational wholeness and unity. she grants

herself grace. More than an individual escapist utopia. Brand's self-expression challenges

the unity, wholeness, the "this-is-the-way-it-has-to-be-ness" of the ruling ideology by

voicing the unconscious of the hegemonic order. It releases an altemate reality and begins

to interpeIlate/convert its own subjects born again beneath an alternate absolute other. Her

space fractures the politics of the ruling class by destroying the illusion of its unified,

solidified order and "steals" some of its power for her altemate unified community. 99

Brand's rn~iltiplymarginalized subjectivity signifies to the contradictions and hierarchies in the ruling ideology. Her ability to grant herself the representational wholeness of grace fractures the political strength of the ruling hegemony. CHAPTER 3

How Was it for You?: Becoming Place

This those slaves must have known who were my mothers, skin falling from their eyes. they moving towards their own bone, "so thank god for the ocean and the sky all implicated, all unconcerned." they must have said. "or there'd be nothing to love." -- Dionne Brand Land to Light On

3.1 Introduction

Joan Thomas criticizes Brand's novel In Another Place Not Here for not containing a "largeness of spirit" and says Brand "repudiates any common humanity between races" (C20). Brand, however, is not attempting to be universal. but is first concerned with creating a subject at home, with voicing a coherent and empowered subject position within community and beneath an overriding politic. As H. Nigel

Thomas describes. her poetry takes part in the "communal choice," addressing the concerns of her community in their own voice (52).

As Black, woman and lesbian, Brand speaks from the contact zone in multiple combinations. Although in *Bread out of Stone" she fails in her project of creating an image of authentic Black women, she succeeds in creating coherence under her own politic -- to own, express and defend her inseparable fragments. Claiming these fragments and taking on the responsibility of defending them, she is always a whole, authentic being with community and coalitions, with proactive agency in discourse. It is where she can 10 1

"be" that is fractured, creating the effect or symptom of a multiply split subjectivity.

Taking a stance against "porno-multiplicity" (Land 3 1).Brand instead wants to express her entirety, wants to grant herself and history a redeeming. unifying gmce and recreate her authenticating area A. See Figure 3.

Fig. 3. The Uropinn Conroct Zone

Here A once again exists, a self-centred, empowering utopian zone existing outside of B, yet still communicating through the contact zone. This contact zone is a coalition.

Because it is a large part of who she is and what her culture encompasses, she cannot dissolve or remove herself completely from the overlap with area B. Similarly adjoined through multiple contact zones, area A is not an individual, separatist space. but a sheltered relational space.

3.2 No Language Is Neutral: Wilderness Self

Speaking of Wordsworth's spiritual autobiography, M.H. Abrams asserts, "m 102

Prelude [. . .] represents a central form of English, as of European romanticism -- a long work about the formation of the self. often centering on a crisis, and presented in the radical metaphor of the poet's interior joumey in quest of his true identity and destined spiritual home" ("Romantic" 7). This could also be a description of Brand's No Lan~uaee

Is Neutral. It too is a long work about the formation of the self. centering on a crisis that splits the subject, presented as a journey through an ideological and symbolic landscape in search of healing grace, a reflection of her resolved authentic self, of home. The poet's joumey in "No Language Is Neutral" is a quest for a place from which to speak her authenticity. Like the disinherited and exiled romantic poet. she is searching For a sense of home and its reflection of self in landscape. She begins her geographical search in the home place, the island where she spent her childhood. But, Brand describes Trinidad as:

"Here was beauty and here was nowhere" (22). The island is both desirously beautiful. a cultivated civilized space, and nowhere. absent in dominant history and language, a part of the hegemonic sublime. Even in this beautiful, nurturing landscape, the poet reflects the racism imposed by dominant culture and sees her island as a part of the wilderness.

When the poet comes to Canada, she writes. " [. . .] heart and eyes fixed to a / skyscraper and a concrete eternity not knowing then I only running away from something [. . .I"

(emphasis added 28). She yet does not understand that language is not neutral, that it has turned her eyes toward the ocean, to look for escape: "It was as if a signal burning like a fer de lance's / sting turned my eyes against the water even as love / for this nigger beach became resolute" (22). The poet tums to face the ocean, her desire drawn to the eurocentric West, but Brand does not simply say she turns towards the ocean, but that she 103 turns her eyes against it. Even when her desire is for the sense-enforcing ocean, she realizes that it is against her and she to it. Even here, she is resistant. This desire bums like venom; compare it to the "resolute" love for Guaya. or the warm watery soothing desire she finds with her self affirming lover. The sexism. racism and heterosexism in language and ideology denies her the island as physical place.

Compare the image of denied desire for place with Wordsworth's transcendent solution for healing the split subject. He describes his mind's communion with nature. and therefore his coherence and unity, as occurring even in babyhood:

. . . blest the Babe

Nursed in his Mother's arms, who sinks to sleep

Rocked on his Mother's breast; who with his soul

Drinks in the feelings of his Mother's eye!

For him, in one dear Presence, there exists

A virtue which irradiates and exaIts

Objects through wildest intercourse of sense.

No outcast he, bewildered and depressed:

Along his infant veins are interfused

The gravitation and the filial bond

Of nature that connect him with the world. (2.232-245)

For Wordsworth the mind is connected to nature as a son to a mother. As a baby, his mind extends the safety and security of his mother's arms to the landscape, remaking it into a safe and sheltering self-reflecting space. 104

Contrast these images of childhood and filial relationship to nature with Brand's. a Black lesbian woman not content with any sacrifice of self. In "No Language Is

Neutral" she writes of her childhood in Guaya:

The smell of hurrying passed

my nostrils with the smell of sea water and fresh fish

wind, there was history which had taught my eyes to

look for escape even beneath the almond leaves fat

as women, the conch shell tiny as sand. the rock

stone old like water. I learned to read this from a

woman whose hand trembled at the past, then even

being born to her was temporary, wet and thrown half

dressed among the dozens of brown legs itching to

run. (22)

Brand also learns to read the landscape from her mother, but because of the sexism and racism always present in language, there is no self affirming link between mother and daughter and therefore no childhood unity with nature. Instead of comfort and connection, she senses hurrying and temporariness.

At the same time as she searches for a landscape that mirrors her, Dionne Brand turns away from the romantic tradition of complete unity with nature by making part of the landscape antithetic to the actions and emotions of Black women. In "No Language Is

Neutral," the poet watches as her mother attempts to cross the river Pilate/English. A

Black female Jesus figure, "weeping for the sufferer she would become" (27), her mother 105 looks into the baptismal river, discovers her disempowered reflection and without a centre to give her an alternate representation of self and landscape. internalizes the racism and sexism in language. As the narrator's mother weeps over the river's "brutal green meaning," there are "dry-eyed cirri tracing the blue air" (27). Not only is the sky "dry- eyed" and not reflecting the mood with rain, but the mother's reflection is caused by the unclouded sun, symbolizing the hegemonic centre. In "Bread out of Stone," Brand echoes

St. Augustine's spiritual confession when she writes that in Playas Del Este she "put the sun outside at the back of [her] head" in order to gain the perspective to write the oral histories of the Black women (1 1). Augustine writes, "I had my back to the light and my face turned towards the things which it illumined. so that my eyes. by which I saw the things which stood in the light, were themselves in darkness" (88). By putting the sun behind her, like Augustine, she can appropriate its illumination without being blinded by its light. But whereas Augustine uses this image to show his sinful separation from the graceful light of God, Brand employs it to illustrate her enabling exile and separation fiom the hegemonic centre. In the river, the poet's mother also has the sun at the back of her head, shining above her as she looks into the water; however, for her, positioned within the torrentous river Pilate, which distorts and Fragments any reflection or representation according to the eurocentric ideology at the centre af English, this is not an enabling position. A blue sky dotted with cirrus clouds would only amplify and clarify her mother's disempowered reflection of self in English. Compare this to Wordsworth's

image of himself peering into the river in book 4. Because his river is enabling, the sun enhancing the reflection of an empowering image of himself in relation to the centre, he 106 finds the act of looking in the river a "sweet" and "pleasant" experience (4.270-27 1).

Brand's mother, however, having no centre from which to distinguish fact from racist and patriarchal fancy is left to the mercy of a drowning river that needs to silence her. For the poet and her mother, unlike Wordsworth. there can be no absolute unity. no complete communion with the universe as represented in a romantic landscape.

Because the poet's mother has internalized the racism and sexism she sees

reflected in the river of English, any connection Brand could have had to the landscape through a self-empowering mother tongue is gone. As she enters the river, the narrator's

mother is followed reluctantly by the little girls. And when the river swallows her, it

hardens "like the centre of her" trapping the girls as well. who now weep for her to leave

the river and go back home. Turning back being impossible, all are drowned within a

colonizing language, fixed within the stone that Brand must then turn into bread.

Historically, this poem would have occurred during Trinidad's independence movement

when, freed from servile positions, most Black families urged their children to go to

colonial schools to become lawyers, doctors or other professionals. When Brand's

mother's generation turned wholeheartedly to the British system after their release from

their enforced submission to that very system, they disinherited their daughters. Brand's

childhood relationship to her mother infuses her relationship to nature but for her it is not

a relationship of love and unity but of fragmentation and se!f hatred.

Compare this drowning image to the image Wordsworth gives of his childhood

relationship to the Denvent. To Wordsworth, the river is

A tempting playmate whom we dearly loved. Oh many a time have I. a five year's child,

In a small mill-race severed From his stream,

Made one long bathing of a summer's day [. . .I. ( 1.286-290)

Wordsworth, hlly centered in English and his hegemonic imagination, is completely at home in his river. in complete harmony with the landscape. The only Black woman in

Brand's text who has been able to have this kind of nurturing relationship to a river is

Amelia who, as we will see, finds it only after she has escaped the contact zone through death.

This contrast between wholeness and fragmentation is still present when both

Brand and Wordsworth are seventeen. Wordsworth writes that at this age, projecting his own inner mind on nature he "Saw blessings spread around [him] like a sea" (2.395).

Wordsworth projects his unified subjectivity on a self-reflective nature, surrounding himself with a landscape of grace and blessings. Brand, too, finds a reflection of herself in nature at 17, when seduced by co-opted utopia she makes the journey across the sea to

Canada CbConversation" 10). As a little girl, immersed within Western ideology, white eurocentric Canada becomes the desired place. However, the landscape in Canada is strangely dystopian. The poet writes of Toronto: "It don't have nothing call beauty / here but this is a place . . . (29). Again her subjectivity is mirrored in the landscape as she becomes segmented into "dolorous prisons" according to race, gender and sexuality (29).

The ideology and language that has constructed the absence and worthlessness of

Trinidad and the powerful capitalist utopia of the west has lied. Here, too, repelled tiom area B she is denied place and becomes '?he thin I mixture of just come and don't exist" 108

(29). Emphasizing that landscape is not a geographic but rather an ideological. imaginary place, Brand depicts her young self bringing her contact zone with her. She writes:

Five hundred dollars

and a passport full of sand and winking water, is how

I reach here, a girl's face shimmerins from a little

photograph, her hair between hot comb and afro, feet

posing in high heel shoes [. . .]. (28)

Brand brings her narrow and restrictive beach with her and the result is a fragmented subject, symbolized by her hair style which is both an attempt to be more white (hot comb) and proudly Black (afio). All this is supported by the patriarchal restraint of high heel shoes. This complexly split and sentried subject is projected onto the Toronto landscape which becomes "a constant drizzle of brown brick cutting I dolorous prisons into every green uprising of bush" (29). Nature, the sublime, is strictly divided and contained.

Not only does eutocentric and patriarchal culture repel Brand to the sublime, but for her, as a Black lesbian woman, the white Canadian culture and the patriarchal

Trinidadian culture are wilderness, are subliminal and beyond comprehension. Still searching for a place that can define her, the island once again becomes the desired place.

Compare her description of Toronto to her immigrant description of Trinidad:

[. . .] never to pass her eyes on

the red-green threads of a humming bird's twitching

back, the blood warmed quickened water colours of a sea bed, not the rain forest tangled in smoke-wet [. . .I. (28)

Brand's desire is for a landscape that can ref-lect her beauty, her own empowering centre.

But, her memories, distorted by nostalgia, become "half lie and half memory" (30), neglecting to recall the overt sexism, submerged racism and self-hatred she felt in

Trinidad.

Brand has no unified connected self in either place. Unlike Wordsworth or Jesus who invert/subIirne the wildemess by carrying their words and their centres with them,

Brand, in the wildemess with no self-centred language and no area A, becomes

fragmented and defined in relation to other centres, other agendas. After arriving in

Canada. the narrator declares. "No wilderness self. is shards. shards. shards" (29). For

Brand, the romantic unified self, relying on her silencing for its construction. cannot be

universally reproduced in the imagery and language of the post-romantic landscape and

is, instead, Fragmented for as long as she remains restricted to the contact zone.

Until she realizes no language is neutral, that all languages and landscapes are

created by and create ideology, she has no way of voicing her subjectivity, and must

attempt to negotiate a fractured subjectivity liminaly in two places, two languages and

two cultures. With her Trinidadian friend Pearl in Toronto, the poet celebrates Christmas

with both 1 chicken and ham and sweet bread effort to taste like / home" and "the

finally snow for Christmas" (30). Until finally, "language !seemed to split in two, one

branch fell silent, the other / argued hotly for going home" (3 1). Unlike when the two

rivers were located on the island beach, in this place, the treelriverllanguage branch that is

silent is English. Although the poet does not internalize the racism inherent in English, [lo the "brutal green meaning" (27) of Walcott's oak cathedral, as her mother did, she is silenced in a language that cannot express her experience. She asserts that she is "biting

[her] tongue / on new english" (32). The branch that speaks and argues for going home is

Nation Language. In either place it is the language from the other place that speaks for her and draws her desire. This split subject can never find an empowering combination of place and language. When she returns to Trinidad. she realizes the escapism of her nostalgia -- because she is a woman and lesbian. Nation Language also can not express her experience. Brand writes of her return:

This place so full of your absence, this place

you come to swim like habit, to taste like habit, this

place where you are a woman and your breasts need

armour to walk C...... I

that

always fear of a woman watching the world From an

evening beach with her sister, the courage between

them to drink a beer and assume their presence

against the coral chuckles of male voices. (33)

On this confining beach, her authentic self is absent and her allowed subject position becomes part of the hegemonic landscape. The poet has no reflection of self in landscape.

She goes on to say:

Our nostalgia was a lie and the passage on that six hour

flight to ourselves is wide and like another world, and

then another one inside and is so separate and Fast

to the skin but voiceless. never born, or born and

stilled ... hush. (33)

Here, too. her subject is fragmented and divided according to her difference. Her authentic self is separate from her liminal skin. which. like the beach. represents the difference her Black female body is forced to express. and yet is also fast to the skin. She depends on her skin and on her body, on her alternate material experience, as her source of difference. Skin, like landscape is mediated by ideology. She needs to express her difference, her alternate utopia which exists (has been born) but is silenced. For the strong

Black woman located on the beach, merely existing is courageous. She can only visit the ocean. Unlike the c(h)oral chuckle of male voices, its mermanic siren song, she cannot speak fiom it, but must instead exist on the liminal beach. Again, her desire is denied.

As one of those male voices speaking f?om within the patriarchal ocean, Derek

Walcon gives us another image of desire for a unifying and authenticating place, a place he finds by paradoxically emphasizing his fragmentation. He sees his two-headed space in the world as synthetic, a symbol of the convergence of two cultures. Although he describes his cultural split as two opposing armies, or languages, navigating the roads of his head, the armies march together on the same road strewn with the rotting leaves, or words, fallen Eom the stately oak tree of English. He writes of these armies, "One fought for a queen, the other wis chained in her service, I but both, in bitterness travelled the 112 same road" (506). Like the romantics, for him English and the forms it expresses itself within. in particular poetry, have the potential to unite the world. In this world view,

English is the constant, the steady whole. It is the "mortar" that can "size." or glue together. the world from "Belfast" to "Brimstone Hill" (506). But Brand argues that in attempting to voice his divided self completely from within the universalizing forms and language of the colonizer, Walcon ends up sublimating his Black self to achieve the illusion of unity within the white centre. She asserts Walcott is "the mulatto. the cultured of the cultureless, the cream struggling up from the black hordes. mimicking the colonizer in the drawing rooms in Port-au-Prince" ("Caribbean" 26). Of that kind of assimilation she comments, "Well. that would take science. Not will" (Bread 80). The only way

Walcott can equally enter the drawing rooms of the colonizer is by becoming white.

Walcon's mimicking of the colonizer is demonstrated in the image of the Black children pinning the red paper poppies to their British school jackets -- an act the British use to symbolize the conservation and valorization of the memory of, what is for the

Black children, the "Army of Occupation" (506). Walcott writes that as a child: "I pinned the poppy to my blazer. It bled like a vowel" (507). Following from his use of military metaphors throughout the poem, Walcott here uses the word "bled" in its military sense, to sacrifice one's blood in battie. As a child, Walcott is sacrificing his Black self, bleeding out his othered language and culture and appropriating English and British culture, in order to gain the unity and grace he desires. Brand writes of "Midsummer,"

"This is Walcott trying to be Coleridge, Walcott trying to be Yeats but without their sense of place" ("Caribbean" 26). Whereas Brand realizes there is always difference as well as 113 similarity, Walcott desires the universalism of the romantics, and attempts to join them in the centre by autoethnogaphically expressing himself as an ambiguously multiple subject

speaking fiom the universally fragmenting post-colonial contact zone. But, a bi-racial

subject Fully reflected in area B is an impossibility. In his attempt to find unity. Walcon

sublimes his subject, bleeds off what cannot be reflected in the river of English.

Eurocentric hegemony inserts him and his spoken subject into the mythography of the

centre by supporting his work through publication. education, awards etc, keeping othered

subjects interpellatrd into a subject position of attempted (yet impossible) assimilation,

drawing other Black subjects down the same leaf-wet road to the contact zone. Opposing

Walcon's postcolonialism. Brand's utopia offers another path.

Wordsworth also gives us an image of himself on a contact zone, a split subject

wavering between narrow reason and the expansive imagination. Parallelling Brand's

involvement in the Grenadian revolution, as a young man, he takes part in a revolution

that is also meant to create a State for the disalienated subject, a political utopia on Earth,

and like Brand, when the revolution turns against him, he too returns to an area of the

world that has declared war against the State he was fighting to create. But, whereas

Brand is a split subject fiom birth and finds a means to unity in the struggle, Wordsworth

is whole until he engages in struggle. Before the revolution, he is llly centred in a

geographic and ideological place, a district and a landscape within which he finds a

complete reflection of self. But, in his twenties he is "lured" (9.34) to France during the

French Revolution and finds himself transformed fiom privileged to patriot.

Throughout The Prelude, Wordsworth creates order by organizing his experience 114 beneath his overriding politic. For example, in his non-sensical description of the people at the London fair, "A Parliament of Monsters" (7.7 18), his metaphor for the conhsion and disalienation of life in the city. we see him imposing order on the chaotic sublime, ending his description with:

But though the picture weary out the eye,

By nature an unmanageable sight,

It is not wholly so to him who looks

Ln steadiness, who hath amongst least things

An under-sense of greatest; sees the parts

As parts. but with a feeling of the whole. (73 1-736)

This imposition of his politic on chaos is also how he establishes order out of the events

in France during the Revolution. Compare his description of the London fair on St.

Bartholemew's Day (book 7 lines 675-72 1 ) with the following description of Paris:

The Arcades I traversed, in the Palace huge

Of Orleans; coasted round the line

Of Tavern, Brothel, Gaming-house, and Shop,

Great rendezvous of worst and best, the walk

Of all who had a purpose, or had not;

I stared and listened, with a stranger's ears,

To Hawkers and Haranguers, hubbub wild! (9.52-58)

This confusion ends with his absorption into the ideology of the revolution, with his

becoming a patriot and withdrawing "into a noisier world" (9.12 1- 122). This new world 115 view not only converts chaos to order, but also inverts what was formerly ordered to chaos when he retums to his life in England.

When the revolution turns bloody with the September Massacres and the rise of the Jacobins, Wordsworth feels it no longer reflects him, and describes himself as a tourist with a checklist of all the correct revolutionary places to see but which he can not understand, which are "from him locked up. / Being written in a tongue he cannot read"

(1 0.60-6 L ). But when he returns to England, his allegiance now to the ideology of the enemy, he describes himself as "an uninvited guest !Whom no one owned, sate silent"

(10.297-298). He, like Brand, is silenced in either place. Unable to find a pre-existing geographical location where he can "be." he too is split to his very core.

Throughout The Prelude, Wordsworth argues for a synthesis between reason and the imagination. During and after the French Revolution, this balance is destroyed as his split between allegiance to France and England leads him to turn his back on nature and the imagination and, in an attempt to defend his revolutionary beliefs, turn instead to reason. But of reason, he states:

This was the crisis of that strong disease,

This the soul's last and lowest ebb; I drooped,

Deeming our blessed reason of least use

where wanted most ( 1 1299-304).

Reason cannot mend him. He describes himself at this point in his life as "misguided and

misguiding" (1 1.293), and in book 6 he compares this mistaken road to climbing the

highest mountain in the Swiss alps, Mt. Blanc, located near the French boarder. With 116 greater desire than readiness, he mistakenly follows others down the wrong path. the path to the summit. Like the revolution. the route becomes impossible, and "reconciled [. . .] to realities" (6.534) they are forced to turn back. Rejecting imagination, the force that allows him to navigate his life. Wordsworth finds, for the first and only time, his path is blocked.

His attempt at the peak is immature. Until he finds a way to bring together reason and the imagination, experience and ideology, being and soul, he cannot reach the metaphorical summit.

Faced with the failure of reason politically to heal his split subject, Wordsworth shaves off the active material revolutionary and returns to imaginative transcendent poetry to mend his split. His sister Dorothy makes him see he is "A Poet made me seek beneath that name, / and that alone, my office upon earth" ( 1 1.346-347). As poet. he centres himself once again beneath his transcendent imagination. his organizing politic.

But, unlike in his apolitical youth, he now has added a love of mankind to his love of nature, and has found other similarly located subjects with which to interpellate, subjects such as Dorothy and the romantic poet Coleridge. Turning to poetry for redemption, it is at this point he realizes that through language he can create a self-reflecting landscape,

realizes he can manipulate reality to reflect his alternate ideology. Earlier he has written

of language and verse that:

Embodied in the mystery of words:

There, a darkness makes abode, and all the host

Of shadowy things work endless changes there,

As in a mansion like their proper home, Even forms and substances are circumscribed

By that transparent veil with light divine.

And. through the turnings intricate of verse.

Present themselves as objects recognized,

In flashes. and with glory not their own. (5.597-606)

Language here is malleable. capable of affecting change in the perceptible world. Verse and discourse are the means through which the human mind can reveal its divine unlimited creativity. But although the imagination is untethered and mysterious language is endlessly expressive, this "new world" is "ruled" by "fixed laws" (13.370-372).

Wordsworth insists on the primacy of his own politic and his own meaning. The one. the only true apocalyptic Utopia is the utopia in which Wordsworth and others like him tind grace, synchronisity between experience and ideology.

Like Wordsworth, Brand also entered a crisis when she "came / back from

Grenada and went crazy for two years" m~46). And, like Wordsworth, it is a woman who mends her and guides her to a state of wholeness. To her lover the narrator of &

Lan~uageIs Neutral says:

I suddenly sensed you

at the end of my room waiting [. . .I.

1 brushed my

hand, conscious, against your soft belly, waking up. (46)

Brand's lover releases her into "another life" (5 1) and another place. Like many spiritual autobiographers, the poet employs the image of waking up fiom sleep to express the 118 moment of conversion to an alternate ideology. The poet awakes from her sleep in the contact zone when she finds community and a governing politic with which to impose order on the world. With her lover, the true length of the room appears. But unlike

Wordsworth, Brand does not attempt universal unity and deny the sublime, but rather she concerns herselfonly with her own community and her own space. she takes part in the anti-hegemonic field of resistance activists and their appreciation of difference.

3.3 Hard Against the Soul: Re-Solving the Sublime Beauty Dialectic

Wordsworth's unsuccess~lfirst attempt at the summit can be compared to

Brand's first return to the beach at the end of "No Language Is Neutral." Like

Wordsworth's, this first attempt is immature. She has not yet realigned experience and ideology, not yet learned that no language is neutral. As with the catalytic combination of

Verlia (imaginative utopian impulse) and Elizete (experiential connection) in In Another

Place Not Here, this narrator too must synthesize ideology and experience in order to heal the word image equation. Like Wordsworth, before she can take flight over and transform the void she must construct a central seIf-reflective absolute other as well as frnd a community of similar others. Then she can achieve an empowering quadruple interpellation and represent it in landscape, creating a self-reflective authenticating (yet non-hegemonic) utopian place.

When asked in an interview with Frank Birbalsingh why she has never returned to live in the Caribbean, Brand responds, "I finally decided I don't live there, and in some 119 ways I don't live here either; so I live between there and here" ( 122). She has found an empowering position of inbetweeness. but this is not a liminal space; it is, rather, a self- centred space. As Brand states. "I live somewhere between these two places -- and it's a place too -- a new place we're making [. . .I" (Conde 2-3). Searching for that place of inbetweeness, Brand ends "No Language Is Neutral" by asserting:

I have come to knotv

something simple. Each sentence realized or

dreamed jumps like a pulse with history and takes a

side. What I say in any language is told in faultless

knowledge of skin, in drunkenness and weeping,

told as a woman without matches and tinder, not in

words and in words and in words learned by heart,

told in secret and not in secret, and listen, does not

burn out or waste and is plenty and pitiless and loves. (34)

Dionne Brand, the poet-autobiographer, comes 'Yo know something simple" (34). Brand, echoing Walcott, knows "no language is neutral." Neutrality implies being neither one nor the other and not engaged on either side. Liminal, as Claire Harris defines it in "Poets in Limbo," is the space between two worlds (125). Liminal space may be neutral, but would most often involve being pulled by the strongest gravitational force in one direction or another. Whereas a neutral space would be an indifferent zone, a liminal space would be a contact zone. From Brand's liminal space on the beach whatever she writes is pulled in multiple directions by different forces. The realization that no language 120 is neutral allows the poet to alter the discursive forces acting on her. Once she realizes this, she understands that nothing constructed in a language and space other than her own can give her grace. Knowing that the alienated subject is created through a narrowing of discursive possibilities she manipulates the languages she has available to voice her wholeness. to navigate her interior. Following Wordsworth's advice. she expresses her non-normative exiled subjectivity in the symbolic language landscape.

The romantics successfi~llyinserted themselves in the hegemonic centre but their attempt to renew the world and reveal a universal eden failed because there can be no universal ideological mapping of reality. The resolution of the dialectic on the side of beauty, combined with their desire to be united with the entire universe, cut them off from any experience that could not be reflected beneath their absolute other. But Brand is de- centred and can appropriate the romantic tradition to re-imagine and re-script the world around her altemate experience. However, because hegemonic language, ideology and history are all based on her silence, her struggle is to voice her wholeness. She accomplishes this by altering metaphors and overlaying landscape with a different ideology, reflecting an altemate centre. But Brand's return to the romantic tradition is not naive. She realizes there will always be a sublime and that in order to avoid silencing others and establishing her own hegemony, she must remain anti-hegemonic.

Brand understands that landscape is both "implicated" and "unconcerned" (Land

46). Of the three Trinidadian-Canadian poets she discusses, Harris asserts Brand "has a far more ambiguous and complicated relationship with the landscape" (1 18). She commenl: 121

Nature in all her guises is a major participant in the action. It is the climate

and fertility of these islands which made sugar cane, and therefore slavery,

profitable. It is that history which allows the barbarisms of western

hegemony to continue. But, the islands have an aggressive incredible

beauty. Blues are richer, the greens of trees, the colours of flowers and

ferns are exuberant and vital. A remarkable clarity of ocean surrounds

everything. ( 1 1 9)

The Caribbean landscape. its fertile soil and moderate climate, fostered cane fields; shallow seas inspired salt flats, trade winds powered mills. and the earth itself encouraged quarries. This landscape made slavery profitable. And the isolation of the islands enabled the slave trade. Dislocating distances from Africa and the sunounding ocean imprisoned slaves. Vast distances fiom Europe made it possible for Europeans to ignore the dystopia that fuelled their empires. The physical Caribbean landscape was a participant in the continuation of slavery and as a landscape appropriated by hegemony, it continues to be implicated in neo-coloniaiism. In the language and culture of the West, the Caribbean is absent in any way other than as playground, a Disneyesque utopia, a paradoxical good place and yet in relation to the West, an isolated Third world political no-place.

But landscape is also unconcerned, impassive, neutral. Reality is impermeable, watertight, airtight. And because impermeable reality is neutral, semipermeable landscape can also be implicated in Brand's freedom fiom hegemonic representation. Landscape is a contact zone, a threshold, a liminal zone like the beach or the skin; just as skin is a semi- permeable barrier where the body and the world meet and exchange, landscape is a semi- permeable barrier where two ideologies can meet and exchange. Like the soucouyant in her grandmother's stories, Brand wants to remove her skin, her silencing and reductive difference she is forced to express, but not only to become an image of the strong and dangerous Black woman. but also to create new subject positions by exposing what is beneath, the beauty and vulnerability beyond the contact zone.

To voice her area A, Brand, too, sublimes the wilderness, creating a place for her own inverting authentic self. Here, in this imaginary space, her desire for place is fulfilled with the creation of a centre from which to distinguish beauty and nowhere. She speaks of this centre in "No Language Is Neutral" when she writes:

In another place not here, a woman might touch

something between beauty and nowhere. back there

and here, might pass hand over hand her own

trembling life [. . .]. (34)

A woman needs another place to voice a self outside of patriarchy's two extreme allowable subject positions, the narrowed and restrictive sublimely beautifbl and the sublime, the nowhere, the void. Like the romantics, Liney must fmd an empowering position of inbetweeness, must locate herself in her own absolute centre in order to articulate all parts of herself, all her history and possibilities. But, this is not meant to be a universal Utopia. From this alternate centre, Brand and her community can create home as well as coalition, empowering contact zones with other centres in the field of resistance.

To transform the romantic apocalyptic Utopia into a radical political utopia, Brand 123 takes the transcendent and ahistorical romantic symbol and creates seditious metaphor.

Terry Eagleton says of the romantic symbol:

Tlie symbol hsed together motion and stillness. turbulent content and

organic form, mind and world. Its material body was the medium of an

absolute spiritual truth. one percr ived by direct intuition rather than by any

labourious process of critical analysis. In this sense the symbol brought

such truths to bear on the mind in a way which brooked no question: either

you saw it or you didn't. It was the keystone of sn irrationalism, a

forestnlling of reasoned critical enquiry, which has been rampant in literary

theory ever since. It was a llnitary thing, and to dissect it -- to take it apart

to see how it worked -- was almost as blasphemous as seeking to analyse

the Holy Trinity. (22)

Romantic symbols reduced possibility to the One, to the ahistorical and transcendent

"absolute spiritual truth" of the hegemonic centre. They worked because they were created within and supported their ideology. These symbols have become a part of how we structure, view and understand the world of area B. Contemporary post-romantic readers still almost intuitively understand them because we take part in the same ideology. Brand takes the romantic symbol and tuns it around on itself, forces it to confront history in order to voice her life story. She takes these symbols and modifies them by bouncing them off her material reality in order to force them to reflect her landscape, history and subjectivity. In this way, the history and world view that was previously hidden behind the construction of the ideological landscape can no longer be 124 taken-for-granted. Brand inserts history back into the romantic symbol, forcing the reader to dissect how these symbols have worked to conceal the unconscious.

Brand's landscape symbols. her metaphors, based on her history and her desire. voice the subliminal. Brand's authentic subjectivity, grounded in her material actions. is

representationally fragmented to keep it and the possibilities it represents contained on

the contact zone. But her subject is always whole and exists in its entirety within the

centrifugal field of resistance. in her silenced area A. outside of yet colliding with B. To

voice this silenced place. Brand employs and redeploys her romantic landscape symbols

as seditious metaphors From within her ~utoetlmographicallyspeakable space of area B.

Tom Moylan, drawing on Michael Ryan, relates seditious metaphor to critical

utopia. He writes:

Metaphor names that state of things characterized by transformation,

alteration, relationality, displacement, substitution, errancy. Metaphor

holds open our perception of reality to otherness, to historical change.

Thus, Ryan links metaphor and sedition as linguistic and political

activities that share the challenge to the forces of containment, authority,

totality. The seamless universality claimed by the present dominant system

is thereby ruptured by these twin practices. (213)

Critical utopias are read as "metaphorical displacements arising out of current

contradictions within the political unconscious" (2 13). Traditional static utopia opposes

the symbolic good place to the present place; it acts like the romantic symbol. You either

get it or you don't -- literally. Critical utopia, however, based on the presumption that the L 25 world will never be static, let alone perfect, and that Utopia is only to be found in the actions of subjects continually in the process of altering the world to reflect their disalienated selves, persistently joining together in the imaginary field of resistance to halt hegemonic forces, breaks down binary models and creates multiple possibilities.

Moylan ends Demand the Impossible, with "Here, then, critical utopian discourse becomes a seditious expression of social change and popular sovereignty carried on in a permanently open process of envisioning what is not yet" (213) -- But, critical utopia combined with Althusserian ideology and interpellation and the romantic reflection of

self in landscape can also be employed as a seditious expression of the silenced

possibilities within the cultural unconscious, a voicing of what is not yet acknowledged in

the hegemonic always already.

Banne rji asserts that Brand's images "convey, not a photographic naturalism, but

a well-selected sense of the environment, or a conjunction of meanings worked up

through the poet's own perception of the world, her own philosophy and politics" (53).

Brand places herself at the centre by unfolding her narrative long poems, all the while

introducing and repeating her landscape symbols, intertextually bouncing them off

previous traditions that have constructed ideologies that both silence and enable her.

traditions such as Yoruba, Christianity, romanticism, modernism, postcolonialism.

Caribbean literature, English literature, lesbianism, feminism, the tradition of the strong

Black woman and Black women's oral tradition. By placing herself at the centre, she

rebounds these symbols off these traditions and their ideological construction of

landscape, as well as off impermeable reality itself, in order to alter the semi-permeable 126 landscape creating different relationships between signifieds, signifiers and referents.

Language begins to refract instead of reflect. warping the ideological centre, expressing her unspoken subjectivity and overlaying the geography of Trinidad with an empowering self-reflective landscape.

Brand's symbolic landscape language, reflecting her radical utopian politic, can not be neutral either. In Books in Canada, Brand asserts. "I write to say something about the world. The language that I encounter as a response to me in the world is no more neutral than mine to it" (1 5). To create this language she must excavate a context: a history that will sustain it. Brand's project is not to remove history/ideology but rather to excavate within it what will allow for language to voice her wholeness, allow her to create a symbiotic language, history and ideology that will reflect her authentic self and give her grace. There are traces in dominant history, artifacts in the ocean. that allow for altered readings, other possibilities. She writes of them in "Hard Against the Soul" when she asserts:

you can hardly hear my voice now, woman,

but I heard you in my ear for many years to come

the pink tongue of a great shell murmuring and

yawning, muttering tea, wood, bread, she, blue,

stroking these simple names of habit, sweeter

and as common as night crumbling black flakes

of conversation to a sleep, repetitious as noons

and snow up north, the hoarse and throaty, I told you, no milk, clean up ... (38)

Because she is a Black lesbian, Brand's voice can hardly be heard by '-woman." but

Brand has built her language out of woman's language of the everyday and oral tradition, which she metaphorically represents as shell -- perhaps drawing on Wordsworth's image ofthe shell as soothing inspiration. Although submerged in the deluge of the ocean, this constant presence of woman's subversive and never completely silenced voice is still able to be retrieved. '

The following section of "Hard Against the Soul" connects her to lesbian history and voice. To the lesbian she asserts, "You can hardly hear my voice, but I heard you / in my sleep big as waves reciting their prayers so hourly the heart rocks to its real meaning

[. . .I" (39). The lesbian can hardly hear her Black voice. but Brand acknowledges the enabling voice of women's desire for women that has also been submerged but omni- present. speaking to her even in her sleep. in her dulled life in the contact zone. Brand awakes within this alternate ideology writing, '?here are no poems to this only 1 triangles, scraps, prisons of purpled cloth" (39). The ambiguous line break indicates "only" refers to both the idea that there is no hegemonic representation of only this part of herself, the rest has been written over; and to the idea that the only way to speak through the silencing has been through these symbols. The poet declares, "time begins with these gestures, this / sudden silence needs words instead of whispe~g"(39). The narrator's time is depicted as the fulfilled chiliastic moment, suddenly beginning with the wholeness she has found in the material experience of loving women. But this crossing over also leads to sudden silence. Time also begins with the gesture of this poem, this unsilencing within the hegemonic sea.

In "Hard Against the Soul," lesbian desire creates connections and similarity. and moves beyond the limit of the contact zone to create an altemate centre from which to decipher clear differences. Afier mapping her location in relation to woman and lesbian,

Brand maps her location as a Black lesbian. She writes to her lover, "you can hardly hear my voice by now but woman / I felt your breath against my cheek in years to come [. . .I"

(40). The lovers can hardly tell their voces apart. Again, time is chiliastic as what is inside moves outward to transform the surrounding landscape. washing it in an altemate ideology. The past, present and hture melt into one another as Brand and her lover recognize each other and themselves. Together in specular interpellation the lovers find grace. Brand writes that after her wilderness self has been broken into shards, it is with her lover that she fmds wholeness: "I lucky is grace that gather me up and 1 forgive my plainness" (36). Now completely outside the light of the centre, Brand, like Saint Paul who must go blind before he can truly see, loses her "sight in night's black pause" (40).

And when light returns, she is in another place, interpellated into another centre where there is no language, where "breasts to breasts mute prose we arc a leaping" (40). The lovers find in each other complete reflections of themselves. Their removal From the hegemonic centre mutes prose, or the hegemonic representation of the world, but also leaves them without prose, without poetry, with only the symbols and gestures of lesbian resistance. They must arc their meaning. Absolute grace, a complete interpellation between self and other, is voiceless, a complete conversional conversation between two

"1's." Hence, here in this space, the lovers can hardly distinguish each other's voices. But 129

Brand asserts "no more may have passed here except 1 also the map to coming home, the tough geography 1 of trenches. quarrels, placards, barricades" (40). Brand has found grace within an alternate centre and these gestures can map her Black lesbian space, indicate its existence within the unconscious, but now she needs to voice it for others. To be more than an escape from reality, to actually alter the reproduction of the relations of production and reveal the lie of hegemonic unity, she must voice grace fiom beneath her radical utopian politic. To prove she is both subject and Subject she must make bread out of stone by voicing herself at the centre.

The narrator asserts, "It is not sufficient here to mark the skin's water or foId"

(II). It is not enough to map the surface of the skin, to indicate the boundary of the subliminal from the contact zone. To sabotage the exploitive relations of production that

have repelled them to the sublime, Brand and her lover must voice other possibilities,

must navigate the area outside of B. Her lover goes first. After the last image of

relationship and sameness, Brand gives us an image of separation and difference. This

section is dedicated to Faith Nolan, a Black lesbian social activist, singedsongwriter, and

Brand's long-time partner. Of Faith, she writes:

She

startled me just last night. I heard her singing and

could not dance. I heard her navigate the thick soil of

who we are. Her boundless black self rising,

honeying. (4 1)

In Faith's social activist music, Brand hears her singing fiom the other side. She hears her navigating their authentic lives, telling their story, and creating connections with community. Here, sweet grace is found not in relation to the eurocentric centre as represented by sugar, but in relation to their own centre as represented by honey. Just as

Wordsworth overlays his relationship to nature onto his relationship to other men, combines imaginatiodideology and reason/experience. before he can approach the summit and fly out over the void, so too has Faith. She becomes boundless. Like the romantics, she can re-present the world according to her own centre and takes flight, navigates her utopian space, not on roads or on rivers, but on wings.

This resynchronization of ideology and experience beneath her own interpellating centre and reflected in the landscape/wildernesslvoid is what Brand must do to voice grace. Through her appropriation of the romantic manipulation of landscape, she demonstrates her altemate utopian ideology. She begins her autobiographical book of poetry with a depiction of her and her lover idas utopia. This utopia is an estranged version of her island home of Guayaguayare where she locates her past poetic subjectivity in the poem "No Language Is Neutral," and overlays her, her lover and their landscape with an altemate utopian ideological geography. (See Appendix A: Map of Trinidad.)

Like Wordsworth, it is finding another who shares her space, her ideology and her language that displaces Dionne Brand far enough fiom dominant culture to begin creating another. Her lover "ripped the world raw" (5 1) and gives her "another tense" (47). She removes the beach, the skin's liminal space, and gives the poet a different place fiom which to articulate herself Brand writes to her that:

This grace, you see. come as a surprise and nothing till

now knock on my teeming skull, then, these warm

watery syllables, a woman's tongue so like a culture.

plunging towards stones not yet formed into flesh,

language not yet made ... (36)

Like God, who John has declared can condemn all the sons of Abraham and make new children, a new culture. out of the stones on the ground. Brand's lesbian tongue, her alternate language, can create culture/flesh from stone. In "Hard Against the Soul" section one, she metaphorically describes her lover in a state of grace, her fully interpellated authentic self reflected within the landscape. Her lover is depicted as both island and ocean, experience and ideology are synchronized:

this is you girl. this cut of road up

to blanchicheuse, this every turn a piece

of blue and earth carrying on, beating, rock and

ocean this wearing away, smoothing the insides

pearl of shell and coral (6)

Her lover becomes the road to the sea cliff, only in this utopian landscape there is no need to jump into the sea and attempt to swim away. This alternate version of the road of slavery in *Returnv offers something different than the marginalized existence on the contact zone. It offers a means to navigate an altemate and authenticating centre. Whereas

Walcott's road is covered with rotting oak leaves, symbolizing the rot of Empire that remains in the Caribbean (Gingell45), and perhaps also the rot that remains in English, 132

Brand's utopian version locates the road beneath Caribbean hit "hanging, greening,"

"wanting to fall" and "quenching the road" (6).As road, Brand's lover represents her desire for self-expression within area A and is a means to navigate across the island's interior from the flatlands around Guaya in the South to the mountainous Blanchicheuse

in the North. Like her childhood desire for Western culture, this desire also bums, but she tums wholeheartedly "to" it, not "against" it, as she does the hegemonic sea.

Brand pictures her childhood self in this alternate landscape as stone (7), as

innocent, not yet transformed into breadiflesh. But in this version, rather than itching to

run in her "pidgeon toed way" (22), she. like Mammy Prater. hesitates to walk right. But

Brand's hesitation is not a means to resist a restrictive subject position. but a way to

prolong her childhood connection to this authenticating place. Whereas Wordswonh finds

wholeness when he turns to his subliming, transcendent imagination, Brand finds

authenticity when she turns "to burning reason" (7). to the other side of the dialectic. But

her burning reason is not the science and logic to which Wordsworth refers.

Wordsworth's split between reason and the imagination is a split that occurs completely

in area B, both being a part of hegemonic construction of the world and both relying on

the silencing of area A. Brand instead turns to Liney's reason of "dueme and spirit" (7),

to island culture and oral tradition, the reason and imagination of area A. She re-solves

the romantic sublime beauty dialectic firmly on the side of the sublime, the wilderness to

which she has been repelled.

Brand also turns "to the sea wall and sea I breaking hard against things" (7). Faith

is depicted as ocean, as an alternate ideology. Her wearing away makes La Fillete Bay 133 wash up from the rocks (6)as now she is "sometimish historian" (15). Here. the tide no

longer washes against the beach. wearing away the interior, but instead breaks against a

sheltering sea wall. What was previously a dead river. is now "that bit of lagoon. alligator

I long abandoned" (7). This river. now located between the sea wall and shore. has lost its

menacing imagery, interacts with the ocean and protects the island. The contact zone still

exists, but moves From the beach, a part of Brand's subjectivity, to the oceadlagoon,

becomes enablingly located within language and ideology. Brand's utopian

ocean/ideology is "something hard against the soul" (7) being contributed to by "sheets of

her like the mitan rolling into the atlantic" (7). Brand ideologically retranslates nature, the

tumultuous Pilate becoming the p it an: metaphorically composed of the sheets of this

autobiographical poem voicing the interior and flowing into the hegemonic ocean altering

its composition. No longer acting as sentries. these rivers instead become sheltering and

enabling.

As Teresa Zackodnik notes, Brand's poetry "moves towards a notion of the exiled

self as place and belonging, and a conception of the language that will voice her

experience as a multivoiced discourse in both standard English and Nation Language"

(1 94). Unlike Walcott who depicts his languages/armies marching the same road in order

to navigate his fragmented self, Brand's utopian landscape has multiple rivers through

which she can navigate her whole self. Her subjectivity remains whole beneath her

overriding politic while the languages and traditions through which she can speak that

subjectivity are split. By appropriating these silencing languages, Brand has been able to

navigate her late twentieth-century lesbian Caribbean-Canadian subjectivity. The poet 134 writes that within this utopian landscape, ''this is where you make sense, that the sight becomes tender, the night air human, the dull silence full chattering, volcanoes cease, and to be awake is more lovely than dreams" (7). Here the eruption of their volcanic voices through the suppression of colonization ceases as nonsense becomes sense, silence becomes chattering, and utopia becomes reality.

3.4 in Another Place: The Highest Bliss

To make bread otrt of stone and insert a reflection of herself within her own centre as an absolute subject, subject and Subject, recognizing and being recognized by other subjects, Brand needs to come back fiom her utopian space and tell her own story, to answer, "How was it for you?". By beginning her text in her utopian space, Brand emphasizes her materiality -- her belief that her authentic self exists outside of and comes before language. But, by itself this inverting depiction is desire without struggle and has the potential to parallel the romantic transcendent, apocalyptic Utopia. To demonstrate her appreciation of difference, she must return fkom this potentially escapist and hegemonic space in order to speak her ideologeme of activism. The second section of the text, entitled "Return," is not only a depiction of her return to the Caribbean after the failure of the revolution in Grenada, but is also a return to hegemonic reality fiom the previous textual utopian space, indicating, perhaps, the apparent uselessness of text and utopia in making real change in the world. But her return includes her activist autobiography and establishes her as one among many in the field of resistance activists. Brand depicts both home and coalition.

In this section's title poem, she finds the same landscape as before, the same road she travelled in the past:

... so the road, that stretch of sand and

pitch struggling up, glimpses sea, village, earth

bare-footed hot, women worried, still the faces,

masked in sweat and sweetness, still the eyes

watery, ancient, still the hard, distinct, brittle smell of

slavery. ( 10)

This futility and absence of escape is emphasized in "Retcim 11," where at the end of the road people try to escape by jumping off the cliff into the sea and swimming to what they think is Venezuela, only to find it is not away they have reached, but rather Pointe

Galeote, the south-east tip of Trinidad, a place where they will find only more of the same. This circularity is the result of following Walcott's autoethnographic leaf-wet road to the contact zone. As long as they remain within the same eurocentric ideology, they will never be whole because the reality that is imaginarily represented to them is based on their exploitation. Without an alternate sheltering ideology, a radical political utopia like the one Brand is attempting to construct, they can attempt to leave but will always end up returning to the same place beneath the hegemony of area B.

The other poems in this section, "Phyllis," "Jackie," "Amelia Still," and "Blues

Spiritual for Mammy Prater," demonstrate different Black women's resistance. Brand juxtaposes "Phyllis" to "Jackie," both biographical poems describing two revolutionaries 136 in Grenada. In a endnote, Brand explains "Phyllis" is for Phyllis Coard, Minister of

Women's Affairs in the People's Revolutionary Government. who is now imprisoned in

Grenada's Richmond Hill Prison for her role in the revolution (13). A smuggled note from Phyllis has been read at a rally by an "upstart castigate Fidel" ( 13) to emphasize

Phyllis's strength, romanticizing her revolutionary resistance and suffering. Brand declares:

Phyllis, they said you defied the prison guards

and talked through their shouts to be quiet

your laugh clanging against the stone walls

your look silencing soldiers. ( 1 3 )

But, in the repeated assertion, "I know they treat you bad ;like a woman'' ( 1 I. 11, 13).

Brand implies she knows prison for Phyllis is different than what is being depicted by the male revolutionaries and their version of the strong Black heroine. She contrasts the male description of Phyllis' laugh with her own description of it "like a bronze bauble" (I 1) and "luminous and bubbling" (12). In her portrayal of part of what has been left out,

Brand creates an image larger than that of the patriarchally constructed strong Black

woman, an image that reflects both the resistance and the beauty found in being a Black woman.

"Jackie," Brand tells us, is for Jacqueline Cree, Minister of Education in the

People's Revolutionary Government (14). She is described as:

[. . .] dreaming an extraordinary life, an idea

fanning La Sagesse and Carib's Leap then slabs of volcanic clay in a reddened ocean, perhaps even

larger. (14)

Like Brand. she is dreaming of something that will alter the entire landscape. Jackie is killed in the revolution, but in death is transtbrmed into the Yoruba Orisha Yansa:

That day on the last hill, bright

midday heat glistened on your hands you were in

yellow too, yellow like fire on a cornbird's back, fire at

your mouth the colour of lightening. then in the last

moment, bullets crisscrossed your temple and your

heart. They say someone was calling you. Yansa.

thundering for help. ( 14)

In Yoruba, a West AErican religion that was transported and Christianized by slaves brought to Brazil, Cuba and Trinidad. Yansa is the Orisha or emissary of the dead and of justice, the redeemer of ancestors. Like the Holy Spirit, she moves as the wind, from the cooling and soothing breeze, to the destructive hurricane. She is most often represented by the whirlwind, and symbolizes sudden change and revolution. The revealing and transforming flash of lightening can also signal her presence and thunder is the voice of her lover. Brand transforms Jackie into a symbol of redeeming revolution, a goddess leaving the battle to respond to an alternate cry for help. Jackie as Yansa, redeemer of all ancestors, has been summoned away born a failing revolution to help Brand in her quest for redemption and justice.

Filled with the spirit of Yansa, the narrator now gives us poems of two ancestors. 138

"Amelia still" is Brand's description of her grandmother's escape through death From her restrictive life as a Black woman in the Caribbean.'' Unlike the mother in "No Language

Is Neutral" who is hardened to stone by her reflection in the river Pilate, symbolizing her internalization of the racism and sexism inherent in language. this mother escapes:

[. . .] to the Ortoire river

to wash her own hair, take her sweet time

waking up, pitch stones over water.

rat a little sugar, in peace. ( 16)

Amelia is the only woman outside of Brand's utopia who experiences the river as the childhood Wordsworth does the Derwent. the only woman who finds harmony with the landscape. But this escape, this little bit of sugary grace is only found in death, in an escapist abandonment of this world leaving her daughter (and granddaughter) alienated in an empty house. Death here is seen as a way to cross over, a way to move away from the contact zone, but Brand juxtaposes the escapism and abandonment of death to the courage and resistance it takes Mammy Prater to live for 115 years.

iBlues Spiritual for Mammy Prater" is a poem about an elderly slave woman's resistance as captured in and pratered from a photograph. As Faith Nolan explains in the film Lone Time Comin', Blues spirituals were doublevoiced songs that outwardly spoke of the redemption to be found in Christian heaven, yet hidden beneath the passive idea of waiting for death to be released to a better place was often a dialogue on active escape fkorn and resistance to slavery in the here and now. Brand demonstrates the doublevoiced interplay of activism and passivity found in the blues spiritual. Of Mammy Prater, she writes:

[. . .] the fields, the ones she ploughed

on the days that she was a mule. left

their etching on the gait of her legs

deliberately and unintentionally

she waited, not always silently. not always patiently,

for this self portrait. ( 18)

The line "deliberately and unintentionally" refers both to the contradictory images of

. active resistance and passive waiting." Unintentionally, the work she performed as

"mule" has left her with a limp. But her limp is also deliberate. Because it impairs her

ability to perform in her subject position of labourer, a limp can be a form of resistance.

Deliberately and unintentionally, she waits resistantly for the opportunity to create this

photograph, to send her message of strength as it is reflected in her body as landscape.

Diana Brydon writes that the protagonist looking at the photograph "describes the

moment of her own interpellation as Black woman, implicated in African-American

diasporic history, as she finds herself captivated [. . .] by the eyes of an old Black woman

[. . .I" (8 l), but Brand has also been interpellated by the image of Amelia, her

grandmother. Although the photograph and the resultant poetic narrative reveal an

ideologeme of active resistance, for as Himani Banne ji notes, 'Tust to survive is an act of

heroism" (52), Brand needs more than the interpellating image of the strong Black

woman in the contact zone --just as she needs more than the escapist image of salvation

through death. She has had enough of waiting to be whole, to represent all of her 140 authentic self including both her strength and her vulnerability. She follows these images of Black women's resistance with her own story, her telling of how she moved from being placed to becoming placed.

To anti-hegemonically represent her authentic self, Brand creates a radical political utopia by appropriating both the romantic tradition and the critical utopia. Both

Brand and the romantics attempt to speak of an altemate life style in a repressing political climate by creating an altemate ideologeme. Within the romantic emphasis on the actions and language of the everyday combined with their imaginative altemate portrayal of the world, can be fo~lndan ideologeme, an altemate ideology and narrative on action, a call to rebellion against utilitarianism. empiricism and rationalism and an espousal of non- alienating lifestyles. an education of desire. But for the romantics, poetry was prophesy and the chiliastic ideologeme of their autobiographical protagonists educated desire towards an edenic universal Utopia ironically resulting in narrowed and hegemonic subjects.

Like Moylan7scritical utopians, however, Brand's autobiographical works create an ideologeme of activism within the field of resistance. This utopian space is not a static space but an anti-hegemonic space based on personal and political actions within the field of resistance activists. As Heather Smyth notes, Brand demonstrates an "activist assertion that belonging is found through political activity, the attempt to ultimately create a social utopia" (155). As we have seen, she writes more overtly of her activism in Bread out of

Stone, but it is also apparent in No Language Is Neutral, particularly in section 6 of "Hard

Against the Soul." After five sections describing the beauty of her space, she asserts it is not escapist:

listen, just because I've spent these

few verses fingering the register of the heart,

clapping life, as a woman on a noisy beach,

calling blood into veins dry as sand,

do not think things escape me [. . .I. (12)

Unlike Walcon who appears to be content with sacrificing his blood in order to find a certain grace in the one language of English. Brand insists on calling blood into her dry veins. Like Walcon, she too employs military images. But whereas he uses images of the

British military. Brand employs images of guerilla warfare to describe how her actions confront the ruling hegemony. She writes to her lover that she sees her with her "back arched 1 against this city we inhabit like guerillas" (46). As Teresa Zackodnik argues,

Brand "identifies lesbian existence and experience as revolutionary;" she and her lover

"disrupt and challenge the unity of heterosexist society with their lesbian presence and relationship" (199). Unlike the unravelled spine that results from the silencing of the authentic self in "No Language Is Neutral," Brand's lover's spine is defiantly arched against the hegemonic centre. Black lesbian desire is described as '?his drawn skin of hunger twanging as a bow. / this shiver whistling into the white face of capital" (42).

Unsatisfied and unsatisfiable within the patriarchal capitalist system, this desire is the bow that propels Brand, that allows her to see the world as "not enough." The lesbian shiver or orgasm has become the splinter, the arrow with which she confronts hegemony.

The narrator's grandmother's fearful, trembling walk (26) and the narrator's trembling in 142 the immigration office (29), have become an image of self-affirming lesbian orgasm. As

Black lesbian, she finds both the position of strong Black woman on the contact zone and a position of self-affirming beauty in relation to her own centre. She refuses to shave off or sacrifice anything of her self, and she appropriates the critical utopian form to voice her alternate actions and to create a space where she can find grace on her own terms. based on her whole subjectivity, her material experience.

Brand ends her autobiography by once again juxtaposing the images of other

Black women's resistance to that of her and her lover's Black lesbian selves. She asserts the only way she would commit suicide in order to escape through death like Amelia, or walk into the ocean (attempt to assimilate like the narrator's mother in "No Language is

Neutral") would be "because I am not good enough, not the woman to live / in the world we are fighting to make" (15).The only way she will give up is if she finds she is nor enough for the culture they are in the struggle to create.

Brand compares the resistance of her Black lesbian self to the resistance of the strong Black woman as represented by Mammy Prater. She gives us the image of an old woman washing herself with a cup on the beach. In Books in Canada, she directly equates this woman with the poem "Blues Spiritual for Mammy Prater:"

When I was about eight years old I saw this woman sitting on the beach

naked, throwing water over her head and bathing herself, and I remember

at first going by her, and looking back and suddenly thinking, she's naked,

you know, and smiling to myself. And later, I thought, what freedom, she

finally made it. She had earned the right not to be looked at in a certain 143

way. It was in my mind, earning that right someday. The poem came out of

looking at a photograph of a woman who was 1 15 years old. and thinking

of all that was in her shape. all the days and days of waiting to sit there for

the photograph [. . .] and while being enslaved. never allowing slavery to

keep her from waiting for the day when it was over. That old woman had

endured. ( 16)

The strong Black woman as represented by Mammy Prater, like the beach this nameless old woman sits on, is both an enabling and constraining force for Brand. Speaking of the woman on the beach, she says: "It was an image of incredible freedom. It was also an

image of an old woman who had been through a lot. but had gained the right to sit naked on the beach and just throw water over herself [. . .]. What I was also struggling with was that she was tired. And she was so tired and so done-in and had lived so much she was totally fiee to do whatever she liked" ("Conversation" 18). In "Hard Against the Soul,"

Brand speaks of these enabling and constraining forces acting on her. She writes:

I envied her,

so old and set aside, a certain habit washed from her

eyes. I must have recognized her

In my nerves something there

unravelling, and she was a place to go, believe me,

against gales of masculinity but in that then, she was

masculine, old woman [. . .]. (47) 144

In the same section, Brand describes her childhood experience of her aunt clothing her in a dress. She remembers her aunt asserting she looked "nice and pretty." about which the adult Brand says:

Nice and pretty, laid out to splinter you. so that never.

until it is almost so late as not to matter do you grasp

some pan, something missing like a wing, some

fragment of' your real self. (19)

The description as "nice and pretty" attempts to interpellate her in relation to the patriarchal absolute other. "splintering" her conscious self from anything within her subjectivity that may not be "nice and pretty." Like her mother peering at her disempowered reflection in the river, this representational shaving off of her non- normative actions occurs so thoroughly that without an alternate centre from which to observe it, it almost goes unnoticed. But Brand, as lesbian, recognizes she is missing something, a fragment, a wing. This missing splinter is the portion of herself that loves

Black women, allows her to love her own reflection. This splinter will become arrow.

Unlike Walcott, even as a child Brand refuses to sacrifice any part of herself. She realizes what she is offered is "not enough."

The strong and enduring old woman would be the end result of following this splintering path. Although there is fmally freedom From the construction of self through male desire, it comes at too high a cost. Brand writes:

I know since that an old woman, darkening,

cuts herself away limb from limb, sucks herself white, running, skin torn and raw like a ball of bright light,

flying, into old woman.(48)

The old woman is depicted as the soucouyant. She is the enduring and dangerous Black woman, but she is also narrowed, restricted to the one fragment of the strong Black woman on the contact zone. Like Wordsworth's idealized connection with the shepherds in his youth. she is for Brand an "accidental grace" (8.355), an early. immature attempt at interpellation with an idealized other. She is alone, graceless in that she has no way to connect with the fragments she has repelled in her attempt to fulfill the subject position offered Black women, and like the elderly women in "Bread out of Stone." although she has existed long enough to no longer be constructed in relation to male desire. she also no longer has any way to love other Black women.

Brand describes her specular relation to this fragmented woman: "I [. . .] pursued one eye until it came to / the end of itself and then I saw the other. / the blazing fragment"

(50). It is this Black lesbian fragment, free from the "prisoned gaze of men" (48), that

Brand says she "fell in love with" (50). It is "inviolable" (50). In its unrepresentableness within area 8,it provides a place of shelter. But the old woman herself cannot recognize it. Brand writes to the woman:

sitting on a beach in a time that did not

hear your name or else it would have thrown you into

the sea, or you, hear that name yourself and walked

willingly into the muting blue. (50)

Ifthe potentially estranging and dangerous fragment had been recognized, it would have t 46 been submerged, silenced. Instead. the woman washes herself on the beach. throwing cupfuls of water over her head. To Brand, the old woman is a bird with clipped wings.

She writes. '.old bird squinting at the / water's wing above her head" (47). Instead of flight. the woman is held beneath the wing of ocean water she throws over her head. unable to move outside of her relationship to hegemony. Without recognizing the fragment, she exists only on the contact zone, always in relation to the hegemonic ocean.

Brand is released from this end result of her interpellation as "nice and pretty" by her lesbian lover whom she hears "laughing in another tense" (47).

Brand's quest has returned her to the beach, only now she returns with the knowledge that no language is neutral and with a self affirming relationship with her lover. Once again. she finds herself located on the surrealistic rim between beauty and the sublime, sense and nonsense. Like Brand, Wordsworth, too, gives us a second image of the poet located on the shore between sense and nonsense. In book 14. he symbolizes how man can find transcendent unity with the universe through the image of himself once again attempting the summit. Only this time, he is not mistakenly following others up a

European peak, but is leading his group to the highest point in Wales, the interiorly located Mt. Snowdon. As we have seen, as a result of his role in the French Revolution,

Wordsworth has learned that in his pleasurable self-reflective relationship to nature can be found a model for a unified relationship with other men, particularly men who have a similar relationship with nature. Now mature, he can once again attempt the summit.

Climbing at night in the thick fog and unable to see where he is going,

Wordsworth almost steps off a cliff, but at the last instant, he steps out of the mist, the 147 moon appears and "instantly a light upon the turf/ Fell like a flash" ( 14.39-40) revealing his location on the brink. Earlier, he has described the imagination as like "[. . .] when the light of sense / Goes out, but with a flash that has revealed I the invisible world (7.600-

602). Drawing on the same theme, he reverses the image of light and dark to show how he was walking in the darkness of reason. but that imagination once again illumed the night, revealed the invisible world, and spared him his life. What the imagination shows him on the precipice of Mt. Snowdon is the world in unity beneath his feet. The poet stands transcendent. looking out towards a distant Atlantic. "usurp[ing]" ( 11.50) all that he can see and hearing torrenteous rivers -'roaring with one voice" over earth and sea and in heaven (11.60 - 63). The invisible world revealed behind this natural scene is the world of grace and unity found through the synchronisity of man's usurping mind and God's eternal universe. Wordsworth writes the torrent is "Not distant from the shore whereon we stood" (14.58). On the precipice, he stands on the shore, but not between himself and the ocean which is miles away, or even between himself and the river which is close but still some distance away. Wordsworth's shore is between reason and the imagination, being and spirit, earth and heaven, the sublime and beauty. It is in locating himself in the

inbetween, in the absolute centre that Wordsworth believes he can reveaVreflectiread his

unified authentic seif in the landscape. But even here we see evidence of resolution on the

side of spiritual beauty. The earthly landscape of mountains and ocean, "appeared to

dwindle," "usurped upon far as the sight could reach (14.47-49). But "not so the ethereal

vault; encroachment none I was there. nor loss" (14.50-5 1). Wordsworth's contact zone

becomes hegemonic centre, his interpellating relationship with the MadGod absolute 148 other of area B being reflected in the ethereal and his rejection of the sublime reflected in the dulled earthly landscape that is to become "dark abyss" ( 11.8 1 ), the void he must transform in his own image to find universal grace. He sublimes the poet. elevating him to the centre, both subject and Subject. Poets, who are of "majestic intellect" ( 14.67). are

"by cornmiinion raised [. . .] from human to divine" ( 14.1 17- l 18). Although preaching

balance throughout The Prelude, demonstrating the need for synthesis of the sublime

beauty dialectic, of dark and light, of reason and imagination, tumult and peace, earth and

heaven, being and soul, man and divinity. Wordsworth obviously desires the poetic

subject to become divine. to become Subject. He gives us the image of the poet standing

on the precipice, above the world, consuming all within his gaze, rewriting all within his

image of self, seeing "All gratualant, if rightly understood" (389). He becomes a lark

(14.383) as he writes "Anon I rose / As if on wings" ( 14.38 1-382). Taking tlight on the

soothing breeze of inspiration he has described earlier in book 1, which Abrams points

out in a footnote is equated with the inspiration of the Biblical prophets when visited by

the Holy Spirit (257), he transcends above the world, interpellating the landscape in an

image of his authentic synchronized self. As prophet, he becomes a part of the "majestic

intellect" and must "speak I A lasting inspiration" to those less fortunate so that they too

might find redemption and wholeness. The poet has the ability to deliver grace, to unite

and redeem mankind in his own subliming image. Not only a prophet filled with, but the

actual equivalence to the Holy Spirit, he soars over, navigates, and transforms the void in

his universal image, unaware he is repelling all else to the sublime.

Wordsworth's resolution of the dialectic on the side of his beauty and his 149 expansion of his narrowed experience under romanticism's hegemonic politic has left

Brand silenced, repelled to and conjured out of the void. However, Brand realizes that, like Wordsworth, she needs to resolve the dialectic on the side of her own centre, on the side where she makes sense and can reflect her authentic self. Brand, too, ends "No

Language Is Neutral" with the image of the poet attempting to become bird. She writes, "I have tried to keep my throat / gurgling like a bird's [. . .] to hum mud and feathers and sit peacef~illy"(34). Following Wordsworth's construction of a whole subject, she has tried to imagine her way out of suffering:

[. . .] I have tried to imagine a sea not

bleeding, a girl's glance full as a verse, a woman

growing old and never crying to a radio hissing of a

black boy's murder. (34)

But as part of the sublime, Brand realizes the passive escapism of Wordsworth's romanticization. She also opens her poem "No Language Is Neutral" with a breeze. But instead of being blown into by divine inspiration, as a Black lesbian, she experiences a

''sea wind heaving any remnants of / consonant curses into choking aspirate'' (23).

Delivering emptying aspiration, instead of empowering inspiration, this wind unravels the spine. Fragmented, she cannot find a source of divine healing and take transcendent flight in area B, nor can she find peace and shade beneath Walcon's healing oak of English. As she says, "I have chewed a few / votive leaves here, their taste already disenchanting / my mothers" (34). Neither of these roads will lead her to grace, to wholeness.

Although she cannot find grace in Wordsworth's apocalyptic chiliastic Utopia, she 150 can appropriate his method of creating that utopia. She too places herself at the centre, becomes prophet, becomes holy spirit, both subject and Subject. In "No Language Is

Neutral" the poet asserts: "This time Liney done see vision in this green guava season, fly skinless and turn into river fish, dream she self [. . .I." (25).This contemporary version of

Liney has a vision where she, like the soucouyant flies skinless. Without the screen of skin imposed by dominant culture. one's "interior" is expressible. There is no liminal space. This Liney sees herself speaking from outside the contact zone where she no longer engages with the Fracturing terms of the colonizer. She becomes river fish. completely in her element in language, and has the discursive power to dream her own life.

Ln the utopian sections of "Hard Against the Soul." the poet becomes prophet as vision becomes reality. Now, "'to be awake is more lovely than dreams" (7). In this imaginary space, beyond the patriarchal absolute other where the unconscious becomes conscious and nonsense becomes sense, Brand experiences grace and becomes hlly articulable in her self-centered language. The romantic quest for grace ends with the poet declaring:

I have become myself. A woman who looks at a woman and says, here, I

have found you, in this, I am blackening in my way [. . .I. It was as if

another life exploded in my face, brightening, so easily the brow of a wing

touching the surf, so easily I saw my own body, that is, my eyes followed

me to myself, touched myself as a place, another life, terra. They say this

place does not exist, then, my tongue is mythic. I was here before. (5 1) 151 hterpellating with another Black woman. Brand is released to another space. From here she represents herself by describing herself as place. This is not a new place, but has always existed, and is now articulated by redesigning ideology. history and language to reflect a self-empowering ideal within an alternate community. Following her own politic, she takes flight, not from a transcendent peak re-scripting the entire world, but fiom sea level, fiom the beach. Her flight is low level, wings touching surf as she re- interprets the world for herself and her community. Brand redraws the beauty sublime dialectic, reverses her island/ocean metaphor making the ocean the no-place that needs to be re-presented, conjured in order to make sense of. The poet assertively glides out into the void and creates her own sense-making. She moves from being placed to becoming place. CONCLUSION

Living, Moving, Being

We name the worlds we're in, and no one culture can define that. Diome Brand Books in Canada

Both Wordsworth's and Brand's texts can be read as spiritual autobiography. as stories of the journey from fragmenting sin to unifying redemption, pivoting on a moment of crisis and written as an education of desire so that others may follow. As spiritual autobiographies both echo St. Paul's Epistles and Augustine's Confessions.

Ln Being in the Text, Paul Jay writes of Augustine's Confessions that the structure is divided into two parts: "the retrospective narrative of Augustine's life (Books 1-9) and the introspective exegetical portions that follow (Books 10- 13)" with Augustine's conversion occurring in book 8 (24). Jay writes that while the text is concerned with the story of Augustine's life, it is "every bit as concerned with his renewal and transformation as he writes it. From the outset, Augustine exists in his own narrative less a subject to be remembered in language than as a subject to be transformed by language" (23). Augustine

'%rites of the past in order to 'heal' in the present [. . .I. One of his central purposes in writing, then, is to perform a healing kind of self-analysis. His goal while rvriting is to

[. . .] 'gather me together again from that disordered state in which I lay in shattered pieces" (Jay 24). In the Confessions, Augustine's quest is to fmd Heimat, a home where he can synchronize both being and place, a healing redemption that will unite his 153 fractured and fragmented self'.

Augustine's split subject is caused by his sin. defined as his turning away from

God, and healing unity is brought about by his return. He writes to God that, "[. . .] in all the regions where I thread my way, seeking your guidance, only in you did I find a safe haven for my mind, a gathering-place for my scattered parts, where no portion of me can depart from you [. . .I" (249). But yet even after his whole-hearted conversion. he writes:

But my heavy burden of distress drags me down again to earth. Again I

become prey to my habits. which hold me fast. [. . .] In this state Iam fit to

stay, unwilling though I am; in that other state where I wish to stay. I am

not fit to be, I have double cause for sorrow. (249)

Augustine is still split. haunted by sin and desiring grace. Realizing he will not find anything more than moments of unity in this life, his quest becomes unity in the next, in the pure grace of the Heaven of Heavens, his Utopia.

For Augustine, heaven is found in becoming both being and place. Heaven is described as an "intellectual creature" who experiences "rapture and joy" in its

"contemplation of God" (286). But as well as a creature eternally staring into the face of

God, it is also the place where God and his chosen can be -- His dwelling. Augustine writes:

How happy must this creature be, if such it is, constantly intent upon your

beatitude, forever possessed by you, forever bathed in your light! I can

think of no description better suited to the Heaven of Heavens, which

belongs to the Lord than to call it your dwelling which forever 154

contemplates the blessedness of God, never forsaking it for lesser things, a

pure mind at one and undivided in the sure and settled peace of the holy

spirits, the dwellers in your heavenly city far above our earthly heaven.

(28 7)

To achieve Heaven is both to become an eternal intellectual divine creature with access to and contemplating the mind of God and to become home, to synchronize being and place.

Utopia, the systematic good place, is removed to the no-place. In death. Augustine will finally come home. But in life, he must continue his quest for living in grace for the only way to enter Heaven is by following the narrow Christian path.

As mentioned earlier, The Prelude's form can also be divided into two parts: books 1-6 focus on telling the story of Wordsworth's life and his changing relationship to nature and the imagination, and books 7- 14, although referring to his life for concrete examples, focus on an explanation of how the human mind can transform the natural world in its own image. His central crisis and transformation from an appreciator of nature to a creator of nature is expressed metaphorically at the end of book 6 in the failed attempt at Mt. Blanc, and literally in book 1 1 when he describes himself after his involvement in the revolution. As it is for Augustine, writing autobiography is a way to heal the fractured subject. In book 1, he describes himself as he was immediately before he began The Prelude3 an old man wanting to write a "philosophic song / of truth that cherishes our daily life" (229-230), but paralysed by worry and doubt and passing his days "in contradiction" (235). What moves him past this fractured paralysis is the remembrance of the Denvent, the river that ran by his childhood home. He asks was it for 155 this end in disabling and paralysing contradiction that the river has followed him through life like music mixing with his thoughts to grant him soothing inspiration (269-281)?

Once more the river inspires and enables him. mends his contradictions by producing in him a sense of wholeness and connection of past and present from which he can move on to attempt his "philosophic song," "The Recluse."

However, as Abrams points out, although Wordsworth appropriates the form of the confession, he radically alters it, converting it to "secular and humanistic terms"

("Prelude" 256). Abrams remarks, "Its religion [. . .] is not an inherited creed, not even a religion of Nature, but rather a hith in the redeeming power of the 'mind of man' which. the closing lines declare, compared with the unchanging earth is 'In beauty exalted. as it is itself / Of quality and fabric more divine"' ("Prelude" 256). Not content with the submissive Christian subject position and waiting for death to deliver him to the good place, Wordsworth desires heaven on earth and creates it by subliming the subject, placing the mind of man in the centre and reflecting it on the landscape on all sides -- becoming, like Augustine's heaven, both being and place. As such, his sin is not necessarily the sin of turning from the Christian path, but in turning away from the imagination. He writes in book 14 that what causes his "lapse" (137) is in "bow[ing] down the soul I Under a growing weight of vulgar sense" and his redemption is found in the realization that "By love subsists i All lasting grandeur, by pervading love; / That gone, we are as dust [. . .I" (168 - 170). Wordsworth's redemption is found in a unified quadruple interpellation imposed on reality to create the illusion of universal unity. His redeemed subject finds disalienation in interpellation with others like himself, romantic 156 poets. Prophets of Nature. Heaven for Wordsworth and others like him is found in re- scripting the world to reflect their ideological "Faith in life endless, the sustaining thought

Of human Being, Eternity and God" (14.204-205). But although Wordsworth also attempts to interpellate with "rustics" (Abrams "Romantic" lo), they can not find grace. but instead become the ideal of how to sublime fear and suffering. For those less fortunate who must remain in "servitude," "ignominy," and "shame" (14.437-438) redemption and release is still found in passive Christian suffering and waiting to be saved.

Brand's autobiographical portions of her text can also be said to be divided into two sections: her poem "No Language Is Neutral" corresponding to her telling of her fragmented life and "Hard Against the Soul" demonstrating her release to another place.

Her crisis takes place on the beach at the end of 'Wo Language Is Neutral." Like

Wordsworth's precipice, this is a place she must return to and re-present after she has learned how the imagination can alter reality, after she realizes no language is neutral. For her as well, writing is a way to heal the split subject, to make bread out of stone. As a

Black lesbian, she is placed on the contact zone, a fracturing marginal space absent of grace. Her split is magnified by her being drawn away from the love and community of the island by the "signal" that turns her eyes "against" the water (22). And redemption is found with her turning inwards, tovVr.wdsher own centre, when, as with Wordsworth, she finds specular interpellation with another like herself - locating her utopia in this place, not in the no-place. Like Wordsworth, she navigates her utopian space. Unable to accept the glorification of Christian suffering, the idealization of the strong black woman on the 157 contact zone waiting for divine intervention. Brand intervenes in the divine. Through her writing, she voices grace from beneath her radical utopian politic, altering the reproduction of the relations of production and revealing the lie of hegemonic unity that in part has been created and maintained by Paul's, Augustine's and Wordsworth's confessional texts.

St. Paul preaches to the Athenians that it is in God that "we live, and move. and have our being" (Acts 1798). Augustine, modelling his spiritual confession after the conversion of St. Paul, repeats these words (146). Augustine will find complete redemption and authenticity inlas the landscape of heaven, God's dwelling. Here, he will become both being and place. Thirteen hundred years later. Wordsworth. radically altering the spiritual confession, echoes St. Paul (Abrams "Preface" 160) when he writes that producing pleasure in poetry, producing "an acknowledgement of the beauty of the universe," as opposed to the sublime, is "homage paid" to ''the grand elementary principle of pleasure, by which [man]knows, and feels, and lives, and moves" ("Preface" 170).

Man becomes both being and place, finds utopia, not in God or in heaven, but in his own creative mind. Wordsworth realizes that man has an imaginary relationship to the real but in his synthesis of the dialectic on the side of beauty (pleasure), denying the sublime, what he does not recognize is his place in the liberal humanist ideology of his time, the effect of his cultural moment on his representation of the world -- thus the contradictory assertions that man can re-create paradise but must wait for divine intervention. In 1970,

Louis Althusser also appropriates St. Paul, asserting that it is in ideology "that we 'live, move and have our being"' j 16 1). In other words, we become both being and place within 158 the highly restrictive ideological representation of our imaginary relationship to the real.

However. although Althusser grants a certain freedom to the subject by conceding ideology is heteroglot and contradictory, his own world view remains universal. ending in the concept of universal recognition and his absolute guarantee.

In Demand the Impossible, Tom Moy Ian never paraphrases St. Paul but he does echo Althusser when he argues that the individual "live[s] and carr[ies] out the needs of his or her class" in ideology (18- 19). Unlike Althusser, however, Moylan goes on to explain how the form of utopia is a way to voice the cultural unconscious within the restrictive ideology of the present cultural moment. Moylan argues that to see history and subjectivity anew. we need radical alternative narratives, we need science fiction, utopia and magic realism with their alternate ideologemes. Speaking of critical utopias, Moylan writes, "[. . .] these texts reject the metaphysical structuring of reality that restricts perception and activity by excluding the negative and the marginal. In the critical utopia, the margins are brought back into the historical situation [. . .] once included the contradictions must be faced, the struggle cannot be avoided (2 1 1). Utopia, even though it is an extension of the social and political real, is also part of the fantastic, non-realist mode because of its use of estrangement (Moylan 32). Utopian estrangement displaces reality to another world, another time, and/or another zone in a way that sheds light on its inverted cultural moment. Utopia is both real and unreal and it is because of the element of the unreal that utopia can be enlisted to express the unconscious, what is left out of strictly realist genres, and it is because of the element of the real that utopia can speak of the unconscious within the cultural moment. Utopia draws the unconscious into area B. 159

Moylan argues that as a fantastic rather than a realistic form, utopia falls under

Northrop Frye's general paradigm of the romance. Quoting Fredric Jameson. Moylan writes, "Free from narrative homogeneity and 'that reality principle to which a now oppressive realistic representation is the hostage,' romance in twentieth-century writing again offers *the possibility of sensing other historical rhythms, and of demonic or

Utopian transformations of a real now unshakably set in place"' (3 1 ). The mode of the romance is "centred around a process ofwish-hlfilment or utopian fantasy that aims at a displacement and transfiguration of the given historical world in such a tvay as to revive the conditions of a lost paradise or to anticipate a hture kingdom in which suffering and limitations have been effaced" (3 1). Moylan draws on how Jack Zipes explains the operation of estrangement in terms of Freud's uncanny. Freud defines the uncanny as

"something which is familiar and old-established in the mind and which has become alienated from it only through the process of repression" (Moylan 34). According to

Moylan, the act of reading a text in the fantastic mode is:

[. . .I an uncanny experience in that it separates the reader from the

restrictions of reality and makes the repressed unfamiliar familiar again.

An estrangement fiorn the known world results from the uncanny feeling,

the recognition of suppressed human fulfilment, that is both frightening

and comforting. This echoes Frye's sense of the romance as a meditation

on the cyclic confrontation of good and evil, or in more general and less

moral terms of that which is narrow and limiting against what is expansive

and emancipating. (34) 160

The romance or the fantastic, and in particular the utopia, "focuses on a quest for what has been repressed or denied, for Heimat, as Emst Bloch puts it - that sense of home which includes happiness and fulfilment and which the human collectivity has never known" (34). Hence, utopian texts, as part of the romantic mode, have the ability to delineate a vision of a better world, as we11 as deliver the sense that the cultural moment is not a fixed singular reality. This voicing of what has been silenced becomes more than an individual voice because of its power to disrupt. In the romantic mode. the literary fblfilment of the utopian desire creates an estrangement of the real world, exhibiting the world's invertedness and creating an alternate ideologeme, and perhaps an education of desire for the reader. Through estrangement. the romantic mode and utopia in particular can voice alternate desires than those which support hegemony.

Following his idealism, Moylan asserts. "The operation of the uncanny, of estrangement, in the fantastic genres opens readers up to what Freud calls 'unfulfilled but possible futures to which we still like to cling in fantasy, all the strivings of the ego which adverse circumstances have crushed, and all our suppressed acts of volition which nourish the illusion of 'Free Will"' (35). He calls utopia a "dreaming ahead" a "fonvard pulling vision" (35). Brand, however, like the romantic poets, believes that utopia can be reached in the here and now by adhering to an alternate world view and synchronizing it with reality to create a self-referential landscape. Yes, utopia can bring about the realization that the human race is not now "home," but rather than leaving us stranded with that realization, it can also voice the repressed and silenced in a way that can bring us home, can unalienate us and bring us closer to a sense of authenticity. For Brand, it is 161 in her radical political utopia that she becomes both being and place, that she can live and move and have her being. ENDNOTES

I. In "After Modernism: Alternative Voices in the Writings of Dionne Brand, Claire Harris and Marlene Philip." Lynette Hunter shares Claire Harris' viewpoint that what has been silenced must be voiced. But Hunter differentiates her theory of subjectivity from Harris' seemingly essentialist authentic self by using the term "authentic voice." This distinction is important because whereas Harris argues for a subjectivity and community that exist outside of and need to be represented within hegemonic discourse and ideology. Hunter is advocating a subjectivity and community formed in its response to social reality. in flux around reality. She writes that "... the stance taken up by these writers acts towards the possibility of writing by interacting with an audience, constructing a stance out of its social immediacy and historical need. The stance outlines a different kind of community, not working from conventionally accepted grounds. but a community anchored as such by actual social problems. and hence a community that will necessarily change" (257). And later: "[. . .] 'authentic voice' is a way of describing the necessarily different self that emerges from the discussions. decisions, and actions instigated by addressing social realities and the communities that form in response to those realities" (258). Reintroducing history and social reality back into discourse, Hunter creates this "responsive stance" in order to avoid "corporate habituation" (258).However. there is a difference between convention and hegemonic convention. By arguing that Brand, Philip and Harris do not work from conventionally accepted grounds but are grounded in a reactionary relationship to social problems, Hunter is essentially arguing that these sitbjectivities and communities have no reality outside of hegemonic social reality, outside of their marginal relationship to Area B.

3. Zackodnik puts forward that Brand writes this section in standard English yet locates it in Trinidad, thereby critiquing both English and Nation Language for silencing the Black woman ( 198).

3. Although in "The Preface to Lyrical Ballads" Wordsworth does argue for a shift in language to one that more resembles everyday speech and can more easily speak of his common experiences.

1. The connection between Henderson and Brand was brought to my attention by Zackodnik in "'I am Blackening in My Way' : Identity and Place in Dionne Brand's No Language Is Neutral." Zackodnik looks in detail at the interplay between English and Nation Language, asserting that Brand finds an empowering voice by engaging in "multiple dialogues and dialectics of identity' (207).

5. Rather than Wordsworth's subliming poet. we are left with Shelley's image of the poet in "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty." Here the spirit of Beauty floats through the world on an "inconstant wing" and her follower, who has vowed to dedicate his powers to her so that she "wouldst fieel This world from its dark slavery" (690), fmds in his later years that universal freedom has not yet happened and instead settles for a prayer for individual unity, calmness and love of all humankind. The poet redeemer is left with chiliastic moments of fulfilment, but also with deep moments of despair. Like Christ on the cross, he asks of Beauty, '%here art thou gone?" (689). The poet's redeeming power of the Holy Spirit is replaced once more with a Christian ideologeme of submission to and of passive waiting for destiny, the co-opted utopian end result of the liberal humanist always already. but in the process. the ideology of ideology, the contradictory concept that the wish guides the will. has been established. The romantic subject believes he is in charge of his actions, can produce paradise. yet must wait for progress, for destiny.

6. H. Nigel Thorns speaks of capitalist neo-colonialism in the Caribbean and its relation to sugar. He writes to the people of Grenada that. "[. . .] your labour had to profit the American banks. fanners and manufacturing companies. Like the sugar you produce. they refine and sell back to you" (59). Although slavery has ended, this alternate form of colonialism results in the same withholding and refining of grace and redemption.

7. Brand is echoing the converted St. Paul who begins every statement with the blessing "Grace."

8. Kathleen Renk notes that "Brand's style [. . .] draws heavily on a woman's storytelling tradition to begin to refashion worlds disfigured by colonialism and neocolonialism" (98). This never- ending, unsilencable tradition "flows like a stream, with no beginning and no end." conjuring up stories that "destroy and "illumine colonial discourses" ( 100).

9. This river resembles the river Arve in Shelley's "Mont Blanc." Shelley depicts the Arve rumbling down from its concealed and my sterioiis source "in tumult welling" destroying everything in its path ( 122). Yet, this river, although destructive in Shelley's location, is also a life giving force to those far away, "the breath and blood of distant lands" (688). The Awe, like the river Pilate/Mitan has the power to be both destructive and life giving, to be both sublime and beautiful, depending on the subject's relative position to it. He writes. "The wilderness has a mysterious tongue 1 Which teaches awhl doubt, or faith so mild [. . .]" (76-79). Nature here is neutral, doubt or faith created instead out of the human mind and reflected in its translation of nature's mysterious tongue.

10. As Himani Bannerji points out, the poem "Amelia" in Brand's Chronicles of a Hostile Sun takes on the issues of Black women's existence in the Caribbean by depicting the details of Brand's and her grandmother's daily existence. "Amelia Still" is a continuation of the same theme.

1 I . Diana Brydon points out the multiple ways this line could be read, and that "[tlhe effect of such a line, however one decides to read it (and there seems to be no definitive reading), is to focus attention on the indefinite itself and to force consideration of a paradox: in what ways may an action be both deliberate and unintentional? The line pushes the reader into a mode of thinking beyorid dualities" (84). Abrarns, M.H, General Ed. The Norton Antholow of English Literature. 4th ed. Vol. 2.

New York: Norton and Company, 1979.

---.Introduction. "The Romantic Period." Abrams, Gen. Ed. 1-20.

---. Headnote. "Preface to Lyrical Ballads." Abrams, Gen. Ed. 159- 160.

---. Headnote. The Prelude or Growth of a Poet's Mind. Abrams, Gen. Ed. 35-36,

Althusser, Louis. "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses." Lenin and Philosophy

and other essavs Translated from the French by Ben Brewster. London. New Left

Books, 1971. 121-173.

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Map of Trinidad

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Source: "Trinidad and Tobago (Shaded Relict)." Maps of the Americas: The Penv- Castaiieda Library Map Collection. Produced by the US Central Intelligence Agency, 1969. University of Texas, Austin, Texas. July 26,2000. .