Negotiating Identity in Diaspora: Memory and Belonging In

Negotiating Identity in Diaspora: Memory and Belonging in

Dionne Brand's Land to Light On andAustin Clarke's The Origin of Waves

Cheryl Elliot

A Thesis submitted to the Faculty of Graduate Studies of The University of Manitoba in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the degree of

MASTER OF ARTS

Department of English University of Manitoba Wiruripeg, Manitoba

November 16,2007

FACULTY OF GÌADUATE STUDIES

Negotiating Identify in Diaspora: Memory and Belonging in Dionne Brand's Lønd to Líght On and Austin Clarke's TIte Origin of llaves

Cheryl Elliot

A Thesis/Practicum submitted to the Faculty of Graduate Studies of The University of

Manitoba in partial fulfillment of the requirement of the degree

MASTER OF ARTS

Cheryl Elliot @2007

Permission has been granted to the University of Manitoba Libraries to lend a copy of this thesis/practicum, to Library and Archives Canada (LAC) to lend a copy of this thesis/practicum, and to LAC's agent (UMI/ProQuest) to microfÌlm, sell copies and to publish an abstract of this thesis/practicum.

This reproduction or copy of this thesis has been made available by authority of the copyright owner solely for the purpose of private study and research, and may only be reproduced and copied as permitted by copyright laws or with express written authorization from the copyright owner. TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowiedgements .....1

Dedication ,...11

Abstract

Chapter I: The Immigrant Writer's Landscape ...... 1

Chapter II: Colonial Haunting and Adrift in Diaspora ...... 24

Chapter III: Past Imperfect and Giving Up on Landing...... 49

Conclusion 76

Works Cited...... g1 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank my advisor Dr. Warren Cariou for his support, guidance, patience, and inspiration. I also applaud his sense of humour.

I would also like to thank my committee, Dr. Diana Brydon, Dr. V. Ravindiran, and Dr. Mark Libin for their encouragement and advice. DEDICATION

I dedicate this effort to my loving and patient life partner, Geoffrey, my children Rocky and Spencer, who revel in their hybridity, my late grandmother, Enid Applewhaite, a midwife, who "grew" me, and my mother, cyralene Gale, whose trailblazing accomplishments as journalist, politician and diplomat have been an inspiration. ABSTRACT

Inhabitants of contemporary diasporas may have no desire to return to a

homeland, but their experiences of displacement from their 'homes', and the memories they choose to carry with them help shape their identities in diaspora. This thesis will examine two texts of first-generation Caribbean Canadian writers, Austin Clarke and

Dionne Brand, to investigate how coming to terms with the memories of self and homeland is crucial in forging a place of belonging in diaspora. By analyzingClarke's

The Orígin of Waves and Brand' s Land to Light On, I will argue that while both authors approach negotiating diaspora differently, ultimately both challenge the notions of fixity of identity and belonging, while at the same time realizingdifferent outcomes. The study will show that although both texts advocate the fluidity, if not the rejection, of identity,

Brand responds to this notion by extending her work to a global perspective, whereas

Clark, in his text, appears to promote aretreaf.from the present as an approach to negotiating diaspora.

ilI Chapter I

The Immigrant Writer's Landscape

flJdentity is always a question of producing in thefuture an account of the past, that is to say it is always about narrative, the stories which cultures tell themselves about who they are and where they came from.

Stuart Hall "Negotiating Caribbean ldentities" (3)

Writers inhabiting Canada's recent diasporas are emerging as a significant force on its contemporary literary landscape. Among those writers are migrants from the former British colonies in the Caribbean, who have been settling in Canada since the mid-1950s. Their distinctly postcolonial writings not only reflect experiences of the

Caribbean diaspora, at times in tandem with colonial experiences of home, but also provide a gauge of how inhabitants of diaspora negotiate identity as they situate themselves within a Canadian context. Although not unique, the Caribbean diaspora is complicated by its inhabitants' histories and ethnic diversity, and it is from this background that I explore how Caribbean Canadian writers draw on memory of their homelands to locate their place and identity within their host country. In keeping with

Stuart Hall's epigraph, I agree that the narratives of a culture are the best places to look when defining a people. Furthermore, I propose that Wendy W. Walters' contention that "diasporic identity is performed in writing" (viii), and that it is "more than a literary

performance; it is [...] a political act" (ix) is confirmed in the ways Caribbean Canadian

writers depict experiences of diaspora and home that expose fissures in the social and

political fabrics of both places. Hall's and Walters' claims are the point of departure for

my thesis that examines two texts by first-generation Caribbean Canadian writers, Austin

Clarke and Dionne Brand, to investigate how coming to terms with the memories of self

and homeland is crucial in forging aplace of belonging in diaspora. By analyzing and

comparing Clarke's The Origin of lhavest and Brand' s Land to Light On2,Iwill argue

that while the authors approach negotiating diaspora differently, ultimately both

challenge the notions of fixity of identity and belonging, while at the same time realizing

different outcomes. The study will show that Brand's text advocates fluidity, if not

rejection, of identity that moves her characters beyond the local to a more global

perspective in negotiating diaspora. In contrast, Clarke, whose text also resists stability

of identity, appears content to promote a retreat from the present, and, as a result, leaves

his characters in diasporic limbo.

Caribbean Diasporic Writing

Since the middle of the last century Caribbean immigrants have been streaming

into Canada carcying not only their material possessions, but also armed with

experiences, traditions, and history that fashioned their lives in the places they lived

before. But once they arrive, what of their life in the host country? How do these

immigrants participate fully and develop a sense of belonging in their new setting?

I The Origin of Ll/aves will be referred to as I4/øves in the thesis. ' Lqnd to Light On will be referred to as Land in the thesis. Furthermore, who do they become when they venture into diaspora, an imagined

place/space with its elastic and porous cultural, social, and political boundaries? Turning

to Caribbean Canadian literature is helpful in tackling these questions because it presents

the Canadian experiences of Caribbean immigrants through their unique lens. By reading

through Brand's and Clarke's chatacters, I will examine these questions to uncover how

Caribbean immigrants struggle to construct an identity and a sense of belonging, while, at

the same time, coping with constraints of imposed identification by the host country and

their diaspora. However, it is important to recognize that Caribbean immigrants are

already practiced at grappling with identity in diasporas back home. A Caribbean identity

has always been difficult to articulate because the region resists categorization and

containment as a result of its legacy of slavery and history of migration. Indeed, Stuart

Hall, in his discussion of the Caribbean and cultural identity, speaks of the.,rift of

separation", and the 'loss of identity' [resulting from slavery] which has been integral to

the Caribbean experience" (Colonial Discourse 394). Critic Carole Boyce Davies adds to

this discourse when she characterizes Caribbean identities as "products of numerous

processes of migration" (13). She suggests that the region is often seen as "not so much a

geographical location, but a cultural construction based on a series of mixtures,

languages, communities of people" (13). consequently, caribbean immigrants, who are

already dealing with the quandary of identity back home, are faced with a similar

dilemma when they arrive in Canada. But as Brand observes, "There is something distinctly Canadian about trying to focus on an identity or a place which would describe where we live and who we are" (Austin Clarke Reader l4). Despite Brand,s allusion to a common Canadian focus of identity, this study will show that Caribbean immigrants seeking their place/space in Canada face ethnic, racist, and gender hurdles, as well as

government policies and programs that are geared to encouraging immigrants to retain

their cultural heritage.

Brand's Land to Líght On and Clarke's The Origin of Waves, both published in

1997 , ate representative of a body of late twentieth-century Caribbean Canadian

immigrant literature that critiques colonialism, identity, racism, sexism, and sexuality at

home and in diaspora. Although both Brand and Clarke employ memories of home

alongside experiences in diaspora to explore identity formation, nevertheless, the writers

engage diaspora and home differently. Brand's engagement with landscape, women,s

lives, and language in her poetry questions the stability of identity and underscores the

role of patriarchal systems in Canada and at home in shaping women's lives. On the

other hand, Clarke's narrative meanders in step with the reminiscences of his main

characters, Tim and John, to expose the indelible mark left by the British in the colonies.

It is a mark that is diffrcult for Clarke's characters to erase and leaves them poised in a

state of in-betweeness even as old men.

The different approaches of the authors, influenced by the particularities within

their similar backgrounds, explained below, are significant in exposing the heterogeneity

of diasporas in their texts. Brand and Clarke, like many labeled "Caribbean wïiters",

write out of diaspora. Both Toronto-based authors were influenced by the Civil Rights

and Black Arts movements in the United States and are well-known for their political

activism. Although their works are politically charged in their representations of home

and diasporic life in Canada, Brand and Clarke write from different political and generational standpoints, which may account for the different approaches in their texts. I

4 believe that gender and sexualify are important factors to consider when explicating their

work.

Fifteen years separated Clarke's and Brand's ar¡ival in Canada. Clarke was just

twenty-one when he moved to Canada from Barbados in 1955 to pursue undergraduate

studies. He settled in Toronto at a time when the majority of immigrants coming to

Canada from the Caribbean were domestics. Later, Clarke witnessed the arrival of

significant waves of Caribbean people who began settling in Canada during the 1960s

and 1970s after new immigration legislation opened the doors wider to immigration from

the Caribbean. During that period, Clarke worked as a joumalist and became a political

voice for the plight of immigrants. Since 1964,he has chronicled the lives of Caribbean

immigrants living in Toronto, in particular, male experiences, but he has also stayed close

to 'home' by writing his memoirs as well as satire on contemporary political life in

Barbados.

Brand, on the other hand, was part of those later immigrant waves coming from

the Caribbean. She migrated to Toronto in1970 from Trinidad and Tobago at the age of join seventeen to her family and, like Clarke, pursued a university education. Brand, a

lesbian and Marxist, is active in many immigrant and women's causes in Toronto and this

reflects in her work which often centres on immigrant women's issues, gender, and

sexuality. Her numerous works of poetry, fiction, essays, and f,rlm, interrogate the immigrant experience in Canada juxtaposed with recollections of Trinidad and allusions to Africa. In Land, Brand reaches beyond this genre to examine the interconnectedness of issues between countries, diasporas, and their histories. In the rest of this chapter, I will examine theory and criticism of the contemporary

concept of the term 'diaspora' to illustrate what is at stake in trying to characterize a

Caribbean diaspora in Canada. From this analysis, I will propose a working definition of

diaspora that will provide a context to situate the two texts under discussion. For it is

diaspora where Brand and Clarke have created their works and where their characters mediate identity. Moreover, the crux of both Land and Waves explores the dynamics of

displacement in diaspora, vis-à-vis immigrants' relationships with home, inter-and intra- diaspora, as well as the expectations of both the immigrants and the host country. Part of these expectations is embodied in multiculturalism, another significant environmental influence that colours the writings of Brand and Clarke. I will consider the impact of

Canada's immigration and multiculturalism policies on the anival and settlement of caribbean people. In particular, I will examine what role, if any, these policy interventions have played in the political and social landscape that informs diasporic cultural production and, in tum, shapes Caribbean diasporic writing. This background helps clarify how Brand and Clarke unsettle diaspora in their narratives, especially by writing about failed relationships among diasporians that call into question the viability of multiculturalism and hybridity.

Diaspora: Towards a Definition

In the wake of globalization, the term diaspora has emerged as a prominent signifier of the nebulous boundaries of nations and identities today. As the dynamics and significance ofdiaspora have evolved, there has been an effort by scholars to find consensus in a comprehensive definition of the term whose meaning keeps expanding with new complexities. The term has long been linked with globally displaced and

dispersed populations of Greeks, Jews, and Armenians, but as Hall maintains, diaspora no

longer refers "to those scattered tribes whose identity can only be secured in relation to

some sacred homeland" (Colonial Discourse 401). Instead, he believes it is ..def,rned ...

by the recognition of a necessary heterogeneity and diversity; by a conception of

'identity' which lives with and through, not despite, difference; by hybridíty,, (402).

Consequently, the term diaspora is now used to characte rize the populations of any

number of nationalities or groups that reside outside of their homelands. As well, Hall provides a broader interpretation of the term that moves away from the notion of

essentialism of identity as a necessary component and, instead, asserts that traces of home

in memory are reconstituted with influences of the immigrant's host country in

negotiating identity in diaspora. The act of reconstructing memory opens a new space for

constructing an identity that relates to, but is separate from, home and nation/host

country.

In his discourse on diaspora, James Clifford also supports expansion and greater

flexibility in the parameters that have traditionally def,rned the term. Although Clifford

does not believe that diaspora can be "sharply" (3 10) def,rned, he offers a view ofhow

diaspora may be envisioned. He posits diaspora as a signifier, .,not simply of transnationality and movement, but of political struggles to define the local, as a distinctive community, in historical contexts of displacement" (308). Clifford,s argument complements Walter's assertion that diasporic writing is a "politic al act, (xi). We see this in Land when the sexually-charged verbal abuse hurled at the narrator by the truck driver illustrates the political struggles within diaspora, but neither Brand's nor Clarke's naratives purport fhat"a distinctive community" should result from these struggles.

Clifford takes the position that in diaspora the "sense" (3 10) of a connection between

displaced people and their former home "must be strong enough to resist erasure through

the normalizing processes of forgetting, assimilating, and distancing" (310). But he also

argues that "[whether] the national narrative is one of common origins or of gathered

populations, it cannot assimilate groups that maintain important allegiances and practical

connections to a homeland or dispersed communities located elsewhere" (307). He

suggests that immigrants' resistance to erasure is an action taken from within diaspora.

Certainly, in Lflaves, we observe Tim and John clinging to their memories to the

detriment of their assimilation. Nevertheless, Clifford's analysis does not take into

account the possibility of extemal coercion at the site of diaspora to maintain the

'connection' (310) by means of government intervention through policies such as

multiculturalism that promote celebration of cultural diversity and may inadvertently

promote the maintaining of allegiances with homelands. Brand's writings demonstrate a

conflict with multiculturalism because of the idea that it promotes a collective identity

constructed on difference. Instead, her work stresses the commonalities of people across

diasporas through her focus on poverty, gender issues, and racism.

Edward Said puts forward another viewpoint on the intellectual in exile that

illustrates Clifford's point on the relationship between homeland allegiances and

assimilation in diaspora. He helps situate why ties with homeland are sometimes diffrcult to sever, stating that it is a "mistaken assumption" (Reader 370) that exiles are .,totally cut off' (370) from their place of origin. He points out that the difficulty for exiles is being reminded that "home is not . . . far away, and that the normal traffic of everyday contemporary life keeps [exiles] in constant but tantalizing and unfulfilled touch with the

old place" (370). Said touches on the impact of technology on the temporality and

spaciality of contemporary diaspora. Lengthy displacements in diaspora, rather than

diminishing the attachment, sometimes foster nostalgia for home instead. Recent

developments in communications technology create seamless, virtual access to distant

homes. This immediate access may undermine a desire to return home or assess identity,

and therefore lessen the need to reconstitute stale memories. The generational difference

in Brand's and Clarke's chatacters illustrates this point. Tim's and John's memories are

at times indistinguishable from the present. They have no desire to return home because

home, as their memories retain it, no longer exists. They are out of touch with home.

Brand's narrator, who is younger, has little nostalgia for home. Could it be that home is

no longer far away? It is within reach, and memories are kept fresh.

Said's opinion of the intellectual in exile is helpful in understanding Brand's and

Clarke's roles as writers in diaspora. He contends that "[t]he intellectual who considers

him or herself to be part of a more general condition affecting the displaced national

community is therefore likely to be a source, not of acculturation and adjustment, but

rather of volatility and instability" (370). Said's statement helps us understand Brand,s

Land which raises troubling questions that extend beyond the local constituency of the

Caribbean diaspora to Canada's broader relationship with its immigrant community. As a recognized intellectual, Brand commands a platform which she uses to advocate her political agenda. Clarke wields similar influence, and both are capable of falling into what Said cautions is a "state of in-betweeness [that] can itself become a rigid ideological position" (377) in their work. The state of ambivalence Clarke stages in Waves results in inertia and his characters never move forward. But Brand's unhinging of identity risks

diminishing personal history.

Importantly, Said does not propose a definition of diaspora, which I believe

underlines the malleable scope of the term and the diffrculty in pinning it down.

Contemporary diasporas resist rigid definition because of the diverse characteristics of

immigrants who are instrumental in shaping them. Myria Georgiou adds to Said,s

discourse in her discussion of diaspora, identity, and the media. She argues:

The variety of diasporic cultural formations and spatial connections shows how diasporas are not bound in just one, stable and exclusive place, just one imagined community, but they are actually parts of various networks and communities while relating to at least two nation (-states) - the one of their origin and the one of their settlement. (4)

Georgiou expands these connections into the realm of current technology and

consequently broadens the term diaspora to include virtual membership that is located in

cyberspace. Meanwhile, she sees the diasporic condition shifting "and centrality of the

nation-state and the homeland being challenged" (49). The advent of virtual diasporas

will encourage multiple belongings and identities. This could cause fragmentation of

allegiance and undermine the authority of nation-state and the homeland. Brand's

narrator makes this shift when she gives up on f,rnding land to light on, both at home, and

in Canada, and instead, takes on a global persona.

Even though there are colrunonalities among the components typically identified

in defining diaspora, it is clear that it is challenging to construct an encompassing

definition or one that would remain static. Any diaspora is contingent on the history of those who live in it. The reception and influences of the host societies and govemments on that diaspora are of equal importance. However, the notion of return, which was once

10 an essential element in defining diaspora, is no longer a priority. Advances in

communications technology and transportation, as well as their universal availability,

place real or imagined homelands in proximity to diaspora, making it easier to maintain

ties while lessening the risk of cultural erasure. At the same time, the concept of a diasporic collective identity is increasingly unsettled by transnational relationships that

develop between diasporas, creating new hybrid spaces and collapsing the notion of essentialism. From this broad definition of diaspora, I will examine a more specific

Caribbean diaspora.

Situating the Caribbean Diaspora

Caribbean people are characterizedby their historically migratory habits both

regionally and globally. However, to define a Caribbean diaspora is to imply the

subsuming of multi-ethnic and multi-racial groups under one umbrella, and the

recognition that Caribbean people live in diaspora at home in the Caribbean even before

they resettle, this time voluntarily, in new locations. Robin Cohen argues that the

Caribbean diaspora (beyond the Caribbean) is a cultural diaspora, but it is also part of three other diasporas, which he labels as the African victim diaspora, the Indian labour diaspora, and the European imperial diaspora. cohen's list is by no means demographically complete as it does not include the influx of other nationalities such as

Jews, who first settled in Barbados in 1628, and Chinese, and Arabs, who arrived much later. Because this thesis addresses Caribbean people of African descent, any discussion of the black Caribbean diaspora should acknowledge its connection with the African diasporas, as well as other waves of dispersals.

11 According to Cohen, the African diaspora did not commence with the advent of

transatlantic slavery; instead it has been "a prolonged affair" (33) with a slave trade and

forced migration starting during the seventh and eighth centuries (34). However, the

term 'diaspora' was not used to refer to the displaced people or immigrants of African

descent until the mid- 1 950s or I 960s. (3 1). The notion of a diaspora for black people

came directly out of Pan-Africanism, a movement in the United States associated with

,.a w.E.B. Du Bois that is described by Brent Hayes Edwards as discourse of

intemationalism aimed generally at the cultural and political coordination of the interests

of [black] peoples around the world" (46). Cohen writes that Du Bois "expressed two

desiderata of a diaspo ra - that there should be a sense of empathy and solidarity with co-

ethnic members worldwide and that there should be a sense of distinctiveness, a com.mon

history and the belief in a common fate,, (41).

However, according to Edwards, American historian George Shepperson was the

person first "credited with introducing the notion of 'diaspora' when he delivered a paper

in October 1965 called "The African Abroad or the African Diaspora" (51). Shepperson describes the African diaspora as "adhering to many of the elements considered to be common to the three "classic" diasporas (the Jewish, the Greek and the Armenian),,

(Edwards 52), including"areal or imagined relationship to a.,homeland,', mediated through the dynamics of collective memory and the politics of 'return"' (52). Edwards writes that Shepperson invokes this term to revise "'isolationist' (D, 173) and,restrictive trends in African historiography" (52). Specifically, Edwards contends that.,African diaspora" is formulated expressly through an attempt to come to terms with diverse and cross-fertilizedblacktraditions of resistance and anticolonialism" (53). Du Bois' notion

t2 of diaspora appears more conciliatory than Shepperson's with its gesture to empathy and

solidarity. But Du Bois' elements of distinctiveness, coûrmon history and belief in a common fate presupposes an essentializingof African identity. Shepperson,s notion of diaspora calls for recognizing the diversity and hybridization of black resistance. His

approach recognizes the heterogeneity of black people and is more in step with the

contemporary thinking of diaspora.

Black Caribbean people can assert membership in the African diaspora, but any attempt to retrieve an identity, in the belief that its essence originates in Africa, will prove

elusive' Hall acknowledges that essence and fixity are important foci in the discourse of

identity and that in a world of mobile histories and peoples, there is an assumption that

"somewhere down there is a throbbing culture to which we all belong,, (Negotiating 2).

Even so, the search for identity, Hall maintains, is "problem atic" (2)because if identity is

contingent on establishing origins, "it is impossible to locate in the Caribbean an origin for its people" (2)' Indeed, few members of the indigenous communities in the area

survived their encounter with the Europeans, and in the contemporary Caribbean, Hall admits:

Not a single Caribbean island looks like any other in terms of its ethnic composition, including the different genetic and physical features and characteristics of the people. And that is before you start to touch the question of different languages, different culturaitraditions, which reflect the different colonizing cultures. (3)

It is from this perspective that Hall claims that "[t]he Caribbean is the first, the original

and the purest diaspora (3), a statement that conflicts with his earlier statement in this

chapter that aligns diaspora with hybridity and, hence, discounts essentialism. Clearly, the people of the Caribbean all hail from elsewhere, but Hall's descriptors, namely

13 "first," "original", and "purest" ate impossible to verify. He also argues that because

Caribbean people live in diaspora at home, they are "twice diasporized,, (3) when they

migrate and settle in new locations.

One of the tragedies of the Middle Passage is that black Caribbean people lost their linguistic and tribal groups. other diasporic groups in the Caribbean differ from Caribbean people of African descent because they are able to trace their point of

departure and are able to maintain their original religions and culture. Likewise, the

European colonizers also managed to preserve their traditions and customs by creating

and retaining .,with a "fossilized replica', Qrlegotiating 5) of home, the usual colonial cultural lag" (5). Hall's point resonates with Waves where Tim and John also appropriate

the 'fossilized' teplicas of the British in their memories. The involuntary split from

Africa resulted in black Caribbean people being forced to give up their native languages

and to adopt English, which Kamau Brathwaite labels "nation language,, and describes as based on an oral tradition (I9) and "the language ofslaves and labourers...(5). Except for remnants of African culture that they were able to retain, the culture of the black

Caribbean initially was influenced solely by the colonizers and later by other settler groups. Yet Hall believes there was a "retention of cultural traits from Africa. . . [n]ot intact, never pure' never untouched by the culture of Victorian and pre-Victorian English society' (Negotiating .." 5). As a result, Caribbean blacks exist in the state of double consciousness living in their unfixed composite culture while negotiating the European culture of the colonizers. Hall contends that, "For wherever one finds diasporas, one always finds precisely those complicated processes of negotiation and transculturation which characterize Caribbean culture,' (4).

14 Mary Chamberlain maintains that "for all the diversity which eventually emerged

in the histories and cultures of those islands, there was a coÍìmonality in the potential of the far horizon" (4). Caribbean people continue to migrate today,establishing diasporas globally. When they resettle in new countries, this time voluntarily, they are considered

doubly-diaspored and are already versed in the double consciousness necessary to

negotiate day-to-day living in societies where they are not the dominant power. This negotiation is crucial in determining how Caribbean immigrants construct identity in

diaspora, but it remains complicated, as Brand and Clarke illustrate in their texts, by the

Caribbean's historical ties to Africa and Europe, and the expectations and policies of the

host country.

Canadian Multiculturalism and Identity Formation

The survey that follows will explore the intent of multiculturalism, and the role it plays in diasporic identity formation. For peoples of the Caribbean, identity, complicated by race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality, and a lack of definable history, is a salient issue even before leaving their homeland. Settling in a new country with an enshrined policy of multiculturalism that readily provides fixed places in the margins for immigrants, makes it more difflrcult for immigrants to have a sense of belonging to their hostland. Rather than promoting integration based on personal determination, instead, multiculturalism appears to promote the idea of an essential identity that is fixed and therefore easily categorized. Indeed, scholars differ on the need for and contributions of state-imposed multiculturalism policies and their usefulness to the immigrants these policies are ostensibly designed to help. However, it is the notion of maintaining or

l5 assuming an "identity" within a host nation that seems to be the most troubling issue in

Land and Waves.

Historically, immigration has often been linked with the discussion of identity.

Not only has there been a concem about immigrants' identities before they gain entry to

Canada, but also, once here, there is additional concern about who they become. Being

'Canadian' never seems to be quite enough. Richard J.F.Day points out that immigrants

of the early twentieth century, "fo]bsessively marked out as distinct from canonical

Canadian society,..., appeared to have precisely what those who would administer and

assimilate them lacked - an identity" (145). But that identity was mostly European, in

keeping with the majority who had earlier colonized Canada,and as Day infers, easier to

"manage" (3) by the state than immigrants who arrived when Canadaopened its doors to

diversity in the 1960s. Day associates identity with homogeneity, and suggests that

homogeneity is a desirable quality in a people who need to be controlled when he infers

that minority immigrants require more effort by the state to be managed.

The 1952Immigration Act allowed "individuals to be barred based on ethnic

aff,rliation" (Gregg 44) and was driven by "country of origin quotas" (44). In 1967 a

points system replaced the country-of-origin quotas, and this resulted in the influx of a

new type of immigrant. Immigration from the Caribbean, according to Allan Gregg of the Strategic Counsel, "ballooned from 46,000 and 3 percent of the total (many of whom were white) in the 1960s to nearly 160,000 and 11 percent in the i970s (almost all of whom were black)" (44). The defining identity of today's new immigrants from the

Caribbean is their visible difference from the majority of Canada's population. Unlike other non-white immigrants, Caribbean immigrants do not come armed with a definable

t6 culture. Instead, they possess an ethnicity that has accommodated and appropriated many

cultures' as well as comrpted and absorbed the European cultural 'ideal' of their former

colonial masters- Consequently, a policy that categorizes immigrants' identities under

specified umbrellas seems incompatible with this new group of immigrants who have a

background of accommodating other cultures. One of the "necessary affirmations,,(12)

of Canadian multiculturalism that Day outlines is that it must "openly admit and orient to ,full the impossibility of full identity" (12). What is not clear is what is a identity,? Day

seems to be suggesting that a defined Canadian identity exists before immigrants arrive

and remains in place as they seek membership.

Will Kymlicka states that until the 1960s, "immigrants were expected to

assimilate" (153). However, from the 1970s, Canada, as well as the United States and

Australia, "adopted more tolerant and pluralistic policies that allow and indeed encourage

immigrants to maintain various aspects of their ethnic heritage" (154). In I97I, Canada

went a step further, and was the first country to offlrcially adopt a multiculturalism policy

at the national level and signaled the first changes in its traditional integrationist practice.

Seventeen years later, in 1988, the Canadian Multiculturalism Act was passed in both

Houses of Parliament. Canadian Heritage furnishes a definition of Canadian multiculturalism that states it "ensures that all citizens keep their identities, can take pride in their ancestry and have a sense of belonging" (Canadian Heritage, l) which seems to encourage immigrants to consciously maintain their particular ethnic identity.

Consistent with this reality, Kymlicka contends that "many people worry that

[the] historic pattern of successful integration is in jeopardy" (i53) and fears this will lead to the ghettoizationof immigrants that may result in a 'balkanized' society (153).

t7 There is also concem, according to Kymlick a, thatimmigrants are "less able or willing to

integrate than earlier waves of immigrants" and some people blame govemment

multiculturalism policies for "discouraging immigrants from integrating... [and]

encouraging'ethnic separatism,', ( 1 53).

Kymlicka concedes racism is a stumbling block in achieving integration and

cohesiveness, especially for blacks. He states that blacks in Canada, particularly

immigrants from the Caribbean who make up the largest group of blacks in Canada today (186)' "face many barriers to integration not faced by other immigrants, including other

non-white immigrants" (178). Kymlicka lists the schools, courts and economy as areas

where racial bias exists and contends that blacks "have sought to avoid this racism by partially separating themselves from mainstream society. As a result, the potential for the

creation of a disaffected black subculture is a rear one" (17g). Kymlicka sees

fundamental racism in Canada today as "less white/non-white, and more white/black',

(189) and that acceptance in Canada today is not based on being white, but on not being

black.

It is this climate of intolerance that black Caribbean immigrants encounter and

negotiate to establish their identities on a daily basis in Canada. The federal government's

multicultural program which pursues goals of identity, social justice, and civic participation, while admirable in recognizing cultural diversity, may be perceived as patemalistic and also inadvertently fostering stereotyping and ghettoizing of immigrants.

In addition, the policy may be viewed as controlling and containing difference by supporting group classification and this could result in hindering rather than promoting integration. I believe that through their writings Caribbean immigrants relay the effects

18 of multiculturalism in their lives and subvert and counter goveffiment's encouragement to

hold on to their old identities by promoting the notion of unfixed and intersecting

identities and, hence, focusing attention on hybridity. As Day advocates, .,[i]nstead of

being wielded as a tool to build a pre-designed nation, the Canadian state's role would be

to create a space of free play" (225).

Writing in/out of Diaspora

Cultural production created in diaspora exemplifies how immigrants position

themselves in the host country socially and politically. Writing is often an accessible and

effective way for immigrants to communicate and assert their influence on diaspora and

nation. Ian Chambers notes language is "a means of cultural construction in which our

very selves and sense are constituted" (22). Accordingly, immigrant writers often focus

on identity construction in diaspora by incorporating home and contemporary experiences

in their "narratives of displacement" (Hall, Colonial Discourse,392). Anialoomba

contends that literature is "an important means of appropriating, inverting or challenging

dominant means of representation and colonial ideologies" (63). Chambers makes a

similar point when he asserts that, as a result of migrancy, the dominant language is

retooled for consumption as "fl]anguage is appropriated, taken apart,and then put back together with a new inflection, an unexpected accent, a fuither twist in the tale', (23). But even with this reconfiguration of the old, immigrant writings are often sidelined to the margins of national narratives. Nevertheless, Chambers sees the margins shifting to the centre when he posits that migrancy "disrupts and interrogates ...the nation and its literature, language and sense of identity" (23). This shift to the centre that Chambers

19 outlines indicates an adaptation rathe¡ than an adoption of the nation's narratives. I also consider this a movement towards breaking new ground in Canadian literature as Bra¡d

and clarke have shown in their works since writin g Land ond l|/aves.

Chambers' observations on language and migration are applicable to what,s

happening on Canada's literary landscape. Immigrant writers, such as Brand and Clarke,

are reshaping foundational narratives in their works. For example, Brand inverts Northrop Fry's idea of a garrison mentality in Land.In the process of articulating

diasporic experiences, these writers cross traditional boundaries both within and across diasporas. As Cyril Dabydeen notes, a range of Canadian Caribbean writers is .,sustaining

their reputations as their sensibilities continue to define the Canadian identity- (231).

Dabydeen says first generation Caribbean writers in diaspora such a Clarke, Derek

Vy'alcott, Sylvia ,,contributed Winter, George Lamming, and Kamau Brathwaite to the steadily shifting grounds and polarities of place with inherent paradoxes stemming from

the sense of the hurts of history (slavery and indentured labour), colonialism, and

immigrant marginality, while grappling with the politics of race, ethnicity, and class,,

(232). Clarke's writings are representative of Dabydeens's list. Whereas his earlier works focused on defining a Canadian identity, Vf/aves shows that he is moving away from any quest for a stable identity in his work. His literature has been instrumental in breaching the boundaries of the Canadian literary landscape by employing the vernacular and foregrounding Barbados and immigrant life in his works. His texts are destabi lizing because, like the lifesaver in Waves,they are unmoored and float between Canadaand the

Caribbean.

20 . A number of Caribbean diasporic writers from outside Canada, like Lamming, are

an ongoing influence in the development of Caribbean Canadian writing. They set the

stage, Dabydeen says, for Caribbean Canadian writers "to influence an evolving literature accommodating themes and argot often appearing unaccustomed to their Canadian

readership only a years few ago but now gaining acceptanc e,, (232). At any rate,

Dabydeen says that questions are still raised about the "function" of immigrant writers in

respect to who their target audience ,.as is and whether they should label themselves a Canadian writer or Caribbean writer or as a hyphenated or hybridized one. ..?', (236).

Dabydeen observes that defining identity is central to diasporic writing, and as it

gamers a wider national audience, diasporic writing is shifting perceptions of the definition of Canadian identity into the cultural arena. Achievement of this recognition

suggests that immigrant writing is removing itself from "the policy of containment,, (xxix) which Smaro Kamboureli says has been a basis for attacks on multiculturalism policy' She explains that "by legislating 'otherness', [the policy] attempts to control its diverse representations, to preserve the long-standing racial and ethnic hierarchies in canada" (xxix). Moreover, immigrant writing continues to be marginalized,by a t¡aditional Canlit mindset that still raises the age-old question of where minority and immigrant writing should be situated. Dabydeen quotes Clarke stating his position on immigrant writing in Canada in 199g:

The social and cultural landscape of canada has changed fundamentally from the 1960's... And even at that time, there was nõti.. being given to the literary establishment, that we had in our midst, the traditional one - albeit an English sensibility - and that this non-traditional ,minority, perspective could no longer be viewed as a point of view. (232)

21 Embedded in the non-traditional perspective of Clarke's narratives, as well as

,.central those of Brand and other immigrant writers, are discourses of home, which are to

any understanding of the politics of location" (Davies 20). But immigrant writing in

Canada is often in transit, moving between locations and, in turn, collapsing boundaries

between Canada and home. Ca¡ibbean writers resist traditional Canadian literary forms

by employing demotic language in their writing. They engage their audiences on their terms and demand recognition of their difference. But, besides engaging in the politics of identity and belonging, diaspora is also a space where Caribbean writers realjze freedom to reassess home outside of a nostalgic prism. As Said maintains, there is a certain amount of liberty for the intellectual in exile even though he cautions that being ..[an] exile means that you are always going to be marginal" (Reader 379). The freedom Said alludes to is the freedom for an intellectual's personal and creative development and the ability to be innovative because there are no "time-honored footstep s" (379) to follow.

For Caribbean wdters in diaspora, this means greater freedom to create, better opportunities to be published, and more autonomy to explore personal identity, for instance sexuality. These issues are often diffîcult to negotiate or accomplish in the homeland. In conclusion, I will return to Said, who warns the intellectual in exile that

"A condition of marginality, which might seem flippant, frees you from having always to proceed with caution. . .No one is ever free of attachments and sentiments of course"

(37e).

22 Chapters Two and Three that follow, focus on close readings of Clarke,s The

Origin of LYaves and Brand's Land to Light On. Clarke draws on his background in a pre-

independence Barbados to shed tight on the double-consciousness of Caribbean people

living under British rule. Clarke's work juxtaposes a desire for belonging in Canada with reflections of a desire to be part of the English traditions that prevailed in Barbados when

he lived there. Clarke's fictional characters are immigrants wrestling with displaced

Caribbean traditions in diaspora while trying to accommodate the British-infused traditions of Canada. Brand, on the other hand, invokes less nostalgia in her work and sheds a harsh light on her birthplace, Trinidad, and is equally critical in her perspectives on Canada. In her long poems, the narrators appear detached from their memories when recollecting 'home' in Trinidad, and this sense of surveillance and aloneness likewise permeates the poet's narratives set in Canada. In Land,Brand conjures up a sense of belonging that is attached to the politics of the present rather than a longing for the past.

Her unsettling depictions of random and systemic racism suffered by immigrants in

Canada, placed alongside the stark realities of suffering in their homelands, offer scant relief for those trying to navigate diaspora. By declaring "I am giving up on land to light on" (43), Brand implies a certain futility in the immigrant talking back to the host country, as well as in reconciling with home. She promotes the notion of a stable identity as unsettled and unattainable, if not undesirable.

23 Chapter 2

Colonial Haunting and Adrift in Diaspora

The exile therefore exists in the median state, neither completely at one with the new setting norfully disencumbered of the old, beset with hatf involvements and half detachments, nostalgic and sentimentql on one level, an adept mimic or a secret outcast on the other. Edward Said "Intellectual Exile: Expatriate and Marginals " The Edward Said Reader (370)

Where do waves come from? Nowhere and everywhere would be the answer

gleaned from Austin Clarke's The Origin of llaves. In fact, Clarke's narrative mirrors

the actions of waves in many ways. The author has fashioned his two main characters,

Tim and John, from the human waves that leave the Caribbean and travel north to Europe

or North America typically to seek work or to fuither their education. Tim, the narrator,

and John, his childhood friend, often reach back to memories of their homeland,

Barbados. They reminisce about the last time they spent on their local beach together,

and draw on memories of the wonder and enchantment of the waves as they sat on the

sand, and gazed out to seemingly unreachable horizons. But throughout the text, Clarke's

"waves" are also a metaphor for the constant washing ashore of memories in the

24 diasporas Tim and John inhabit, only to have them swept out again, leaving behind their

traces of psychological debris.

In Ll/aves, Clarke captures this psychological debris from his elderly characters

and uses it to create a retrospective of their lives that illustrates the implications for

immigrants negotiating contemporary diasporas. He juxtaposes Tim's and John,s

experiences of displacement from 'home' with the memories they carry and choose to

excavate to reveal the complexities in shaping identities in diaspora. By focusing on

colonial influences nurtured in these memories, I will examine how Clarke demonstrates

the extent to which diasporic identity has its roots in immigrants' homelands, and how he

shows that the constant ebb and flow keeps both the past and the present in a state of flux,

resulting in what Said labels'the median state'1. Clarke situates his characters in this in-

between state, and I will argue that by creating this persistent atmosphere of stasis in the

text, the writer challenges the idea that identity can be fixed or constant. Furthermore,

Clarke portrays diaspora as a contaminated site in his rendering of Tim's and John's

relationships with women, who I read as metaphors for negotiating diaspora.

The influences of the past Clarke addresses in Waves originate not only from the

Caribbean, but also from across the Atlantic, from Africa and Europe. In exploring

writing in African diasporas as it relates to recollections of home, Wendy W. Walters explains that "the ferm diaspora captures . ..the memories of enforced migration, displacement, and racial slavery or colonial dominance that emerge in cultural expressions of diasporic peoples" (xiv). This capture and distillation of memories in diaspora that Walters claims is supported by Victor J. Ramraj who writes that though

"diasporans may not want to actually return to a home, wherever the dispersal has left I See Chapter 2's epigraph.

25 them they retain a conscious or subconscious attachment to traditions, customs, values,

religions, and languages of ancestral home" (215). In a caribbean context, the

'traditions', 'customs' and 'values' are primarily based on European imperialist models

instituted during the process of colonization. Few traditions and customs have survived the extermination of most of the indigenous peoples who once inhabited the area.

Ancestral traditions, customs and language were all but stamped out of African slaves by the colonists. What remained and emerged privately was the cobbling together of carefully guarded remnants of African societies and invention. Publicly, European colonists established traditions and customs built on laws, rigid class and colour structure, and, as Clarke exposes in the novel, often installed them through education. When Tim and John, like Clarke, attended school in Ba¡bados between 1940 and i950, British-based education dominated curricula that etched British traditions, customs, and values into memories of students. The importing and transplanting of traditions from Britain to the

Caribbean became a controlling and unifying device for the British. Said recognizes this when he posits, "the invention of tradition was a practice very much used by authorities as an instrument of rule in mass societies ... [when] authorities needed to find ways of connecting a large number of people to each other" (Invention,ITg).Itis important to note that in the 1940s emancipation had been proclaimed just over a hundred years earlier; whites represented less than ten percent of the population on the island; and the overwhelming majority of Barbadians were descendents of African slaves. However, the imposed 'traditions' did not disappear after the Britain divested most of its Caribbean colonies in the 1960's. Not only do these traditions survive back home, but also, as

26 Clarke's text highlights, they are imbued in the collective memories of Caribbean people

in diaspora.

Clarke foregrounds the past in Waves to underscore that immigrants do not arrive

in host countries as blank slates. He gives the past a voice in the discourse of the present

through Tim's and John's recollections of home when they discuss their lives in diaspora.

It is through these recollections that Clarke pieces together the narrative of their struggles

as they try to come to terms with their place in diaspora and nation. Said contends that

memory "touch[es] significantly upon questions of identity, of nationalism, of power and

authority" (I76), although he believes memory is "not necessarily authentic" (179). But

is authenticity in memory always critical in negotiating the present? Said maintains that

memory is not inert, but is "something to be used, misused, and exploited" (179), and

that people look to this "refashioned memory ... to give themselves a coherent identity, a

national narrative and a place in the world" (179). Refashioning or rewriting memory

includes forgetting as well as self-deluding. Diaspora is a space which is shaped by its

inhabitants' past. It not only harbours their histories and geographies, but also a 'living'

past where culture and traditions of the homeland are suspended in immigrants'

memories, and come alive and play out in diaspora.

But Africa continues to haunt by not relinquishing its identif ing badge or its lure

as a symbol of forbidden memories. Hall notes that "Africa, the signified which could

not be represented directly in slavery, remained and remains the unspoken unspeakable

'presence' in Caribbean culture...'hiding' behind every verbal inflection, every narrative twist of Caribbean cultural life" (Cultural Identity 398). In fact, Africa haunts the work of both Brand and Clarke. In2002, during an interview with Linda Richards, Clarke

27 says that he regards Africa as a "threat". He contends that he can never go there "because

of the uncertainty of [his] association and reaction to Africa" (Richards 5). He believes he

might never come back. In comparison, Brand confronts Africa in A Map to the Door of

No Return. She admits, "I had never made up my mind to visit Africa. I had some-how

felt the beckoning of the Door of No Return but was prepared to imagine it and never

arrive" (Map 96). However, Brand does visit Africa and admits that as she flies from

Europe over the African continent on her way to South Africa, she wishes she is on the

ground. She declares, "I know I would soon be enveloped by it ...I am crossing the place

which holds it [The Door of No Retum]; the place which holds the before of history',

(8e).

By focusing in his texts on the history and past lives of diasporians in Canada

which brings them into the national narrative, Clarke is carrying out the "political act"

that Walters believes is the thrust of diasporic writing. Clarke's literary works, fiction and

non-fiction, are aimed at aCanada-wide as well as an international Caribbean audience.

His narratives are statements about immigrant life often set in Toronto and Barbados, and

seem to draw directly from his own experiences as an author writing out of diaspora.

Clarke confronts his audience by divulging the intimacies of life in diaspora, and lest the

audience forgets that immigrants come to Canada with cultural histories, he provides

further challenges by injecting his homeland, Barbados, into the text. Clarke achieves

this by constantly moving the language of his characters from the centre to the margins by switching from standard English to the Barbadian vernacular. Rinaldo Walcott writes that Clarke implants a "Caribbean presence" (Austin Clarke Reader 12) in Canada by his use of language, including "his uncompromising use of Caribbean language-sounds"

28 (12). Walcott also allows that Clarke's characters "move between different registers of

English, using vernaculars which reference the characters' class, gender, race and other personal and collective qualities" (12). The vernacular can also be interpreted as the last vestige of identity and power immigrants can hold on to. Vernacular becomes a language

"where important things can be said" (Hall, Negotiating, 9) by a group that has been educated to believe that European standards of communication should prevail.

Colonial Memories

The first short chapter of The Origin of llaves is dedicated to Tim's intemal dialogue about his youth in Barbados and, in particular, an afternoon spent at the beach with his best friend John. Understandably, the dominant physical features of their tiny island-home, the beach and the sea, play important parts in their lives. The beach is a space for Tim and John to wonder about other lands, and about "which ship would carry

[them] from ftheir] governors and pageantry and fun and parades and colonialism"

(llaves 17). The beach also represents history. It symbolizes the point of anival of

African ancestors who survived the middle passage, as well as their English enslavers.

But the sea also holds the past, which is the trauma of slavery that haunts the Caribbean.

Poet Derek Walcott captures the anguish of the Atlantic crossings when he writes in "The

Sea is History":

Then there were the packed cries,

the shit, the moaning :

Exodus. Bone soldered by coral to bone, mosaics mantled by the benediction of the shark's shadow,

29 that was the Ark of the Covenant. (25)

The terrible legacy of the sea continues in Tim's and John's memories. It is the sea that engulfs and expels Tim's uncle, a fisherman, a painful reminder of those who did not survive the Atlantic crossing. Yet it is the sea that provides a bounty of food and pleasure, and that erases Tim and John's footsteps in the sand. It is the sea that fires their imaginations as they watch the large ships disappear over the horizon. Ultimately, it is the sea that isolates the island, while, at the same time, providing an interconnection with the outside world.

John tells Tim, "The meaning of a' island is that you have to swim-out from it

...like you have to swimway far from it, and then you know the measurements of the place" (17). This sentiment that only after leaving the island can an inhabitant truly assess the nature of his homeland reflects on Clarke's own works, which often point back toward Barbados from Canada. V/alters echoes this view of writers in diaspora when she suggests that "displacement creates distance that allows writers to encode critiques of their homelands, to construct new homelands, and to envision new communities" (viii).

However, in an interview following the publication of his novel The Polished Hoe, clarke disputes this assumption when he says, "This idea of objectivity being synonymous with distance. I don't believe that at all" (Richards 4).

Nevertheless,inThe Origin of Waves, Clarke not only exposes the flawed lives of his characters and the diasporas they inhabit, but also draws on the teachings and mimicry of their colonial past to critique Barbados, and, in away, to hold it accountable for some of his characters' failings. Clarke also explores how immigrants' identities are reconfigured in diaspora. He employs Tim's and John's memories to illustrate how

30 immigrants' relationships with their homelands have a bearing on how they conduct their

lives abroad. When Tim and John reunite after decades of separation, they settle down in

a bar to share stories of their experiences in the intervening years. The author initially

problematizes the credibility of the characters by portraying them as two old men with

faulty, and, perhaps, selective memories. They repeatedly try to recall the last time they

saw each other, arguing whether it was forty or f,rfty years ago, and they contradict each

other on their shared memories. What ensues is a fragmented dialogue that keeps shifting between the present and the past, at times making them indistinguishable. Memories of their youth in Barbados play for equal time with stories of their lives in diaspora.

In analyzing the influences of colonialism and how it manifests itself in postcolonial discourse, Lois Tyson argues in Critical Theory Today that the colonial ideological forces "pressed the colonized to internalize the colonizers' values" (365). She adds that "the British intrusion" (365) into the lives of its colonial subjects was far- reaching. The British left behind "a deeply embedded cultural colonization" (365) which

Tyson says leaves their subjects "a psychological 'inheritance' of negative self-image and alienation from their own indigenous cultures" (366). And notably, colonial ideology appears to be as important to Tim and John in their musing as the influences of their families and friends. The colonial institutions and culture of pre-independence Barbados remain central to their development. The role of Governor, the Queen's representative on the island, symbolically has a far reaching presence in the novel. Yet Tim reminisces that

John and he were unaware they were living through "anything like colonialism" (Waves

18) as they watched the Govemor "drive through ftheir] neighbourhoods, in his black, polished Humber Hawk" (18). This is an echo of Clarke's statement in an interview with

3t Marion Richmond when he says, "when I was growing up in Barbados, I never

considered myself to be growing up in a colony" (Other Solitudes,65), atelling statement

of the success of the colonial project. The boys' view of their faces and their.,grinning

teeth in the bonnet of the glimmering Humber Hawk" (18) is an image of their lives

reflecting colonial programming from an emblem of Empire. It is a black inner tube from

a tire off the Humber Hawk that Tim and John could not retrieve on their last day at the beach. The "big, black Lifesaver" (56), with its thirteen black and red patches, suggests that the psyche of black West Indian colonials is pieced together with sketchy memories of a tortuous past which is created upon a surface that is British. The inner tube is a

'safety device' that Tim needs because he cannot swim. Yet "he is rendered unmovable,'

Q$ and unable to hold onto the tube as the tide pulls it out to sea. He "stop[s] dead,, (6) as he looks out to sea and thinks of the waves submerging him. He also thinks about his

"uncle's bloated body, filled with sea water and with some sprigs of moss,, (6) and dragged along the beach "leaving atrail of his limp body over the sand ... marking out journey" his last (6). Tim hesitates to venture far into the sea because he does not want to get swallowed in its history. The sea's history not only contains recent memories of drowned fishermen, but also of slaves lost during the joumey of the Middle passage. walcott breaks the silence of the submerged bodies when writes:

but the ocean kept turning blank pages

looking for History Then came the men with eyes heavy as anchors who sank without tombs. .. (26).

32 The inner tube drifts away from the island, much like Tim and John do. However, it

represents a sense of shame for Tim, because it is a constant reminder of his failure to

'swim' at home and in diaspora.

England's governance of her colonies included exporting a British education.

Tim's frequent references to his school days in his interior monologues, and in his

reminiscing with John, are insightful in showing the enduring impact of a colonial

education. For instance, Combermere School for Boys, which both boys attend, provides

them with an English-style classical education and "tum[s] [them] into senior civil

servants" (Waves i 1). During their conversation, Tim and John show off their education with references to Virgil and Caesar and Hannibal crossing the Alps, and test each other with their Latin translation of "I fear the Greeks when they bring gifts" (97). Still, it is not just what the British included in their gift of education to Caribbean people that is surprising, but also what is pointedly left out. Not included in the colonial education is any study of Africa or the Caribbean. The origins and history of Caribbean black people and the complicity of the Europeans in the slave trade are erased by this exclusion. The colonizers treat the Caribbean as if it was a blank slate before they arrived. Caribbean history and geography continued to be excluded from classrooms until the early 1960s.

This heavy-handedness is observed by Tim when he muses, early in the narrative, that the school made John and him see themselves "as colonials, sitting on that sand, staring at waves that washed assertive and sullen strangers ashore, as if they were born like us, in the island, as if they were born here, to rule over us, here" (19). In spite of this effort by the British, Clarke is ambivalent as to whether Tim and John ever recognizethemselves as colonials.

J-t At the same time, Tim's and John's pride in their British-style education and its

trappings is evident in their recollections, and it plays a role in retaining the ideals by which they continue to measure their adult world. Tim thinks of his elementary school

Headmaster when he observes John's clothing. He notices John's conservative outfit, a white shirt with French cuffs "with his initials, JDN, embroidered in blue italics on his

shirt pocket" (47). He compares the "tight and elongated" (47)knot of John's silk tie

with that of the Headmaster who had a "pure gold ring around his knot,, (47). Tim

alludes to the rigidity of a colonial upbringing when he notes that the stiffness of John's

collar and cuffs was "just like the Headmaster's" (48). In fact, mimicry of the colonizer

is an inevitable result of imposing traditions and conformity on the colonial. An example

of this is the British military-styled school uniforms that Tim recalls John and himself wearing. They included "khaki uniform pants, and khaki stockings ... lthat] had the school colours of blue and gold, in the flashes, two pieces of ribbon attached to an elastic band ... worn on both legs, up to the knees" (53). But, in spite of this controlled s¿uneness, Tim shows his partiality for his colonial model when he expects John's taste in dress to be "more American" and pictures him in "a heavy faked wool suit with large red squares upon green cloth" (47). Instead, he finds that John's choice of dress is still influenced by the British styles worn by people in authority. Tim's assumptions about

John underscore his disdain for American culture, and are conditioned by past colonial teachings that established British ways as his norïn. Similarly, these teachings are also responsible for John's mimicry of British dress.

34 The Colonial in Diaspora

Tim and John handle colonial conditioning differently. In fact, Tim misreads

John when he expects his taste to be "more American and conspicuous than he looks, like

parts of his conversation and speech" (47). John's identity, although heavily influenced

by his colonial upbringing, has broadened. He is a transnational and transcultural

composite. He appropriates and uses what works for him as he shifts between countries

and cultures. His ability with languages is his main tool. Tim notes that John speaks with

"the same accent he grew up with, although to show me the difference between us, and his greater sophistication,...he laces his speech with words he has remembered from the languages of those countries" (46). But this aspect of John's character also surfaced in

Barbados and is an example of the double-consciousness Caribbean people adopt in their homelands (Hall, Chambers) as they negotiate between cultures, and that they often carry them to diaspora. While at school, John had a tendency to mimic an English accent, and

Tim reminds him of it. He adds, "You still have a little of it, (77). John admits to

"trying to talk like an Englishman" and "dropping fhis Barbadian] accent when he got to university in England" (78). And his propensity for mimicking continues in America, where, besides having a Bajan accent, he uses and likes to hear a Southern accent. He tells Tim that he "would do anything to talk like a real southerner" (7g).

Throughout the text, John's mispronunciations and corruptions of European languages are peppered with this AmericanizedEnglish. His (mis)pronunciation of words such as "hot-cuisine", "Shan-deleezays" (45) and "statute-o-Liberty" (43) breaks the language rules of the countries he inhabits. Through John's malapropisms, Clarke shows how language can be a tool which may subvert and destabilize the host country. John's

35 mangling and corruption of language even before he left Barbados raises the issue of

slaves losing their languages and being forced to adopt European languages. In giving up

their language, the slaves were relinquishing apartof their identity. John's appropriation

and shifting of language also reflects how Clarke inserts his hybrid narratives of

Barbados and Canada onto the Canadian literary landscape. Johr's appropriation of

language by creating new words and pronunciations is a subversive act, although it is not

clear that he realizes it. He destabilizes the host country by reconfiguring an important

component of its identity, its language. But the ease with which John changes his accent

as he moves between countries also signifies his desire to belong, and to be authentic or .,real,'for "Íeal" in the community he lives in. He implies that what is him goes back

beyond America and Barbados when he informs Tim that African women are .,[t]he real

McCoy" (107) in comparison to African Canadians and African Americans. In what

seems like an opportunity to grab remnants of his identity that were stripped away in the

past, John gives his bi-racial son "a real African name, purposely... Rashid', (l s6).

However, he admits that "[he doesn't] really know what it mearrs" (186). Rashid, in fact,

is an Arabic name that means "rightly guided". In trying to reclaim an African heritage

for his son, John inadvertently fuither destabilizes his son,s identity.

In counterpoint to John, Tim initially seems to prefer an identity that is solidly

based on values acquired in the colonial system in Barbados rather than in Canada. His

values surface in his memories of British colonial culture and authority from his youth.

He recalls the headmaster who "prepared for his greater intellectual prowess,, (9) by working on his "Bachelors of Arts Degree, External [my emphasis], from London

University, Part I Honours, in Classics ." (49) and his meticulous process for preserving

36 his classical texts imported from England. The addition of 'External' to the title is an

indicator of difference that renders the students in the Caribbean the 'other', and

signifies that the degree has less prestige than one eamed in Britain. This means of

subordinating colonies is aided by the headmaster. Through his careful preservation of

classical texts, the headmaster is also fossilizing, which Hall refers to in Chaper 1, not

just British culture, but also antiquity in Barbados. Tim emulates his headmaster's

reverence for books. He reminisces that one of the highlights of his youth is his weekly

library visits with John, and their "reading races" (a8). The books are primarily

European. They provide Tim and John with an image of the world outside Barbados; however, their view of that world is filtered through a European lens. Hence, early in life,

Tim and John establish cultural foundations based on European standards that remain with them even into old age. British values continue to influence every aspect of their lives. For example, in describing the grandeur of his offrce in America, John's referents are all European-based. He tells Tim that his offrce has "fancy telephones, those old- fashioned ones from England in the nineteenth century, like the ones you see in books, or in murder movies with Sherlock Holmes and Dickens, things you come across in a library book" (73).

The colonial influence moves beyond daily living into Tim's and John's self- actualization. Tim's recollection of a painting in John's mother's house also shows how he still reveres England and, like John, sets his aesthetic standards based on British books and illustrations. He fondly describes the watercolour of "an English cottage with a thatched roof " (I44) and smoke coming out of the chimney, which was "painted by an

Englishman" (144), and entitled "home sweet home" (I44). He wonders if this..wasn't

37 the house of [John's] Old Lady's dreams" (I44), and tells John that on his first vacation

home after twenty-five years, he visited his mother, and the new house John bought her

"looked almost identical" (144) to the house in the painting. Tim surmises that "those

English pictures fitted-in to the landscape of ftheir] lives as if fthey] had painted them

themselves" (I44).In contrast, Tim remarks that Barbadian painters "paint only blue

skies and deep-blue sea water with a coconut tree leaning to one side,, (144), and

concludes that "Barbadian art is nothing more than post cards for tourisses" (145). Tim,s

criticism shows that he identifies 'home' more with a representation of a British scene, which he has never seen, than with a painting that depicts Barbados, which he knows first hand. He believes that the English pictures "fitted-in to the landscape of our lives as if we had painted them ourselves" (i44). Tim's rejection of the Barbadian painting is as a result of what Tyson calls "a deeply embedded cultural colonization" (366) left behind after "the colonizers retreated" (366). Tyson believes that "ex-colonials often were left with a psychological 'inheritance' of negative self-image and alienation from their own indigenous cultures" (366). However, because of the double-consciousness of the

Barbadian artist, he or she could be rendering their work through European eyes. Idyllic paintings like this one are prevalent in the Caribbean. They are typically devoid of people, like the blank slate the Europeans colonists envisioned.

Specifically, it is their British education that affects how Tim and John cope in diaspora. In an interview with Kuan-Hsing Chen, Jamaican-bom Hall admits that

"having been prepared by the colonial education, [he] knew England from the inside"

(Critical Dialogues 490) when he moved there. Hall's familiarity with the "mother" country because of colonial education is similar to the experience of Caribbean

38 immigrants settling in Canada. Hall admits that even though he knows England and

Jamaica "intimately, ... lhe is] not wholly of either place" (480). As a former British

colony, Canadahas retained many of the colonial trappings and institutions. Instead of

leaving these systems behind, Caribbean immigrants are confronted with the same

colonial presswes in Canada. The frustrations caused by residues of Canada's colonial

past reflect in Tim's argument with himself about life in Canada: "What has this

goddamn country given you? With all the richness and racism building up, year by

year?" (Waves 15). Familiarity with the English language, British culture and class

structure could be considered assets for immigrants as they negotiate their diasporas in

Canada's multicultural society. Instead, establishing a diasporic identity is difficult because of the tendency in Canada to lump together all Caribbean people and to align them with other ethnic groups under the expansive stereotypical banner of 'visible minority', and to fail to recognize what Hall acknowledges as "heterogeneity and diversity" (Colonial Discourse 402) indiaspora. This diversity is illustrated in the different approaches and directions Tim and John take to conduct their lives outside of the Caribbean, even though they are from the same country, and have similar racial and social backgrounds.

Women as Metaphor

As well as reminiscing on their youthful experiences in Barbados, Tim and John chronicle their lives in diaspora through their relations with women. In "Tory Elitism in

Austin Clarke's Short Fiction", which was published before Waves, George Elliott Clarke argues that the author's white female characters are metaphors for Canad,a. On the other

39 hand, black women in Clarke's works "inspire an alternative constellation of metaphors,

involving notions of nurtute" (243), George Elliott Clarke maintains. Applying this

analysis to Waves illustrates how Tim's and John's relationships with women are

indicative of their relationships with places.

Tim recounts the repeated attempts by an unnamed white Canadian woman to

seduce him. Although she entertains with candlelight, wine, and "steak fried with the

blood running out of it... [and] shortie-pyjamas made out of white silk" (Waves l7I),

Tim is not able to have sex with her because of impotency. The inability to have a sexual

relationship under encouraging circumstances may indicate that Tim is overwhelmed and

frustrated with his tife in Canada and unable to cope. He tells John, "...my tom-pigeon

can't make a move. Sometimes the bare idea of sex scares me,'(ig3). canada is

attractive and enticing to him, and he recognizes she is offering him opportunity.

Although he is willing to accept her gift of hospitality, he feels he has nothing to give in

return. His impotence signals a failure to have an intimate relationship with the host

country. After realizingthat he cannot commit, Tim withdraws from their relationship

and, hence, from full participation in the country. He admits to John, "I wonder, if I had-

remained back home, if I would be facing these sex-things, and if these sex-problems are

caused by immigrating to Toronto?" (185). Tim is suggesting that Toronto is a site of

continual emasculation for immigrants.

Tim's performance of masculinity in diaspora is also brought into question through his relationship with the white woman. He worries that his 'lover' will discuss his sexual failings with her friends. When John asks Tim why he did not seek help from a doctor for his impotency problem, Tim is mortified about what a white doctor..would say

40 about a man like [him]" (172), a black man. He is even more concerned that a black

doctor would divulge his problem to the black community. He declares that he "would

be the laughing-stock of the whole black community- (173). What Austin Clarke

exposes in creating Tim's dilemma is that, just as the myths of black men's sexual

prowess prevail and are upheld even by black men themselves, so are the expectations of

the immigrant's perforrnance already constructed in the new country and upheld by

immigrants already there. Again, the immigrant not only has to live up to the

stereotypical expectations of the country, but also the expectations of fellow immigrants

in diaspora. Clarke is portraying negotiating diaspora as sometimes a fearful experience.

In the same vein, as John relays tales of his white "wives" from France, Germany and ltaly, his discussion is centred more upon his relationship with the countries than with the women. He discusses his diffrculties with the food, the language and the perceived idiosyncrasies of the countries. Although he initially alludes to a stable relationship with each woman by stating that he fathered children from each of them, he rarely discusses his intimate feelings for the women. Later in the narrative, John admits to

Tim that he never married or had children from his European liaisons. Like Tim, his failed relationships with the three white women parallel his failed relationships with their countries. His tales of fatherhood express his desire to belong by impregnating the country, but his seed falls on infertile ground. John, for reasons that are left unsaid in the novel, does not fit in, and he leaves the European countries he tries or pretends to inhabit.

Like Tim, he is also rendered impotent in diaspora, but does not adopt Tim's withdrawal stance. Instead, John uproots and moves on to inhabit new spaces.

4t In following George Elliott Clarke's argument, just as white women represent the

nation-state, conversely non-white women represent diaspora in the novel. However,

Tim's relationships with two non-white women are also failures. He withdraws from a

relationship with a Guyanese woman when he fears she may be rejecting him him. After

waiting for many hours at her apartment building, Tim finally gets the courage to knock

on her door, but quickly walks away, convinced that she will not answer. Tim's

inconclusive relationship with the Guyanese woman represents his passive involvement

with his Caribbean diaspora. He then tries to build a relationship with Lang, a refugee from China. Clarke includes this cross-cultural relationship to introduce the intersection of diasporas. He reveals the far reaches of the British when he writes about Lang learning

"to speak such good English from the BBC International Service" (218) in poly-lingual

China. But, Lang's "good English" (218) is not helpful when she faces a Canadian

Immigration officer whose accent differs from her BBC accent. It is Lang, the immigrant, who is "frightened" (218) by English being spoken with a Canadian accent rather than an authoritative BBC accent. She does not understand the people who speak

English "in such loud insistence, enunciating each slight syllable and prejudice stressing each suspicion and disapproval of her immigrant presence" (218). Tim claims he fell in love with Lang when she told this story because "she and I were so close. .." (218). Their bond is established through their common link to British culture and it reveals their closer affrnity to Britain than to Canada. Lang is a symbol of Tim's language and his ability to speak. He becomes obsessed with Lang, but never consummates their union. When Lang dies unexpectedly, Tim questions whether her death may have resulted from his inertia in not answering her phone call. Her death signals Tim's failure and withdrawal in his

42 relationship with Canada. Tim is giving up on language, but by silencing himself, he is

also giving up a determinant of identity. Fifteen years later when he encounters John,

Tim is still mouming Lang. He never establishes a relationship with another woman, and

keeps his house as a shrine to Lang.

Similarly, John's relationship with a fellow Barbadian, Gloria, in France, initially

thrives, but ultimately fails. Gloria is the successful immigrant who encourages other

Caribbean immigrants and students to meet at her apartment "for real down-home

cooking" (136). John abandons his French family periodically to partake of Gloria's

promise of a taste of home and the possibility of sex. Gloria, like Lang, dies suddenly for

no apparent reason. Following her death, John regrets missed opportunities in his

relationship with Gloria, including the opportunity of a sexual relationship which was

thwarted when he discovered that she was a relative. If Gloria represents diaspora, then

Clarke is cautioning here of the risk of the incestuousness of diaspora. At Gloria's

funeral, John's sexual arousal while reading the lesson from the bible is an arousal of his

nostalgia for his colonial past rather than a longing for Gloria. The bible readings and

hymns remind John of singing English hymns in the church choir in Barbados, and also

of the now-dead fishermen who rode the waves for their livelihood, but could not swim.

The fishermen's plight echoes much of John's and Tim's life in diaspora, except that

John can swim. Unlike Tim's reaction to Lang's death, John is not immobilized by

Gloria's passing. John uses the story of Gloria in a similar way to how he tells a story of

home. He is more interested in perpetuating the idea of home than in realizing its physicality.

43 Although they are part of the same diaspora, Gloria's relationship with John does not work because they are too close. Lang's and Tim's relationship, which intersects two

diasporas, also fails because they are too different. Clarke, through Gloria,s and Lang,s

unexplained deaths, suggests diaspora is a contaminated environment where life does not

always flourish, and that, in tum, it can render the immigrant powerless. But Clarke also

implies that transcultural relationships are flawed. When John moves to the southem

United States, his new partner is a white southern American of multiple European

ancestries. John fathers a child in this relationship, but he explains to Tim that the child "turned out wrong" (191). In fact, it is during the time that he brings his son to a hospital

in Toronto that he encounters Tim. He never tells Tim what is wrong with the child.

Through Tim's and John's failed relationships with women, Clarke shows that the

performance of masculinity is complicated and problematic for men in diaspora. Linking

Tim's and John's relationships to nation, Clarke paints a bleak picture of the black male

immigrant in Canada. Men's impotency and infertility depicted in the text calls into

question of the very survival of the black male immigrant.

Beyond Home

Walters believes contemporary diasporic literature is "shifting from the concept of the origin as the site of Return to the concept of the diasporic itself as a home,, (xiii).

Consequently, she sees the writers repositioning a centre "via their writing, through the literary construction of alternative narratives of identity" (xiii). Cyril Dabydeen detects a similar change in Clarke's writings. In his discussion of voices of Caribbean Canadian writers, Dabydeen contends that writers, such as Clarke, in asserting their place in

44 Canadian literature, "have challenged, implicitly and explicitly, the sense of the Great

White North as the overwhelming paradigm" (232). In particular, he refers to the

"uncompromising themes of fClarke's] earlier works ... chronicling West Indian

immigrants' lives in the 1960s" (232). But Dabydeen suggests that Clarke's work has

shifted, and that in Waves, he "has consolidated his particular vision- (232). Clarke confirms this shift in discussing his book The Políshed Hoe,published in 2003, when he says that he had "solved all the problems that Barbados implied over the years and ... could [now] write about Barbados" (Richards 5). Clarke is suggesting that he is positioning himself differently in his relationship with Canada and Barbados and is writing from a different space. This time, inThe Polished Hoe,he is gesturing from

Canada to Barbados. In 199i, Clarke was already indicating a change in his literary f.ocus. In an interview with Frank Birbalsingh, Clarke says that he is "defining an identity for the Caribbean man who has lived in Toronto for some time, in such a way that he will no longer consider himself an immigrant" (101). Clarke hopes to shape this character so that he will reject "a national cultural identity involving the two solitudes...

[and] is able to see that this [Canada] is where he belongs,,(l0l).

If Tim is the character Clarke describes above, then, in the process of his rejecting a national cultural identity, Clarke completely collapses his character. Initially,

Tim attempts to live in diaspora by his values established in Barbados, but memories of home continue to haunt and govern his life iu Toronto. These are not only memories of the familiar, but also memories of his failures at home. Eventually he withdraws into a singular world he has constructed. As he daily traverses Yonge Street, the spine of

Toronto, as what John calls "a walking ghost" (70), Tim believes he is invisible to all,

45 and that the reactions, or lack of reactions, of the passersby to him ultimately invalidates

his existence in Canada. He resembles the classic figure of diaspora, the Wandering Jew,

who is condemned to eternally drift. His life in diaspora never progresses because he is

unable to establish a relation with diaspora and with Canada that works. Lake Ontario,

the destination of his daily walk, is comforting and at the same time menacing. It arouses

memories of his happy times on the beach with John in Barbados. Tim tells John that he

looks into the water and sees "nothing...not even [his] reflection" (214). But the absence

of his reflection in the water confirms Tim's belief in his own invisibility in the city.

Viewing the lake also reminds Tim of his inability to swim, both real and metaphorical,

at home and in Canada.

Consequently, Tim entombs himself in a house that boasts among its fuinishings a

two-year old Christmas tree. He tries to keep the world atbay,but there are constant

incursions from the outside. He wages war with a colony of black ants that relentlessly

nibble at the foundations of his house. In what seems like the only vestige of power he

has left, Tim stalks the black ants and tries to eliminate them with a can of Black Flag.

He points out that "Black Flag is a black flag, not of a country but a 'black flag' written

in big, white capital .black letters on the can" (92). However, flag, more pointedly, is a

racial marker of his identity. Tim's effort to wipe out the black ants with the .black flag'

suggests that he is trying to eliminate race as a determinant of his identity. But as the name on the can is written in white capital letters, this can be interpreted as blackness being ,black superimposed upon and identified by a dominant white society. The flag, is a traditional sign of anarchy and represents Tim's withdrawal, as an act of defiance

46 against life in Canada. It is also a symbol of negation and mouming. It suggests that Tim

is mourningLang, mouming the loss of his ability to communicate in Canada.

After Tim and John separate, Tim continues his walk to the lake. He contemplates

suicide. As he holds onto a rail that acts as a barrier between him and the lake and

deliberates on his next move, Tim spies "in the middle of the lake ... an inner tube

drifting slowly upon the oil-spilled surface, in [his] direction" (243). Real or imagined,

this flotation device represents a life saver for Tim. He believes it is the same inner tube

that floated away from him on that last day on the beach with John. clarke,s

reintroduction of the inner tube symbolizes the floating and disconnectedness of identity

in diaspora. The appearance of the inner tube is also an acknowledgement of the

converging of Tim's colonial past with his present, an arriving of sorts, and an acceptance

of place. Maybe Tim, like the inner tube, has finally arrived in Toronto.

In Waves, Clarke attempts to bury an earlier type of Caribbean immigrant

characterization in his writing. He is leaving behind the typical theme of centering his

work on home, and instead has shifted his centre. In doing so, Clark questions whether,

for immigrants, identifying and engaging in a dialogue on the host country's terms is

futile. He also suggests that strongly identifying with diaspora may hinder immigrants'

attempts to achieve a sense of belonging in the host nation. By cloaking Tim and John in

snow, Clarke provides a surteal, but a classic Canadian setting for his characters to navigate. He provides them with an uneasy footing with a layer of ice on the sidewalk to illustrate their determination to deal with, but not to fully conform to, their surroundings.

As they stumble in the snow, John defiantly declares that he "[n]ever learned how to walk in all this goddam snow ...and never want to, neither!,' (30).

47 However, Clarke's characterization of Tim and John in the latter part of their lives, and as immigrants from the early stages of Caribbean migration to Canada,

suggests that even with questionable memories, there is something to be learned in their

reflections. They represent an old guard whose immigrant experience could be deemed a

failure. Even so, Tim appears to be taking a stand in determining his personal identity, for

instance, when he defies goveffIment labeling and declares, "I was never an immigrant,,

(34)' At the same time, he isolates himself from society. Meanwhile, John embraces a

flexible identity that crosses borders and remains fluid. Rather than give up on language,

he just takes it. Clarke's narrative suggests that the foundations of immigrant identity are

grounded in 'home', and continue to be influential in how diasporians define themselves.

Ultimately, both Tim and John, in their own way, opt for identities without fixity. By

bluning time and place in their dialogue and introspection, Tim and John effortlessly

traverse cultural boundaries of homeland, diaspora and host country. Although they are

caught up in the midst of nostalgia, at no time do Tim and John seriously discuss

returning to Barbados. Indeed, the notion of home they hold on to no longer exists. Hall

sums up the diasporic experience as being "far away enough to experience the sense of

exile and loss close enough to understand the enigma of an always-postponed ,atïival,,,

,.Man, (chen 490). when Tim asks John if he would go back home, he responds, there ain't no goddam home back home" (Waves 70).

48 Chapter 3

Past Imperfect and Giving up On Landing

The re-negotiating of identities is fundamental to migrøtion as it is to Black women writing in cross-cultural contexts. It is the convergence of multíple places and cultures that re-negotiates the terms of Black women's experience thar in furn negotiates and re-negotiates their identities. Carole Boyce Davies Black Women, Writing and ldentity (3)

Dionne Brand asserts her thoughts are not typical of the Black diaspora but ,.only

that they proceed from the experience" (Map 92). Her texts, nevertheless, are at the

forefront of the diasporic discourse in Canada by exempliffing the complexities of

inhabiting that landscape. Specifically, as Johanna X.K. Garvey contends, "Brand writes

of the diaspora as displacement, loss, exile, yet she incorporates into her works the power

of memory and the urgency of resistance, especially through the mapping of space to

locate diaspora identifications" (486). At the same time, the sense of indeterminacy and

ambivalence in much of Brand's writing implies that she and her characters have "given

up on land to light on" (Land 45). I believe that far from giving up, Brand's work

attempts to stake out a new space in which to negotiate identity/ies, or what Carole Boyce

Davies calls "[to]trafftc between various identities" (i 19), by its relentless vision and revision of race, gender and sexuality on the landscape of diaspora, nation and home.

49 .Third Brand's new space is evocative of Homi Bhabha,s space,, which he

argues "challenges our sense of the historical identity of culture as a homogenizing,

unifying force, authenticated by the originary Past" (37). Bhabha envisions the .Third

..[t]his Space' as a new space rather than a derivative one. Moreover, he asserts third

space displaces the histories that constitute it, and sets up new structures of authority,

new political initiatives, which are inadequately understood through received wisdom,' (r99r,126). Brand is not interested in "new structures',, but rather in a space of

flexibility and movement. I surmise that if there is any "giving up", Brand is giving up

on conventionally rigid spaces allotted to immigrants by a multicultural society and a

"state bureaucracy that patrols our lives" (Brand CBC) in favour of a more open space

that advocates in-betweenness, which is comparable to Richard J.F. Day's call for.,a

space of free play" (225).

Diana Brydon notes that criticism of Brand's work has tended to focus on three

distinct cultural imaginaries of place: "the contexts of the Black Atlantic, The Grenadian

revolution, and Canadian urban and country landscape' (ggg), and adds that Brand

"negotiates all three to make sense of place..." (999).It is from contexts of the Black

Atlantic and the Canadian landscape that I will examine Brand's notion of constructing

identity/ies in diaspora. By drawing on her treatment of landscape, women and language

in Land to Light On,I will illustrate how Brand embarks on a series of what Eleanor

Wachtel calls "metaphorical joumey[s]" (Brand CBC), often viewed through the lens of history and memory, which contest and unsettle a sense of belonging and the anchoring of identity in diaspora. Brand's work is significant, Rinaldo Walcott contends, in her

50 "refusal to construct a narrative of the easy nostal giathat has come to mark much

immigrant writing. .." (Black 45).

Land to Light Onhas garnered less critical reception than some of Brand's other

works, which Sophia Forster suggests is because the book is "fairly pessimistic"(160). in

explaining the volume of criticism received by one of Brand's earlier books of poetry, No

Language is Neutral, Forster states that "fa]lthough it raises many of the same complex

and difficult issues sur¡ounding colonialism, racism, and sexism as Land, it also

expresses a certain amount of personal and political hope" (160). 'While some pessimism

can be detected in Brand's work, I would argue that what Forster views as pessimism in

Land, in fact, reads more as ambivalence. This occurs as the poet constantly slips across

lines of time and space as she traverses histories and geographies in an attempt to chart

borderless maps for the present and the future. Brand's approach is supported by Davies'

proposal that black women's writing "should be read as a series of boundary crossings

and not as a fixed, geographical, ethnically or nationally bound category of writing" (4).

A survey of Brand's writing demonstrates that she progressively challenges notions of

origins and identity through the interconnectedness of her fiction and non-fiction texts.

For instance, I found her 2001 memoir, A Map to the Door of No Return crucial in

informing my reading of Land in this study. Moreover, it is difficult to separate Brand's

narrator from her persona in Land. In characterizing her writing, Walcott admits, the writer "offers no orthodoxies on blackness. Instead her Marxist, feminist, lesbian voice

and political insights are the bases from which she articulates critiques of patriarchal and

essentialist notions of blackness..." (45).

5l Judging a Cover

Before entering the text, my examination of Brand's Land to Light On starts with

its cover, a prelude to the contents of the book. The front cover is an unfocused sepia

photograph that renders a slice of Caribbean life. It subtly introduces a context for the

collection of poems by reflecting influences and themes that permeate the poet's work.

Notably, Brand sets a sombre and haunting mood for what follows by choosing a photograph in sepia rather than in the vibrant hues of blues and green her audience may

expect of a typical Caribbean beach setting. Brand photographed this scene on Tobago, a

small island off the north eastern shore of Trinidad, washed on the west by the Caribbean

Sea and on the east by the Atlantic Ocean. Often 'Tobago' is dropped from the official name of the nation of Trinidad and Tobago. However, in featuring Tobago on the cover rather than a scene of her birthplace, Trinidad, Brand sets up one of her recurring themes that focus attention on the insularity of the Caribbean while at the same time suggesting its links, regionally and globally.

Brand's photograph differs from the classical beach and coconut tree scene that

Tim reviles in lï/aves as "post cards for tourisses" (145) through its inclusion of local people. In the foreground of the photograph, a group of children and a woman are standing by a coconut tree on a beach observing a baptism in the sea. Like Clarke, Brand utilizes the sea as a significant trope in her writing. In this image, the sea is the location of a religious ritual representing cleansing and rebirth. The participants in the baptism are standing fully clothed in the sea up to their waists, some with raised hands, presumably in prayer. Next the eye moves beyond the baptism scene to an expanse of sea. Because of the grainy texture of the photograph, it is difficult to define the waves or to distinguish if

52 the sea is calm or rough. The grayness of the tropical water projects the coldness reminiscent of a northern lake. Because of the monochrome quality of the photo, the sea resembles land. The eye is drawn then to a faint horizon that is buttressed by the sky.

Nothing is reflected to the viewer. This is the water that Brand claims "gave one an immediate sense of how large the world was, how magnif,rcent and how terri$ing" (Map

7). The indefinable horizon reveals the vastness of the sea and its underlying terror is its history of claiming lives.

The children on the beach are dressed in their Sunday best. One boy, who is standing in the middle of the group, takes a stance reminiscent of a colonial army officer as he stands with one arm held behind his back. The woman standing with the children has a child propped on her hip. As with the poses of the children, we can see only the back of her head. Brand's treatment of women in her work acknowledges their role as caregivers, whether they are mothers or extended family. Still she prefers to write of women beyond the "mammy" role and to portray them as sexual beings. Brand observes that "when we talk about the wonderful Black women in our lives,...we forget fhat apart from learning the elegant art of survival from them, we also learn in their gestures the fine art of sensuality. .." (Bread 93).

On final examination of the photograph, it is noticeable that the scene is anchored by the exposed roots of a coconut tree. These roots are a reminder that this landscape is not defined just by its present tranquility. The roots that cling into the shifting sand also come under siege from the force of a sea that shapes the land as it continually removes and deposits its wonders and debris. The clinging roots are comparable to the allegiances and memories that remain rooted in diaspora, even as time and experience shift and

53 reconfigrrre immigrant sensibilities. The sea's movements symbolize the journeys that shape the psyche of Caribbean people: the arrivals of colonists and slaves; the departures of their ancestors for 'better' lives elsewhere. This water, Brand tells Wachtel in their

CBC interview, would flow under her house in Trinidad when the tide was high. She adds that for her the sea was a reminder of "all the people who went away" (Brand CBC).

Davies maintains that "migration and the fluidity of movement which it suggests or the displacement and uprootedness which is often its result, is intrinsic to New World experience, fundamental to the meaning of the (African) diaspora" (128). Brand's claim is characterized in the dominant themes of eroding roots, shifting ground and shape- shifting which Brand employs in Land to illustrate that historic roots and routes can neveï be erased completely for Caribbean people at home or in diaspora. Brand observes and fixes her subjects in the lens as they fix their gaze on others and perhaps beyond to routes leading North.

Landscape of Diaspora

In A Map to the Door of No Return, Brand states that "fl]anding is what people in the Diaspora do" (150). Brand's "landing" can also be interpreted as "lighting on" although the latter connotes a more delicate, tentative movement that suggests the possibility of flight. Land includes a series of vignettes where Brand's characters attempt to light on and to negotiate landscapes that are hostile and treacherous. These spaces, whether located in rural or urban Canada or in the Caribbean, often evoke parallel spaces from individual and collective pasts. Her landscapes and accompanying forbidding weather are natural entities that have the power to overwhelm and control, and

54 as Walcott points ottt, "Brand's recharting of the Canadian landscape is not in any way

tomantic" (52). In her poems, landscape is a metaphor for nation, and Brand creates a

conflict between individuals and landscape that results in a sense of un-belonging by her

immigrant characters. In her poetry, Brand, similarly to Clarke, adopts a Canadian

literary staple that engages national geographies as a means to stake out personal and

collective territories and identities. However, what is apparent in both Land and ll'aves is

that Brand and Clarke use this literary staple to convey the futility immigrants experience

when trying to engage in a dialogue on belonging with Canada. Kaya Fraser argues that

in Brand's case, "rather than falling into chorus" with the Canadian canon in her writing,

"Brand is in fact critiquing the Canlit clichés of vast, menacing landscapes and garrison

mentalities..." (5). Although there is some merit in this perspective, Brand's engagement

with landscape in this collection is a catalyst for a discourse on social criticism of race,

gender and identity in the diaspora she inhabits. Roads and routes are carved into Brand's

landscapes because, as she says, "We [blacks] are always in the middle of the journey"

(Map a$. Whether they lead to a small town in Northern Ontario, to a village in

Trinidad or across the Atlantic, often it is the significance of the struggle and terror of the journey rather than the arrival at a destination that Brand uses to map the politics of her poetry.

Brand signals the struggle of the journey in the opening section, "I Have Been

Losing Roads," when the speaker declares:

Out here I am like someone without a sheet without a branch but not even as safe as the sea without the relief of the sky or the good graces of a door. If I am peaceful in this discomfort, is not peace, is getting use to harm. Is giving up, or misplacing surfaces... (3)

55 The speaker appears weary with her journey, exposed, vulnerable and discombobulated

in her surroundings. Brand uses bird imagery to suggest that the speaker is emotionally

in flightl, perhaps has lost her way and is unable to find even a "branch" to light on.

There is an awareness of the speaker glancing back when she evokes the terrors of the

Middle Passage by her ironic references to the "safety" of the sea, "the relief of the sky",

and the "good graces of a door". Certainly the sea held no safety for the slaves who

crossed the Atlantic as large numbers were thrown overboard when they became sick or

died. Slaves were only able to get a glimpse of the sky from the bowels of the ships after they left port in West Africa. The 'door' which the slaves passed through as they were taken from Africa held no promise of return. Her comparison of the dislocation of slavery to her sense of dislocation in Canada aligns the present with the past and suggests the slaves had something she could never have: origins. Brand holds no allusions about a retutn to home in the Caribbean or Africa, but at the same time she is wary about her place in Canada, the place where she is 'landed'. The speaker appears to be under siege when she acknowledges that she "is getting use to harm." As the speaker continues, she seems to be submiuing or "giving up". However, the switch in tone when the speaker says "My eyes is not a mirror" (3) warns that she is an outsider, that she is unlikely to reflect what is expected of her, and is resistant to assimilation. Her eyes will not reflect the stereotypical identities society imposes on diaspora. The speaker is not interested in assuming an ascribed identity.

Brand moves from the transient space of the opening poem in Land to specific locales in the rest of the collection as she unravels the vastness of Canada, but at the same t flight can be used to symbolize an escape from slavery. Nanatives about slavery sometimes refer to slaves returning to Africa by flying. For example, see Sozzg of Solomon by Toni Morrison.

56 time the sameness in the way she is treated. She situates a series of the poems in rural

Canada during winter. The enormity and diffrculty of her dialogue with Canada are heard in the speaker's words: "Maybe this wide country just stretches your life to a thinness / just trying to take it in.. ." (43). As she engages with the Canadian landscape, Brand, like Clarke, employs ice and snow as a metaphor for Canada and whiteness. She believes that Canada "built itself around 'whitenes s"' (Bread 187), using it to "differentiate the colonizer from the colonized" (187). Brand maintains "[i]nclusion in or access to canadian identity...depends on one's relationship to this 'whiteness"' (187). But whereas Clarke engulfs his characters in Waves with snow and ice to allude to an environment of claustrophobia and unsteady footing encountered by black Caribbean immigrant men living in a dominant white society, Brand takes Clarke's metaphor another step. She writes "...ice invades /our nostrils in chunks, land fills your throat"

(43), depicting choking and suffocation, with the possibility of death, an allegory of the immigrant experience that also harkens to the terror of the sea.

The bleakness of the opening poem extends through the first section while the speaker describes her sojourn on a secluded property in rural Ontario. Brand shatters the natural rural setting in the following poem introducing the spectre of racism, sexism and homophobia on the landscape. The speaker explains that "when a white man in a red truck on a rural road / jumps out at you, screaming his exact hatred / of the world ... you think of Malcolm" (a). The red truck recurs throughout the first section as a leitmotif for danger as well as for Canada. The white man in the red truck reflects the colours of the

Canadian flag and Brand is demonstrating that bigotry against immigrants respects no boundaries in Canada. The verbal violence the white man hurls silences the speaker as

57 she realizes how Canada feels about her. Her "mouth could not find a language" (5) to respond. Brand is exposing the futility of the immigrant trying to dialogue with or respond to Canada. Even if the speaker could speak, there is no one to listen to her. The man has driven away. Again Brand connects the immigrant's experience in Canada with slavery. Just as the slaves were forced to give up their language, the speaker/immigrant is shocked out of her language by the white man/Canada. As the poem continues, the tension in the mood increases. The sounds of nature, the wood breathing and the stars crackling, unnerve the speaker. Her paranoia reaches its peak as night falls and she worries that the man in the red truck may come back to harm her. As a result her shape shifts "into a crouch" (11), suggestive of the slave's position, forcibly bent in the hull of the ship en route to the New World. She reveals that while in the house, "with telephone close by and the doors / checked and checked, all night. I can hear everything" (1 1).

She continues:

"...I can hear wood breathe and stars crackle on the galvanized steel, I can hear smoke turn solid and this house is only safe as flesh

I listen for the crush ofa car on ice or gravel, the crush of boots or something coming. (11)

The scene is reminiscent of Earle Birney's 1951 poem "Bushed". Birney writes:

He took then to waiting till the night smoke rose from the boil of the sunset

But the moon carved unknown totems out of the lakeshore owls in the beardusky woods derided him moosehorned cedars circled his swamps and tossed their antlers up to the stars Then he knew though the mountain slept the winds were shaping its peak to an arrowhead

58 poised And now he could only bar himself in and wait for the great flint to come singing into his heart. (60)

There is a mixture of the sublime and the uncanny in this wilderness gothic setting as

Birney's character is unnerved by nature and believes he is under siege by the wildemess.

But unlike this character, Brand's speaker is not waiting for the "great flint", but instead

for the "the man in the red truck". In an inversion of Northrop Frye's "garrison

mentality"2, Brand's speaker perceives danger not in nature, but in her white neighbours.

Brand notes that "[i]n the Diaspora, as in bad dreams, you are constantly overwhelmed by

the persistence of the spectre of captivity" (Map 29).The image of captivity in the poem

is raised by the speaker's fears of the white man in the red truck. He raises the spectre of

the slave traders. The speaker's recourse is to bar herself in and wait, not unlike Bimey's

character.

Besides eliciting an atmosphere of fear, other poems in this section are laced

with personal disappointment and dread as the speaker attempts to reconcile her place in

diaspora to her aspirations. The tone of resignation in the first poem continues to echo in

her voice:

Yes, is here I reach framed and frozen on a shivered country road instead of where I thought I'd be in the blood red flame of a revolution. (6)

2In his discussion of the literary history of Canada, Northrop Frye states that small and isolated communities "surrounded with a physical or psychological "frontier," separated from one another and from their American and British cultural sources... [when] confronted with a huge, unthinking, menacing, and formidable physical setting - such communities are bound to develop what we may provisionally call a garrison mentality. In the earliest maps of the country the only inhabited centres are forts, and that remains true of the cultural maps for a much later time" (227)

59 She feels trapped in a frame of stereotypical expectations of nation and diaspora. She

expects to be active in instituting changes in society, but instead she becomes

immobilized and loses her political drive as ground shifts beneath her. Brand's reference

to "revolution" reaches beyond alocalized space to a global context. She refers

indirectly to significant influences in her life, the black power movement in America and

revolution in Grenada and the subsequent intervention by the United States and forces

from neighbouring Caribbean countries.

In "Islands Vanish", Brand intersects diasporas to demonstrate the shared

experience of racism by non-whites in Canada. The speaker recounts a journey in a car to

Chatham with her female Ugandan lover and a male Sri Lankan friend. Brand writes:

In this country where islands vanish, bodies submerge, the heart of darkness is these white roads, snow at our throats and at the windshield a thick white cop in blue steel windbreaker peering into our car, suspiciously

.....as a man looking at aliens. (73).

Brand overlays the snowstorm with visions of Africa and the Middle Passage, projecting the idea of the spectre of slavery haunting the Caribbean and Canada. The speaker implies that immigrants' history, memories and selves can "vanish" or be lost in diaspora in Canada, and she parallels it to slaves who were stripped of their history in the New

V/orld. But that history never completely disappears and is very public in its visible stain.

Brand maps the snow over the Atlantic Ocean when she writes of 'bodies submerged", suggesting that diaspora could be a place of death, as the sea proved to be for an uncountable number of Africans, or conversely, a place of rebirth, as depicted by the photograph on the cover. The author brings Africa to the Canadian landscape by an ironic comparison of the snow-covered roads to "the heart of darkness". Again Brand re-figures

60 and inverts the colonial myths of settlement. She inverts the ter¡or of the'dark continent'

for white Europeans by portraying Canada as the "white continent," instilling terror in

black people. Hence, "the thick white cop" symbolizes the colonial power policing and

containing the 'Other' or the "aliens." In addition, as Forster argues, "the cop represents

the colonial endeavour of reinscribing the landscape in order to erase all non-white

presences" (161).

The colonial gaze of the cop's eyes "f,ixes" (Land 73) the three black people in the

car. The three Blacks "stumble on [their] antiquity" (73), but theirs is an old and an

"unbearable" (73) story to unearth. Their antiquity refers to the stories of themselves that others assumed because of their race. These stereotypes of blackness are stuck in the past but they persist in the present. The three travelers continue to be under surveillance "in the jagged beam of the cops blistering eye" (74) as they make their way to Chatham and

Buxton. This is a route taken by slaves as they made their way through the Underground

Railroad. The people in the car are being pursued like the runaway slaves who came to

Canada for freedom, except they are being pursued in Canada. Brand is commenting on the meaning of "freedom" in Canadafor visible minorities in diaspora and calling into question the idea of Canada as a place that is welcoming of immigrants and refugees.

Later, the speaker says, "we laugh, lie that we are not harmed" (77). But as she says in the first poem of the text, she "is getting use to harm" (3), and harm in this landscape is the motif of racism. According to Brand, "Race makes your life public" (Brand CBC).

The binary of black and white that threads through her poems is a stark reminder of how difficult it is for Black people in diaspora to have a sense of belonging in Canada. Brand shows that history continues to haunt Black people wherever they settle, but as Goldman

61 states, community for Brand "is not predicated by an essentialized past" (27). By bringing three non-white immigrants from different countries under the gaze of racism, as well as her gestures to Blacks in the United States, indicates Brand explores the notion of a collective identity. However, as Marlene Goldman points out, "her drifting subjects reconfigure the trajectory and objects ofthe desire for belonging by forging decentered, transnational connections that are not necessarily based on the concept of a homeland"

(26).

Writing Women

In discussing diaspora and cultural memory, Anh Hua contends "fm]emory analysis is significant to diaspora and feminist theorizing because it can reveal the inner psychic states of postcolonial diaspora women and men ...as well as the social state of diasporic communities" (199). She explains that it can also "unfold...various traumas including transatlantic slavery..." (199) and "evoke identity formation [and] the rewriting of home and belonging" (200). When Brand draws on memories of a real or an imagined home in Land, it is not for the sake of nostalgia, but to provide a point of reference for identity-discourse in diaspora. In fact, her writings on home often depict harsh realities rather than idyllic settings. Remembering women's lives at home instructs and shapes

Brand's dialogue with Canada. As Hua alleges, "feminists are more interested in critical remembrance that can make women's individual and collective pain and suffering publicly visible" (202).

Brand's political advocacy for Caribbean women in diaspora is a substantial component of her dialogue with Canada. She writes about the plight of black women in

62 away that contests patriarchal domination and celebrates their sexuality. Her discussion

centres on themes of mothering, sexuality and poverty.In Land, Brand 's writings on

Caribbean women in diaspora are prefaced by her memories of women in Trinidad, and

in particular, the women of her own family. Brand acknowledges in her interview with

Wachtel that her grandmother "grew" her. She was raised by her grandparents and in a

large extended family that included many aunts. The author admits that she did not meet

her mother "formally" until she was 13 years old and never met her father (Brand CBC).

Her descriptions of the struggles of women back home, and how they cope with the

patriarchal systems, parallel the experiences Caribbean immigrant women encounter in

Canada. Nevertheless, she recognizes, "No one leaves that easy and I don't forget it. . . "

(85). When people emigrate, it is not only what they carry with them, but also what they

leave behind that informs their subjectivity in diaspora. Brand acknowledges this even

though she advocates destabilizing identity by loosening of ties with the past.

Towards promoting a broader image of Black women, Brand indicates she wants

black witers to move beyond the stereotypical "mammy" tradition which, as Walcott

describes, "makes all things right or at least smooth everything over" (Btack 54). But, at the same time, she does not eliminate or diminish the role of black women as caregivers or nutlurers in her writing. Nevertheless, she argues that "what the eyes demur, what is missing" (Bread 92) in writings about black women, is "the sexual body" (92). The female body has been co-opted by male writers "as representative of colonialism/anticolonialism" (94) she claims, and asks, "[How] does anyone else dare use it, even those of us whom the body belongs to, how we loosen it from this 'high moral' use...?" (94).

Brand engages in working loose the female body in the section entitled "Dialectics". Her

63 description of a mother and her children in poem VII i interplays with the photograph on

the cover of the text. She writes:

I took in the child sucking her thumb, holding on to the butter of her mother's skirt, the other sitting on the gathers at his mother's hips, leaning out dangerously, leaning away happily from the mother's set cheek, set mouth and the baby in thå remaining arm, maffer in her eyes, screaming. I made a note. one at her dress tail, one on her hip, one in her afin... .(Land 53)

This mother is waiting outside an electricity company for a worker, perhaps the

children's father, perhaps to get child support. She is rebuffed by the guard at the

barricade of the company: "He gone, he not here, don't waste your time,, (53). In

depicting the hardship of mothering in poverty in the Caribbean, Brand makes men

complicit by showing them as failing their partners and their children and as collectively

erecting patriarchal barricades. The speaker's response to the scene is a rejection of

motherhood: "I never fell into the heaviness of babies. Thank god. Not / me and no

baby. Baby, in bony lap? It can't hold no baby / there. I is not nobody mother,, (53)..

Brand is shifting the traditional roles by suggesting that remaining childless is an option

for women.

When the mother contemplates how to care for her children, the speaker mentions

possible a solution born in slavery. She says that "short of burying them in the cane field

at the back of her house / she had to hang them on her hips where harm lwas greater if

only they knew the sweet ground would / be milk" (54). During slavery, mothers would

kill their babies so that the children did not become slaves. Instead, it robbed the

plantation of an asset. Instead, the mother "could fool those children / to sleep cooing a watery promise of nice things / tomorrow, ladling sugar water into their mouths', (56).

Brand shows there are no easy solutions for the mother, but in the midst of this dilemma,

64 the writer refuses to separate her from her sexuality and desire. As she is "sleepless

waiting for his sodden body to fall I and lay near the steps outside or break a window

/coming in" (56) she wonders "not just how they / would eat but how she would love,

why lwas it only lost to her this need to love" (57). Brand strips away the notion of

mother as sacrosanct by portraying her character as an accomplice in the violence and

sensuality that imbues her life. Motherhood is a symbol of origins and essence.

Consideringthat Brand was not raised by her mother but by other women, this could be

thought of as a diasporic experience. She thrived even though she was not attached to

origins.

The narrator speaks from a strong matriarchal background where "aunts was like

tree / and good cloth, river and big road. . ." (62).She diffuses the mood of despair

associated with mothering when she describes the exploits of one of her aunts. The

mother of five "steal[s] out the door without them...going looking for another / as her

mother said. ..trusting the cane f,reld ...while she found another I tall and prefry" (Land

59). Again Brand is erasing stereotypes of motherhood by portraying a mother of f,rve as

sexually appealing and desiring. However, the mother's actions are furtive as she

"steal[s] out the door" and depends on the cane field for camouflage, reminiscent of slaves escaping plantations. By using the description of "tall and pretty", Brand is ambivalent about the sex of the aunt's partners. Even though the aunt is portrayed as expressing liberated sexuality, Brand shows that her relationships must be hidden and, in a broader sense, that historical mores regarding women and sexuality remain in place at home. She also undermines the view that migration is an overriding desire for people living in poverty in the Caribbean. Because of the aunt's appetite for pleasure, "a ship to

65 England would leave without her many times" (Land 59). Missing the boat can also be

interpreted as apprehension about making the reverse joumey of the Middle passage.

This time the passage is to a door opening to postcolonial servitude.

The women living in diaspora in Canada fare no better than the women Brand

writes about in Trinidad. Traces of home are never far away from their daily lives. In the

section "All That Has Happened Since" Brand portrays an immigrant mother's concerns

for the children she left behind:

..... and how she could, bringing them one at a time, picking them up by airplane where she had left them, in this village, that town, this family, which aunt and grandmother and never being able to reach them as she had left them, how folded in a brown paper was not how you left children, untying sweet string was not how they c¿rne, and whatever plansshehadothershadplentymore,...... (31)

This scene of anguish is comparable to the scene of the mother in Trinidad trying to feed

her children. Neither woman is in control of important areas of her life. The mother in

Trinidad cannot feed her children. The mother in Toronto has lost control of "whatever

plans she had" (31) to raise her children. To bring them to Canada, "one at a time', (3 l ),

she works "lifting spoiled white bodies, their own whimpering death / songs elegizing,

'bitch, black bitch, I want my ovvrr daughter"' (31). The mother is working in urban

Canada as a caregiver to white people, a role that harkens to colonial times. Even though

she is lifting immobile "white bodies", she is rendered subordinate/inferior. She is

reminded of her otherness, her race. She is resented also because she reminds the old

white woman of her daughter's lack of caring. In the host country an identity is already in place for this immigrant based on her ancestral badge, her black skin. But Brand also adds gender and sexuality to this equation. When the driver of the red truck hurls his

66 "exact hatred", the narrator says, "and he threatens, something about your cunt", Brand is

stating that an attack on the body is an attack on identity. She is depicting Canada as a patriarchal country where identity is seen through the prism of race and sex. Brand also shows the irony in the patients' "death / songs" because the immigrant mother also

"wants her own daughter" (31). Although she has created a link between the here and home, in a broader sense Brand is signaling the death throes of ascribed identity and the conventional construct of what she sees as a rigid and racist society and culture in

Canada.

Brand is pushing the Caribbean diaspora into a wider arena by including the black

American diaspora and aligning her struggles in Canada globally with other black causes.

Brand crosses diasporic boundaries to expose the struggles of immigrant women. As a result, she shows the interconnectedness and shared experiences of immigrant communities and how "the ways in which lives lived in one place are implicated as much in what happens elsewhere as in what happens here...ways in which global and local interact and co-construct one another" (Brydon 993). In this vein, Brand provides an intriguing linkage to Africa when she writes about African women. In "Every Chapter of the world", the speaker tells of a woman in Africa fleeing for her life:

Someone in the tumbled rush of bodies cutting out

her own singular life and the life of a child running with her to a refugee

camp on the Burundi border, caught in the bulb of a television camera, seen

in her most private moments, tumbling to the bottom of a mass grave after all her running. (100)

67 Although this incident is set in Africa, similar events resonate in the lives of refugees

who have settled in Canada. The memories of these incidents help shape their lives in

diaspora in the same way as the memories of women's lives in the Caribbean. Again,

there is a sense of futility. Brand's reference to the television camera places the world as

anthropolo gical gazer. The public and the private are merged by the camera. Borders are

blurred. They also shift as people journey and settle in diasporas that extend borders of

their homeland. In this way, influences of Africa and the Caribbean enter Canada

through diaspora and re-shape Canada's landscape.

She extends this theme in "Islands Vanish". The speaker's lover is a woman

"from uganda / via Kenya running from arranged marriages...,' (75). Brand draws

attention to the global plight of women living under patriarchal systems. She depicts

lesbianism as a sexual identity that transcends borders. Hua argues that "for queer

diasporic subjects, neither the homeland nor the diasporic location can offer spaces of

'safety', 'authenticity', and belonging, since queer identities, experiences, and sexualities

are written out of nation and out of diaspora" (195). Therefore, Brand's inclusion of

queer identities in the text enables diaspora to become an in-between space where women have options and can assert their identities. Also, her transnational coupling of a

Caribbean woman with an African woman identifies diaspora as a place for negotiating roots. Yet this is contrary to the speaker's reference to origins when she declares, "I don't want no fucking country, here lor there and all the way back..." (48). Ironically, when the speaker describes her lover sleeping with "[her] legs wrapped around me" (77), she portrays the intimacy of Africa wrapping herself around the Caribbean. It reveals a desire to recapture a relationship or to construct an identity based only on traces of the

68 past because, as Brand observes, "Africa is ...a place strictly of the imagination - what is imagined therefore is a gauzy, elliptical, generalized, vague narrative of a place" (Map

2s).

In discussing the lives of women at home and in diaspora, Brand illustrates the interconnectedness of the spaces they live in and the impact of history on those spaces. 'What's more, she shows how the patriarchy of colonialism, nation and diaspora have contributed to undermining the role of women. The author states that "in many senses the

Black body is one of the most regulated bodies in the Diaspora" (Map 37); however she believes that "the most regulated body is the female body" (37). Consequently, Brand's poetry promotes the notion that women have choices that will help them take control of their own bodies. Motherhood and sexuality are two areas of choice that she stresses.

Charlotte Sturgess describes Brand's poetry as "interstitial, shifting on borders of meaning and concerned with the problem of frnding voice as aracially and sexually inscribed Other" (203). Most of Brand's sexualized women in the text are portrayed in flawed relationships with men. In depicting the relationship between the speaker and her lover as successful, Brand recognizes new avenues of identity for women in portraying the success of this relationship.

Voice in diaspora

In the Foreword to The Austin Clarke Reader, Brand contends that immigrant literatures "are only allowed one book. The same book from its different ethnicities; versions of a Canadian myth of the perpetual newcomer, outsider. Versions which help in the project of shaping the elusive Canadian identity by pointing to its difference from

69 it" (15). Brand, in her determination to give voice to diaspora in a national and global

context, is at the same time clearing a space for other black immigrant writers within a

Canadian literary context. Foremost, she addresses what Walcott calls "the politics of

...present location" (Black 46) in her writing and she refuses to be pigeonholed in what

she calls "the same book" (Austin Clarke Reader 15). According to Walcott, Brand

"redlaws and remaps the Canadian urban landscape in order to announce and articulate a black presence that signals defiance, survival and renewal" (Black45). However, in an interview with Walcott and Leslie Saunders, Brand asserts, "All black writers are expected to make signs for other people that will identiff black bodies and code them ...

I don't want the job of addressing, or signing "black behavior"" (6). on the other hand, she writes in Land "...I did not want to write poems / about stacking cords of wood, as if the world / is that simple. .."(7), indicating that she has no interest in being part of a literary landscape that is preoccupied with Canadian identity and is globally myopic.

In her discussion on writing in diaspora, Andrea Davis contends that for black women writers, "the concept of the diaspora can be employed both as a creative transfotmative attempt to name and relocate black women's experiences as part of a shared collective" (65). Also, it can contest "the hegemonic patriarchal control of geographical, political , and cultural borders" (65). Davis rightly stresses the need for black women writers to ensure inclusion by participating in constructing the Caribbean diasporic narrative in countries like Canada and the United States. Her contention that

"black women writers complicate and enhance discussions about identities, race, ethnicity, gender, colour, class, geography and sexuality" (64) is strongly supported in

Brand's writings. Brand's work answers Davis's call for "trespass" and "resistance",

70 while moving further by utilizing 'claiming' as an additional act. Brand is not satisfied

only to venture where she does not 'belong'; she also insists on claiming her own space.

Her ambivalence about single and collective identities puts her at odds with Davis's view

of black women writers "nam[ing] and relocat[ing] black women's experiences as part of

a shared collective" (65). Forster also points out this ambivalence about identity in

Brand's work when she argues that while Brand "appears deeply suspicious of collective

identity, at times presenting it as a threat to the liberation of oppressed groups, she also

suggests that it may be indispensable to precisely that same liberation" (Forster 3).

Brand's resistance to a fixed identity based on origins suggests that she does not favour

collective identities. However, this conflicts with her invoking of Malcolm X when she

writes of the abuse by the man in the red truck and implies that she is aligning with black

Americans and their struggle against marginality and racism.

The line of resistance for Brand starts in the diction of her poetry. In the first

place, she admits that she does not "construct a sentence as a standard English speaker or

writer does" (Butling 72). Like Clarke, she works in the demotic style in keeping with

her characters who are mostly working-class. Initially, she questions whether she is

"plumbing fthe demotic] for the range of things that it can do or, ...for recognition by

[her] audience" (Butling,72), in this case, an immigrant audience. Brand prefers "to

work fthe demotic] like a language rather than work it as an example of culture" (72).But

when she writes, "...the mouth of the world will open I yawnher in, float her like a

language on its tongue / forgetting" (Land 94), itis diffrcult to see how she can separate language from culture. In reality, the hybridity of Caribbean culture is reflected in the hybrid Caribbean demotic, which is derived from "a fi;sion of English and West African

71 languages" (Gadsby 149) constructed by slaves . Forster, nevertheless, contends that

Brand's use of dialect:

tends to trouble rather than legitimate given cultural identities fand that] Brand also uses a range of formal poetic devices, including inventory, discourses of the natural, irony, and metapoetic elements, to both shore up and subvert identity structures, sometimes at exactly the same moment. She thus suggests that her ambivalence towards identity politics is, to a certain degree, tied to the operations of language itself. (4)

Indeed, Brand parallels the act of writing to her discussion of negotiating diaspora in Land. The frustration in her voice when she writes about "losing roads" (15) is echoed in her discourse about language and writing. Earlier, Brand writes in Bread Out of Stone,

"Every word turns on itself every word falls after it is said" (i95). Although she alludes to the temporality of words, there is a sense that her flow of words will persist. In contrast, later in Land, when the speaker says, "...I try to say a word but it fall. Fall / like the stony air ..." (5) and "...My mouth could not find a language" (5), the intimation is that words are no longer available to the poet. Furtherrnore, the speaker claims language is a burden and history is implicated:

...all I have are these hoarse words that still owe

this life an all I'll be is tied to this century waiting

without a knife or courage and still these same words

strapped to my back (9)

Brand implies that there is a state of inertia in her life and nothing has changed in spite of her politics and activism. But the speaker's words have remained unchanged as well. In her interior monologue she questions, "Where is this. Your tongue, gone cold, gone / heavy in this winter light" (14), and points to Canada as the cause of her silence. What the speaker cannot say here, she falls back on writing about home. Her words are placed

72 in motion, traversing oceans and borders. Even so, her language is sparse and distant.

She writes home "blue airmail letters opening, whisping, 'Dear I mama, hope you are well and enjoying the / best of health."' (68) and "...I'll send you more poems even if they arrive late" (8i).

The speaker's tone changes as she "suffender all parentheses, / all arguments, this world is that one , that one is this" (102). Earlier, she appears to move from resignation

"[to] giving up what is always shifting" (47), which may include diasporic identity. But far from giving up, Brand reinvigorates her political acumen and turns her attention from a Canadian diasporic to a global outlook in the later section of Land. Her list of couplets, drawing attention to everything from slavery to global markets, is a precursor to her book

Inventory. In "Every Chapter of the World", Brand runs across the globe from one issue to the next - "bundles at more border" (101), "at water holes on the edges of deserts"

(101, "gunboats steaming toward the middle of America" (100), "corporate boards, running shoes, new economic plans" (102). She employs enjambment in this poem to demonstrate the interconnectedness of the global issues she raises. Importantly, she brings a Canadian context into the global in a teniffing way when she writes of the brutal slaying of Shidane Arone, a young man tortured and murdered by a Canadian soldier because he had sneaked into the Canadian Forces compound in Somalia:.

Someone moaning the name of a country, this country, in Belet Huen, flesh melting into his blood,

in the pulp of human flesh he becomes, blindfolded and longing for a gateway, afence, away out, the way in (98)

73 With these graphic lines on the Belet Huen killing, Brand illustrates that Canada is not absolved of complicity in acts of brutality on the global level. Brand's message is that injustice and inhumanity are both local and global.

Conclusion

Brand challenges the literary and social landscape of Canada through her writings that question an immigrant's place in diaspora and nation. Although the history of the

Atlantic haunts her contemporary experience and memories of home inform her writings of Canada, Brand shies away from supporting "the romance of origins" (35) and essentialism as key to negotiating identity in her work. She resists being assigned to the margins as an ethnic writer, or residing in pre-existing spaces. Instead, Brand attempts to exact new spaces to inhabit. Walcott maintains that "[h]er use of language signals the unsettled restlessness of the exile and refugee who must rechart, remap and regroup so that both self and collectivity are made evident" (Black 49). To this end, Brand engages the landscape of diaspora and extends links to home, the African diaspora, and the globe.

She manages to take the theme of siege, introduced in the first section of Land, outside of the Canadian landscape by inserting the theme into other national narratives. For example, the theme of siege is seen in her discussion of the young mother in Trinidad

"sleepless" waiting for the "sodden body" of her lover to fall when he comes home drunk. By doing this, she collapses boundaries and demonstrates the intersection and interconnectedness of growing global influences.

Brand's writings of history and home are not nostalgic. She writes, "no, I do not long, long, slowly for the past. / I am happy it is gone" (Land 68). Goldman questions

Brand not supporting "the dream of returning home or...belonging to a new home," and

74 asks if she posits "an alfemative to nostalgia" (16). Brand's preference is to concentrate

on politics of the present rather than constantly looking to the past. Brand is not only

concerned that there has not been enough progress in eradicating racism, sexism and

poverty; she is also concerned about their impact on her freedom to write. There is a

mood of resignation about missions unaccomplished and tasks left undone as she chooses to move on from her current politics and writing. She writes, "...perhaps / we cannot hope to finish anything, which is life's / harsh caution" (83).

In her characterization of working-class immigrants, Brand shows that in Canada, a longing for belonging is not necessarily a need for embrace, but instead an understanding of a right to an equal footing in the present that enables aspirations for the future. Even so, as Goldman states, "[the author] acknowledges the overwhelming sadness of lives lived in isolation and exile" (18). Brand's work resonates with the complexities of self-identification, but also illustrates the difficulty of situating identity in new and acceptable space. Brand believes that "To live in the Black Diaspora is ...to live as a fiction - a creation of empires, and also a self-creation" (Map 18). Brand supports the idea of self-creation in the text, especially for women, and in turn, she regards fixity of identity as troubled, unachievable, and not desirable.

75 Conclusion

In the introduction to this thesis, I posed two questions on the ways in which

Caribbean immigrants negotiate identity in diaspora: how do they participate and

develop a sense of belonging in the host country, and who do they become once they are

situated in diasporic space? I turned to diasporic narratives for answers, and in this study

of The Origin of Waves and Land to Light On,I argte that although Clarke and Brand

take different approaches to the treatment of identity in their texts, in the end, both

writers challenge ideas of fixity of identity in diaspora. Recognizing that gender roles and

patriarchal and matriarchal frameworks are important considerations in Caribbean

diasporic writings, I focus on the intrusion of memory and a desire for belonging, which

I believe shape first-generation Caribbean diasporans' experiences and are foundational

in locating, as well as dislocating, place and self in diaspora.

The theory that frames the study shows that today's parameters for the term

diaspora have expanded its traditional meaning and extended its scope to include voluntary migration. No longer are people in diaspora expected to have a desire to return to their homeland. Technological advancements in communications and inexpensive transport now make it much easier than before for diaspora dwellers to maintain close connections with their homeland. Because of the ability to maintain ties with home, diasporas have increased their influence on the homeland and extended the influence of homeland in diaspora. In the case of the Caribbean, large numbers of people have

76 migrated, primarily to Canada, the United States and the United Kingdom, but still they

identìfy with their Caribbean country of origin as 'home'. Their cultural and f,rnancial remittances as well as political involvement, expands the borders of their homeland to include its diasporas. Those who come to Canada encounter multiculturalism policies that regulate immigrants and move them to the margins by promoting retention of traditions that have often been abandoned or have evolved in the homelands.

At the onset of my research, I expected to find wide variances between Brand's and Clarke's works based on the differences in their generation, gender and sexuality.

Although this proved true in comparing the authors' approach to their works, surprisingly, they come to the same conclusion about diasporic identity, but with different, though connected, outcomes. Clarke's work depends mostly on colonial memories of home that impinge on the present. While recollecting their experiences during the past forty or fifty years, his characters, Tim and John, foreground childhood events in Barbados in their memories, indicating that they are not rid of colonial influences on their lives in diaspora. Aside from John's comments that African women are "the real McCoy" (107) and his desire to give his sickly child an 'African' name,

Clarke makes few direct references to Africa, though his descriptions of the sea in

Barbados conjure up allusions of the Middle Passage. Brand, on the other hand, draws heavily on images of the Middle Passage, although her influences seem to be more contemporary than Clarke's, and her speaker declares that she has given up on land to light on. Africa, through references to the Middle Passage, as well as African characters and events, is privileged throughouf Land, but this seems inconsistent, because, at the

l1 same time, Brand appears to be divesting herself of origins as essential to identity-

formation in the text.

Diaspora is not a place of forgettin g, yef hanging on to memories of elsewhere,

although enriching, can be stagnating if those memories choke out recognition of and

involvement in new experiences. Both Brand and Clarke initially seem in danger of

submerging their characters in memories of home and their history of displacement, but both books ultimately turn away from this fate. Brand repositions her work in "Every

Chapter of the World" by cataloguing contentious current events. She indicates that she is no longer attempting to fashion an identity within a Canadian context, but, instead, is reaching outside herself towards a more global identification. Clarke's character, Tim, rejects any ascribed identification by simply withdrawing from society. His house becomes his sanctuary as he spirals into himself and falls into a place of seclusion and exclusion. In his deliberate act to resist being characterized, Tim seems to contest race as an identifier in using Black Flag to kill black ants invading his home. V/hat is surprising, howevet, is that in spite of Brand's global outreach, the last poem in the book concludes with a woman circling, "walking into herself ' (Land,103), a movement that appears to parallel Tim's introspection. I believe both authors are pointing to subjectivity as key to negotiating place in diaspora, aware that place is always marginal and shifting, and negotiation is a continual process.

Loosening the strings of identity from origins and questioning identity's very existence are instrumental for Brand and Clarke in order to move their work into new areas that extend beyond early diasporic crises of a desire to belong and identity construction in alignment with the host country. However, both authors express concems

78 in the texts about the ability to hold on to their voices in diaspora. Both authors, as

revisionists of national and colonial narratives, have helped destabilize the center of the

Canadian literary landscape to gain acceptance for racial and ethnic diversity and to

challenge stereotypical perceptions of identity. But, more importantly, their works since

Land and Waves show that these two texts were turning points in their careers. Brand's

latest collection of poetry,Inventory, continues the cataloguing she started in Land. She

also branches out from her earlier writings centred on Caribbean diaspora to engage with

current discourses in globalization. She lists the violence and instability on the globe, at

times through the eyes of the media. Brand offers no solutions, but the starkness and

bleakness of her observations underscores the plight of humanity. What We All Long

For,Brand's latest novel, broadens her conversation on identity and origins discussed in

Land and Map to the Door of No Return. Her characters are four multiracial young people, mostly second-generation immigrants, who live in Toronto. Brand undermines fixed racial and gender identities, and her narrative raises the question of whether second- generation inhabitants of a nation should be considered to be living in diaspora, and how they define 'home'. In comparison to Brand's works, which have shifted into a global

arena, Clarke has written a novel, The Polished Hoe, that is set in a fictional Caribbean island, Bimshire, in the 1930s and 1940s. The narrative, entirely written in the vernacular, is a very personal work that confronts the plantocracy system, racism, class, colour and gender on the island.

In their latest works, although Brand has jumped to a new generation, while

Clarke has revisited his home's colonial past, both writers continue to resist categorization and literary boundaries with their diverse narratives. The writings of both

79 Brand and Clarke are political and both draw attention to the relationship of Caribbean diaspora dwellers with Canada and home. In Land and.l4/aves, the authors move toward an identity that floats, promotes fluidity and choice for diasporic dwellers, enabling them to inhabit spaces/places other than those they have been assigned.

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