Ossuaries, Dionne Brand

Becoming

Alice Oseman, Radio Silence // David Almond, The Tightrope Walkers // Will Wood, Marsha Thankk You for the Dialectics but I Need You to Leave // Dionne Brand, What We All Long For // Erin Morgenstern, The Starless Sea // Jeff VanderMeer, Acceptance // Emily M. Danforth, The Miseducation of Cameron Post

One enters a room and history follows; one enters a room and history precedes. History is already seated in the chair in the empty room when one arrives.

Dionne Brand quoted by Saidiya Hartman in an essay from an afterword to the reissue of Brand’s The Map to the Door of No Return in The Paris Review. ARoom with History

A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging

"prologue for now - Gaza" is a new poem by dionne brand, a black canadian lesbian poet, novelist, essayist, and documentarian. her latest book is nomenclature: new and collected poems.

"what brutal hours, what brutal days, do not say, oh find the good in it, do not say, there was virtue; there was no virtue, not even in me." -Dionne Brand

“Desire, too, is the discovery of beauty as miraculous. Desire in the face of ruin. How in these lines there is such wreckage and that too is beauty, how in those lines there is such clear-eyed dread, such deeply mocking knowledge, and that too is desire. How those lines read beauty and desire into any given night, in any place, trailer park wasteland, rural rum shop, shebeen, sports bar, speakeasy, piss-and-beer-reeking dive, beauty walks in. On any given night, even with history against you in any hardscrabble place, beauty walks in. The ruin of history visited on a people does not wipe out the steadfastness of beauty. Not a naive beauty but a hard one. Beauty, it seems, is constantly made. It is both fortunate and unfortunate. Surprising.

For some, to find beauty is to search through ruins. For some of us beauty must be made over and over again out of the sometimes fragile, the sometimes dangerous.”

— Arriving at Desire: A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging, Dionne Brand.

Through conversation and poetry two poets meet for the telling and the listening. Adrienne Rich and Dionne Brand.  Topics include political issues, feminism, racism and lesbianism, among others. ( 1996 | 55 min )

Dionne Brand, reads from thirsty (2002)

2003 shortlisted for Griffin Poetry Prize

"how come / I anticipate nothing as intimate as history"

Just because you have only stage one of an illness doesn't mean you're well. Yes, you could have a fever, yes you could be dead, no doubt that would be worse. But recognize the disease.

from The Blue Clerk by Dionne Brand

Ossuaries, Dionne Brand

When you embark on a journey, you have already arrived. The world you are going to is already in your head. You have already walked in it; eaten in it; you have already made friends; a lover is already waiting.

A Map to the Door of No Return | Dionne Brand 

A Room with History “So then how might one write the disaster, the terrible history carried in our gestures, residing in our bodies, marked on our flesh, etched onto our retinas?” https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2023/01/09/a-room-with-history/

And the priest, Gaspar de Carvajal, on whose journal Werner Herzog based the film, his face unbeatific and slightly grungy, tells the desperate Inés, wife of Pedro de Ursúa, whom Aguirre has had shot,“You know, my child, for the sake of our lord, the Church has always been on the side of the strong.” 

What truth. 

- Dionne Brand On Aguirre, the Wrath of God (Werner Herzog, 1972 [x]

XXIII (from thirsty)  // Dionne Brand

I’ll tell you what I’ve seen here at Yonge and Bloor, At this crossroad, the air is elegiac with it whiffs and cirri of all emotion, need and vanity, desire, brazen as a killing a burger a leather jacket a pair of shoes a smoke to find a job to get drunk at the Zanzibar, a body the body of a woman in a cage on the window in a photograph in a strip joint two blocks away. to piss to get drunk to get fucked to get high grease sushi men wanting to be beaten to be touched and all the anonymous things that may happen on a corner like this for instance murder If you look into any face here you might fall into its particular need. And a woman I’ve seen her Julia perhaps walks here I can’t quite make her out She is a mixture of twigs and ink she’s like paper

the tenses of light,

Dionne Brand