Tidal Poetics in Dionne Brand's at the Full and Change of the Moon
Caribbean Quarterly › Vol. 55 Nbr. 3, September 2009
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Tidal Poetics in Dionne Brand's at the Full and Change of the Moon
'All beginning in water, all ending in water. 'Dionne Brand, A Map to the Door of N o Return1
In her memoir, A Map to the Door of No Return (2001), Caribbean Canadian writer Dionne Brand says of her 'large and unwieldy' family: 'Our origins seemed to be in the sea' . Quoting Derek Walcott' s words, 'the sea is history',2 she reflects: ? knew that before I knew it was history I was looking at' .3 In relating the idea of the sea to genealogy, Brand not only draws on Walcott' s idea, but also shares the approach of a number of other Caribbean writers. Notably, in Caribbean Discourse (1981), Edouard Glissant uses Kamau Brathwaite' s phrase 'the unity is submarine'4 as the basis for his own model of 'rhizomatic' identity;5 Brathwaite' s 'unity' is replaced with Glissant's plural '[submarine roots', which are 'floating free [. . .] extending in all directions in our world through its network of branches'.6 For Antonio Benitez-Rojo, the culture of the Caribbean is 'not terrestrial but aquatic', since the Caribbean is the 'realm of marine currents, of waves, of folds and double-folds, of fluidity and sinuosity'.7 Both writers make use of the concept of fluidity in order to put forward a model of Caribbean identity which takes into account the region's complex history of multiple migration. For Glissant, the notion of rootedness is not rejected but rearticulated within an aesthetic of movement and interconnection. For Benitez-Rojo, the 'flow' of Caribbean culture 'outwards past the limits of its own sea', beyond essentialising frameworks of place or ethnicity, is a distinguishing feature of the region.8 In both cases, fluidity is a means of exploring not the dissolution of cultural identity but the cultural specificity of the Caribbean.Later in her memoir, Brand discusses her fictional text, At the Full and Change of the Moon (1999):When asked, as in Derek Walcott' s poem, 'Where are your monuments, your battles, martyrs? / Where [sic] your tribal memory?' my characters answer as in that poem, 'Sirs, / in that grey vault. The sea. The sea / has locked them up.'9This sense of the sea as a repository of ancestral memories which at the same time re...See the full content of this document
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