Dionne Brand has never been afraid of reckoning with narrative—the demands of certain scripts on certain lives—the wreck from which one must salvage a self. Salvage: Readings from the Wreck marks Brand’s first return to nonfiction since A Map to the Door of No Return, in which she famously and daringly writes, “One enters a room and history follows; one enters a room and history precedes. History is already seated in the empty room when one arrives.”
Navigating the wrecks of history and narrative, Salvage expands Brand’s 2019 Kreisel Lecture given at the Centre for Literatures in Canada, later published as An Autobiography of the Autobiography of Reading. Brand reads the literature of British and American empires, analyzing works by Aphra Behn, William Thackeray, and C.L.R. James among others, questioning the implications and elisions made in and by this library of empire—a library in which we all have a membership card.
This interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.
Shazia Hafiz Ramji
I want to begin by talking about the wreck as a site of reading, and the salvage as what’s been saved from the danger of this wreck. You write, “the wreck is the library itself, and the salvage is the life which exceeds the wreck.” What is this library and how did you save yourself from it? I don’t want to get a library card there.
Dionne Brand
We all have a library card there. I suppose it is the body of works that contain a set of scripts for the ways of ordinary living passed down in the historical to this moment, not only for everyday living, but also for the life of the mind. So, all of the texts and scripts, and those texts and scripts might be literary and non-literary—sound and affect—the atmosphere of living constructed through the historical passage, if you will, that begin or continue through British imperialism, American imperialism, etc.; but all the texts out of that, that inscribe the contours of what a life might be.
I’m being very impressionistic about it, but, I mean that, and concretely. There are various aesthetic objects that have arrived in our time, that have persisted, through the last 400 or 500 years or so, as objects of aesthetic value. And those might be literary, they might be visual, they might be sonic. I read that as so much wreckage, of lives going on through them, and against them, and with them.
Shazia Hafiz Ramji
How do you save yourself from this configuration?
Dionne Brand
Through a careful and critical reading of them. The only way in, is through. Some you’ve read voluntarily, and some quite involuntarily, right? One must do a re-examination of the involuntary. Basically, the salvage is a recognition of the wreckage itself—reading through it, which means reading, yes, against it and with it at the same time. It’s a very complex kind of space, this reading space where both the text and the reader are alive and trembling with it, trembling with the processes inside, and trembling with and against the processes inside. Both are active—the impassive reader and the impassive text are fallacy—all mean to do something, to enter the social and the political.
Shazia Hafiz Ramji
The question of recognition came up for me in your reading of Vanity Fair by William Thackeray, when you question why you didn’t notice the Black characters Miss Schwartz and Sambo on the first reading and successive readings. How do you think that happened? And why do you think that happened?
Dionne Brand
So let me complicate that a bit, because the rhetorical stance is: why did I not notice them? But of course, I did. One cannot help but notice them, but I meant notice in which register. When one reads a text like that, one is called, as I say in the text, to associate, to parallel, some character in the text, and the text’s demand is to parallel what it calls the “major characters” in the text, and to make some recognitions or to find some identification with those characters, and that’s the main draw or desire, and pull or requirement of the text. And then there are other instruments arrayed there to augment the seduction of the interaction. The business of the text in trying to create verisimilitude between the world of the text and the world outside of the text leads you to not notice; to be led to believe that there is something settled, therefore in place, therefore unnoticeable both in and outside of the text, and so Miss Schwartz and Sambo go by as apparatus in and for the construction of the main character. And so my question is, why does that pass so easily? And further, not just in these works but in any works.
Shazia Hafiz Ramji
One of the things that I’ve been most grateful for in this work in particular is the way that you’ve read these texts, which is beyond representation. You write, “Mine is not an argument about being ‘absent’ from literary texts; we were not absent. We were in the texts. Potent as life. But we (and others) were trained to remove or skirt our presence, or to observe that presence as something like background, immutable, not subject to the action of the text.” That, to me, exemplifies elision. You use this word frequently when discussing several works. When reading Oroonoko, you say, “the scrim of propriety, grace and valor marks the great elision of colonial violence.” So why did you choose to talk about your reading in terms of “elision,” as opposed to other similar words like “erasure” or “exclusion,” or something along those lines?
Dionne Brand
I mean to point this out as narrative practice in these works. We are redirected, or we are directed against Black existence as a force in the space, toward certain characters and their concerns, and we’re directed to care about those concerns, even as there are others in the text whose lives function as the transportation, the circulatory system of those characters; a kind of blood system of those formally acknowledged characters. One doesn’t attend to them as character, but they are the material on which the world of the novel runs.
In the material world those characters are indeed the blood that runs through the veins; how that character is transported, how that character is made, what is necessary to happen to those characters in order for this character to continue and to succeed, right? It’s elision on the part of the writer and on the part of the text, and it’s accomplished in these ways. When we read these texts and when we critique the texts in so far as we were absent, well, no, not really, we’re actually quite present in them. So my suggestion is to read the presence of these characters and therefore read the main character through these presences.
The invitation to inhabit and to identify with, what for the text, are the “main characters” is interrupted by the presence of these other characters. For me sometimes two thirds of the text is full of everything that one is invited not to see, to not attend to it.
Shazia Hafiz Ramji
When you were writing about Camus, you attended to the man on the beach who had been murdered, and you said that you tried to read Camus, and you found that you had fallen out of the narrative, but then you understood it wasn’t inclusion that you wanted, you said, “I wanted to be addressed.” And this brings me back to your discussion about the “we” throughout the book. You say that the “we” has a barbarity to it, that “it’s an administrative category that binds the affective to the relations of ruling.” Who are you addressing?
Dionne Brand
In my short story ‘At the Lisbon Plate’ there is a counter narrative to L’Etranger that names the murdered man as Ahmed, a man taking a day off, going to the beach with his brother where he encounters his murderer Camus’s Meursault. I’m thinking through how we read, what we read, what’s produced, the mechanisms of the production of fictions, the ways in which certain texts are designated, and why, how texts arise out the material conditions that we live, and what instruments, meaning words, are arrayed in the text to produce affect—how a text is not innocent, how involved a text is in its time. I am examining who is reading, who is being addressed, and where the text is located and who it locates. And then, again, troubling how structures of writing may and do replicate structures of ruling.
Shazia Hafiz Ramji
You mentioned Lisa Lowe whose work is so important to me too. Her Intimacies of Four Continents unmasks the ways that the exploitative economies of slavery and indenture made possible bourgeois life in many European countries, and you noted that your professors made no references to the histories that produced and buttressed the literature. You also say that our reading and writing practices are steeped in narrative schema, like in Thackeray’s work, and this is a pedagogy of the colony. You’ve taught for over 20 years and recently became emerita at the University of Guelph, and I’m curious now about your pedagogy. How do you think about the pedagogy of the colony when teaching? The unmasking that Lowe has done is so clear to me, but I want to show my students how to come to these conclusions themselves instead of drawing the conclusions for them, so I’m keen to know how you think about this in your teaching.
Dionne Brand
How one reads, what one reads, how one is read, that’s guided my teaching. I mean, that was the position of my teaching, it was anti-imperialist and anti-colonial. I couldn’t be wedded to those texts uncritically, if you will. I teach to read critically, to write critically, and how not to reproduce oppression and its mechanisms, which in the practice of writing may give it a kind of positioning as uncritical, or a positioning as unencumbered by the very processes it writes out of, so I just taught hard reading, and hard writing. So any of the texts that I taught, we looked deeply at the construction of the text, what it says it comes out of, and what it has come out of, working and thinking through all these things. I was anti-pedagogy pedagogy. At least anti-imperial pedagogy.
Shazia Hafiz Ramji
That’s very on brand, Dionne!
I want to ask you about the autobiographical aspect of Salvage. The first part, “An Autobiography of the Autobiography of Reading” reflects on a childhood photograph, and you say that it shouldn’t be taken as an “account of my life, but an analysis of reading,” and for me this emphasized leaving open the possibility of multiple autobiographies. It reminded me of Lyn Hejinian’s My Life and of Deborah Levy’s Living Autobiography series and I was thinking about this section as being in conversation with these kinds of works in some sense. What drew you to “autobiography” to talk about the reading self?
Dionne Brand
I’m not drawn to autobiography at all. In the section that’s called “An Autobiography of the Autobiography of Reading”—the difference between the definite and indefinite article is to shake that construct because a certain person is being made through reading, because that certain person is reading a set of texts that have directives and prescriptions and suggestions in it as to the way to live; and that person is reading themselves in the set of texts, and then reproduces a self in a set of other texts, so that construct of the autobiography became interesting as a device more than a genre, a device by which the text proceeds. It’s an account of reading—a life of reading which might be at the end of it, but there can be another life of reading, there can be other ways of reading the life too. But, if I were to follow this particular strand, that’s the thinking it would take me through.
Shazia Hafiz Ramji
The book ends on a tender and bittersweet note for me. It closes with a reflection on C.L.R. James, where you wonder if the ending of his Minty Alley informs the way you look into houses when you pass them by at night: “Perhaps the whole of Minty Alley resonated through my own Mon Repos scheme, the backyards, the hopscotched streets. And me, like Haynes, observing, but taking only a small part in the cut and thrust, in the passions of life. Except, as narrative.”
Dionne Brand
Haynes, one might call him the main character of Minty Alley, is in and out of narrative. Haynes in Minty Alley is a young man who comes to live on this working class street. His mother had all these dreams for him and wanted him to go away, to England or America or whatever, and then she dies, and he finds himself living in Minty Alley, and he becomes a part of the life of Minty Alley, but not really, because in a sense he’s already attuned to going away and his mother’s ambitions for him, so he lives both in Minty Alley and outside of Minty Alley, therefore Haynes in Minty Alley is both inside of the text, which recounts the life in Minty Alley, and outside of the text, because he looks in on Minty Alley. So I was thinking in the end there about someone who becomes the writer, who’s both in and out. It’s a multiple and layered thinking, about a writer who writes a text who is both inside and outside of the text, and who, from a certain point onward, cannot be in the text, but is stranded outside of it.
I think that novel was one of the first postcolonial texts of this place, a text that sought to write down the life of a place, and not only the life formally constructed of the place in the 16th, 17th, 18th, 19th century texts, but a text that wrote Black people in that space. It’s one of the early texts that I read, along with Samuel Selvon’s Lonely Londoners—the sudden apprehension of the self, the indication of a self that had not been written down before, the affinity to that representation, if you will. Representation is a bad word—but the affinity to that appearance, and so that’s buried in my reading life as much as the other texts. It’s a complicated little ending, inside and outside of the text, and also about seeing the world as narrative.
Shazia Hafiz Ramji
When did this turn from reading to writing happen? Did you know that you had always wanted to write? How did you become a writer? Because the question of reading is also a question of writing, right?
Dionne Brand
I don’t know, I don’t recall. I think maybe I thought of life itself as difficult, and writing about life as much easier. Living was hard, so writing was better.
[Laughs]
Shazia Hafiz Ramji
If you’re lucky, like James Baldwin, your writing becomes your life, and the line isn’t so stark.
Dionne Brand
For me it has, it is the life—thank heavens, I mean, thank goodness. It’s hard. Living is hard.
NONFICTION
Salvage: Readings from the Wreck
by Dionne Brand
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published October 1st, 2024