The following conversation took place at the Toronto Reference Library on September 11, 2024, to celebrate the release of Dionne Brand’s Salvage: Readings from the Wreck.
David Chariandy: You describe Salvage as a kind of forensics of how a reader is made. You describe how, in university, the language of the novel assaulted you, and, in turn, you offer powerfully critical readings of books like Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, Brontë’s Jane Eyre, Behn’s Oroonoko, Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, and Austen’s Mansfield Park. Can we talk a bit about why you now return to these canonical texts?
Dionne Brand: Well, I’m not sure if it’s a return. In a sense, we exist in these texts, right? Because these texts were produced at a particular time—a particular historical moment, that is: that moment of colonization and conquest of what was called the New World. These texts accompanied this exploration, so-called, and the violence of colonialism. These texts became an educative tool for the peoples who were conquered as well as the conquering people. In another generation, we come to know the texts as aesthetic objects, as directions for living, how one must live, how one must proceed, how one must succeed in the world. We come to erase, in a sense, the trace of colonialisms in the text and the trace of how those texts were actually used to produce us.
Chariandy: I wonder if you could speak about one text in particular, Thackeray’s Vanity Fair. I find it very striking how you describe not quite seeing certain figures in that book. I’m thinking of Miss Swartz and other characters like Sambo. Would you be able to elaborate a bit?
Brand: Thackeray’s Vanity Fair is this massive, far-ranging text, but it sits in the Napoleonic Wars, which are really colonial wars about who owns Sri Lanka, who owns Barbados, who owns Tobago, et cetera. The Treaty of Amiens settles some of these matters, whether the British own it or the French own it or whatever. These wars are about possessions: about colonial possessions. That’s at the basis of the text. So when various people in the text go off to war that’s what happening.
The text opens in this finishing school where a carriage comes to take these two young women away to their lives. I think it’s Amelia and Becky Sharp. One is the kind of simpering, simplistic girl who of course is going to be the hero, and the reader is meant to side with her because she’s innocent. She’s going to get the guy who is reticent. It’s every Mills & Boon novel. That’s the imprint. That’s the palimpsestic. That’s the thing underneath. And of course Becky Sharp is too shrewd, too horrific, you know what I mean? She’s not the good woman. So the text opens, but who is coming in the carriage to transport these two away? It’s a Black man called Sambo, and he’s the one who knocks on the door early, in the first two pages of that book. And we don’t notice him. Or do we? And how do we notice him? This is part of the question in the text. How does he slip by us? How is he located in the text?
Also, in the finishing school there is a young woman called Miss Swartz whom Thackeray makes great amusement with, including in his drawings in the original book—great racist kinds of drawings, really. She’s Miss Swartz, and she is a young Black woman. Her father is supposedly a Jewish colonialist, and her mother is Black, but we never meet her mother. We just know about the man. She too is not one of the people we will follow, even though she repeats throughout the novel. She arrives many times. She’s very rich. She marries some other planter in the text.
So my point is that all texts contain the world of their time—all the world of the time. But as a reader, you are called to land where? And to support what things? The text tells you exactly what the world is. The world is the world of colonization, of exploitation, of extraction, but we ignore this. This great movement is in the text, present as the “romantic,” but also in the success of the characters whose lives and well-being depend on these structures. It is not that we don’t know wealth is made on violence. It is that we come to love it. We come to absorb the violence as well as the aesthetic.
Chariandy: Does what you’ve just said connect with this line from Salvage? “Mine is not an argument about being absent from literary texts, we were not absent, we were in the texts, potent as life.”
Brand: Yes. In fact, we were the life in the text—whether it was South Asia or Africa or Blackness—we sat in the text, generated the text. These were marvellous adventures this group of people, the protagonists, were having. They were having a wonderful time. They weren’t having a dreadful time. That wonderful time was predicated on violence, and it was written in this way. So my thought is, When we absorb these texts, whoever we are, what is it that we are absorbing and how? My project in the book was to break down this violence.
There’s a passage in Salvage about a horse, and the passage looks at Mansfield Park. It’s a paragraph about the protagonist, whose name I can no longer remember. But it’s about whether she can have a horse or not. Every once in a while in the paragraph, Antigua appears. Because the head honcho, you know, sir what’s-his-face, is off in Antigua taking care of some very uncomfortable business. Something has ruptured how Mansfield Park is actually made. Mansfield Park is made from the money that he makes in Antigua, from plantations, but only once in a while is there this thing about disturbances in Antigua and if he will return or not to tell her whether she can have a horse. They are deciding she should have this horse, but they are waiting on his approval. Several paragraphs go by about this horse with only now and then a mention of Sir Bertram being in Antigua. Well, what is Antigua? What is going on in Antigua is that he has several slave plantations, and there has been some kind of disruption. But we do not know what that is, we just want her to get a horse. Seriously, read it. We’re anxious that she should get the horse. Of course she has the right to have the horse, the other sisters, the Bertram sisters, have a horse! Why can’t the cousin have a horse? I swear . . .
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Chariandy: Salvage offers not only these incisive readings of the colonial archive. It also draws attention to what you describe as the “writings of people who are alive to the sensorium of catastrophe.” You name and talk about eighteenth-century abolitionist authors, such as Ignatius Sancho. You indicate C. L. R. James’s work. But you also warn about other writers, be they white, Black, or otherwise, who seek to rewrite canonical narratives. What limits these projects for you?
Brand: There’s an aspect of writing that’s involuntary. Without thinking, we tell ourselves “These are the books that came before, the books that I might write like. This is the book that teaches writing. This is how ‘character’ works. This is what ‘character’ is. And this is what happens to ‘character,’ what is famously called the arc of the character.” The arc is someone going out to find their fortune, a very amorphous, horrible thing. Or someone going out to do his adventures, like The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe. Well, this adventure of Robinson Crusoe was an adventure in slavery, really. He left as a boy, and he went on a ship with a few little bits of money that he collected to go to the coast of Africa to buy people and to make his fortune. He took little knick-knacks to sell, to buy human beings.
What is an adventure? It’s a very violent move. It’s not a journey. It’s not enlightenment. It’s not to go about the world to know the world or something. It’s to go about the world to conquer. So when we write an adventure, what is it we’re actually doing? What are we duplicating? How do you port notions of colonial conquest into the text without thinking about them at all? Because these are the texts that are significant. These are canonical. There’s that involuntarily aspect: “I want to write a book like that.”
The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe is played out in the contemporary in so many ways. What is that show, Survivor . . . ? That’s what that is. We bring to it all those knowledges we have of that particular colonial moment through those colonial texts. And the game is always the same. Then there are serious literary efforts to speak to it or imitate The Adventures, such as J. M. Coetzee’s Foe or Patrick Chamoiseau’s L’empreinte à Crusoé (Crusoe’s Footprint). Always some writers speak back to these canonical texts because they were taught them as schoolchildren but also because they encountered them as they were imitated and repeated and repeated again across all kinds of colonial territories. They become a kind of unseen script or schema of thought both for writing and for living.
Chariandy: Maybe I could ask you more about narrative, how you’re understanding this complicated thing. Each of your books has been a precious gift to me—each necessary and each a surprise. I wonder, however, if Salvage is for me, a novelist, among the most vital and surprising. After reading your ars poetica, The Blue Clerk, I somehow did not expect from you a book lengthily engaging narrative fiction. In A Map to the Door of No Return, you quote appreciatively these lines by Derek Walcott: “Pray for a life without plot, a day without narrative.” And I know you are not being celebratory when you write in Salvage, “One is made by works of literature, and one is made through and by narrative.”
Brand: No, I guess not.
Chariandy: So did writing Salvage help clarify your understanding of or stakes in narrative?
Brand: No, I didn’t clarify a thing. It’s an ongoing interrogation of how we think about narrative. An ongoing interrogation of history, what comes to be history qua history. It’s a never-ending thing. One is born into narrative and into its structures. It’s my ongoing interrogation of those structures and the dominant forms of narrative, which mirror the dominant forms of governing. The question is how to disentangle oneself from those dominant forms. Therefore, how, in a sense, to write about the rest of the world. What shape might that take? How might we disturb the shapes that narrative, and therefore ruling, come in? And what shape or shapelessness might structure that which exceeds that finite, narrow form of telling? The text looks at British imperialism and what it transported with it. Domination is not simply militaristic, and its violences are police-like in another way. One is policed through narrative too. There are official stories and they are imposed. Yet one comes to love these impositions, and one is taught to love these impositions.
It’s an interrogation about how one is constructed as a reading, writing subject—and definitely as a reading subject. British imperialism brought its modalities, and one of those modalities, let’s say, is a kind of government, and one is a kind of police, one is the military, one is the educative, the book, the educational systems, et cetera. But the text also deals with the emergence of an American imperialism and what came with it—which was sound. All the songs: the Bing Crosby; the belligerent, religious texts on the radio; the sermons and all their contradictions. America arrived, in my childhood for example, as a sound that contested the British formal, structured sound. The American outlaw, the games of Cowboys and Indians, the portrayal of Indigeneity as even more outlaw than the outlaw. That came into my childhood, along with the music of America, which was also kind of outlaw, the “sound of America,” and the sound of its Presbyterianism. The book examines all these texts and all these scripts of domination and how they come complicated.
Chariandy: I don’t think I could possibly conclude without asking about a specific image in Salvage, that photograph of you taken when you were four. Earlier in Salvage, we encounter a line that strikes me as archly necessary for readers of your work: “The only place the autobiographical appears in my art with a small vestige of itself may be in the fictions I write and even then alloyed.” Perhaps accordingly, you write of that photograph of yourself as a child, “It has always been and still is a mystery to me, or an opening, a wonder, and a source of inexhaustible looking.” You add, “It is possible that everything since, and therefore my writing life, emanates from the photograph.” Could you elaborate?
Brand: Throughout the book, I read the photograph. The photograph is taken when I’m—well, I’m not sure it’s me in the photograph. And I say in the text, the girl “reputed to be me.” I don’t know if it’s me in the photograph because I don’t recognize the photograph.
Chariandy: Yes, that’s the striking thing. You don’t recognize yourself.
Brand: Right. Everyone else recognizes the photograph, but I don’t. I see these four girls at a certain point in their life but also in history. The photograph is a kind of document, a colonial document, if you will. It’s the only photograph of the period, and the only reason the photograph is taken is to be sent to England, where their mother and their aunt live now. I read the photograph through its various possibilities and iterations that the girls are being made in some way by the act of being photographed and the way the photograph will be used. The photograph is a kind of passport. The photograph is an assurance to the aunt and the mother that everything might be all right or that everything is not all right. And there are tons of these photographs that moved from the Caribbean to England or from the Caribbean to the U.S. where people posed in a particular way to affect well-being or desire. The photographs were a reminder and a possibility.
So there were all kinds of readings throughout the text about this photograph and how it exists in its historical mode. The personal is almost evacuated from the photograph. But you can see the disruption of the little girls in the photograph because they’re a bit unruly. One of them is crying, one of them is shaking something—the one who is reputed to be me is shaking something—and then another one looks terrified. What are the communal and historical things going on outside the studio at the time the photograph is taken? What are the great historical movements going on? That moment is the moment of many ships going from the Caribbean to England with many people to work in the NHS and to work in the building of English industry. Just as you might find a photograph of someone in the 1970s here moving across Canada for the same purposes—the purposes of labour, providing labour for the metropoles. So as with the canonical texts, I wanted to look at the photograph historically and politically. And it changes, the notions of the photograph changed throughout.
DAVID CHARIANDY is a writer and critic. Author of the novels Soucouyant and Brother, and the epistolary memoir I’ve Been Meaning To Tell You: A Letter To My Daughter, his books have been translated into a dozen languages. He is a member of the editorial board of Brick and a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, Division of Arts.
DIONNE BRAND is the author of twenty-three books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, including The Blue Clerk, Nomenclature, Theory, A Map to the Door of No Return, and most recently, Salvage: Readings from the Wreck. She is the editorial director of Alchemy, an imprint of Knopf Canada, as well as a member of the editorial board of Brick.