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Sarah Buck

Dr. Joel Deshaye

English 4822-001

04/01/2022

Dionne Brand’s Contribution to the Research and Education of Intersectionality

While the fight for human rights and equality is still far from over, there has undoubtedly

been a significant increase in the past decade or two in the advocation and study of human rights

and how inequality and marginalization should be understood from an intersectional

perspective––that is, “the theory that the overlap of various social identities, such as race, gender,

sexuality, and class, contributes to the specific type of systemic oppression and discrimination

experienced by an individual” (“Intersectionality Definition & Meaning”). However, before the

21st century, marginalized minority groups faced even more discrimination, disadvantages, and

erasure than they do today––where the voices and stories of minority groups are still struggling

to be heard as a result of the racism, sexism/mysoginy, and homophobia brought about by

colonization. In the year 1990, when the gay rights movement was receiving significant

widespread recognition, and just about two years since Canada had become a truly multicultural

country accepting of immigrants, Dionne Brand published her collection of poems titled No

Language Is Neutral. This revolutionary book of poetry not only pays tribute to history and to

the oppressed women of color who paved the way for women like Dionne Brand to be able to

have a voice in the literary world, but it is also unique in its contribution to the existing available

literature written by and about marginalized women in the 20th and 21st century. Given that

Brand is a Canadian lesbian immigrant woman of colour, her sharing of her perspective and

personal story through No Language Is Neutral is immensely valuable to the study of

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intersectionality and to the societal conversation surrounding the systemic oppression of minority

groups in the postcolonial world.

Brand gained public recognition for her skill in writing, and with this newfound platform

she combined her talents and her experiences to create a work of poetry that would provide a

voice to those experiencing similar challenges as a result of colonialism and oppression. In No

Language Is Neutral, Brand explores her unique experience of being an immigrant woman of

colour in Canada who faces systematic oppression and is healing from the intergenerational

trauma of slavery and segregation, she uses language––the combination of Trinidadian Creole

and standard English referred to as “code-switching”––to document and express her experience

with language that has been filtered through colonialism, and she courageously expresses her

feelings and experiences as a lesbian woman despite the prevalence of homophobia not only in

Trinidad but in Canada as well in the 1990s. During a time period in which immigrants and

ethnic minorities faced oppression and racism in a newly multicultural Canada, and in which the

LGBTQ+ community was still met with homophobia and treated as taboo, Dionne Brand boldly

created a work of literature that would impact and contribute to the progress of the human rights

movement as well as the future of education for years to come.

Having grown up in Trinidad on colonized land and then moved to Canada in 1970,

where segregation was only just coming to an end and racism was still prevalent in its

white-dominated population, Brand is very familiar with the ways in which colonization has

caused the erasure of culture and the facilitation of racism and intersectional oppression in

general, and she speaks to this in No Language Is Neutral. Through her poetry, Brand provides

first-hand accounts of her experience living in Trinidad and being painfully and inescapably

aware of its colonial past of racism and slavery, and of her transition from living in Trinidad to
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living in Canada and the challenges she faced in being treated like an alien in this new foreign

country. By using her platform for activism and to tell the story of what it is like to be a woman

of colour living in a postcolonial world and the challenges she faces in terms of understanding

her own cultural identity, she has provided a voice to other young women who can relate to her

situation and she has opened a new door for marginalized communities in terms of literary

recognition and has set an example for the following generations of academics and activists. In

Joseph Pivato and Winfried Siemerling’s 1996 article about three other ethnic minority women

who gained recognition for their writing on multiculturalism, they write “These two volumes are

evidence of a growing interest in the work of ethnic minority writers in Canada. As little as 8 or

9 years ago these journals would not even consider publishing single articles one some of these

lesser known minority writers, let alone devote a special issue to their publications” (Pivato and

Siemerling 1). There is no doubt that popular activists and authors like Dionne Brand contributed

to the recognition and increased support of ethnic minority groups; there is power in numbers,

and Brand’s early contributions to the literary works on minorities therefore plays a pivotal role

in the collective fight for equality and human rights.

There are very few authors in the public eye––and even fewer Canadian ones––that have

experienced growing up in Trinidad in the 1950s and 1960s, and then immigrating to Canada in

the 1970s; through her poetry, Brand is able to convey a clear message and paint a vivid image of

what this was like, and how the weight of colonialism, segregation, and slavery still hang heavily

in the air of the Caribbean, since causing irreparable damage to the land, its people, and their

culture. In No Language Is Neutral, the poem titled “return I” in the section titled “return”

discusses the experience of the narrator––which we can assume is, if not Dionne Brand herself, a

person who is equally as knowledgeable on the subject of colonialism in Trinidad––with living

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in Trinidad and experiencing firsthand what has been left behind by the destruction of

colonialism:

So the street is still there, still melting with sun

still the shining waves of heat at one o’clock

the eyelashes scorched, staring the distance of the

park to the parade stand, still razor grass burnt and

cropped, everything made indistinguishable from dirt

by age and custom, white washed, and the people…

[...]

pitch struggling up, glimpses sea, village, earth

bare-footed hot, women worried, still the faces,

masked in sweat and sweetness, still the eyes

watery, ancient, still the hard, distinct, brittle smell of

slavery (Brand 7)

Brand’s use of language and diction to describe the environment in

Trinidad––”melting,” “scorched,” “razor grass burnt,”––conveys a dual meaning intended

to expresses the physical heat of the country, as well as the metaphorical scorching of

land and culture caused by colonialism. She illustrates the way in which the impact and

trauma of colonization spanning generations can be seen in the eyes of the

colonized––“still the eyes”––and how the air still contains the scent of the “brittle smell

of slavery.” The ways in which Brand’s use of diction is able to truly capture the image

and emotion of her experiences is incredibly unique and valuable to not only the literary
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world, but to research and the documentation of history to be used in the study of these

marginalized groups. In Daniel Coleman’s 2016 article on indigeneity and diaspora, he

states how in Brand’s work, she “presents diasporic experience as deeply suspicious of

land; for members of the Black Atlantic diaspora the long histories of harm, of

enslavement on lands to which they could never belong, followed by multiple

displacements from troubled Caribbean or southern economies to tenuous existence in

racially charged metropolitan cities, raise doubts that any land can be a place to ‘light on’

and find belonging” (62). By Brand’s authentic expression of her experiences through her

poetry, she speaks for all women, all minority groups facing descrimination, and all

immigrants, and allows them to feel seen, heard, and validated, thus encouraging them to

also speak out about their experiences. Coleman states that “literature, especially poetry,

distills wide ranges of human experience into condensed, arresting formulations, allowing

us close access to experiences and affects, not just empirical analyses, of Indigenous and

diasporic life,” and that this is why he chose to examine Dionne Brand’s work to study

diasporic life (62). It can certainly be concluded that Brand’s literary contributions have

proven to be useful in various contexts.

Not only has she provided vivid firsthand accounts of her experiences, but she has

also employed the use of a mixture of standard English and Creole to demonstrate her

varying cultural experiences and to make a statement about the impacts of colonization.

In the section titled “No Language Is Neutral,” Brand writes, “Even she daughter didn’t

know but only/ leave me she life like a brown stone to see. I in the/ middle of a plane ride

now a good century from their/ living or imagination, around me is a people I will/ only

understand as full of ugliness that make me/ weep full past my own tears and before hers”
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(21). The use of this type of language is important and unique in that it acknowledges and

validates the existence of Caribbean immigrants whose language does not fit perfectly

into one categorical box or another. It expresses the complexity of culture that has been

polluted by colonialism in an authentic and relevantly modern way; mention of being on

a plane ride alludes to the process of Brand’s immigration between Trinidad and Canada.

Writing of this style is certainly not common in Canadian and American literature, thus

making Brand’s work especially valuable. In Maria Lúcia Milléo Martins’ article on

Dionne Brand and Afua Cooper’s work, she writes “In making use of the demotic and

code-switching, Cooper and Brand oppose the idea of the dominant language as

naturalized or monophonic.” She continues, “In Mary Louise Pratt’s understanding of the

term, 'code-switching’ implies a form of cultural power ‘to own but not be owned by the

dominant language.’ For Pratt, as an aesthetic device, code-switching ‘can be a source of

great verbal subtlety and grace as speech dances fluidly and strategically back and forth

between two languages and two cultural systems.’” This unique form of speech is

certainly fascinating and quite useful to the study of language; as Martins states, this “use

of Caribbean demotic serves for Cooper and Brand as an effective tool for asserting the

importance of oral tradition from their origins and its continuity in the present” (202).

Dionne Brand’s contribution to the preservation of Caribbean culture and

language has inspired numerous authors to write about their similar experiences. In

Paromita Mukherjee’s 2012 article on Nalo Hopkinson, a Caribbean writer born seven

years after Brand in Kingston, Jamaica, she writes “Nalo Hopkinson’s innovative usage

of Creole language in her novel, Midnight Robber, contributes to the formation of

nationalistic Caribbean literature, and marks a departure from the traditional methods”
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(Mukherjee). In a 1999 interview, Nalo Hopkinson states, “When I read the Trinidadian

creole of the opening passage of Dionne Brand’s novel In Another Place, Not Here, I

know I’m in the presence of a master poet” (Rutledge, 601). It is evident that Brand uses

Trinidadian creole in more than one of her literary works, as a means of preserving and

teaching others of her culture, and in No Language Is Neutral, she addresses the fact that

all language has meaning, is biased or political, and is never simply neutral. There is

always a history behind the words and the language we use, and Brand makes this clear

in her poetry:

No

language is neutral seared in the spine’s unravelling.

here is history too. A backbone bending and

unbending without a word, heat, bellowing these

lungs spongy, exhaled in humming, the ocean, a

way out and not anything of beauty, tripping turquoise

and scandalous. The malicious horizon made us the

essential thinkers of technology. How to fly gravity,

how to balance basket and prose reaching for

murder. Silence done curse god and beauty here,

people does hear things in this heliconia peace

a morphology of rolling chain and copper gong

now shape this twang, falsettos of whip and air

rudiment this grammar. Take what I tell you. When

these barracks held slaves between their stone

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halters, talking was left for night and hush was idiom

and hot core. (20)

Brand not only makes a bold statement in the use of code-switching, but she even

addresses her use of Trinidadian Creole in combination with standard English within her

poetry, thus emphasizing her message even further and ensuring that the history of her

culture be heard.

Brand’s work is even further valuable in terms of its contributions to the

LGBTQ+ community, as she published this collection of poems which, towards the end,

explores in detail the mental process of discovering and understanding one’s own sexual

orientation and her experience of being a lesbian. At the time No Language Is Neutral

(1990) was published, same-sex marriage would not become legal in Canada for another

15 years, and would not be legal in the United States for another 25 years. The fact that

Dionne Brand spoke out publicly about her sexuality at a time far before today’s

generally more progressive and accepting ways of thinking––that is, when homophobia

was significantly more prevalent in North America––is a courageous and admirable

choice in itself. She plays such a crucial role in the advocacy for and representation of not

just queer women, but queer immigrants and queer people of colour in the Western world.

Minorities often struggle to find representation of themselves and their own experiences

in literary works because generally the focus of mainstream media and literature is

cisgender straight white people, and every variation of a cisgender straight white person

that one could think of. Minorities are not so lucky in this aspect and are often ignored

entirely; Brand’s skill in writing and her proficiency in speaking out about important
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causes allowed her to break through the barriers of living in a heteronormative society of

white privilege and achieve success in her career and her contributions to pedagogy and

the human rights movement while providing a voice to those silenced by marginalization.

Her unique experience in being a queer immigrant woman of colour living in Canada is

extraordinarily valuable to the study of intersectionality, in that her particular experience

is relatively rare and very complex and multifaceted. The concept of intersectionality can

be explained by the following excerpt from Veronica Terriquez’s 2015 article:

“Intersectionality theory indicates that each individual has multiple identifiers that are

linked to broader structures of inequality. Determining an individual’s social location,

these identities include a person’s race, gender, class, sexual orientation, and legal status.

Varying in relevance and salience across social contexts, these identities shape how

individuals experience unequal power relations and make sense of their surroundings”

(345). In Brand’s case, she experiences the combined intersectional oppression of racism,

homophobia, misogyny, and alienation as an immigrant. In the section of No Language Is

Neutral titled “Hard Against The Soul,” Brand writes:

Then it is this simple. I felt the unordinary romance of

women who love women for the first time. It burst in

my mouth. Someone said, this is your first lover, you

will never want to leave her. I had it in mind that I

would be an old woman with you. But perhaps I

always had it in mind simply to be an old woman,

darkening, somewhere with another old woman. (45)

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In Brand’s expression of her personal experience of realizing that she is a lesbian,

this provides not only representation, but a role model for the queer youth reading her

poetry and experiencing the same things. Her work is cathartic and inspirational, and

therefore contributes to the mobilization of social movements towards equality. Terriquez

writes, “Yet the identities of multiply marginalized actors and their interests do at times

become salient in movement efforts. Building on and synthesizing prior research on

diversity within social movements, I propose that movements can generate what I call

intersectional mobilization, meaning high levels of activism and commitment among a

marginalized subgroup of an already marginalized population” (346). Essentially,

Terriquez is suggesting that as a result of work contributing to the research of

intersectionality, such as Dionne Brand’s No Language Is Neutral, the public is inspired

and prompted to join in on activism surrounding the experiences of marginalized groups.

It is because of authors like Dionne Brand, in combination with the various other

minority writers that fought for their right to visibility in mainstream media, that so many

women, queer people, people of colour, and immigrants feel confident enough to speak

up for their rights and push back against oppression to this day.

Through Dionne Brand’s literary works, specifically No Language Is Neutral, she

provides a vivid depiction and illustration of her experiences in life as a queer immigrant

woman of colour. She explores her experiences with oppression based on her ethnicity

and her status as an immigrant in Canada, her unique understanding and use of language

that has been influenced by her Trinidadian culture, colonization, and modern-day

Canadian culture, as well as her experience with being a queer woman in societies––both

Trinidadian and Canadian––where the LGBTQ+ community is still largely discriminated

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against. Based on her literary work and her involvement in activism and the bettering of

life for marginalized groups, it is evident that Brand holds a very special place among the

most innovative, talented, and inspirational authors and public figures in Canadian

history.
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Works Cited

Brand, Dionne. No Language Is Neutral. McClelland & Stewart, 1998.

Coleman, Daniel. “Indigenous Place and Diaspora Space: Of Literalism and Abstraction.” Settler

Colonial Studies, vol. 6, no. 1, Routledge, 2016, pp. 61–76.

“Intersectionality Definition & Meaning.” Dictionary.com, Dictionary.com,

https://www.dictionary.com/browse/intersectionality.

Martins, Maria Lúcia Milléo. "Dionne Brand and Afua Cooper: Diaspora and

Continuities Shaped by National and Regional Cultures." African American

Review, vol. 51 no. 3, 2018, p. 197-209.

Mukherjee, Paromita. “Creolizing Nation Language, Folklore and Science Fiction: Nalo

Hopkinson’s Rhetorical Strategy in Midnight Robber.” Rupkatha Journal on

Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities, vol. 4, no. 2, 2012.

Pivato, Joseph, and Winfried Siemerling. “Writing Ethnicity: Cross-Cultural

Consciousness in Canadian & Quebecois Literature.” Canadian Ethnic Studies,

vol. 28, no. 3, Canadian Ethnic Studies Journal, 1996, pp. 224.

Rutledge, Gregory. “Speaking in Tongues: An Interview with Science Fiction Writer

Nalo Hopkinson.” African American Review, vol. 33, no. 4, Indiana State

University, 1999, pp. 589–601.

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Terriquez, Veronica. “Intersectional Mobilization, Social Movement Spillover, and Queer

Youth Leadership in the Immigrant Rights Movement.” Social Problems, vol. 62,

no. 3, Oxford University Press, 2015, pp. 343–62.