Dionne Brand Quotes

The sea sounded like a thousand secrets, all whispered at the same time.

Fashions are not fashions at all but refashioning; language is not communication but reinvention. They are never in place but on display.

Books leave gestures in the body; a certain way of moving, of turning, a certain closing of the eyes, a way of leaving, hesitations. Books leave certain sounds, a certain pacing; mostly they leave the elusive, which is all the story. They leave much more than the words.

About her family she had taken a superior view. She considered them somewhat childlike since her power over them in the form of language had given her the privilege of viewing them in this way. And her distance from them, as the distance of all translators from their subjects, allowed her to see that so much of the raison d'etre of their lives was taken up negotiating their way around the small objects of foreignness laced in their way. Either they could not see the larger space of commonality or it was denied them.

Angie was a border crosser, a wetback, a worker in the immigrant sweatshop they call this city. On days like this I understand her like a woman instead of a child. Everybody thought she was a whore. She wasn't. She tried to step across the border of who she was and who she might be. They wouldn't let her. She didn't believe it herself so she stepped across into a whole other country.

She could assassinate streets with her eyes

They were born in the city from people born elsewhere.

Carla might recognize herself in the lean girls against the bar, the girls in slender-cut suits with silver rings on each finger and thumb who looked so compact and secretive, so much as if all their essences were perfectly locked and kept, and only if you managed to please them could you unlock their fingers and pry them out. They smelled of a different perfume, they never quite met your eyes except in a swift and thorough appraisal whose conclusion you became aware of immediately when their eyes averted without the longed-for approving smile. You longed to go with them to secret apartments in the suburbs or condos on the lakeshore and there have their fingers brush down your back and have their maroon mouths kiss your thighs.

A boat, even a wrecked and wretched boat
still has all the possibilities of moving

Cities collect people, stray and lost and deliberate arrivants.

He believed in nothing. Which is why his departures and his pursuit of the most intense feelings and acts were so radical, so deep and honest. The truth of life was perfectly clear to him. Nothing was made, every new morning was clear. His only challenge was inward. He had not been disillusioned or had some bad experience that he could put it all down to. He had simply seen the world and that was that. And he understood how slippery every moment was and he liked the thrill of it. Slipping from the knowable to the unknown, walking from one street to the next, being different all the time. In one afternoon he could slip from one personality to another. Why not?

It is not the job of writers to lift our spirits. Books simply do what they do. They sometimes confirm the capricious drama of a childhood living room. When you think that you are in the grace of a dance you come upon something hard. � - "A Map to the Door of No Return" - Dionne Brand

One gleeful headline drives me to the floor, kneeling,
and all paint turns to gazette paper and all memory
collides into photographs we could not say happened,
that is us, that's what we did. When you lose you become
ancient but this time no one will rake over these bodies
gently collecting their valuables, their pots, their hearts
and intestines, their papers and what they could bury.
This civilisation will be dug up to burn all its manifestos.
No tender archaeologist will mend our furious writings
concluding, "They wanted sweat to taste sweet, that is all,
some of them played music for nothing, some of them
wrote poems to tractors, rough hands, and rough roads,
some sang for no reason at all to judge by their condition.