An Autobiography of the Autobiography of Reading

by Dionne Brand

The geopolitics of empire had already prepared me for this…coloniality constructs outsides and insides—worlds to be chosen, disturbed, interpreted, and navigated—in order to live something like a real self.

Internationally acclaimed poet and novelist Dionne Brand reflects on her early reading of colonial literature and how it makes Black being inanimate. She explores her encounters with colonial, imperialist, and racist tropes; the ways that practices of reading and writing are shaped by those narrative structures; and the challenges of writing a narrative of Black life that attends to its own expression and its own consciousness.

Genres: Nonfiction, Race, Literature, Canada, Essays, Academic

72 pages, Paperback

First published January 28, 2020

About the author

As a young girl growing up in Trinidad, Dionne Brand submitted poems to the newspapers under the pseudonym Xavier Simone, an homage to Nina Simone, whom she would listen to late at night on the radio. Brand moved to Canada when she was 17 to attend the University of Toronto, where she earned a degree in Philosophy and English, a Masters in the Philosophy of Education and pursued PhD studies in Women’s History but left the program to make time for creative writing.

Dionne Brand first came to prominence in Canada as a poet. Her books of poetry include No Language Is Neutral, a finalist for the Governor General’s Award, and Land to Light On, winner of the Governor General’s Award and the Trillium Award and thirsty, finalist for the Griffin Prize and winner of the Pat Lowther Award for poetry. Brand is also the author of the acclaimed novels In Another Place, Not Here, which was shortlisted for the Chapters/Books in Canada First Novel Award and the Trillium Award, and At the Full and Change of the Moon. Her works of non-fiction include Bread Out of Stone and A Map to the Door of No Return.

What We All Long For was published to great critical acclaim in 2005. While writing the novel, Brand would find herself gazing out the window of a restaurant in the very Toronto neighbourhood occupied by her characters. “I’d be looking through the window and I’d think this is like the frame of the book, the frame of reality: ‘There they are: a young Asian woman passing by with a young black woman passing by, with a young Italian man passing by,” she says in an interview with The Toronto Star. A recent Vanity Fair article quotes her as saying “I’ve ‘read’ New York and London and Paris. And I thought this city needs to be written like that, too.”

In addition to her literary accomplishments, Brand is Professor of English in the School of English and Theatre Studies at the University of Guelph.

For more information, please see http://www.answers.com/topic/dionne-b...

Reviews

[Kiki · Rating 5 out of 5]

Periodically, I doubt my personal approach to book criticism. I doubt its substance, grounding so much in the autobiographical. One is taught that the impersonal, "neutral" voice is more authoritative, more intellectually credible. Then a writer like Dionne Brand and blows all that blather away.

Starting from a childhood photograph into critiques of Vanity Fair, Jane Eyre, and Wide Sargasso Sea, among other texts, Brand maps herself as a reader within a colonial schema and then shows how she and other writers like Gwendolyn Brooks and Wilson Harris break free of it, to varying degrees of success.

I am decades younger and too much of it was still familiar which shows how necessary these readings are even now. Thanks to Wayne State University Press who sent this to me for review at The Book Slut. I'll add the review link when it's up.

(The star rating has no meaning, in this instance. Just there to keep things looking pretty.)

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[Shivanee Ramlochan · Rating 5 out of 5]

I will come back to the space of the review to formulate cogency, articulate lucidly on what Brand has mapped for us here, but for right now I am gazing at a disassembly (and therefore, new assembly) of the products of my attentions in reading, from child to juvenile to teenager to adult, all laid out high in a forest of the stars. And in each bough there is a way to make a space belonging to me, belonging to the world's intellect and history and journey, as I have always needed and hoped it could be seen.

It may well be that others are working to radiate the landscape so free, so palpably and outstandingly free, so luminous and black and queer and free, as Brand is and does. But no one does it like Brand does. How fucking fortunate I am to be alive to read her.

5 stars feels reducing, but you will have to imagine something past the star system here. You will need to radically position new stars for this one.

[Hannah · Rating 4 out of 5]

the violence of the narrative :0

[Sally Elhennawy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dionne Brand is radically transforming the way I see the world and I am so much better for it!!!

[Leif · Rating 3 out of 5]

Short on concepts and long in the execution. Brand doesn't mention it in these short comments, but in the 1970s, calls were made to abolish the English department (in favour of what were then conceptualized as various regional studies), and Ngugi wa Thiong'o made a powerful case for the decolonization of the classroom. Today, as in (self) investigations like this one, we are still digesting how powerfully the centring work of literary canonicity has created readers who read themselves into and out of various positions in relation to identity and narrative sympathies. I suspect that An Autobiography of the Autobiography of Reading would be interesting for fans of Dionne Brand and as an entry point into these well-worn paths - find it at your local library and give it a scan!

[Jennie Chantal · Rating 3 out of 5]

"While class and gender (the making of white class, white gender) may have been the obvious subjects of the narrative, race and colony as bedrocks of power are startlingly unremarked; in fact, normalized, stipulated, matter-of-fact.
The constant reinforcement of the unseen, unread, the hardening of narrative position, is the pedagogy of colony."

Cultural and literary criticism often goes over my head. I don't have the academic background that would allow me to better understand texts like these. But what I did get out of it is critical to helping me read with even more awareness and attention to what she calls the "pedagogy of colony".

[Ty Bradley · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a thought provoking treatise on the colonialism inherent to the use of narrative in classic English literature. Uses somewhat complicated sentence structure and vocabulary, which makes the ideas of this book harder to understand. At its best this book shows cutting examples of how the creation of wealth through slavery and colonialism is ignored in classic literature, as authors chose instead to highlight extravagance without considering its origins. At its worst this book often gets too in depth about characters in other books which I have never read. I would prefer that this book focus more on explicitly presenting Brands broad ideas on narrative rather than only discussing specific examples.

[Kimberley Ryan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Amazing critical look at the link between reading and the intrinsic colonialism of the stories we are told. Short read, impactful.

[2TReads · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dionne Brand has put into critical thought what many a Black reader has felt or questioned re the positioning of us, within, quite frankly a literary landscape that is still very much mired in colonialist views and expression.

Brand right away hits me with the association we as Black readers, understand and form with certain words within certain narratives. It is never just surface with us, especially when it comes to specific words that immediately trigger a sense of loss, treatment, or existence, and experience.

We cannot escape colonialism and imperialism in literature today whether we are reading past or present. We can still see how the structure and words forming the sentences, creating the characters are dismissive, traumatizing, and erasing of our identities and personhood(humanity)

I can definitely relate to questioning narratives when it comes to the positioning and portrayal of Black bodies. How we are allowed to exist and interact within the colonialist literary spaces. How we are used to advance the narrative without actually being integrated into/within it.

However when we occupy a narrative written by Black authors, we may still question the depiction of the Black body, but here the narrative is for us, and we know where we stand.

[S P · Rating 3 out of 5]

8 ‘I call this essay “An Autobiography of the Autobiography of Reading,” leading with the indefinite An Autobiography, which leaves open the possibility of multiple autobiographies, that this is but one iteration; it is particular but not individual. An autobiography gestures to the world of a reading self. It signals the complicated ways of reading and interpretation that are necessary under conditions of coloniality. It suggests that coloniality constructs outsides and insides—worlds to be chosen, disturbed, interpreted, and navigated—in order to live something like a real self. The definite article of the second clause the Autobiography identifies the subject who is supposed to be made, through colonial pedagogies in the form of texts—fiction, non-fiction, poetry, photographs, and governmental and bureaucratic structures. This subject situated at the meeting of violent pasts and futures of coloniality is hailed ambiguously in these texts to simultaneously be mastered and elide to mastery as something other than violence, erasure, and absence.’

45 ‘In Caribbean Discourse, Édouard Glissant writes about the importance of form when thinking about the ghosts of colonialism, which reverberates into the present and future. For him, narrative “implode[s] in us in clumps” and we are “transported [to] fields of oblivion where we must, with difficulty and pain, put it all back together.” If structures of sociality derived from the colonial moment pursue us and are anathema to our living, and if such structures include narration and narrative style, then a rethinking of these forms of address is necessary—I would say urgent, as urgent as the overturning of that sociality.’

[cate]

“Narrative is not just the simple transportation of language but of ideas of the self, and ideas of the self contain negations of other people. What is it, then, to adopt or be indoctrinated into these narrative structures, those ideas, to come to know these ideas as your own, when you are the negated people?” - Dionne Brand, An Autobiography of the Autobiography of Reading


Something about Brand’s writing offers me a pleasant clarity. I see my clumsy attempts at articulating what I see and feel on literature presented precisely and often in gorgeous prose! This mini book is a part of the Henry Kreisel lecture series published by the University of Alberta Press, and offers a more accessible forum for critical canadian literary theory. I will not lie tho, I definitely bought this because it was by Dionne Brand lol, but reading the introductory statement piece has picked my curiosity to see what other lectures are in this series!

[Carmijn Gerritsen · Rating 4 out of 5]

This particular essayistic work by the Black Canadian author Dionne Brand was recommended to me due to its exploration of postcolonial counter-narratives. Building upon various theoretical conversations and personal accounts of displacement, the writer discusses notions of memory in relation to the rewriting of hegemonic discourses. The reference to Jean Rhys' Wide Sargasso Sea is notable here. Overall, a very interesting essay which explores the multifaceted nature of writing and 'living' autobiographies.

[Holly · Rating 3 out of 5]

"One wants to completely embrace Wide Sargasso Sea, strangely as this same reader wanted to embrace Jane Eyre and had. Such a reader ignores the misgivings, or rather reads with a set of aches, like forming a callus at each reading. Such a reader has a mindbox inside of a mindbox inside of a mindbox and so on."

[Qonita · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is an interesting outlook on reading colonialism in literary works.

You know, I've always wondered how people in classic books seem to dilly dally a lot in their lives, walking on morning and afternoon walks for hours, staying over in an acquaintance's residence for a fortnight at the shortest, and then moving directly to another acquaintance's castle on another city, not coming home and be productive for a month or more! And yet they still live in a lavish property, eat proper dinners made by cooks, hired maids, and bequeath thousands of pounds to their children upon marriage or death. Hiring maids and cooks is the least they think they could do for their social status, and they would still insist on doing so even if they already felt like they 'fell into poverty' (which poor people can hire anyone else to provide their basic necessities??). Lavish, lavish, lavish. Where's all the money from? Why of course, OF COURSE, they might just have been involved in the astronomically lucrative business of SLAVERY AND COLONIALISM. This is barely mentioned in the classics I've read, which are mostly Jane Austen's. The men's jobs were brushed over quickly as if it's so natural and easy to earn money, or she's just clueless about it. This is a parallel I noticed in Habis Gelap Terbitlah Terang as well. Women living in affluent houses won't be affected by the conflicts happening outside their neighborhood. With no internet, limited means of disseminating the news, or intentional deprivation of information due to then European patriarchal tendency to baby their women lest they fell into a hYsTEriCaL fit, it's possible that they weren't quite aware of imperialism/colonialism going on? Well, being ignorant is a lesser sin than being the actor of evil themselves, I guess. I'll be lenient to female classic authors.

Anyways, this book investigates traces of slavery and colonialism in Vanity Fair and Jane Eyre. I haven't read both, but anything written by white people pre-1945 hits different now. I'm seeing things in a new light, and I'll try to pay more attention to this nuance from now on, IF I'm going to read more of such classics anytime soon. I feel it is most urgent to read things from the colonised point of view instead now, at least until the disgust subsides :/

[Lottie S · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was so amazing and insightful and ranging but also what am I doing reading new literature 5 days before my diss is due help