Bøger af Dionne Brand

Hvor kommer jeg fra? Hvad vil det sige at høre til? Disse enkle, men overvældende spørgsmål er udgangspunktet for Dionne Brands Et kort over Døren der gjorde tilbagevenden umulig – et poetisk hybridværk, som undersøger sorthed, nærmere bestemt den sorte diasporas fornemmelser af tilhør og hjem.Bogen er en både essayistisk, selvbiografisk og poetisk meditation over Døren. Døren, som på én gang er en ræk- ke fysiske steder, slaveforterne langs Afrikas vestkyst, og en metafor for sted, det væld af symbolske og psykiske processer, der forvandlede afrikanere til sorte, til slaver, i den så- kaldt nye verden. Dionne Brand trækker på kartografi, barndomsminder, rejser, revolution og litteratur i sin uafrystelige undersøgelse af de skiftende grænser for hjem og nation.“En af de bedste udforskninger af sorthed, jeg har læst – og helt sikkert den smukkeste.” – Mikas Lang

“One enters a room and history follows; one enters a room and history precedes. History is already seated in the chair in the empty room when one arrives.” Now entering its third decade in print, Dionne Brand’s groundbreaking A Map to the Door of No Return has emerged as a modern classic, a disquisition on ‘being’ in the Black diaspora. “This book is a world, a triumph of art and thought, a compass for the ages.” —David ChariandySince its first publication in 2001, Dionne Brand’s groundbreaking disquisition on being in the Black diaspora, A Map to the Door of No Return, has emerged as a modern classic. The door, in Brand’s iconic schema, represents the point of rupture where the ancestors of the Black diaspora departed one world for another: the place where all names were forgotten, and all beginnings recast. “This door,” writes Brand, “is not mere physicality. It is a spiritual location. . . . Since leaving was never voluntary, return was, and still may be, an intention, however deeply buried. There is as it says no way in; no return.” Through shards of history, memoir, lyrical investigation, and the unwritten experience of so many descendants of those who passed through the door, Brand constructs a map of this indelible region, culminating in an enduring expression, both definitive and seeking, of what it is to live, think, and create in the wake of colonization. With a new preface by the author, and a moving afterword by Saidiya Hartman.

Nomenclature: New and Collected Poems collects eight volumes of Dionne Brand’s poetry published between 1983 and 2010, as well as a new long poem, the titular Nomenclature for the time being.

In The Blue Clerk renowned poet Dionne Brand explores memory, language, culture, and the nature of writing through a series of haunting prose poems that contain dialogues between the figure of the poet and the Blue Clerk, who is tasked with managing the poet's discarded attempts at writing.

Gripping at times, heartrending at others, What We All Long For is an ode to a generation of longing and identity, and to the rhythms and pulses of a city and its burgeoning, questioning youth. Dionne Brand's multicultural infusion follows the stories of a close circle of twenty-something second-generations living in downtown Toronto-and the secrets they hide from their families.Tuyen is a lesbian avant-garde artist and the daughter of Vietnamese parents who've never recovered from losing one of their children while in the rush to flee Vietnam in the 1970s. She rejects her immigrant family's hard-won lifestyle, and instead lives in a rundown apartment with friends-each of whom is grappling with their own familial complexities and heartache. Tuyen is love with her best friend Carla, a biracial bicycle courier. Oku is a jazz-loving poet who, unbeknowst to his Jamaican-born parents, has dropped out of college. He is tormented by his unrequited love for Jackie, a gorgeous black woman who runs a hiphop clothing store.Meanwhile, Tuyen's lost brother, Quy-now a criminal in the Thai underworld-sets out for Toronto to find his long-lost family. Gripping at times, heart-wrenching at others, Dionne Brand's What We all Long For is a story of identity, love and loss-the universal experience of being human, and discovering the nature of our longing.

Ars Poetica in 59 Versos.

"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."--

Dionne Brand's hypnotic, urgent long poem is about the bones of fading cultures and ideas, about the living museums of spectacle where these bones are found. At the centre of Ossuaries is the narrative of Yasmine, a woman living an underground life, fleeing from past actions and regrets, in a perpetual state of movement. She leads a solitary clandestine life, crossing borders actual (Algiers, Cuba, Canada), and timeless. Cold-eyed and cynical, she contemplates the periodic crises of the contemporary world. This is a work of deep engagement, sensuality, and ultimate craft from an essential observer of our time and one of the most accomplished poets writing today.

One of Canada's most distinguished poets, Dionne Brand explores and chronicles how history shapes human existence, in particular the lives of those ruptured and scattered by New World slaveries and modern crises.

The selections in Fierce Departures, drawn from Dionne Brand's work since 1997, delineate with searing eloquence how history marks and dislocates peoples of the African diaspora, how nations, concretely and conceptually, fail to create safe haven, and how human desire persists nevertheless.