SALVAGE

Black lives in literature.

Award-winning novelist Brand, Toronto’s former poet laureate, melds autobiography and literary criticism to offer a shrewd, intimate reading of the 17th-, 18th-, and 19th-century novels that shaped her sense of self. She terms this fictional trove a “wreck,” from which she aims to salvage “the literary substance of which I am made.” As a Black girl attending an Anglican school in Trinidad, she was schooled in “the racial work of literature, whose most abiding feature will be our absence, on the one hand, and our eternal subjugate presence, on the other hand.” From novels such as Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, Defoe’s Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, Austen’s Mansfield Park, Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko, and Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, which she reread later at the University of Toronto, she came to understand the power of narrative structure and style—sentences, character, dialogue—to teach her “how to feel and what to feel” about her identity as a Black woman in a “world of coloniality.” “I am not interested in the morality of any given writer,” she asserts; “I am interested in the construction of, and the information contained in and relayed by, their paragraphs. I want to see what the writing imports from the systems in which the writer (and the work) is immersed.” That system was imperialism, dependent on the slave trade, on the suppression of non-whites, and on a firm belief in the unbridgeable chasm between civilized and savage—a depiction, Brand finds, that persists even in contemporary novels. J.M. Coetzee’s Foe, for example, insists on reviving the question, “Can Black people be trusted with freedom?” Paintings, movies, photographs (especially a significant portrait from her childhood), and American novels and popular culture are all part of the wreckage that Brand astutely analyzes.

Penetrating cultural criticism.