Abstract

A diasporic Toronto-based Trinidadian writer, filmmaker and educator whose literary contributions span from revolutionary Grenada, to domestic work in Canada and the war on terror, Dionne Brand’s work is far from static. However, a poetics of stillness in Brand’s work offers a crucial intervention into the narrative of exile and mobility that characterizes much of twentieth-century Caribbean poetry. In ‘Ethno or Socio Poetics’, Sylvia Wynter defines the poetic as the practice through which artists recreate the world, breaking out of a capitalist relationship and producing a human relationship by describing a possible and as yet indescribable relationship (1976: 87). In this sense, all of Dionne Brand’s work, across genres, is poetic.