After Modernism: Alternative Voices in the Writings of Dionne Brand, Claire Harris, and Marlene Philip

Abstract

As Lorris Elliott notes in the introduction to Literary Writing by Blacks in Canada, there has been an 'outburst of literary activity by Blacks in Canada' since the 1970s, and the three writers discussed here are part of that 'outburst.' Some of this recent activity comes from Canadian-born writers such as Maxine Tynes and George Elliott Clarke, part comes from immigrants from the United States, England, South America, and Africa, and part comes from the community arriving from the Caribbean. Dionne Brand, Claire Harris, and Marlene Philip, whose work I approach in this essay, all come from the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago,and each develops a writing that raises three tightly associated issues: race, access, and the appropriateness of the verbal tradition, literary or linguistic, to their writing.