Dionne Brand and Afua Cooper: Diaspora and Continuities Shaped by National and Regional Cultures

Abstract

Since its roots, African ("Black") Canadian literature keeps the singularity of its multiple facets. As George Elliot Clarke notes, this literature includes "the new and the old, the come-from-away and the down-home, the urban and the rural, the pull of the regional and the equally irresistible seductions of African-American—and Afro-Caribbean—culture." Dionne Brand and Afua Cooper, Caribbean immigrants to Canada, illustrate this diversity in their writings. Having their poetry as evidence, this study discusses how the two poets give voice both to the history of diaspora and colonialism in a large sense, and its continuities in specific topographies, shaped by national and regional cultures. In doing so, I expect to complicate the transparency of the hyphen—Brand and Cooper as Caribbean-Canadian writers—by examining their hybrid borderland poetics. As Fred Wah observes, the hyphen, "a provocateur of flux," creates "a volatile space that is inhabited by a wide range of voices."