Dionne Brand’s Environmental Poetics

Abstract

The language of nature that permeates Dionne Brand’s poetry is often read as a metaphor for place, a site from which the politics of identity, home and belonging are negotiated. But the places through which the politics of inclusion and exclusion are enacted are alive in Brand’s poetry. This essay reads her attention to the living world of nature as an ethical and political engagement with the complex intersections of social injustice and environmental degradation, as traced through the motifs of landscape, territory, cartography, and planetarity in four poetry collections: No Language Is Neutral (1990), Land To Light On (1997), thirsty (2002), and Inventory (2006). In these poems, nature becomes the lived world when experienced through bodily movement not totalized cartography, when voiced in sound rather than pinned down by the gaze, and when recognized as a multitude of both friends and strangers. The expression of love for nature makes the disjuncture between place, belonging, and justice so painful in Brand’s poetry. In marking so carefully the relations of love and power that bind and rupture identity and place, Brand shows how necessary but difficult is the task of making the places we live in actually liveable.