Drifting and Deterritorialization in Dionne Brand’s Love Enough

Abstract

Dionne Brand provides the reader with vivid representations of the dilemmas and agonies from which people excluded in the history of belonging have been suffering. One of her latest novels Love Enough (2014) deals with the protagonists’ unceasing trial and error in the process of surviving in Toronto. In this paper, I analyze how Da’uud, Bedri, and Ghost’s process of drifting in Toronto causes a rupture with the monolithic sense of belonging in order to argue that they succeed in developing their own sense of belonging and connection and then reach in-between space, based on a link between Brand’s ideation of drifting and Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s conceptualization of deterritorialization. It would be meaningful to elucidate how Da’uud, Bedri, and Ghost’s everyday lives develop the possibility of loving themselves and each other enough, ultimately shedding light on the very beginning of the rupture with the history of belonging.