"Near enough to smell and far enough to desire”: Archipelagos of Desire in Canisia Lubrin’s Voodoo Hypothesis and Dionne Brand’s In Another Place, Not Here

Abstract

Both the 1996 novel In Another Place, Not Here by Trinidadian Canadian writer Dionne Brand and the 2017 poetry collection Voodoo Hypothesis by St. Lucian Canadian poet Canisia Lubrin are concerned with desires spanning the Caribbean archipelago, to Canada and back again. The narrators and protagonists of Brand’s text migrate across this archipelago while navigating various desires—for places, people, a sense of belonging, and revolution—that serve as a way of bridging distances between bodies, continents, and moments in time. Lubrin shares in that project by not only writing about the archipelago’s historic echoes and present connections, but by explicitly dedicating one of her poems to Brand. In this article, we read desire and the archipelagic in these works not just together, but through one another, conceptualizing what we call an “archipelago of desire.” The notion of the archipelago proves useful due to the concrete geographical constellation that forms the Caribbean and that can, in extension, be used to explore not merely one or two forms of mobility, but a plurality of im/mobilities, such as these speakers’ crisscrossing paths. In using the archipelago to grasp desire, we see different desires as fragmented and interwoven; they are part of not a whole but of something which resists being a whole, much like an archipelago resists being subsumed into one category; desire is then a way of assembling these things together while affirming their fragmentary nature.