Spaces of violence, desire, and queer (un)belonging: Dionne Brand's urban diasporas

Abstract

An immigrant from Trinidad to Canada, Dionne Brand has explored gender, sexuality, and migration from myriad perspectives, in film, essays, poetry, and fiction. This essay focuses on two recent texts by Brand, the book-length poem thirsty (2002) and her third novel, What We All Long For (2005), both set in Toronto. Desire, loss, and longing rooted in migration and its concomitant traumas structure the narratives; each text also offers a meditation on the role of aesthetics in addressing contemporary urban experience. Brand's work asserts the positive potential of spaces of queer (un)belonging, spaces the undo belonging while not leading to the destructive erasure of not-belonging. ‘Queer diaspora’ might seem an impossibility, given that there is no queer homeland, no single site from which queerness has been dispersed. Yet, queer (un)belonging as analysed here in Brand's writing seeks to revision the world, using Toronto as the specific location of remaking. Queer (un)belonging can accommodate multiple identities and respond to normative attitudes that rely on racism and other forms of violent categorisation. The poem thirsty creates tension between different meanings ascribed to rootedness and belonging, arriving at an ideal of unrooted relation similar to Édouard Glissant's poetics. In this text, Brand extends the possibilities for both queer diasporas and a queering of diaspora via ‘I’, a persona that interacts directly with the city and offers a vision of community. The essay explores masculinity for diasporic subjects and the kinds of not belonging experienced by men of colour in the two texts, in contrast to the ways lesbian artist Tuyen creates a potential space of homoeroticism, relationality, and queer (un)belonging.