Spirit Possession and the Transformation of Space in the Fiction of Dionne Brand

Abstract

This paper analyzes Brand’s short story “Blossom” in light of Freud’s notion of the uncanny. As I argue, Brand invokes the uncanny to illustrate that in a country like Canada, with a history of arrivals and departures, the trope of haunting is a particularly useful way to think about the relationship between history and memory, about displacement, about ancestors, and about inheritance. My contribution to the discussion of the role played by haunting in Brand’s corpus lies in suggesting that her fiction is not solely informed by embodied experiences of trauma and dispossession. Instead, I argue that Brand’s early engagement with Afro-Caribbean understandings of spirit possession, evident in her first short story collection Sans Souci, provides the foundation for her critique and transformation of the racist, classist, and sexist dimensions of Toronto’s urban space. While scholarly accounts of Brand’s work informed by Western paradigms of poststructuralist performance and trauma theory remain helpful, Brand’s fictions exceed these paradigms because they self-consciously explore the muted consciousness of volatile, possessed female bodies and, in so doing, demonstrate a profound knowledge of alternatives to Western epistemology and ontology afforded by Afro-Caribbean possession rituals and spiritual traditions.