Tidal Poetics in Dionne Brand's At the Full and Change of the Moon

Abstract

This article explores the way in which Dionne Brand's fictional text At the Full and Change of the Moon (1999) engages with the idea of circular movement on the levels of theme, imagery and form. Following the suggestion of a tidal cycle in its title, I read this movement as part of the text's aquatic trope. Presenting Moon as a form of short story cycle, I first put forward the idea that the tidal poetics of Barbadian poet Kamau Brathwaite and the Martinican writer Édouard Glissant offer a more appropriate context in which to read the structure of Brand's text than Forrest Ingram's study of the genre, which builds up a criteria based on an analysis of mainly North American and some European examples. I then go on to identify tensions between Glissant's and Brand's approaches to the notion of circular movement, considering the differing relationship of their writing to the work of the French poststructuralist theorists Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. By examining the recurring concepts of drifting and maroonage, I put forward a reading of Moon as a critical intervention into discourses of deterritorialization. I argue that through this intervention, Brand questions the political efficacy of aquatic metaphors, and in doing so raises important questions regarding the imagining of community in a Caribbean context.