Cultural Memory and the Colonial Archive in the Writing of Dionne Brand
#Political and Discursive Convergences
Erica L. Johnson, Pace University, New York
Trinidadian-Canadian writer Dionne Brand's The Blue Clerk: Ars Poetica in 59 Versos (2018) is an exquisite address to the problem of the colonial archive and the challenges it poses to cultural memory. Brand has long engaged this issue in her writing, from her memoir work to her novels, and in this most recent work of poetry she structures her interrogation with two figures, the "author" and the "clerk." The author and clerk sometimes spar and sometimes mirror one another in their ongoing arguments and conversations about the poet's writing and the clerk's duty to the archive-or, more accurately, the counter-archive. Originally envisioned by Brand as a book in which all left-hand pages would be left blank, The Blue Clerk's "versos" range in length from a single word to several pages of text with the result that the book presents expanses of blank space on the page. This visual dimension of the text illustrates the structuring debate between the clerk, the archivist and keeper of bales of records, and the author, the keeper of memory and experience.
It may seem contradictory that the archivist's bales turn out to be full of blank pages but that is precisely the point: in a Caribbean context and in postcolonial contexts more generally, archival records are not so much historical evidence as they are remains and ruins of histories untold. Their internal logic privileges presence-the presence of newspaper articles, court records, property deeds, letters, photographs, and so forth; however, to read these items as a record of absence, as material remains of what has chipped away from history, is to engage in counter-archival work along the lines of Saidiya Hartman's influential interventions in the archive (Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, 2019; Lose Your Mother, 2007) and Jeannette Bastian's explorations of the complicated relationship between a "community of records" and communal memory (Owning Memory, How a Caribbean Community Lost Its Records and Found Its History, 2003; Community Archives, The Shaping of Memory, 2009, Decolonizing the Caribbean Record: An Archives Reader, 2018). Drawing on Hartman and Bastian, I examine counter-archival structures of memory in Brand's work and in approaches to postcolonial cultural memory.
