Dionne Brand facts for kids

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Quick facts for kids Dionne Brand CM FRSC
Brand in 2009
Born	(1953-01-07) 7 January 1953 (age 72) Guayaguayare, Trinidad and Tobago
Occupation	Poet
Education	University of Toronto (BA) Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (MA)
Genre	Poetry Autofiction

Dionne Brand CM FRSC (born 7 January 1953) is a Canadian poet, novelist, essayist and documentarian. She was Toronto's third Poet Laureate from September 2009 to November 2012 and first Black Poet Laureate. She was admitted to the Order of Canada in 2017 and has won the Governor General's Award for Poetry, the Trillium Prize for Literature, the Pat Lowther Award for Poetry, the Harbourfront Writers' Prize, and the Toronto Book Award. Brand currently resides in Toronto.

Early life and education
Career
Writing
Filmmaking
Activism
Awards and honours
Archives

Early life and education

Dionne Brand was born in Guayaguayare, Trinidad and Tobago. She graduated from Naparima Girls' High School in San Fernando, Trinidad, in 1970 and emigrated to Canada. She attended the University of Toronto and earned a BA degree (English and Philosophy) in 1975 and later attained an MA in Philosophy of Education from the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE) in 1989.

Career

Her first book, Fore Day Morning: Poems, came out in 1978, and since then Brand has published numerous works of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, as well as editing anthologies and working on documentary films with the National Film Board of Canada.

She has held a number of academic positions, including:

Assistant Professor of English, University of Guelph (1992–94)
Ruth Wynn Woodward Professor in Women's Studies, Simon Fraser University
Distinguished Visiting Scholar and Writer-in-Residence, St. Lawrence University, Canton, New York (2004–05)
Distinguished Poet for the Ralph Gustafson Poetry Chair, Vancouver Island University (2006)
She is currently Professor of English at the School of English and Theatre Studies at the University of Guelph, where she also holds a University Research Chair.

In 2017, she was appointed as poetry editor of McClelland & Stewart, an imprint of Penguin Random House Canada. Brand is also a co-editor of Toronto-based literary journal Brick.

Writing

Brand explores themes of gender, race, feminism, diaspora, and nation, among others. Despite being often characterized as a Caribbean writer, Brand identifies as a "black Canadian".

A Map to the Door of No Return

Brand explores intergenerational trauma and post memory in her piece A Map to A Door of No Return. Using a variety of different elements, she explores her own experiences through an autobiographical perspective as well as diving into explain a concept she calls "The Door of No Return". The Door is the space in which the history of black people is lost, specifically when slaves from Africa were transported through the Atlantic slave trade. Brand defines the Door of No Return as "that place where our ancestors departed one world for another; the Old World for the New." It is a place that is as metaphorical as it is psychological, as imaginary as it is real. It is not a physical door, in the sense that it be found at a single location, but rather a collection of locations.

Another theme explored in A Map to the Door of No Return is the theory and praxis of geography.

Brand uses figurative language in the text. Water, doors, the radio and memory figure boldly and lyrically. Through this figurative language, Brand links form and content where the figurativeness of her language, mimics the literal images of slavery that Brand witnessed on her journey to Africa. Her metaphors also help elaborate and emphasize her thoughts, and the understanding of the door. As she puts it, "The door casts a haunting spell on personal and collective consciousness in the Diaspora."

Rivers Have Sources, Trees Have Roots

In Rivers Have Sources, Trees Have Roots (1986), Brand and co-author Krisantha Sri Bhaggiyadatta interviewed a hundred people from the Canadian Native, Black, Chinese, and South Asian communities about their perceptions of racism and its impact on their lives.

Rivers gives each individual an opportunity to speak about his or her personal and migration story. The interviewees speak of their anger, resentments, and complaints of being treated as different and inferior. Brand sees racism as a powerful tool to censor oppositional voices and disagrees with the conception of racism as isolated or unusual.

No Language Is Neutral

No Language is Neutral was originally published in 1990 by Coach House Press. It is a 50-page tour-de-force which tackles issues of immigration, environmentalism, slavery, identity, place and the female body, all from a no-holds-barred Black feminist perspective.

Coach House Press contracted Grace Channer to do the cover art of the book.

"No Language Is Neutral, sold over 6,000 copies, a remarkable number, even with a Governor General's Award nomination." Today, it has been adopted into school curricula Canada-wide.

"St. Mary Estate"

Personal experience and ancestral memory inform her short story "St. Mary Estate", from Sans Souci and Other Stories, pp. 360–366. The narrator, accompanied by her sister, revisits the cocoa estate of their birth and childhood, recalling past experiences of racism and shame. She focuses on the summer beach house belonging to "rich whites" that was cleaned by their mother, the daughter of her overseer grandfather. Her anger over discrimination and poverty is triggered by the recollection of living quarters made of thin cardboard with newspapers walls - barracks that depict the physical, social and psychological degradation endured by the slaves who were denied the basic human rights and freedom.

"This Body For Itself"

In "This Body For Itself" (1994), in Bread Out of Stone, Brand discusses the way the black female body is represented.

Chronicles of the Hostile Sun

Brand wrote many of the poems in her fifth book of poetry, Chronicles of the Hostile Sun, in response to the United States military occupation of Grenada. Brand had been living in Grenada and working for a Canadian non-profit organization when the United States invasion of the island took place. The Reagan Administration sanctioned the military invasion in response to the Marxist-Leninist revolutionary political party, the New Jewel Movement, led by Maurice Bishop, who became Prime Minister of the island after a coup in 1979. He was arrested and assassinated in the days leading up to the invasion in 1983. Brand's Chronicles of the Hostile Sun, published one year later in 1984, is divided into three sections: Languages, Sieges, and Military Occupations. Poems in the lattermost section refer directly to Grenada, including mentions of Bishop and other prominent political leaders, the island's socio-political landscape, and scenes during and after the harrowing invasion. Titles in this section are often dates of significant events during the occupation.

Filmmaking

Brand made a number of documentaries with NFB's feminist-film production unit, Studio D, from 1989 to 1996. When Studio D was criticized for its lack of diversity, Rina Fraticelli, the executive producer at the time, created a program called New Initiatives in Film (NIF). It was out of this program that Brand partnered with Ginny Stikeman to create the award-winning Sisters in the Struggle (1991), a "look at Black women in community, labour and feminist organizing". This was part of the Women at the Well trilogy that also included Older, Stronger, Wiser (1989) and Long Time Comin' (1991). Brand's collaboration with producer Stikeman also became the "model for the Internship Component of NIF", which offered production experience at various regional studios across Canada and at Studio D in Montreal. Brand's film Older, Stronger, Wiser (1989), which "features five black women talking about their lives in urban and rural Canada between the 1920s and 1950s", and Sisters in the Struggle, were both distinct films in that they broke away from the mid-1980s survey films and instead focused on local issues to Canadian women.

Brand did not have pointed interest in filmmaking until an opportunity arose to consult on a documentary about racism at Studio D. A white filmmaker was the lead on the project and after meeting with her for several days, Brand decided she did not want to be a part of the film. She told the Studio that she would be willing to "do something about Black women from their point of view," which resulted in Long Time Comin'.

Brand directed Listening for Something… Adrienne Rich and Dionne Brand in Conversation (1996), a filmic reading and discussion between herself and the American elder lesbian writer. Listening for Something was being made during turbulent times as Studio D was being dismantled. Brand has also written the script and text for Under One Sky… Arab Women in North America Talk About the Hijab.

Brand's documentary work frequently focuses on multiculturalism in Canada. She warns against state-sponsored images of multiculturalism, stating that true diversity means people having "equal access to equal justice, equal jobs, equal education". Having critiqued the concept of 'nation' as the notion of "leaving out" Black women, Brand has focused much of her work on representation for her communities.

Activism

In addition to being a writer, Brand is a social activist. Openly identifying as a lesbian, Brand is vocal against the discrimination of the LGBT community. She is a founder of the newspaper Our Lives, the first Canadian newspaper devoted to Black women. She is also a past chair of the Women's Issues Committee of the Ontario Coalition of Black Trade Unionists, and does work with immigrant organizations around Toronto.

Awards and honours

Brand's awards include:

1997: Governor General's Award for Poetry and the Trillium Book Award for Land to Light On (1997)
2003: Pat Lowther Award for thirsty (2002)
2006: City of Toronto Book Award for What We All Long For (2005)
2006: Harbourfront Festival Prize in recognition of her important contribution to literature
2006: Fellow of the Academies for Arts, Humanities, and Sciences of Canada (formerly the Royal Society of Canada)
2009: Poet Laureate of Toronto
2011: Griffin Poetry Prize for Ossuaries
2015: Honorary Doctorate from Thorneloe University
2017: Honorary degree from the University of Windsor
2017: Member of the Order of Canada (Invested on 6 September 2018)
2019: Blue Metropolis Violet Prize
2021: Windham-Campbell Literature Prize (fiction)