An Autobiography of the Autobiography of Reading
By Dionne Brand (University of Alberta Press)

Reviewed by Shazia Hafiz Ramji

An Autobiography of the Autobiography of Reading is a collection of five essays by Dionne Brand, who turns her critical and uncompromising gaze on herself to understand the afterlives of colonization and the intricate matrix of double consciousness that it creates. 

In the first essay, Brand remembers posing for a photograph with her sisters and cousin, a photograph to be sent to England, where her mother and aunt are training to be nurses. Brand admits that England “is referred to with reverence as ‘away’ or ‘abroad.’ England is as much the spectator, and for England, standing behind my mother and my aunt, we must make a good appearance.” She goes on to admit that she does not recognize the girl in the photograph, even though she remembers the occasion and actions. 

Brand hones in on this absence of herself to interrogate events “marked at every step with colonial imperatives,” from the photographer Mr. Wong’s probable historical connection with Chinese indentured labour to her own British education, during which she read novels such as Vanity Fair by William Thackeray and Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte. 

Brand turns her attention to these novels among others, focusing on her own adolescent identifications with characters and admitting her unconscious dismissal of Black characters, such as that of Miss Swartz in Vanity Fair, described by Thackeray as “the rich woolly-haired mulatto from St. Kitt’s.” Instead, Brand identified with characters who were white and normatively feminine: “good, kind, gentle.” She says that the “geopolitics of empire had already prepared [her] for this identification […] coloniality constructs outsides and insides—worlds to be chosen, disturbed, interpreted, and navigated—in order to live something like a real self.”

Brand’s invigorating close reading unlocks the sites in which Black life is made inanimate and silenced. In so doing, Brand enacts a radical strategy of decentring and undoing coloniality. By inhabiting these absences in her life and in the texts of her education, she insists on “the difficult work of narrativizing the life of Black people.” She offers counternarratives, which insist on unstitching the self from the colonial gaze, speaking the multiplicity of the “I,” changing forms of address, and storying lives that do not revolve around Empire.

An Autobiography of the Autobiography of Reading is exemplary and eye-opening. It reckons with coloniality and the narrative demands it makes in our lives and in our stories, examining canonical texts through close-reading strategies and reflexive thinking that are unparalleled in their clarity and rigour. In a mere fifty pages, Brand undoes the crux of colonial academic pedagogy by insisting on the autobiographical specificity of Black lives and of those who cannot see themselves in literature. 

This is the education we have been waiting for.

The Dyzgraphxst 
By Canisia Lubrin (McClelland & Stewart)

Reviewed by Nehal El-Hadi

The dedication feels prescient: For the impossible citizens of the ill world. This marks Lubrin as a soothsayer, for how else was she to know that her book’s release would occur during what M. NourbeSe Philip has referred to as “these catastrophic Covidian times”? As we shelter in place, I read The Dyzgraphxst as both a truth-speaking work of prophesy and as testimony for what has come before.

Lubrin’s follow-up to the alchemical Voodoo Hypothesis (Buckrider Books, 2017) is a book-length poem organized like a script for a play. Patwa, French, and English reverberate together in the text sonically, geographically, and essentially—and showcase Lubrin’s multi-linguistic dexterity. The weaving together of these particular three languages functions as a reflection of Lubrin’s movements through space over time. Lubrin’s manipulation of the languages creates dynamic cleaving of assumed meanings: What does poetry look like when “to belong” is conjugated in different ways?

The word dysgraphia comes from Ancient Greek, and means “difficult writing”; here, Lubrin applies dysgraphia as referenced by Black studies scholar Christina Sharpe. In her book In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, Sharpe applies dysgraphia to “the rapid, deliberate, repetitive, and wide circulation on television and social media of Black social, material, and psychic death.”

In The Dysgraphxst, Lubrin invites her reader into what theorist Fred Moten describes as the ensemble that comprises the encounters between art and audience, reducing the singular and implicating us. This is set up through the Dramatis Personæ on p.1: “i: First person singular. / I: Second person singular. / I: Third person plural.” The effect of this—once one has gotten through the initial confoundment—is unexpected revolutions in the relationships between text and reader. This unprecedented generosity on Lubrin’s behalf toward I, the reader, proffers unbounded interpretations and understood possibilities of the poem.

The book-length poem comprises a prologue, seven acts interrupted by a monologue, and an epilogue. The title of each act is a proclamation ending with a question mark: Ain’t I the Gate?/ Ain’t I Nickname for Home? Ain’t I Épistémè? Ain’t I the Ode? Ain’t I Too Late? Ain’t I a Madness? Ain’t I Again? The character of Jejune provides a focal point, an addressee that we the reader is positioned in relation to. Jejune is the dysgrphxst, Lubrin’s insertion of the x is to not only represent the unknown but also to assertively reject—or absolve—I.

“Act III: Ain’t I Épistémè? … elsewhere called the transaction of dream and return” feels the most urgent, setting up a conversation between odd-numbered dreams and even-numbered returns. In return #2, Lubrin asks: “What am I to make /     / Of two or three small sons /     / Of anger with its talent for mixtures” (p. 55) and dream #7 begins: “an amateur is in the streets./ to the amateur we are lost/ and startled” (p.60). In return #18, a footnote is indicated in the text as word—this intertextuality reappears in Act V: Ain’t I Too Late? where most of the section occurs in the footnotes. 

In the epilogue, Lubrin writes “a city is time for me, so I cut the road” (p. 158) and this re-purposing of space and time throughout The Dysgraphxst can be considered a fractal approach to the Black experience. Much like the Haitian Spiralist movement, The Dysgraphxst “invite(s) analysis of the various boundaries—geographical, social, and political—that determine individual and collective experiences of space and time, illustrating the consequences and the joys of becoming unbound” (Glover, 2010, 104-5). And even when sites of significance are named—from Toronto to Gabon, Finland, Yemen, and Uronarti in my homeland of Sudan—mapping them does not permit the text to ground.

Lubrin deftly splays open the relations to places, people, events that define I, and while this may not be what we want in these disorienting times, it is what we need if we are to ever make the world anew.

***

References

Glover, K. L. (2010). Haiti Unbound: A Spiralist Challenge to the Postcolonial Canon. Oxford University Press.

Philip, M. NourbeSe. (9 April 2020). Covidian Catastrophes, Canadian Art. Retrieved from https://canadianart.ca/features/covidian-catastrophes/

Sharpe, C. (2016). In the wake: On blackness and being. Duke University Press.

Proof I Was Here  
By Becky Blake (Wolsak & Wynn / Buckrider Books)

Reviewed by Neil Price

Becky Blake’s debut novel Proof I Was Here tells the story of a Canadian expat, Niki, whose world is suddenly upended when her fiancé calls off their wedding weeks before their planned nuptials. 

Confused and gutted by this reversal, Niki heads out into the busy streets of Barcelona, a city laden with immense beauty, simmering turmoil, and beguiling characters of every sort and origin. Moving freely through alluring and kinetic streetscapes, Nikki has no real destination or set plans other than to get away from heartache.

Blake structures the book’s first-person narrative across three parts. In the first section, we meet Manu, a wily pickpocket who engages Niki in the ancient sleight-of-hand art of street theft. Manu and Niki make easy company as two people on the run: Manu from the constant threat of arrest and deportation; Niki from a relationship in tatters, recurring memories of a difficult childhood, and an assault charge that she must answer to at some point back home in Toronto. Through a series of risky thefts and a deepening appreciation for Manu’s predicament, Nikki starts to understand how life’s chain of broken events shape how we see ourselves and the spaces we move within, how as one character puts it, the world consists of “unstitched and broken things finding their way to each other.”

In part two, Niki spends time with a group of squatters who live off the detritus of the bustling city. The group shares their scavenged spoils and makeshift tenement with Niki and other ragtag members of an eclectic band of activists, drifters, and immigrants who style themselves as “freegans.” Eventually, the authorities displace the camp, but not before Niki suffers a vicious beating from a late-night assailant that leaves her with a scar on her cheek, a symbolic reminder that pain rather than happiness often finds permanence.

The book’s final section sees Niki explore newfound freedom through her dormant artistic ability. She comes under the influence of Xavi, a graffiti artist caught up in the Catalonian struggle for independence. In making art, Niki wants to “make something outside” of who she is. With a growing sense of equilibrium and purpose, she tags Barcelona’s buildings and urban facades, rendering things both visible and indelible while summoning the courage to start life anew. 

Proof I Was Here explores themes of ephemerality, loss, and renewal. In sparse, steady prose, Blake reminds us of how layered, complex, and pain-filled our lives can be. Streets are often inhospitable and dangerous places to seek inner peace. Even so, they have an enduring capacity to reinvigorate when we turn to them when problems call. While Blake’s overreliance on plot and the underdevelopment of Niki’s interior voice leave the narrative somewhat stilted, the emerging novelist manages to create an arresting story that vividly assembles the disparate and unpredictable shards that cut through everyday life.

A Good Wife: Escaping the Life I Never Chose
By Samra Zafar with Meg Master (HarperCollins)

Reviewed by Sohini Bhattacharya

Samra Zafar was sixteen when she had to marry a man a decade older than she was. In her debut memoir, A Good Wife: Escaping the Life I Never Chose, the reader is plunged into the claustrophobic depths of what life looks like within a forced marriage. The book opens with Zafar waking up next to her toddler daughter on a quiet morning to a “frayed, rippling tension, a growing brittleness: anticipation and fear,” and to the feeling of sore ribs. From here the reader is hooked into a page-turner as Zafar chronicles her life, punctuated by harrowing abuse and violence from childhood. 

Growing up as a girl in a patriarchal culture in Ruwais, Abu Dhabi, Zafar and her sisters quietly suffered through their parents’ unstable marriage. We get sporadic glimpses of violent arguments between them: her cash-strapped, unambitious father would throw crockery across the room in the direction of her educated but unhappy homemaker mother. 

Zafar never thought of her father as abusive. She thought it was normal for him to vent his frustrations at her mother. After all, she was a “daddy’s girl.” A picture of her father lovingly tossing an infant Zafar into the air are at odds with the violence she’d grow up witnessing at home. 

Tucked into the middle of Zafar’s memoir is a photo montage of her life. Juxtaposed next to a picture of her teenaged self laughing without makeup, a year before her marriage, is a picture of her wedding photo. In it, she sits like a stoic yogi, legs tucked beneath her. A tendril of her black hair falls carelessly over her sad but piercing eyes. She stares into the wedding photographer’s camera as if silently crying out, “Help me.”  

The two pictures bookend Zafar’s life—one led in fear, silence, isolation, and misery before finally culminating in freedom. Readers move from chapter to chapter seeing how, from her point of view, she grows within her marriage from a betrayed and naïve teenager into a resilient and determined adult. 

A Good Wife is a seminal survivor’s story in the fight against gender-based violence, not only within the South Asian immigrant community, but the larger Canadian one, too. Zafar addresses issues of intimate partner violence and child marriage in a bold yet intimate way, where it’s hard to look away. 

Since the book’s launch, Zafar has received countless threats to her life and regular hate mail. She has broken with tradition in revealing all the gory details of her forced child marriage and abusive relationship with her ex-husband and in-laws. In doing so, she draws us to conclude that violence against women is universal, with culture only colouring the experience of it.