![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
Dionne Brand's What We All Long For
May. 10th, 2009 03:09 pm![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
pylduck.livejournal.comContinuing with some of this community's interest in "other" Asian American literature--writing that might conceivably be brought within the critical apparatus of Asian American literary studies but that doesn't immediately fit because the author is not herself Asian American--I thought I'd write up some comments on Dionne Brand's What We All Long For (Knopf Canada, 2005; Thomas Dunne Books, 2008, US edition).
Dionne Brand is fairly well known, I think, in Canada, where she lives and writes. Born in Trinidad, she is part of a Caribbean diasporic artistic community that has settled in North America, particularly in Toronto. Her work has helped constitute a sense of multicultural politics and community in Canada, especially in the form it takes there that differs to some extent from multiculturalisms in the United States. In large part, this difference runs along the lines of highlighting postcolonialisms and immigration as a kind of "return flow" (even if Canada proper is not the colonizing nation but rather Britain, France, and other such European countries). She seems to have worked primarily in the vein of constituting black and native women's perspectives within the arts, but in this particular novel, she also engages substantively with the figure of the Vietnamese refugee.
Within American literatures and culture of the late twentieth century, the Vietnam War and the subsequent arrival of Vietnamese refugees in the United States has long held a particularly weighted significance given the collective trauma that the War occasioned on America's sense of itself as protector of worldwide freedom and democracy during the Cold War. The explosion of writing about the War and veterans' experience importantly set the terms of understanding for awhile (and interestingly emerged on the cinematic screen most intensely in movies like The Deer Hunter (1978) and Apocalypse Now (1979)), followed by refugee memoirs like Le Ly Hayslip's When Heaven and Earth Changed Places (Plume, 1990; also worth noting that this work was ghost written) that tended to strongly support the ideological dynamics of the Cold War and the narrative of America as savior in taking in refugees. The work of memoirists who were just young babies or children when they (and their families) left Vietnam added some complexity to these stories of the War by pushing more strongly on the issue of memory, memorialization, trauma, forgetting, and identity (for example, Andrew X. Pham's Catfish and Mandala (FSG, 1999) literally finds the author on a bicycle journey in search of memories, histories, and a sense of cultural identity).
Starting in the later 1990s to the present, it seems that there is a more concerted push by leftist-leaning writers and scholars to critique the salvation narrative of America's involvement in Vietnam and to explore the complexity of refugee experience outside of a framework of the immigrant's arrival and pursuit of the American Dream. (Mimi Nguyen's forthcoming work, for example, examines the issue of representation--in cultural terms as well as political--for refugees and the ideological uses of the refugee subject. Her web site states, "She is currently completing her first book, Representing Refugees, which examines the historical production and mobilization of refugee affect for varied political and cultural projects (such as commemoration, humanitarianism, consumption and multicultural nationalism).") The editor and writer Monique Truong, as well, has forcefully come out and stated that only Vietnamese refugees themselves should be allowed to write their stories, taking as her primary target Robert Olen Butler's Pulitzer Prize-winning collection of stories about Vietnam, A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain (Henry Holt, 1992), that featured stories in the voice of Vietnamese refugees.
This all leads me to the interesting instance of Brand's novel. Brand herself is perhaps best known for her poetry and for her outspoken politics around blackness and lesbian sexuality. Yet, What We All Long For
takes as part of its central cast Tuyen, a Vietnamese Canadian lesbian artist, and her refugee family. Tuyen and her three friends comprise the core of the novel, with chapters alternating between the various characters' perspectives (in third-person narration but with access at each instance to the interior of the character being followed). The other major characters are friends that Tuyen went to high school with in Toronto: Carla, a biracial (black/Italian) woman; Oku, a black man whose family is part of the Caribbean diaspora; and Jackie, a black woman whose parents are from Nova Scotia (and hence part of a particular African Canadian community that understands itself to have its origins in runaway slaves from the United States in the pre-Civil War era). The novel explores their relationships with each other (sometimes including sex and other intimacies) but pushes particularly on their backstories--how they came to be where they are as young adults and how their relationships with their parents and their parents' failed dreams circumscribe the way they can live their lives. It is ultimately a novel about desire and want (as the title suggests... the title also suggests to me that of Vietnamese American author le thi diem thuy's novel The Gangster We Are All Looking For, and I wonder if there is an allusion there or perhaps just a common theme of exploring loss in the context of refugee dislocation). Tuyen's perspective focuses on her pursuit of art in her installations and other media as well as on her tense relationship with the rest of her family that seems to be much more "traditional" in its orientation towards familial obligation and the immigrant dream of independent business wealth (her parents run a restaurant, for example, and her brother Binh owns a store in Koreatown). Carla's story revolves around the tragic story of her Italian immigrant mother who commits suicide after having two children by a married black man with another family (and to some extent takes on the issue of her brother Jamal, a young biracial/black man who falls in with criminals and is constantly in trouble with the law). Oku's life centers on the tension between his anarchist/anti-racist/revolutionary/poetic visions and his father's hard-scrabble immigrant mentality (where racism is a given in the society, and it is just about survival). Jackie's story is a bit more amorphous, and her role in the novel seems mostly to highlight her Nova Scotian parents' failed dreams in the big city (the shattering of illusions of being young, hip "players" in the heyday of the 1960s and 1970s) and the fact that she is Oku's love interest.
Most significantly, while the novel mostly follows these four twenty-something "borderless" Canadians, there are a series of intercalary chapters simply titled Quy that are in the first-person perspective of a Vietnamese man who was separated from his family and grew up as an orphan living the criminal's life in the refugee camp at Pulau Bidong and later in Hong Kong and other parts of Southeast Asia. While his voice explores the difficult life he has led in the refugee camps and then outside as a swindler, the possibility that he is Tuyen's long lost brother--a small boy who got separated from his parents and two sisters (Tuyen and Binh were born in Canada) while they were waiting for boats out of Vietnam--is what connects his narrative to that of the twentysomethings.
I can definitely see Brand's poetic language in this novel. There are many passages that are rich in evocative and introspective observations such as the opening paragraph:
As beautiful as her language is, the dialogue by and large was rather stilted, and there was a bit of a forced quality in the more explicit discussions of cultural politics (whether between characters or in their own introspections).
This novel is ultimately interesting for Asian American literary critics, though, because of its taking up of Vietnamese Canadian perspectives and stories. Brand's sympathetic portrayals (in the sense of the resistant Vietnamese subject rather than the assimilationist/complicit one) make the novel more amenable to Asian American literary studies though there is a quality of her references to Vietnamese culture and language (some Vietnamese words pepper the novel) that seems unsure of itself. I found her explorations of the complexity of Oku's feelings about his father's immigrant mentality and the politics of (black) race to be more compelling, too, than her sketching out of similar issues for Tuyen and her Vietnamese refugee family. I think Brand's choice to make Tuyen the most significant artist figure (Oku is an aspiring poet and has many moments in which he expounds of African diasporic music) is also her attempt to bring a depth of personality and motivations to Tuyen though whether or not she succeeds would still be a question for me.
Dionne Brand is fairly well known, I think, in Canada, where she lives and writes. Born in Trinidad, she is part of a Caribbean diasporic artistic community that has settled in North America, particularly in Toronto. Her work has helped constitute a sense of multicultural politics and community in Canada, especially in the form it takes there that differs to some extent from multiculturalisms in the United States. In large part, this difference runs along the lines of highlighting postcolonialisms and immigration as a kind of "return flow" (even if Canada proper is not the colonizing nation but rather Britain, France, and other such European countries). She seems to have worked primarily in the vein of constituting black and native women's perspectives within the arts, but in this particular novel, she also engages substantively with the figure of the Vietnamese refugee.
Within American literatures and culture of the late twentieth century, the Vietnam War and the subsequent arrival of Vietnamese refugees in the United States has long held a particularly weighted significance given the collective trauma that the War occasioned on America's sense of itself as protector of worldwide freedom and democracy during the Cold War. The explosion of writing about the War and veterans' experience importantly set the terms of understanding for awhile (and interestingly emerged on the cinematic screen most intensely in movies like The Deer Hunter (1978) and Apocalypse Now (1979)), followed by refugee memoirs like Le Ly Hayslip's When Heaven and Earth Changed Places (Plume, 1990; also worth noting that this work was ghost written) that tended to strongly support the ideological dynamics of the Cold War and the narrative of America as savior in taking in refugees. The work of memoirists who were just young babies or children when they (and their families) left Vietnam added some complexity to these stories of the War by pushing more strongly on the issue of memory, memorialization, trauma, forgetting, and identity (for example, Andrew X. Pham's Catfish and Mandala (FSG, 1999) literally finds the author on a bicycle journey in search of memories, histories, and a sense of cultural identity).
Starting in the later 1990s to the present, it seems that there is a more concerted push by leftist-leaning writers and scholars to critique the salvation narrative of America's involvement in Vietnam and to explore the complexity of refugee experience outside of a framework of the immigrant's arrival and pursuit of the American Dream. (Mimi Nguyen's forthcoming work, for example, examines the issue of representation--in cultural terms as well as political--for refugees and the ideological uses of the refugee subject. Her web site states, "She is currently completing her first book, Representing Refugees, which examines the historical production and mobilization of refugee affect for varied political and cultural projects (such as commemoration, humanitarianism, consumption and multicultural nationalism).") The editor and writer Monique Truong, as well, has forcefully come out and stated that only Vietnamese refugees themselves should be allowed to write their stories, taking as her primary target Robert Olen Butler's Pulitzer Prize-winning collection of stories about Vietnam, A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain (Henry Holt, 1992), that featured stories in the voice of Vietnamese refugees.
This all leads me to the interesting instance of Brand's novel. Brand herself is perhaps best known for her poetry and for her outspoken politics around blackness and lesbian sexuality. Yet, What We All Long For
takes as part of its central cast Tuyen, a Vietnamese Canadian lesbian artist, and her refugee family. Tuyen and her three friends comprise the core of the novel, with chapters alternating between the various characters' perspectives (in third-person narration but with access at each instance to the interior of the character being followed). The other major characters are friends that Tuyen went to high school with in Toronto: Carla, a biracial (black/Italian) woman; Oku, a black man whose family is part of the Caribbean diaspora; and Jackie, a black woman whose parents are from Nova Scotia (and hence part of a particular African Canadian community that understands itself to have its origins in runaway slaves from the United States in the pre-Civil War era). The novel explores their relationships with each other (sometimes including sex and other intimacies) but pushes particularly on their backstories--how they came to be where they are as young adults and how their relationships with their parents and their parents' failed dreams circumscribe the way they can live their lives. It is ultimately a novel about desire and want (as the title suggests... the title also suggests to me that of Vietnamese American author le thi diem thuy's novel The Gangster We Are All Looking For, and I wonder if there is an allusion there or perhaps just a common theme of exploring loss in the context of refugee dislocation). Tuyen's perspective focuses on her pursuit of art in her installations and other media as well as on her tense relationship with the rest of her family that seems to be much more "traditional" in its orientation towards familial obligation and the immigrant dream of independent business wealth (her parents run a restaurant, for example, and her brother Binh owns a store in Koreatown). Carla's story revolves around the tragic story of her Italian immigrant mother who commits suicide after having two children by a married black man with another family (and to some extent takes on the issue of her brother Jamal, a young biracial/black man who falls in with criminals and is constantly in trouble with the law). Oku's life centers on the tension between his anarchist/anti-racist/revolutionary/poetic visions and his father's hard-scrabble immigrant mentality (where racism is a given in the society, and it is just about survival). Jackie's story is a bit more amorphous, and her role in the novel seems mostly to highlight her Nova Scotian parents' failed dreams in the big city (the shattering of illusions of being young, hip "players" in the heyday of the 1960s and 1970s) and the fact that she is Oku's love interest.
Most significantly, while the novel mostly follows these four twenty-something "borderless" Canadians, there are a series of intercalary chapters simply titled Quy that are in the first-person perspective of a Vietnamese man who was separated from his family and grew up as an orphan living the criminal's life in the refugee camp at Pulau Bidong and later in Hong Kong and other parts of Southeast Asia. While his voice explores the difficult life he has led in the refugee camps and then outside as a swindler, the possibility that he is Tuyen's long lost brother--a small boy who got separated from his parents and two sisters (Tuyen and Binh were born in Canada) while they were waiting for boats out of Vietnam--is what connects his narrative to that of the twentysomethings.
I can definitely see Brand's poetic language in this novel. There are many passages that are rich in evocative and introspective observations such as the opening paragraph:
This city hovers above the forty-third parallel; that's illusory of course. Winters on the other hand, there's nothing vague about them. Winters here are inevitable, sometimes unforgiving. Two years ago, they had to bring the army in to dig the city out from under the snow. The streets were glacial, the electrical wires were brittle, the telephones were useless. The whole city stood still; the trees more than usual. The cars and driveways were obliterated. Politicians were falling over each other to explain what had happened and who was to blame--who had privatized the snow plows and why the city wasn't prepared. The truth is you can't prepare for something like that. It's fate. Nature will do that sort of thing--dump thousands of tons of snow on the city just to say, Don't make too many plans or assumptions, don't get ahead of yourself. Spring this year couldn't come too soon--and it didn't. It took its time--melting at its own pace, over running ice-blocked sewer drains, swelling the Humber River and the Don River stretching to the lake. The sound of the city was of trickling water.
As beautiful as her language is, the dialogue by and large was rather stilted, and there was a bit of a forced quality in the more explicit discussions of cultural politics (whether between characters or in their own introspections).
This novel is ultimately interesting for Asian American literary critics, though, because of its taking up of Vietnamese Canadian perspectives and stories. Brand's sympathetic portrayals (in the sense of the resistant Vietnamese subject rather than the assimilationist/complicit one) make the novel more amenable to Asian American literary studies though there is a quality of her references to Vietnamese culture and language (some Vietnamese words pepper the novel) that seems unsure of itself. I found her explorations of the complexity of Oku's feelings about his father's immigrant mentality and the politics of (black) race to be more compelling, too, than her sketching out of similar issues for Tuyen and her Vietnamese refugee family. I think Brand's choice to make Tuyen the most significant artist figure (Oku is an aspiring poet and has many moments in which he expounds of African diasporic music) is also her attempt to bring a depth of personality and motivations to Tuyen though whether or not she succeeds would still be a question for me.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}