Crosstalk: Canadian and Global Imaginaries in Dialogue

10. Unsettling Voices: Dionne Brand’s Cosmopolitan Cities

169 I. Cosmopolitan Cities Nothing in a city is discrete. The city is all interpolation. – Dionne Brand, Thirsty The contemporary, metropolitan city as a cosmopolitan space in which people meet and also clash has figured as an important reference in several of Dionne Brand’s works, notably in her publications since Thirsty. In this book of narrative poems, published in 2002, the city appears as a space of intense interpolation, a place of multiple “thresholds,” “doorways,” “corners” (1), which mingles with the human element to compose a site full of “untrue recollections,” “untranslatable mouths” (1–2), “ambitious immigrants” (11) that eventually become “impossible citizens” and irreconcilable “repositories of the city’s panic” (40). The description of the city invokes a place “of vanishings” (16) or, as the poetic voice puts it more bleakly: “All the hope gone hard. That is a city…. that is a city, the feral amnesia of us all” (24). In this nameless, anonymous, sterile city, people “crave of course being human” (22) as if the interpolation with the devastating and anonymous city has caused them to become dehumanized. This desolate description of a city in which characters “crave of course being human” and are “thirsty” (22) for something they cannot get that appears in Thirsty resonates in her other 10 Unsettling Voices: Dionne Brand’s Cosmopolitan Cities Sandra Regina Goulart Almeida 170 DIALOGISM, POLYPHONY, VOICE works as well, and eventually becomes the central focus in What We All Long For, the novel published in 2005, while also figuring in her long poem Inventory the following year and again in Ossuaries (2010), also a long narrative poem.1 In Inventory, the “earth is corroding already with cities” (40), and the poetic voice tastes “all the materials the city stuffs in its belly” (45). The city here is described as an entity with life, a massive body that shares its sameness with many other global metropolises: “the same in London, Chicago, Tours, Barcelona / some rain in St. Elizabeth, Port-au-Prince deluge / floods in Matanzas, regular day in Melbourne, São Paulo” (46). The poetic voice hears on the radio the weather forecast for several analogous global cities around the world, but seems dismayed to notice that, contrary to her expectation , this “physical world is not interested in us” (46). The personified city interferes with people’s lives, and instead of bringing comfort in anonymity or acceptance in the multitude, it causes pain and anguish: “the big raw cities flailing us / we returned home dead on our feet / and melancholy” (4). The possibility of the “human species spreading out across the cosmos” is met with an appalled response from the poetic voice: “no, God forbid, stop them, and forgive her this one imprecation to a deity” (48). The poetic voice seems to suggest that the effort to inhabit a cosmopolitan city has already done humankind harm enough.2 Likewise, in Ossuaries, which tells the story of Yasmine, a runaway woman and refugee who is in a perpetual movement of dislocation, cities all become similar places of passages, mirror images of borders that are constantly being traversed without offering her the shelter and hospitality she longs for: “no city here could offer / anything but brutal solitudes, ashen mirrors” (Brand, Ossuaries 91). Moving from city to city, Yasmine cannot tell the difference between them for they all bear the unmistaken stamp of anonymity and the negation of belonging: “where was she, that again, which city now, / which city’s electric grids of currents, / which city’s calculus of right and left angles / which city’s tendons of streets, identical” (55). “From the cities” everything she notices is “the electric rains” that “pierced us” (12) and the appalling appearance of a place of openness and generosity: “official cities now for appearances after all this, / all these appearances, generous , for certain / scraggly, wan, and robust appearances” (20). In Thirsty, Inventory, and Ossuaries, Dionne Brand provides a theorization on the contemporary cosmopolitan city as a space of cultural interaction that revise traditional notions of the cosmopolis as an idealized space of Unsettling Voices SANDRA REGINA GOULART ALMEIDA 171 productive social and cultural contact. This questioning is further inscribed and addressed in several instances in What We all Long For. As Dobson, Johansen , Smyth and McKibbin have discussed previously, the global city figures as a prominent spatial configuration in Brand’s novel representing what Dobson describes as a “generational shift in the...