The Blue Clerk: Ars Poetica in 59 Versos by Dionne Brand (review)

Dionne Brand’s The Blue Clerk is not only an epic ars poetica but also an ars archivi – an art of the archive that demonstrates the necessity of poetry for a critical archival practice. Brand has received multiple awards for her poetry, novels, and essays; was admitted to the Order of Canada in 2017; and is currently a professor in the School of English and Theatre Studies at the University of Guelph, Ontario. Her work influences prominent scholars and artists, including Saidiya Hartman, Christina Sharpe, and Torkwase Dyson, and The Blue Clerk marks an important contribution to conversations across disciplines including Black feminist, decolonial, and archival studies. The Blue Clerk is presented as a collection of 59 versos. A verso, or the “back of a leaf,” in publishing language, refers to the back side of the page in a bound book – the left-facing page when one is reading left to right (p. 4). For Brand, the versos represent everything that has not made it into print: “I have left this unsaid,” opens the first stipule (printed on the recto or right-facing page); “I have withheld more than I have written” (p. 3). In this publication, the versos are printed on both recto and verso pages, indicating that what has been previously left out or withheld has now been judged worthy of the archive. The archive Brand manifests continues the project of a “queer, unconventional, and imaginative archive of the black Atlantic.”¹ The Blue Clerk indicates that the entirety of Brand’s oeuvre is in conversation with this archival practice, which involves plumbing the depths of what is unsayable, unimaginable, and unwritten.

Turning the page, the reader begins “Verso 1,” emerging onto “a wharf somewhere; at a port, somewhere,” where the blue clerk restlessly labours (p. 4). The clerk and the author are two voices who negotiate throughout the book to determine what to offer the reader on the page and what secrets to keep protected in the stacks. The clerk is the archivist of all that is withheld. While the author chooses the “presentable things, the beautiful things” (p. 6), and records them on the right-hand page, the clerk presides over the erasures produced by the (public) archive of rectos – over the bales of documents, cities, blues, artists, thoughts, lemons, memories, lavenders, women, music, etc., etc. that make up the subaltern elements of the author’s existence. The wharf buckles under the weight of an incessant influx of immeasurable material; compared to the precious collection of signatures bound into the book held in the reader’s hand, it brings to mind historian Jennifer Morgan’s insight that “archival absences weigh us down.”² Morgan describes the relationship of the subaltern to the state archive as lying “outside of or marginal to the archival project of nation building.”³ When it comes to the state archive, archival evidence forms the foundational justification for exclusionary and racist violence. As Morgan writes, the archive is a fraught space for researchers, one that both produces silences and provides the possibility of producing counter-narratives. Interrogating the archive requires us to interrogate how we are products of the archive itself. In The Blue Clerk, Brand enacts a critical archival practice through an extended and multivalent dialogue between the clerk and the author – or the archivist and the scholar who engages the archive – risking the challenge of simultaneously interrogating both the archive and herself as its product.

“I am the clerk,” Brand writes, and “I am the author” (p. 6). An intimate dialogue between the clerk and the author forms the internal structure of the book, teasing out an inconclusive, combative, and loving elaboration on “the heterogeneous qualities of a life, or of life” in general, that challenges “both corporate and State” efforts to homogenize human life (p. 110). Poetry is the form that allows this heterogeneity to flourish. The human has become describable, argues the author, due to the vast availability of information...