In Another Place Not Here Read Online Free - johncopprectent
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If a favourite poet writes a novel, I'm probably going to read it, especially when the poet is Dionne Brand. I'm writing this review very soon after reading Brand's non-fiction book, "A M
"They thought that the time would come when they would live, they would get a chance to be what they saw, that was part of the hope that kept them. But ghostly, ghostly this hope, sucking their jaws into lemon seed, kiwi heart, skeletons of pawpaw, green banana stalk."- Dionne Brand, In Another Place, Not HereIf a favourite poet writes a novel, I'm probably going to read it, especially when the poet is Dionne Brand. I'm writing this review very soon after reading Brand's non-fiction book, "A Map to the Door of No Return", and I'm seeing her experiences and thoughts on immigration, identity, the diaspora, colonialism etc in that book, displayed in this book. Prior to this I'd only read a few volumes of her poems; in prose form, she is just remarkable and this is a beautiful, intricate book. It did take me a while to get used to the language but once I got into the flow of things it was wonderful.
This book is set in Ontario, Canada and an unnamed Caribbean island (possibly Grenada?). The main stories are those of Elizete and Verlia. Verlia immigrates to Canada as a teenager, becomes a member of the black power movement in 1970s Toronto, then goes back to her island to try to ignite a revolution there with the exploited sugarcane workers. She meets and becomes lovers with Elizete, who eventually moves to Canada herself. The women's lives as immigrants in Canada were very difficult and transformative. When Verlia moves to Sudbury, Ontario to live with her relatives, her observations of whiteness as a black immigrant to Canada were quite interesting. She witnesses and questions the assimilation approach of her aunt and uncle and how this is toxic and seems to result in their emotional death. As immigrants are we supposed to embrace whiteness? Verlia decided she didn't want to:
"They are imaginary. They have come as far north as they could imagine. And they have imagined themselves into the white town's imagining. They have come here to get away from Black people, to show white people that they are harmless, just like them. This lie will kill them. Swell her uncle's heart. Wrought the iron in Aunt Idrisse's voice."
This book made me think, and at times it touched on personal thoughts or the many stories I've heard about from fellow-immigrants: immigration isn't easy. The tough life of a single, black female immigrant in 1970s Canada must have been even tougher. Brand is honest with her portrayal of Canada, and how others often perceive it in a way that sugarcoats very real issues:
"Except that everyone is from someplace else but this city does not give them a chance to say this; it pushes their confusion underground, it wraps them in the same skin and slides them to the side like so much meat wrapped in brown paper."
In this Brexit era when so many immigrants hear the phrase, "Go back home", it's a good time to understand why certain immigration patterns even happened. Often people rarely take into account history and how damaging and pervasive the ills of the Empire have been. There's a realization by so many of us that there is no place where we can be truly free because of history and neocolonialism.
I appreciated this book for highlighting the traumatic experiences of immigration. There were several passages that were heartbreaking because they spoke to loneliness, depression, confusion, waiting...:
"She was working edges. If she could straighten out the seam she'd curled herself into, iron it out like a wrinkle, sprinkle some water on it and then iron it out, careful, careful not to burn..."
"She has too much to tell. That's the answer, too much she holds and no place to put it down that would be safe."
"She was trying to collect herself again, bring her mind back from wherever the pieces had gone skittering. She had deserted herself she knew, given up a continent of voices she knew then for fragmented ones."
This is definitely a book I think will appeal to many. It's beautifully-written, very thoughtful, and gives a voice to Caribbean immigrant women in the big city in Canada.
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still, it's the caribbean and life is hell and two women love each other but life is hell and something happens to one of them and the ot
the first half of this book is prose poetry written in what i can best describe as trinidadian english, because that is the island-english i've heard that most closely approximates the language of this book. maybe it's another island. certainly it's another island. many of the localities have french names. i don't think localities in trinidad have french names.still, it's the caribbean and life is hell and two women love each other but life is hell and something happens to one of them and the other goes to canada to look for her.
life is hell because it's brutalized by 500 years of slavery and 500 years of exploitation and the island is a prison but also home and life is lived in the dark shadow of trauma.
brand's description of elizete's life in canada is amazing and if you have left your land (any land at all) to move to a north american city you will know exactly what she is talking about. (this is true even if you are coming from another "first world" country, though your life will probably have been infinitely better as far as material conditions are concerned).
the second part is also prose poetry but it's in standard canadian english and the poetry is less surrealistic. this part belongs to elizete's lover, and it too describes hell and Verlia's efforts at making it better by joining a black power movement and trying to organize black people in canada and the caribbean, only to be quashed mercilessly by the US-propped local dictatorships.
you can read this book for the story and you'll be happy you did.
you can read this book for the language and you'll be happy you did.
you can read this book for the hell and you'll be happy you did.
but you have to be into all three. if you are not, this book will be hard. i found it amazing and now i want to read everything this woman has written.
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But I found the second part of the novel, when the focus shifts from one character to another, not nearly as good. The second character is not as interesting but, more important, Brand changes the style of the prose with the change of character, a decision I would ordinarily welcome, but it felt like falling down a hillside to me. The writing is still excellent, but I frankly wish the novel would have ended, that the two parts would have been published separately as novellas even though they relate to one another.
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see the rest of my review at http://caseythecanadianlesbrarian.wor... ...more
I like her style. Brand concocts the Caribbean in rich images. You attempt to follow the word's choreography as they dance away from you, unsure how you ended up on the dance floor in the first place. She drops you in the midst. The story slips by and I tried to regain my bearings.
But she is telling our stories mostly heard, seldom written. How grandmas smell blood for legitimacy, how elders watch your face and know who and who is family. Entwined with the stories of these two
Where do we begin?I like her style. Brand concocts the Caribbean in rich images. You attempt to follow the word's choreography as they dance away from you, unsure how you ended up on the dance floor in the first place. She drops you in the midst. The story slips by and I tried to regain my bearings.
But she is telling our stories mostly heard, seldom written. How grandmas smell blood for legitimacy, how elders watch your face and know who and who is family. Entwined with the stories of these two Caribbean women lovers who are found and lost to one another, to themselves and to the land on which they stand.
I was t/here with the characters in the place between the covers.
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I tried again and again and actually read this five maybe even six times in order to find ways to relate to this ve
To be honest I felt like an envious outsider/tourist almost voyeuristically looking in a 'locals' window for the real/authentic experience I was always hoping to discover. It was akin to walking over to the pavilion for the nightly, completely-choreographed-for-plain-vanilla-tastes, Caribbean dance show and stopping shocked by a raw and unscripted genuine story unfolding before me.I tried again and again and actually read this five maybe even six times in order to find ways to relate to this very sensuous account. To this day, I still feel like a lurker when I remember how this made me feel. But it did gift me with the inkling of a perception that I have now that other people's lives are much more sensuous. This awareness was paid for by my sense of intrusion as someone else's place, "In Another Place, Not Here," was not my place to find my sense of home.
It was like visiting a tourist location where I am in the minority and I do not hear my tongue spoken, yet I am given a chair to sit on to watch a peep show. And I finally interpret what the locals are saying to me, "See this? This is something you can never have. But now that you have seen it, you will always want it."
The tourist never gets the real thing. - lol - and maybe that's the point?
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The callbacks and jumping back and forwards in time made more sense as the book progressed, but it was an uphill battle at the beginning. I think maybe this is one of those books you have to read twice. The prose is lyrical and forced me to slow down—I'm a skimmer, unfortunately—and for that I liked it. The three women the book centres around are so rich and have so much depth that it makes me want to chew on them for ever. Overall, a good time, but
Definitely was not smart enough for this book.The callbacks and jumping back and forwards in time made more sense as the book progressed, but it was an uphill battle at the beginning. I think maybe this is one of those books you have to read twice. The prose is lyrical and forced me to slow down—I'm a skimmer, unfortunately—and for that I liked it. The three women the book centres around are so rich and have so much depth that it makes me want to chew on them for ever. Overall, a good time, but only if you have time to think about it for a while.
3 endings that kind of make sense out of 5
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The setting in the Caribbean was never properly defined. Because I know the history, I know it ends in Grenada at the time of the 1983 US invasion. Those events are alluded to. But I am sure many would not know this without more information being provided. Elizete's patois sound distinctly Trinidadian and not Grenadian, and Trinidadian and Grenadian place names are jammed together. If she is trying to create a mythical, universal island, it doesn't work for me. Neil Bissoondath's creation of Casaquemada in "A Casual Brutality" was far more effective.
The Grenadian Revolution, or "revo," is a fantastic topic for a novel. I'm writing a novel about it and that's why I read this one. But although the revo plays a key role in the story, it is treated almost as an afterthought, vague where it should be specific. We don't know why Verlia is there or what her connection is to the revo, and inexplicably at this point the novel shifts to journal entries by Verlia. So many opportunities are missed to tell this important story.
While the bare bones of the plot are intriguing - a lesbian relationship in the rural Caribbean in past times, which would have been severely frowned upon - they are never fleshed out or connected together, with the result that despite its gorgeous prose, the book was so boring it was a real struggle to even finish it, and I did not care at all about the characters or what happened to them.
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There are two worlds here in this city where she arrives years earlier with a shoe box of clippings. One so opaque that she ignores it as much as she can - this one is white and runs things; it is as glassy as its downtown buildings and as secretive; its conversations are not understandable, its motions something to keep an eye on, something to look for threat in. The other world growing steadily at its borders is the one she knows and lives in. If you live here you can never say that you know t
There are two worlds here in this city where she arrives years earlier with a shoe box of clippings. One so opaque that she ignores it as much as she can - this one is white and runs things; it is as glassy as its downtown buildings and as secretive; its conversations are not understandable, its motions something to keep an eye on, something to look for threat in. The other world growing steadily at its borders is the one she knows and lives in. If you live here you can never say that you know the other world, the white world, with certainty. It is always changing on you though it stays the same, immovable, so when she helps children to read without an accent she teaches them by reading pamphlets on what to do when arrested. This warp is what the new world grow on.
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The first chapter of In Another Place, Not Here really blew me away, and so I put it down to savor that experience. But I think that putting the book down was a mistake - I don't think it's the kind of book that benefits from putting time away to consider things. And when I say so, I don't mean that it's better if you don't think about the book and what it's doing, or anything like that. I don't mean it's secretly a dumb book, or something! I mean, rather, that because of the (traditional? standard?) postmodernist techniques that Brand uses, and because, too, of the novel's poetic origins (you can really tell that Brand is a poet) it is probably the kind of book that works best if you let it sweep you away. But I read it over . . . three weeks? And it's just disjointed enough for that approach to harm it, to make you lose the rhythms of the novel. Or, anyway, to make me lose them - you are probably much smarter and cannier than I am, and won't make the same mistake.
I'll have to reread this book in the near future. I think I will better appreciate it then. And I think it is the kind of book that ought to be reread, anyway. There is enough richness in it, in the language, that really wallowing in that aspect would be great.
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Some parts of this are, by 2015, kind of predictable. Most of Elizete's time in Toronto is . . . familiar, shall we say, from other novels. Enough to be a let-down after the "oh my god" opening chapter. Verlia's time in the Movement gets at some really interesting stuff, but Brand has a really unflattering look at the Movement, and Verlia isn't quite well-drawn enough for her emotional lacunae to make sense.
I like the contrast between the spareness of the book's structure and plot, and the lushness of the words a great deal. I wish the characters had felt more like people and less like symbols, but I may reconsider that position when I come back to the novel. I should say that everyone gets at least flashes of really striking, really powerful emotional depth and insight and so it's probably worth it even just for those.
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This is a love story for sure. Verlia and Elizete are lovers but Elizete "never wanted nothing big from the world" and Verlia has never been able to accept the world as it is. They are both Caribbean women. Elizete, abandoned as a child, ends up working in the cane fields;
"In the middle of everything Elizete asks me why I'm with her. Why I'm with her! This is too much now. I don't want to be responsible like that for anyone. I can't stand the feeling of being attached. I'm trying to finish CLR."This is a love story for sure. Verlia and Elizete are lovers but Elizete "never wanted nothing big from the world" and Verlia has never been able to accept the world as it is. They are both Caribbean women. Elizete, abandoned as a child, ends up working in the cane fields; Verlia, forever restless, leaves her family at seventeen in search of The Movement. Under the guise of pursuing an education to better herself, she goes to Canada and becomes involved in various African liberation movements of the 70s. Dionne Brand makes this as real as possible for the reader, taking lines directly from the work of Nikki Giovanni, Frantz Fanon, The Last Poets. When Verlia is arrested and detained for her work, she uses Che Guevara as a mantra "At the risk of seeming ridiculous, let me say that the true revolutionary is guided by great feelings of love." It's a line Verlia says she wants to live in. The revolution is the thing keeping her alive and once she and Elizete meet, she is thing that breathes a new energy into Elizete.
The novel covers so many ideas: immigration, colonialism, imperialism,... all from the perspectives of two black women who love each other. There are so many ways to approach this book for these ideas, for its history, for its poetry.
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There were parts of the book that were hard to read because of the author's writing style (ie: prose; streams of conciseness in creole; jarring change of setting/tense... etc.). The second half was much easier to navigate than the first and it clarified a lot of the confusion we see in the first half of the novel.
I like the subject matter (immigration, blackness, organizing a social movement, love, queer identities, abuse, relationships), but the writer's style was a
There were parts of the book that were hard to read because of the author's writing style (ie: prose; streams of conciseness in creole; jarring change of setting/tense... etc.). The second half was much easier to navigate than the first and it clarified a lot of the confusion we see in the first half of the novel.
I like the subject matter (immigration, blackness, organizing a social movement, love, queer identities, abuse, relationships), but the writer's style was a major draw back for the novel.
I give this book two starts because it was just OK. Not my favorite read despite my interest in what Brand had to say.
Dionne Brand first came to prominence in Canada as a poet. Her books of poetry include No Language Is Neutral, a finalist for the Governor General's Award, and Land to Light On, winner of the Governor General's Award and the Trillium Award and thirsty, finalist for the Griffin Prize and winner of the Pat Lowther Award for poetry. Brand is also the author of the acclaimed novels In Another Place, Not Here, which was shortlisted for the Chapters/Books in Canada First Novel Award and the Trillium Award, and At the Full and Change of the Moon. Her works of non-fiction include Bread Out of Stone and A Map to the Door of No Return.
What We All Long For was published to great critical acclaim in 2005. While writing the novel, Brand would find herself gazing out the window of a restaurant in the very Toronto neighbourhood occupied by her characters. "I'd be looking through the window and I'd think this is like the frame of the book, the frame of reality: 'There they are: a young Asian woman passing by with a young black woman passing by, with a young Italian man passing by," she says in an interview with The Toronto Star. A recent Vanity Fair article quotes her as saying "I've 'read' New York and London and Paris. And I thought this city needs to be written like that, too."
In addition to her literary accomplishments, Brand is Professor of English in the School of English and Theatre Studies at the University of Guelph.
For more information, please see http://www.answers.com/topic/dionne-b...
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In Another Place Not Here Read Online Free
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