Orality and the Body in the Poetry of Lillian Allen and Dionne Brand: Towards an Embodied Social Semiotics

Introduction Recently, while waiting for calaloo in the Caribbean take-out shop around the corner from our flat, I had a conversation with the dark-brown-skinned cook. Where did I live, he asked? Up near Ruskin Park, I said, wishing to share my pleasure in the park, and belatedly aware that I was also overtly indicating privilege. On the edges of Brixton as we are, one's choice of names is a statement of social allegiance. Did I like London? Yes; well, I liked Brixton (again, impulsively sharing my pleasure, but now aware of the signalling of allegiances). Where was I from? As always, a second of hyper-awareness, of computing contexts: if I had been speaking Spanish, I would say Cuba, though I was an immigrant to Anglo-Canada at age five; when I lived in bilingual Montreal I would say Ottawa, the bilingual border-city where I grew up; but here in London, I say Canada, letting the semiotics of dialect and skin colour convey erroneous signals. I am only English-Canadian in certain times and places. Was I here alone? No, with my partner, you might have seen him around, he's from Guatemala ... here I stopped, at a loss, since my partner has roughly the same migrant history as I. Why did I say he was from Guatemala, while I was Canadian? I tried to explain: You might have seen him pass by [...] He has hair, sort of dark, looks American. But the cook didn't know what Latin Americans are supposed to look like. Black? he asked. Dark white, I firmly replied, and found myself facing yet another of those moments of grinding gears, of referential vertigo. The first I ever had was when an American roommate in university asked me, So, how does it feel to be non-white? I'm not non-white, I protested immediately. But if I lived in the United States, as a Cuban immigrant I would be a minority (an alternative American term for non-white). My quick response revealed to me then the size of the investment I had in being on the right side of white. A few weeks later, I happened to be in the take-out shop with my partner and I introduced him to the cook. I asked, What would you call him? The cook formed his lips to say Bl-, and then asked him, What's your name, anyway?, and when informed, I'd call him Eduardo. Despite the cook's grace and my own hapless embroilment in race-ist categories, I realized that the cook subscribed to a larger British binary, that of white and White is us by whomever it is used; black is everybody else, or, as they say in America, non-white (non-us). Even for the cook, although black has strong inclusive connotations, it is an Other to a more powerful, and therefore exclusive us--white. This exchange reminded me of certain moments in the work of poets Lillian Allen and Dionne Brand. Like many postcolonial writers, they focus on the fluidity of identities as a gateway to alternative, more just, social relations. In their work this has often been put in the service of exploring what it means to be and black. By attending closely to the body caught in oppressive structures of meaning, they enter a site of contradictions in which the body is both social construct and body-as-self (Butler). This is the site at which they try to reconfigure the terms female and My argument is that Allen and Brand use orality to embody their poetry; and that this orality realizes languages or systems of meaning that are alternatives to sexist, racist discourse. Although both have worked at the boundaries between speech and print, performance and script, the trajectory of their technical development has been from opposite directions. Allen for a long time presented her poetry in performance, printing versions privately along the way; only her last two books of poetry have been widely distributed by independent publishers. Brand, on the other hand, began to publish early, in standard English, and only later wrote extended passages transcribed from Trinidad English Creole to bring a more defined orality to her work. …

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