Textual Practice 25(4), 2011, 757 777

Johanna X. K. Garvey Spaces of violence, desire, and queer (un)belonging: Dionne Brands urban diasporas

An immigrant from Trinidad to Canada, Dionne Brand has explored gender, sexuality, and migration from myriad perspectives, in lm, essays, poetry, and ction. This essay focuses on two recent texts by Brand, the book-length poem thirsty (2002) and her third novel, What We All Long For (2005), both set in Toronto. Desire, loss, and longing rooted in migration and its concomitant traumas structure the narratives; each text also offers a meditation on the role of aesthetics in addressing contemporary urban experience. Brands work asserts the positive potential of spaces of queer (un)belonging, spaces the undo belonging while not leading to the destructive erasure of not-belonging. Queer diaspora might seem an impossibility, given that there is no queer homeland, no single site from which queerness has been dispersed. Yet, queer (un)belonging as analysed here in Brands writing seeks to revision the world, using Toronto as the specic location of remaking. Queer (un)belonging can accommodate multiple identities and respond to normative attitudes that rely on racism and other forms of violent categorisation. The poem thirsty creates tension between different meanings ascribed to rootedness and belonging, arriving at an ideal of unrooted relation similar to douard Glissants poetics. In this text, Brand extends the possibilities E for both queer diasporas and a queering of diaspora via I, a persona that interacts directly with the city and offers a vision of community. The essay explores masculinity for diasporic subjects and the kinds of not belonging experienced by men of colour in the two texts, in contrast to the ways lesbian artist Tuyen creates a potential space of homoeroticism, relationality, and queer (un)belonging. Keywords Diaspora; queer; urban; relation; belonging and (un)belonging; community
Textual Practice ISSN 0950-236X print/ISSN 1470-1308 online # 2011 Taylor & Francis http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals DOI: 10.1080/0950236X.2011.586779

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A city is not a place of origins. It is a place of transmigrations and transmogrications.1 Diaspora accentuates becoming rather than being and identity conceived diasporically, along these lines, resists reication.2 [Canada is] the most queer of diaspora places.3 The violence at the heart of the Americas haunts Dionne Brands writing from her poetry about the US invasion of Grenada, to her rst two novels centred in the Caribbean and tracing the forced migrations from Africa and India through the West Indies to North America and Europe, to what I term her auto-bio-cartography, A Map to the Door of No Return, which explores the African Diaspora. Herself an immigrant from Trinidad to Canada, Brand has explored gender and migration from a myriad perspectives, in lm, essays, poetry, and ction. This essay focuses on two recent texts by Brand, the book-length poem thirsty (2002) and her third novel, What We All Long For (2005), both set in Toronto. As the titles of both books indicate, desire, loss, and longing rooted in migration and its concomitant traumas structure the narratives. Each text also offers a meditation on the role of aesthetics both the written word and the plastic arts in addressing contemporary urban experience inected by gender, race, class, sexuality, and migration. Brands work asserts the positive potential of spaces of queer (un)belonging, that is, spaces that undo belonging while not leading to the destructive erasure of not-belonging. Dionne Brands vision of diaspora and community has evolved over the course of several decades, from a focus on those from the Caribbean with roots in Africa who migrated to North America (In Another Place, Not Here), to a continued focus on the African Diaspora extended globally, more hybrid and syncretic (At the Full and Change of the Moon), to what I am terming queer (un)belonging in her more recent texts. Theories of diaspora frequently address issues of belonging and identity, of homeland and ethnicity, some arguing for specicity of place of origin and/or ethnicity, even as others encourage approaches that do not assert boundaries, but instead allow for more uidity and creolisation. These two positions often seem to present an either-or situation, while Brand offers a new conceptualisation, particularly in her latest novel. Kim Butlers suggestion can apply here: [. . .] rather than being viewed as an ethnicity, diaspora may be alternatively considered as a framework for the study of a specic process of community formation.4 Queer diaspora might seem an impossibility as there is no queer homeland, no single site from which queerness has been dispersed, forced to migrate, or otherwise scattered into two or more locations. Yet, queer (un)belonging as I analyse it in Brands writing seeks to revision the world, using Toronto as the specic location of

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remaking.5 These texts illustrate Rinaldo Walcotts claims that [. . .] the diaspora by its very nature, its circumstance, is queer. [. . .] the territories and perambulations of diaspora circuits, identications, and desires are queer in their making and their expressions.6 The narrative I in Thirsty and that in What We all Long For, as well as each narrative itself, perform a queering of diaspora and concomitantly seek a new kind of community that might undo belonging. As Rogers Brubaker argues, [. . .] rather than speak of a diaspora or the diaspora as an entity, a bounded group, an ethnographic or ethnocultural fact, it may be more fruitful, and certainly more precise, to speak of diasporic stances, projects, claims, idioms, practices [. . .].7 Queer (un)belonging functions along these lines, such that it can accommodate multiple identities and respond to normative attitudes that rely on racism and other forms of violent categorisation.8 Such attitudes erupt in violence against lesbian immigrant bodies rape, assault, racism in Brands rst novel, In Another Place, Not Here. In this text, each of the two protagonists travels from the Caribbean to Canada, Verlia eeing an island home for the connections and activism possible in North America, Elizete following traces of Verlia to Toronto after the latters death in the US invasion of Grenada in 1983. For each woman, the relation is broken, missing, fragmented, such that we do not yet see a queer diaspora or queer (un)belonging. Elizetes experiences in Toronto are particularly harrowing: A man bends you against a wall, a wall in a room, your room. He says this is the procedure, he says you have no rights here, he says I can make it easier for you if I want, you could get sent back. His dick searches your womb. [. . .] Elizete, at against the immense white wall, the continent. She is drawn just so, to navigate, to scarecrow such a surface, immense, at like the world not drawn just so [. . .] spread-eagled against the immense white wall, the continent.9 Raped by the husband in the house where she is hired as a servant, she ees into the city, unmoored, not belonging in a chain of not-belonging women who have come to Canada seeking work. These women, our mothers, a whole generation of them, left us. They went to England or America or Canada or some big city as fast as their wit could get them there because they were women and all they had to live on was wit since nobody considered them whole people (p. 230). This repeating pattern resembles what Miles Ogburn terms the trace as a geographical epistemology for the Atlantic world: traces emphasize moments of movement and negotiation, and their residual effects.10 Following in the paths traced by foremothers as well as her female lover Verlia, Elizete thus endures a familiar violence: In the Atlantic worlds circulations, therefore, wherever there is the sense of something new, there is also the uncanny sense that this is foreshadowed and shaped by those

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who have passed that way before.11 In Toronto, Verlia, and Elizete keep missing each other: Missing is unravelling though (p. 197). Relocation primarily means dislocation, displacement, and the home becomes not here and no where, gured in Verlias nal leap into the air and sea from Grenadas rocky cliffs, as well as the missing Africa and Door of No Return. This chain of not-belonging and the violence that engenders and perpetuates it proves thick, intractable, and difcult to break. Nevertheless, through Elizetes lover Verlia, who arrived earlier in Toronto and gradually made space for herself there, Brands vision does move towards a queering of diaspora, which might undo belonging and shape a different relation to time and place. There are two worlds here in this city [. . .]. One so opaque that she ignores it as much as she can this one is white and runs things [. . .]. The other world growing steadily at its borders is the one she knows and lives in (p. 180). Verlia learns to negotiate the borders and begins to claim space and with it, presence. She is too busy learning other languages. She can live in this city and make it seem as if shes never left home. Except that everyone is from someplace else and the cadences are not the same, new rhythms have to be made and her mouth is like soft wire around these new sounds (p. 181). Is diaspora too nostalgic? Too rigid? Too categorical? She hates nostalgia, she hates this humid lifeless light that falls on the past, its too close for her no matter how many years she spends away. [. . .] She smells their seduction, its the kind of seduction that soothes the body going home on the train, insulates it from the place of now and what to do about (p. 182). She resists the seductive pull of home, a place where as a lesbian she was not at home, and instead starts to plant herself, to take up space. All this thinking of another place. Well she was there and doesnt want to go back. Give her the day-to-day hardness, real and here. She didnt want to be anywhere but now, nowhere but the what to do about (p. 183). This rejection of diasporic nostalgia and the embrace of the reality of life in Toronto shapes a new kind of belonging, one that does not demand conformity to prescribed identities and dreams of an elsewhere to replace the pain of here and now. In this rst novel, Brands vision (embodied in Verlia) begins to undo belonging and to seek new denitions of the disaporic self. We do not see diaspora community except perhaps in activism and political engagement the Movement. Yet, the appeal of Toronto permeates Verlias perspective on the urban environment and she experiences a paradoxical safety: This is the city where she will be (p. 154). Such an attitude provides a foundation for the queer (un)belonging that emerges more fully in Brands later works.12 Iris Marion Young posits a vision of the metropolis as a shared site of difference, a communal space, where multiple voices and identities mingle while maintaining their boundaries or borders.13 In Brands extended

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poem on the police-shooting of a Black man who utters the word thirsty as he falls dead in his doorway, and in her narrative collage of four secondgeneration immigrants from Asia and the Caribbean, such a vision of mutual longing is belied by the violence rooted in colonialism and enslavement. Doreen Massey, arguing that space is relational, raises a key question: There is a reciprocity of multiplicity between the identity of place and the identities of multiply placed people. But it is also more than this. It becomes necessary to ask, when speaking of global cities: whose city is at issue here?14 In a global city, she continues, that placement involves unequal interdependence, mutual constitution, as well as coeval existence, and the possibility of thinking of placed identity not as a claim to a place but as the acknowledgment of the responsibilities that inhere in being placed.15 What are the prospects for community if the city is a feral amnesia of us all?16 And how might we begin to redene community? Brands thirsty narrates and aestheticises the violence of migration in what I am terming spaces of queer (un)belonging. While the characters in thirsty do not manage to construct such spaces but rather are destroyed by the violence directed at them most specically at the Black male immigrant body the I who frames the narrative performs a communal grieving that underscores the social vulnerability and interdependence Judith Butler presents as inherent to human connection.17 Voicing the desire to transgress borders both physical and emotional, to create new visions of relationality, the poetic persona (I) rescripts the urban milieu in which a Jamaican immigrant longs to plant himself and in which his wife seeks heteronormative assimilation. Thirsty is a narrative of multiple migrations, not only to the metropolitan centre but also within it and between its inhabitants, whom we see poised on thresholds or at crossroads, both in motion and forever stuck, falling and frozen, in both death and melancholia. Based on an event from 1979, when police shot and killed a Black man, Albert Johnson, at the door to his apartment,18 the poem traces a nonlinear path through both time and space, drifting through the moments and years both before and after the fall of Alan, whose last word thirsty echoes throughout the text. As much as it serves as an indictment of racism and the power that it cements in place, the narrative also explores the role of the writer and of aesthetic creation in the context of the contemporary global or world city and the diasporic subjects who inhabit it. In an interview, Brand offers the following comment: [. . .] art is politically charged, because it is, because we are living in a politically charged moment, thats suffused in race and racism, and the ideas of land and border and belonging.19 While embracing the borders and expanding as borderlands, Brand also them into spaces that resemble Anzaldu

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illustrates the potentially lethal ramications of a longing to belong. As she writes in Map, Belonging does not interest me. Once I thought that it did. Until I examined the underpinnings (p. 85). Those underpinnings or requirements of belonging are exposed and rejected in both thirsty and What We All Long For. Thus, queer (un)belonging may offer the most auspicious and constructive alternative to forced assimilation and policing of identities. I am not using queer exclusively as an equation for GLBT or same-sex-loving identities (though I do include them here), but rather as what Omiseeke Natasha Tinsley terms a praxis of resistance or disruption to the violence of normative order, and also to heteronormativity.20 The control of sexuality and of migration are closely linked. As Eithne id states, [n]ational heteronormativity is thus a regime of power Luibhe that all migrants must negotiate, making them differentially vulnerable to exclusion at the border or deportation after entry while also racialising, (re)gendering, (de)nationalising, and unequally positioning them within the symbolic economy, the public sphere, and the labour market.21 Brands thirsty operates on multiple levels, such that the narrative of a mans death underscores the violence of exclusion perpetrated on immigrants, while the poets voice suggests ways to disrupt heteronormativity and perform radical moves into queer (un)belonging. The poem ends where it begins, the inspiration for this extended meditation on urban lives inected by globalisation and migration: In a siren, the individual muscles of a life collapsing,/as waves, stuttering on some harm,/your ngers may utter in the viscera of an utter stranger/I wake up to it, open as doorways,/breathless as a coming hour, and undone. (p. 63, my emphasis) Woken by the screaming siren, signal of the larger emergency Brand is addressing, in the quiet where you can hear someones life falling apart (p. 63), the individual poet becomes the writing hand that spills the guts of victims, spreading blood and horror on the page, and illustrating what psychologist Teresa Brennan terms the transmission of affect. Rather than a generational line of inheritance (the vertical line of history), the transmission of affect, conceptually, presupposes a horizontal line of transmission: the line of the heart. The affects are not inherited, or not only inherited. They also ow from this one to that one, here and now [. . .].22 With the narrative I, we enter doorways into not only Alans dreams of planting a garden, but also his wife Julias longing for domestic stability and bourgeois respectability, and his mother Chloes belief in a son invincible and good. The I engages in a queer romance with the city, saying at the beginning, I am held, and held/the touch of everything blushes me (p. 1). From its opening lines, the poem stresses the relational

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aspects of the city and of the narrators engagement with its spaces and its citizens, as well as the transgressive quality of this interaction. [. . .] no books this time, no/dictionaries to hang on to, just me and the city/ thats never happened before, and happened/though not ever like this (p. 11). In the process, Brand envisions relation in terms of space, bodies, and emotions, similar to what geographers Joyce Davidson and Christine Mulligan call an emotio-spatial hermeneutic: [. . .] emotions are understandable sensible only in the context of particular places. Likewise, place must be felt to make sense. [. . .] Perhaps through an exploration of diverse senses of space, we could become better placed to appreciate the emotionally dynamic spatiality of contemporary social life.23 Brands queer hermeneutics make meaning from the reverberations of a mans bloodied body falling and his expiring, echoing thirsty . . ..24 The text creates tension between different meanings ascribed to rootedness and belonging, arriving at an ideal of unrooted relation, similar to Glissants Poetics of Relation, in which each and every identity is extended through a relationship with the Other, [a] poetics that is latent, open, multilingual in intention, directly in contact with everything possible.25 In thirsty, the narrators voice claims relational spaces, such as the intersection of Yonge and Bloor: At this crossroad, the air is elegiac with it/whiffs and cirri of all emotion, need and vanity,/desire, brazen as a killing (p. 42). She continues, If you look into any face here you might fall/ into its particular need. And a woman Ive seen her/Julia perhaps walks here I cant quite make her out/She is a mixture of twigs and ink shes like paper (p. 42). The poetic persona reminds us that she is embarked on an aesthetic project as well as an ethico-political one. This voice addresses the reader in an active and open engagement with the urban setting and city denizens, an aesthetics of desire and a queering of belonging.26 Brands I is drawn to the border zones and there nds the greatest opportunity for undoing normative belonging, even though such spaces are also fraught with the violence directed at diasporic bodies.27 Such a border zone and site of emotio-spatial relation also exists on the landing and stairway where Alan was killed in May 1980, 18 years to the day before the present moment of the narrative, May 1998. Trying to prevent his wife from leaving laden with suitcases of her belongings, betrayed by the young daughter told to call the cops and 911, Alan emerges from the apartment carrying what he assumes the police are after: items he has borrowed from neighbours in order to do his gardening, rakes, saws, gloves, shovels, owers, weeds without asking/one tulip, three peonies, seven irises (p. 9). In his desire to assimilate, to plant himself and his small family, to take root in the inhospitable soil of Toronto, he has stolen the accoutrements of belonging even as he will remain an outsider and target of suspicion. He only wanted a calming

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loving spot,/we all want that but the world doesnt love you (p. 14), particularly if the world acts according to an already scripted identity for the Black male immigrant: No one prepares for how he died,/no one had a diagnosis before hand/unless you count the mere presence of him,/his likeness, unless you count that/as a symptom of what he could die of,/ unless you count a moment on a staircase/when guesses searing as letters/turned his face into a nightmare. (p. 54) Queer (un)belonging might negate or erase such rote, immediate, and xed methods of reading and identifying people. Instead, it would offer what Rinaldo Walcott calls an ethics of hospitality, such that the landing outside the apartment would be a site of meeting and invitation space as loving relation in/as difference.28 Signicantly, Alan has taken from his neighbours the implements to make his own garden and to plant roots even as he recognised that he could not ower passion/just as he knew he could not spring wild mimosa in Toronto (p. 13). In a sense, his stealing from neighbours mirrors Julias misguided attempts to fashion a home-space of assimilation and the later dreams she shares with her mother-in-law Chloe, to see the daughter fastened into a heteronormative life of seeming safety: They will dream for her all the things people dream for people they love they will dream her rst kiss, they will dream her graduation from college, they will dream her wedding, they will dream her children, if only (p. 30) As Alan is frozen in his fall, nothing of him but his parched bodys declension/a curved caesura, mangled clippers (p. 4), so are Julia and Chloe immobilised as the life around them pearls/against their grain (p. 32).29 The unnamed daughter, who would now (1998) be in her 20s, vanishes into the city on a bicycle, perhaps to metamorphose into Carla, a bike messenger and central character in the novel What We All Long For. Belonging escapes Alan, trapped on the threshold of his fall, as it also eludes Julia and Chloe, cocooned in melancholia. Neither do they achieve queer (un)belonging, a state embodied by the narrative I of the poem.

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Inventing a childhood and adolescence for Alan, the narrator says that when he was sixteen, the astonished foreman sucked his teeth/forgave the boy putting too much water in the concrete/and writing his name over and over again in the drying/pavement (p. 13). Anticipating Alans desire to plant himself in Toronto, this imagined scene of self-scripture illustrates his longing, his thirst, to engrave himself into the spaces he occupies.30 Practicing an affective citizenship, the poems I performs belonging for the citys inhabitants, particularly those victim to its violence: It isnt, it really isnt the city, brief as history, but my life in it passing sooner than this thirst is nished, I can offer nothing except a few glances an uneasy sleep, a wild keening, it would appear nothing said matters, nothing lived, but, this is my occupation. (p. 28) If a city is what the narrator calls the feral amnesia of us all (p. 24), in thirsting for emotiospatial connection and community, the I of Brands poem shapes relation in terms of a queer (un)belonging that counters forgetting with a narrative of violence and loss, but also a vision of the city as space of welcome where a siren in the night can open doorways and usher others in with hospitality. In thirsty, Brand thus extends the possibilities for both queer diasporas and a queering of diaspora via I, a persona that builds upon the perspective offered by Verlia in the earlier text. The vision of community resembles E. Patrick Johnsons description of quare, which both intersects with queer and also maintains a focus on embodied and communal experiences that is not always incorporated into queer theories. Johnson states that as [. . .] a theory in the esh, quare necessarily engenders a kind of identity politics, one that acknowledges difference within and between particular groups. Thus, identity politics does not necessarily mean the reduction of multiple identities into a monolithic identity or narrow cultural nationalism.31 As Johnson explains, he draws on the vernacular roots implicit in [his] grandmothers use of the word to devise a strategy for theorizing racialised sexuality.32 Articulating identities in such a way, Brands narrative voice interacts directly, viscerally, with Toronto in a queering of diaspora, along the lines of what Rinaldo

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Walcott envisions as a rethinking of community.33 The poem does not offer a utopian elsewhere, grounded as it is in the racist murder of Alan and the melancholia that grips his female survivors. Nevertheless, in the embrace of the emergencies signalled by night sirens, I underscores the potential for openness and becoming.34 Relationship based on origins, genealogies, hierarchies of power, and xed identities, shifts here to that formed in relation, shared space, and overlapping paths not yet mapped what Glissant terms errantry.35 In Brands recent novel What We All Long For, we participate in such errantry as a rst-person narrator observes the movements of four young Torontonians who reject or resist their immigrant parents longings and whose own conicting desires belie the idea of a singular we or all acting as a unied citizenry. Similar to the I of thirsty, the primary narrator of the novel engages in dialogue with the reader from the opening pages, reminiscent of the persona of Toni Morrisons Jazz, the city serving as inspiration and also protagonist:36 But at any crossroad there are permutations of existence. People turn into other people imperceptibly, unconsciously, right here in the grumbling train. And on the sidewalks [. . .] the whole heterogeneous baggage falls out with each step on the pavement. Theres so much spillage. [. . .] Lives in the city are doubled, tripled, conjugated women and men all trying to handle their own chain of events, trying to keep the story straight in their own heads. At times they catch themselves in sensational lies, embellishing or avoiding a nasty secret here and there, juggling the lines of causality, and before you know it, its impossible to tell one thread from another.37 The rst-person narrator embraces this promiscuity, lives collected together without order, confusedly mixed, and then untangles the threads, sorting out the stories of the four young protagonists, their immigrant parents and other relations, including the missing son/brother Quy who was lost when the Vu family ed Thailand after the war in Vietnam. The narrative shapes a queer (un)belonging for the second generation out of what to the earlier newcomers has been a space of forced assimilation and broken dreams (resembling the fall of Alan and the ghostly haunting of Julia and Chloe). Opening with the I on a bus travelling the early morning streets, What We All Long For explores the complexities of multiple diasporas in a world city like Toronto and the possibilities for community among its inhabitants.38

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Someone like Carlas mother Angie tragically falls in the interstitial spaces, belonging nowhere. Daughter of Italian immigrants, she fell in love with a married Black man, the father of Carla and Jamal, and found herself rejected by both the biological family and the cross-cultural lover. Thus, she took what appeared to be the only step available, off of her apartments balcony into death: [she was] a border crosser, a wetback, a worker in the immigrant sweatshop they call this city. [. . .] She tried to step across the border of who she was and who she might be. They wouldnt let her. She didnt believe it herself as she stepped across into a whole other country. (p. 212) Angies suicide illustrates the dangers of attempting both to assimilate, to belong according to the terms prescribed by normative citizenship, and to transgress those violent dictates. Her immigrant family, deeply rooted in heteropatriarchy, and her Black lover attached to dichotomous, racialised identities, force upon Angie conicting prescriptions for how to belong and with whom. Her desire to belong ultimately destroys her and severely damages both of her children. On the other hand, Angies daughter Carla and her friends [. . .] believed in it, this living. Its raw openness. They saw the street outside, its chaos, as their only hope. They felt the citys violence and its ardour in one emotion (p. 212, my emphasis). As in thirsty, we see Brand working with the emotiospatial in this depiction of diasporic relationality in Toronto. Trying to step across the borders of who they were. But they were not merely trying. They were, in fact, borderless (p. 213).39 The four friends, whose families have originated in Africa, Europe, the Caribbean, and Asia, have established connections that complicate notions not only of origins, but also of diaspora as rooted in a homeland and preserving singular ethnic identity. Together they produce a conguration that illustrates a version of what Gayatri Gopinath denes as queer diasporas: Rather than invoking an imaginary homeland frozen in an idyllic moment outside history, what is remembered through queer desire and the queer diasporic body is a past time and place riven with contadictions and the violences of multiple uprootings, displacements, and exiles [. . .].40 Their mutual longings and the bonds that they have formed with each other in Toronto, as well as the ways that they often miss each other, suggest new ways to conceive of relation. They thus illustrate the possibilities of a queer (un)belonging in these negotiations of urban space. The citys mantra is expressed in the lines from a poem by Kamau Brathwaite: A yellow mote of sand dreams in the polyps eye;/the coral needs this pain (p. 53, emphasis in original). From loss, one creates art,

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beauty emerging out of violence and trauma for Brand as for Brathwaite rooted in the Door of No Return, in the waters of the Middle Passage. The artist within this narrative is Tuyen, a lesbian daughter of Vietnamese refugees who have made it and moved from the centre of Torontos immigrant community to upscale Richmond Hill, a normative success that their daughter repudiates, as she moves back to the old neighbourhood and creates artistic assemblages in her rundown loft. In Tuyen, the concept of queer (un)belonging nds its most vivid illustration in What We All Long For, and her art provides the title to the novel. Throughout the narrative, she is at work on her latest art installation, a lubaio or huge totem constructed from railroad ties ones she has stolen. She explains this art form as a system originally serving as signposts: Like long ago people would pin messages against the government and shit like that on them (p. 16). As she creates her lubaio out of messages to the city (p. 17), she, like the narrator, embraces the citys chaotic multiplicity and polyphony. As Brathwaites line, the citys mantra, indicates, the aesthetic offers a response to deep, unfathomable pain; in the case of Tuyen and her family, the originary trauma is the loss of Quy and the melancholia that has gripped them during their entire sojourn in Canada.41 This missing son/brother haunts the text as its second narrator, his voice in rst-person intervening in the stories of the four protagonists and his presence looming larger and more ominously as the narrative proceeds. The phrase This city that opens the novel also frames his sections of the text, even as he appears a oater, a drifter, whose element is water: Im doomed to boats, he tells us (p. 286). Quy (whose name ironically means precious, but may also echo the French qui or who) embodies another kind of queer (un)belonging, as his identity often comes completely unmoored, borderless in the extreme: Well, I lost the compass for knowing where I was a long time ago, I suppose. So its useless asking who I am. [. . .] What if I told you that theres a web of people like me laying sticky strings all over the city? (p. 284), he queries. The one left behind in their ight from Vietnam, frozen in the diasporic melancholia of his parents and siblings, Quy has not experienced the city built on parents sacricing for children.42 Instead, he emerges as the sacricial victim, the disjecta of the nuclear heteronormative family, his absence perhaps even necessary for their push to assimilate and belong. He understands this position, which feeds his hatred of brother Binh, in particular, whose success as a businessman is displayed in possessions such as his ashy BMW. Cars clearly connote mobility as well as blatant consumerism, a dead weight, as opposed to the uidity suggested by the boats that have transported Quy around the globe (or the freedom Carla experiences as she moves through the city on her bicycle as a messenger). Gradually,

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the narrative sections told in his own voice work to destabilise Quy, so that both he and the readers cannot be sure he is the lost son. There are times when Ive said to myself, who the hell are you? Thats a dangerous question. And this is a dangerous city. You could be anybody here. That is what rst took me when I walked among people on the streets. [. . .] and right away I knew it would be easy to disappear here. Who could know? (p. 310) In Quy, I would argue, we see an extreme of queer (un)belonging, dangerous and destructive, lacking any connection or relation that might lead to affective citizenship. This erasure of relation, this denial of identication, tragically intersects with the trajectory of another wounded, traumatised young man, Carlas brother Jamal. Marked by his mothers suicide and by his biological fathers rejection of him, Jamal performs the role prescribed for him by a society structured on racism and consumerism, stealing cars and landing in jail. In that sense, he is bordered, not borderless, conned to an assigned identity as Black male, under surveillance, trapped. He tells Carla that jail is a [r]ite of passage in this culture [. . .] for a young black man (p. 46). For those like Jamal, migration is paralysed, citizenship effectively barred, his identity trapped in a liminal zone. Tuyen considers turning that imprisoned body into an aesthetic object for her installation, [. . .] a body cast of him when he comes out (p. 231), in effect visualising him frozen, immobilised. While in jail, Jamal himself treats the body as material for expression, telling his worried sister that since he was raped the other prisoners call him Ghost: He pulled the neck of his grey issue aside, showing her a rough, ugly branded G on his breast [. . .]. Not a tattoo, but a brand rising in an unhealed keloid. It was a furious-looking red, parts of it still oozing (p. 30). Jamal belongs to the city in a xed manner, according to a specic set of racialised laws that provide an embodied identity, similar to what stops Alan on the stairway and causes his fall. Both Black male gures belong in absentia, haunting but not undoing the rules of relation based in racism and enforced by the legal system. In a violent confrontation in the novels nal scene, Jamal and a friend attack Quy (to them a stranger), who sits alone in Binhs BMW outside his parents home, waiting for the longed-for reunion with the family. We witness a clash of diasporas Vietnamese and African that suggests that that way of envisioning identity and relation leads to assault of the stranger-other and potential murder. Left half-dead as they ee with the car, Quy lies on the road and he leans his head as he had over the side of the boat, longingly, and Bo and Ma are nally running out of a doorway, running toward him, and the road between them is like water,

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and they both grab him as they should have and his mouth splits open and all the water spills out (p. 318). This penultimate paragraph concludes the shocking scene of violence when one with a xed, bordered, even patrolled identity attacks a stranger who lacks relation, who slides from (un)belonging to the edge of not-belonging and of non-identity. From that moment of violent contact spills an ocean of trauma as the core site of longing opens like a deep wound and pours out its poisoned waters. In these moments inected by concepts of masculinity, Jamal and Quy stand as bookends to the cop and Alan, their encounters illustrating the violent legacies of the Door of No Return. Thus, we have seen three male gures Alan, Jamal, and Quy not belonging, especially the two Black men who attempt citizenship but are disallowed, imprisoned by the normative assumptions about Black men that prevail in Canadian society. Belonging not available to them except as outlaws, both steal; each is drawn to the objects that symbolise his desired, longed for, belonging garden tools, fancy cars. Also thus attached to belongings, possessions, they cannot undo belonging to enact a queer (un)belonging. Moreover, the Vu familys melancholy longing for Quy resembles the way that Chloe and Julia miss Alan in the 18 years after his murder by the police, and also parallels Carlas attempts to rescue Jamal from incarceration. Parents and siblings, mothers, wife, daughters, all try to draw the absent male back into the hetero-relations of family: as son, brother, husband. Such a reconnected relation would pull that male back into nostalgic diasporic identity, which is not what queer diaspora offers. Instead, Brand has created the character Tuyen, the lesbian artist whose apartment studio serves as a kind of laboratory for rethinking belonging. According to Gopinath, the queer female subject is the crucial point of departure in theorizing a queer diaspora.43 In Tuyens art, as well as in her relationships, Brand develops a vision of belonging that resists and undoes both diasporic longing and bordered identities.44 Though she technically steals the railway ties for her installation, she does not treat the lubaio as a possession, but rather offers it back to others, in a version of an ethics of hospitality. In his discussion of quare, E. Patrick Johnson explains that this is a theory in the esh, which emphasize[s] the diversity within and among gays, bisexuals, lesbians, and transgendered people of colour while simultaneously accounting for how racism and classism affect how we experience and theorise the world. [. . .] this politics of resistance is manifested in vernacular traditions such as performance, folklore, literature, and verbal art.45 Such, I would argue, are the installations Tuyen creates, not only the lubaio but her photographs of street activism, her imagined construction of hundreds of translucent boxes oating in the air to represent the family, and the

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cylindrical curtains she imagines hanging in separate rooms. One will encircle the lubaio, with all the old longings of another generation, while in the next there would be twelve video projections, constantly changing, of images and texts of contemporary longing (p. 309). Using the vernacular literally, the longings voiced by the people Tuyen encounters on the streets or invites into her apartment this art queers belonging and leaves it undone. The last cylinder would be empty, the room silent. [. . .] She still wasnt certain what she was making; she knew she would nd out only once the installation was done. Then, some grain, some element she had been circling, but unable to pin down, would emerge (p. 309). This art is one of movement and relation, involving the artist and her materials, her spaces, and her audience in a project that resists teleology as it also dees categories and boundaries. Throughout the novel, Tuyen has longed for intimacy including sex with Carla, a character whose own sexuality is ambiguous as well as largely unexplored, due to the traumatic loss of her mother. Being neighbours and best friends, they live in apartments that share one wall and whose doors open onto the same hallway. Tuyen has done a slow muscular dace around Carla (p. 43), even as the other woman at least partially resists these overtures and holds her own secrets tightly inside her heart. Nevertheless, Carla listens to Tuyens tapping as she chisels the lubaio and participates affectively in its conception and construction. The city inspires this aesthetics: yes, that was the beauty of this city, its polyphonic, murmuring. This is what always lled Tuyen with hope, this is what she thought her art was about the representation of that gathering of voices and longings that summed themselves up into a kind of language, yet indescribable (p. 149). Tuyens apartment becomes what Gopinath (in another context, Bollywood lm) terms female homosocial space, with the potential to become a space of both homoeroticism and queer (un)belonging.46 Thus, the violent embrace of the two brothers, strangers to each other, is countered in the nal paragraph of the text by the possibility of community and affective citizenship. This culminating paragraph juxtaposes the tragic not-belongings of the male gures with a more hopeful queer (un)belonging, as Carla waits for Tuyen to return to the apartment and take up her work of assemblage. Carla thinks of the various neighbours as she watches them come home from work and makes plans to invite over all of her friends: She longed to hear Tuyen chipping and chiselling away next door (p. 319, my emphasis). If queer is on one level a reading and citational practice,47 ultimately, the I in each text serves as the practitioner who opens and crosses through doorways. In Sister Outsider, Audre Lorde states: without community there is no liberation, only the most vulnerable and temporary armistice between an individual and

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her oppression. But community must not mean a shedding of our differences, nor the pathetic pretense that these differences do not exist (p. 112).48 Through the potential of a newly born lwa49 or spirit of queer diasporas, perhaps doors will open not to violence but to relationality and queer (un)belonging. Faireld University

Notes

1 Dionne Brand, A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging (Toronto: Vintage Canada, 2002), pp. 62 3. Henceforth, cited parenthetically in the text. 2 Paul Gilroy, . . . To Be Real: The Dissident Forms of Black Expressive Culture in Catherine Ugwu (ed.), Lets Get It On: The Politics of Black Performance (Seattle: Bay Press, 1995), pp. 12 33 (24 emphasis original). 3 Rinaldo Walcott, Outside in Black Studies: Reading from a Queer Place in the Diaspora in E. Patrick Johnson and Mae G. Henderson (eds), Black Queer Studies: A Critical Anthology (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), pp. 90 105 (92). 4 Kim Butler, Dening Diaspora, Rening a Discourse, Diaspora, 10.2 (2001), pp. 189 219 (194 emphasis in original). 5 See ibid.: The framework of diaspora provides an alternative perspective on world history viewed as a series of overlapping diasporizations (p. 212). See also Alan Sineld, Diaspora and Hybridity: Queer Identities and the Ethnicity Model, Textual Practice, 10.2 (Summer 1996), pp. 271 93. 6 Walcott, p. 97. Walcott also states, Black diaspora queers live in a borderless, large world of shared identications and imagined historical relations produced through a range of uid cultural artifacts like lm, music [. . .] (p. 92). 7 Rogers Brubaker, The Diaspora Diaspora, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 28.1 (January 2005), pp. 1 19 (13). Brubaker discusses [. . .] a tension in the literature between boundary-maintenance and boundary-erosion (p. 6) (emphasis in original). 8 This way of conceiving of queer (un)belonging extends and refracts Homi Bhabhas unhomeliness, which applies most specically to immigrant experience and claiming of (new) spaces. It also revisits and re-visions the tragic unbelonging of Joan Rileys protagonist in the novel of that title. See Floya Anthias, Evaluating Diaspora: Beyond Ethnicity?, Sociology, 32.3 (August 1998), pp. 557 80, on moving beyond ethnicity in discussions of diaspora: The differentialist ethnicity and cultural syncretism and the different uses to which it is put by different class categories of transnational migrants needs investigating (p. 571) (emphasis in original). 9 Dionne Brand, In Another Place, Not Here (New York: Grove Press, 1996), p. 89. Henceforth, cited parenthetically in the text.

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10 Miles Ogburn, Editorial: Atlantic Geographies, Social and Cultural Geography, 6.3 (June 2005), pp. 379 85 (382). 11 Ibid., p. 383. 12 Brands position as a queer diasporic writer has not been extensively studied to date. I began to develop my analysis of her work through this lens in my A Dream Deferred? Languages and Spaces of Resistance in Caribbean Womens Fiction in Fritz Gysin and Christopher Mulvey (eds), Black Liberation in the Americas (Hamburg: Lit Verlag, 2001), pp. 153 71, in which I examined In Another Place, Not Here in tandem with texts by two other Caribbean women writers (Michelle Cliff and Merle Collins). I continued this thread of analysis in my discussion of her next novel, At the Full and Change of the Moon, as well as her collection of short stories, Sans Souci: see Johanna X. K. Garvey, The Place She Miss: Exile, Memory, and Resistance in Dionne Brands Fiction, Callaloo, 26.2 (2003), pp. 486 503. Rinaldo Walcott (cited elsewhere in this essay) has offered a sustained analysis of Brand as a queer writer of the African Diaspora, while Omiseeke Natasha Tinsley includes Brands autobiographical A Map to the Door of No Return in her Black Atlantic, Queer Atlantic: Queer Imaginings of the Middle Passage, GLQ, 14.2-3 (2008), pp. 191 215. Two other critics who have discussed Brands narratives as queer are John Corr, who looks at Verlia and Elizetes relationship as that of queer diasporans, in his Affective Coordination and Avenging Grace: Dionne Brands In Another Place, Not Here, Canadian rature Canadiennne, 201 (Summer 2009), pp. 113 29, and Literature/Litte Dina S. Georgis, Cultures of Expulsion: Memory, Longing and the Queer Space of Diaspora, New Dawn, 1.1 (2006), who uses Freuds concepts of melancholia and mourning to discuss queer diasporas in What We All Long For. None of those bringing queer theories of diaspora to bear on Brands work, however, have analysed the ways that the narrative persona in thirsty and the unnamed rst-person narrator of What We All Long For participate in creating spaces of queer (un)belonging. 13 Iris Marion Young, Difference and Democracy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000); see especially the section on differentiated solidarity, pp. 221 28. 14 Doreen Massey, World City (Cambridge: Polity, 2007), p. 215 (emphasis in original). 15 Ibid., p. 216 (emphasis in original). 16 Dionne Brand, thirsty (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2002), p. 24. Henceforth, cited parenthetically in the text. 17 In Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso, 2004), Butler argues that we are undone by relations even as we choose them (p. 23). See also p. 20, p. 27. Note that my term queer (un)belonging is not referring to Butlers use of undone, though this vision of interdependence intersects with the communal aspects of queer (un)belonging (as I am developing the concept). 18 Jody Mason, Searching for the Doorway: Dionne Brands Thirsty, University of Toronto Quarterly, 75.2 (Spring 2006), pp. 784 800 (786).

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19 Christian Olbey, Dionne Brand in conversation, ARIEL 33.2 (April 2002), pp. 87 102 (100). 20 Omiseeke Natasha Yinsley, Black Atlantic, Queer Atlantic: Queer Imaginings of the idle Passage (p. 199). Tinsley bases her argument on black queerness as she analyses A Map to the Door of No Return: What proves innovative in Brands black queer Atlantic liquidity is how insistently she weaves these explorations of gurative uidity together with poignant material engagements with the waters that shape raced, nationalized, classed, gendered, and sexualized selves in different moments and sites of diaspora (p. 211). id, Queer/Migration: An Unruly Body of Scholarship, GLQ, 21 Eithne Luibhe 14.2-3 (2008), pp. 169 90 (174). See also p. 183. 22 Teresa Brennan, The Transmission of Affect (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004), p. 75. 23 Joyce Davidson and Christine Milligan, Editorial: Embodying Emotion Sensing Space: Introducing emotional geographies, Social and Cultural Geography, 5.4 (December 2004) pp. 523 32 (524). (emphasis in original). 24 See also Diana Brydon, Dionne Brands Global Intimacies: Practising Affective Citizenship, University of Toronto Quarterly, 76.3 (Summer 2007), pp. 990 1006: In Brands Inventory, these overlapping communities are increasingly bound by a sense of emergency and crisis (p. 1003). She redenes community as bonds that nest identities within larger structures of involvement (p. 1002). Discussing this most recent of Brands poems, Brydon also states: Increasingly, Brands writing laments a situation in which there are few acceptable choices beyond the poets craft, her commitment to language, and her compulsion to respond through all her sense to the world around her (p. 1002). douard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, trans. Betsy Wing (Ann Arbor: Univer25 E sity of Michigan Press, 1997), p. 11, p. 32. See also Marsha Pearce, Transnational/Transcultural identities: The Black Atlantic and Pythagorass Theorem, Callaloo, 30.2 (Spring 2007), pp. 547 54, for a discussion of Glissants work and its application to the visual arts. 26 See Rinaldo Walcott, Land to Light On? Making Reparation in a Time of Transnationality, Thamyris/Intersecting, 12 (2006), pp. 87 99: [. . .] Brands project is not a pessimistic one, but rather a project that provokes us to rethink the terms of belonging from merely those of a multicultural recognition to those of an ethics of hospitality (p. 88). 27 I read this space similarly to the analysis offered by Mason (Searching for the Doorway: Dionne Brands Thirsty), in that the doorway xes Alan while also offering a doorway [. . . such that] the limiting threshold of the doorway is destabilized and dissolved (p. 794) (emphasis in original), largely through the speaker, who is open to engaging in collective change, which will necessitate going beyond the self (p. 797). I am arguing that this concept of openness, the poet open as doorways (Thirsty 63), lies at the heart of queer (un)belonging. On border zones of diaspora, see Timothy Chin, The Novels of Patricia Powell: Negotiating Gender and Sexuality Across the Disjuncture of Caribbean Diaspora, Callaloo, 30.2 (Spring 2007) pp. 53345 (534).

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28 See Rinaldo Walcott, Land to Light On?: Hospitality might require us to think the ethico-political as a relation of ongoing negotiations and desires of the unnished project of achieving justice (p. 88). On the landing, as linked to the Middle Passage, to citizenship, to national belonging, see Maia Joseph, Wondering into Country: Dionne Brands A Map to The Door of No Return, Canadian Literature 193 (Summer 2007), pp. 75 92. 29 On moments when the movement of identity is arrested, see Anne-Marie Fortier, Migrant Belongings: Memory, Space, Identity (Oxford & New York: Berg, 2000), p. 165. Fortier considers migrant belongings in terms of transient thresholds, which is not the experience of Alan or of his family, but perhaps describes that of Tuyen in What We All Long For. 30 See D. M. R. Bentley, Me and the City Thats Never Happened Before: Dionne Brand in Toronto, Canadian Architexts: Esssays on Literature and Architecture in Canada, 1759-2005, http://www.uwo.ca/english/ canadianpoetry/architexts/essays/brand.htm. In Thirsty [sic], Brand continues to draw upon the concept of the middle passage, but with an emphasis on inbetweenness as a liminal space of creative cultural hybridity (p. 8) (accessed 24 May 2006). 31 E. Patrick Johnson, Quare Studies, or (Almost) Everything I Know about Queer Studies I Learned from My Grandmother, in E. Patrick Johnson and Mae G. Henderson (eds), Black Queer Studies: A Critical Anthology (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), pp. 124 157 (135). 32 Ibid., p. 126 (emphasis in original). 33 Walcott, Outside in Black Studies, p. 93. 34 See Maia Joseph, Wondering into Country, on thirsty: Into a city and a nation that she insists are structured by systems of enclosure, assimilation, and exclusion obscured through the trope of home, Brand articulates a conceptualization of relationality that avoids eclipsing or denying difference, and is characterized instead by implication and openness (p. 9). And, as I am arguing, such relationality queers and undoes the forces of belonging. 35 See Raphael Dalleo, Another Our America: Rooting a Caribbean Aesthetic , Kamau Brathwaite and Edouard Glissant, Anthur Mart in the Work of Jose , Brathwaite, and ium: A Caribbean Studies Journal, 2.2 (Fall 2004), on Mart Glissant, and the concept of movement: Simply by keeping in motion, errantry resists the temptations of liation, the European desire for legitimacy rooted in the soil and in heredity. [. . .] In this context, identity can no longer be seen only as inheritance; it is something always becoming, created through contact with Others, online paragraph 14. 36 Toni Morrison, Jazz (New York: Plume, 1993). Jazz is framed and guided by this narrative persona and her relation to New York City: Im crazy about this City (p. 7); You have to understand what its like, taking on a big city (p. 8); Do what you please in the City, it is there to back and frame you no matter what you do (pp. 9 10). See also the concluding section, pp. 220 21. 37 Dionne Brand, What We All Long For (Toronto: Alfred A. Knopf Canada, 2005). Henceforth, cited parenthetically in the text.

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38 On outside belonging, see Elspeth Probyn, Outside Belongings (New York: Routledge, 1996), which she explains in terms similar to what I am terming queer (un)belonging: [. . .] belonging cannot be an isolated and individual affair. Conceptualizing social relations and subjectication in terms of the outside renews an awareness of their very relationality (pp. 12 13); [. . .] movement that seeks not a straight path but rather revels in the inbetween, that picks up things along its way, that is derouted by small ethno-autobiographic shards a tumbleweed of a theoretical project that gathers up memories, wishes, dreams, anecdotes, or sayings scribbled on city walls (p. 40). Such will be precisely the aesthetic project of Tuyen, the lesbian artist in Brands novel, as well as of the narrative persona herself. 39 On the younger generation, see Kit Dobson, Struggle Work: Global and Urban Citizenship in Dionne Brands What We All Long For, Studies in Cana tudes en Litte rature Canadienne, 31.2 (2006) pp. 88 104: dian Literature/E [. . .] hope appears to lie, for them, in the opportunities that they create to construct urban spaces themselves. They build their communities across borders, rhizomatically connecting to each other without a predetermined logic. They are linked by their desire for inclusivity, and not limited by the discourses that are handed to them (p. 100). 40 Gayatri Gopinath, Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), p. 4. 41 See Sara Clarke Kaplan, Souls at the Crossroads, Africans on the Water: The Politics of Diasporic Melancholia, Callaloo, 30.2 (Spring 2007), pp. 511 26, for a discussion of a specically black diasporic melancholy, in ways that can also apply to the melancholia of the Vu family, particularly the parents and elder sisters (the two born in Vietnam): Constituted at the interstices of space and time, absence and presence, the erased past and demands for the future, diasporas are formed in and maintained through contradiction. Undeniably, diasporan thinking can take the form of a regressive ahistorical essentialism or a backward-looking, delocalized ontology (p. 522), which applies well to the Vu parents. Yet, for the younger generation in Brands novel, perhaps the practice of diasporic melancholia is best understood as the articulation of certain ethical impossibilities [. . .] then the spatio-temporal community which it constitutes and by which it is maintained is, at its best, a geography of political possibility (p. 522). 42 On the melancholia of diasporic loss, see Georgiss excellent discussion in Cultures of Expulsion: Memory, Longing and the Queer Space of Diaspora, which draws upon the theories of queer diasporas developed by Gayatri Gopinath. 43 Gopinath, p. 16. 44 For a similar conceptualisation focused on Caribbean diasporas, see H. Adlai Murdoch, All Skin Teeth Is Not Grin: Performing Caribbean Diasporic Identity in a Postcolonial Metropolitan Frame, Callaloo, 30.2 (Spring 2007): This ebb and ow of cultures, and their transgressional expansion and overow beyond borders and boundaries, belies the established binaries of a colonial ideology predicated upon the notion of cultures as distinct and

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45 46

47 48 49

self-contained, the kind of ideology that mediated the spread of hierarchies of inequality and attitudes of appropriation (p. 582). Johnson, p. 127. On queer diasporic cultural forms as a critique of global capital and its local impact, see Gopinath: The cartography of a queer diaspora [. . . articulates] other forms of subjectivity, culture, affect, kinship, and community that may not be visible or audible within standard mappings of nation, diaspora, or globalization (p. 12). Gopinath, p. 22. Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays & Speeches (Freedom, CA: The Crossing Press, 1984), p. 112. I am referring here to the lwa or the loa in syncretic religions of the Caribbean and Brazil. See Maya Deren, Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti (New Paltz, NY; McPherson & Company, 1953): [. . .] the universe would be but an amoral mass of organized matter, inevitably evolving on the initial momentum of original creation, were it not for the loa who direct it in paths of order, intelligence and benevolence. The loa are the souls of the cosmos (p. 86). Thus I imagine a newly born lwa parallel to Yemaya, lwa of the ocean, one who might offer guidance and inspiration to those who occupy spaces of (un) belonging in queer diasporas.

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