“This Those Slaves Must Have Known Who Were My Mothers”: Women Who Live By Their Own Rules in Dionne Brand’s "Land to Light On"

Shoshannah Ganz ((Laurentian University, Sudbury)

and Stephanie McKenzie (Sir Wilfred Grenfell College)

Originally from Trinidad, award-winning poet Dionne Brand writes extensively about a sense of self and finding a place for self expression amongst both receptive and non-receptive audiences in her now claimed home of Canada. In particular, as her poetic collection Land to Light On (1997) and her critical prose in A Map to the Door of No Return (2001) reveals, the self must negotiate a space by theoretically examining and negotiating with communities and their welcoming and unwelcoming manners and by poetically carving out niches in between such theoretical examinations. In blending literary criticism with poetry we attempt to determine what values theory and poetry serve and the manner in which different articulations (creative and theoretical) help create safe and embracing zones for the individual who must confront racism, homophobia and sexism.

As an assistant professor in the English Department at Laurentian University, Shoshannah Ganz will examine the critical theories which inform Brand's work. As a poet and assistant professor at Memorial University, Stephanie McKenzie will engage with Ganz's theoretical comments by responding in poetic form. Such a mixed focus is amenable, we feel, to an examination of Brand's work as Brand is both a theorist and poet who blends different genres and approaches to examine the plight of the fragmented individual.

Shoshannah Ganz - Laurentian University, Sudbury

Shoshannah Ganz is an assistant professor of English at Laurentian University in Sudbury. Her areas of particular interest are in Canadian literature, travel writing, and women’s writing. She has recently beenlooking at representations of the east in travel writing by late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Canadian women and is continuing to work on a project of Canadian writers writing about Mexico. Ganz has published on a number of Canadian writers including co-editing an edition of critical essays and poetry about Al Purdy.