“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.

Stephanie McKenzie - Sir Wilfred Grenfell College

Stephanie McKenzie is an Assistant Professor of English at Sir Wilfred Grenfell College (Memorial University) and has been a publisher (operating Scop Productions Inc. from 2002-2008) and editor ofinternational anthologies of poetry (The Backyards of Heaven: Contemporary Poetry from Ireland and Newfoundland & Labrador, However Blow the Winds: Poetry and Song from Ireland and Newfoundland and Labrador, and The Echoing Years: Poetry from Ireland and Canada). She has also published a book of literary criticism with the University of Toronto Press, Before the Country: Native Renaissance, Canadian Mythology. Most recently, McKenzie has had poetry accepted and published by The Malahat Review, The Antigonish Review and Contemporary Verse 2. She has also published one single-author collection of poetry, Cutting My Mother's Hair, with Salmon Poetry (Cliffs of Moher, Ireland, 2006)and has another book of poetry forthcoming with the same press later this year, Grace Must Wander. In 1997, McKenzie was also the Louise Bennett exchange scholar and conducted research and attended graduate classes at the University of the West Indies, Mona Campus, Jamaica.