SOURCE: Sturgess, Charlotte. “Dionne Brand: Writing the Margins.” In Caribbean Women Writers, edited by Mary Condé and Thorunn Lonsdale, pp. 202-16. New York: St. Martin's Press, Inc., 1999.

In the following essay, Sturgess considers Dionne Brand's particular status as “a Trinidadian Canadian black lesbian feminist” through a theoretically informed analysis of stories from Sans Souci and Other Stories.

‘There is always something that must be remembered, something that cannot be forgotten, something that must be weighed.’¹

In Dionne Brand's writing the effort of the ‘not forgetting’, the necessity of a confrontation between past and present, demands to be examined in the light of her particular experience. As Francesco Loriggio has said of Brand's writing, ‘It designates subtypes, the degree of distance towards the cultural past and the cultural present, of insidership or of outsidership one can or one does assume’.² As a Trinidadian Canadian black lesbian feminist, Dionne Brand...