SOURCE: Sangster, Joan. Review of No Burden to Carry by Dionne Brand. University of Toronto Quarterly 62, no. 1 (September 1992): 120-29.

In the following excerpt, Sangster examines Brand's attempt to give voice to a marginalized group of women in No Burden to Carry.

Exercising control over the definitions and creation of one's history can be a powerful means of establishing one's right to exercise power, speak with authority, or simply live in one's community with a sense of dignity. Definitions of the ‘important’ events, people, and themes in Canadian history have for many years been shaped by a white, male-dominated academic and cultural elite which has made and remade Canadian history in its own image. In the past twenty years, this image has been increasingly challenged by writers with different priorities, visions, and experiences: women, the First Nations, people of colour, for instance, have suggested that their history must be...