SOURCE: Thorpe, Michael. Review of In Another Place, Not Here, by Dionne Brand. World Literature Today 71, no. 2 (spring 1997): 446-47.

In the following review, Thorpe asserts that In Another Place, Not Here is a work that leaves no middle ground between the two extremes of self-hatred and retaliation against white oppression.

In Another Place, Not Here, Dionne Brand's first novel, explores the relationships between three women, set successively on an unnamed Caribbean island (Brand is from Trinidad), in Toronto, and on another nameless island, where an abortive “revolution” is crushed by American military intervention. Grenada, where Brand went in 1983 to “fling myself at the hope that the world could be upturned” (Bread Out of Stone, 1994), comes to mind. Inevitably, therefore, some readers will interpret the novel as fictionalized “herstory”: most will find in it the anguish of colonial and postcolonial history, intensely projected through the three women's consciousness.

The...