SOURCE: Ruta, Suzanne. “Archetypes of Exile.” Women's Review of Books 15, no. 7 (April 1998): 12-13.

In the following review, Ruta describes Brand's violation of the conventional distance between characters and narrator in In Another Place, Not Here. Ruta notes that even the narrator speaks in the rural Trinidadian vernacular, and claims that the overall effect Brand achieves is successful.

It's all very well for the characters in your short stories to use their down home dialect, the writer Caroline Gordon warned her protégée, Flannery O'Connor, but the narrator must speak the English of Samuel Johnson. In her remarkable first novel, poet and filmmaker Dionne Brand, born in Trinidad, living in Canada since 1970, rejects this classic advice. She abolishes the ironic distance between narrator and characters (between mother country and former colony, one could say), liberates the island vernacular from the quarantine of quotation marks and awards it the...