14 Quotes by Dionne Brand

If I am peaceful…is not peace,/is getting used to harm.

Angie was a border crosser, a wetback, a worker in the immigrant sweatshop they call this city. On days like this I understand her like a woman instead of a child. Everybody thought she was a whore. She wasn’t. She tried to step across the border of who she was and who she might be. They wouldn’t let her. She didn’t believe it herself so she stepped across into a whole other country.

The sea sounded like a thousand secrets, all whispered at the same time.

Having no name to call on was having no past; having no past pointed to the fissure between the past and the present. That fissure is represented in the Door of No Return: that place where our ancestors departed one world for another; the Old World for the New. The place where all names were forgotten and all beginnings recast.

Books leave gestures in the body; a certain way of moving, of turning, a certain closing of the eyes, a way of leaving, hesitations. Books leave certain sounds, a certain pacing; mostly they leave the elusive, which is all the story. They leave much more than the words.

If I see someone I see the ghost of them, the air around them, and where they’ve been. If I see a city I see it’s living ghostliness – the stray looks, the dying hands. I see it’s needs and its discomforts locked in apartments.

Cities collect people, stray and lost and deliberate arrivants.

Fashions are not fashions at all but refashioning; language is not communication but reinvention. They are never in place but on display.

I am not nostalgic. Belonging does not interest me. I had once thought that it did. Until I examined the underpinnings. One is mislead when one looks at the sails and majesty of tall ships instead of their cargo.