“We Keep Writing”: A Collaborative Review of Dionne Brand’s The Blue Clerk

Introduction: if the book’s a dialogue, then capture it in dialogue

How to describe a book in discussion with itself, written in collaboration between the poet and herself? How, if that book is part-memoir, part-history, part-music, part-aesthetic treaty, part-ethical investigation, and more, all set on an imaginary plane that is gut-check real? Well, don’t do it yourself. Ask three others to do it, then get them to talk. Then you might get somewhere. And I believe we have. I asked Klara du Plessis, Linzey Corridon, and Alexei Perry Cox to take an angle, or perspective, on Dionne Brand’s The Blue Clerk. They ran with it, and ran well. Below you’ll find their initial takes, and the start of a discussion that flows from them as if from headwaters. It could only ever have been a start. We didn’t even get to how this book marks Brand’s literary legacy so far (perhaps that was assumed). We didn’t even get to Coltrane (I will have to get to this soon). But we got to a lot, for sure. Dear readers, you will carry this on past us.

—E Martin Nolan

---

To Verse: Dionne Brand’s Energetic Ars Poetica

by Klara du Plessis 

Subtitled Ars Poetica, Dionne Brand’s eminently generative progression of poetry, The Blue Clerk, meditates on the process of writing. It stresses the kinetic, indeterminate, and even contradictory forces of mobility that creativity constantly navigates (or that constantly navigates creativity). Brand posits, for example, that the “poem is concerned formally with the qualities of time, materiality, and meaning and has no obligation to the linear or the representative”; then she rescinds the claim, questioning, “When was I that naive?” (178). Polarizing writing as a collaboration between the interconnected figures of the author and the clerk—and redefining text as versos (discarding rectos and introducing stipules, as if the latter were a linguistic term and not the “small, leaf-like appendage” dividing the bottom of a leaf stalk (3))—Brand plays with articulating the organic. “Something so thin” as the poetic line (178) becomes aligned with the green vitality of the stalk, of the stipule, implying not only the endless potentiality of regeneration and growth, but also a structure of versatility in poetry. Versatility. “To verse, to turn, to bend, to plough, a furrow, a row, to turn around, toward, to traverse” (34). The poem becomes a verb, a vector. To verse as the act of articulation, poetic communication, and composition, but also as agency, a mode of writing which takes parts of speech and endows them with vitality. To verse, to turn, to bend, to plough—all verbs—then a furrow, a row—nouns leading with the same forward thrust of sound—toward—a preposition taut with action— dissolving in to traverse, a nested return to verse, but with the mobility of a verb. “Without verbs nothing can be done, nothing can get in the bloodstream,” writes Brand (69). In poetry, every word needs to be a verb, to be vibrant, taut, and engaged. After all, “poetry has that ability to reconstitute language” (112). The division of creative labour between the clerk and the author situates a discussion around how poetry is activated. On the one hand, Brand narrates a world in which the clerk comprehensively documents every instant, every act, every fact of existence, while the author selects aspects of this raw material to isolate and aestheticize. In other words, the clerk is intricately related to experience, to reality, and so also to a sense of vitality. The clerk’s proximity to life is further schematized by her alignment with versos, with left-hand pages, leaving the author presumably sequestered on the right-hand page. Since the volume’s poems are almost exclusively titled Versos, and never Rectos—“The left-hand page is not only chronic it is viral” (70)—the author’s voice becomes muted, filtered through the clerk’s more vibrant and omnipresent documentation. On the other hand, the clear resemblance between verse and verso challenges the clerk’s monopoly. If the author is orchestrating content into more literary manifestations such as poetry, then the vitality of the clerk’s versos gestates, mutates, and eventually merges with verse. The clerk’s versos are overlaid with the author’s verse so that the reality and vitality of the everyday, as documented through the omniscience of the past, present, and future, channels the energy necessary to write poetry of note. “Why make a verse of everything?” (88) asks the undefined voice of either clerk or author. A rhetorical question par excellence—one which emphasizes the persistent hesitation denying the formulation of theory—that underlines poetry’s momentum, its ability to stretch its limbs across the scope of this book, across the exhaustive content of this book, and to verse itself in vitality. 

FOLLOW UP: E Martin Nolan: If to verse is an action, if poetry is a verb, what does that do to the “exhaustive content of this book”? Brand’s content—in particular, her engagement with history past and present—has always been integral to her work, but never, I’d argue, primary. There’s always, as you say, a vitality within her verse that dominates. How do you encounter, then, the seriousness of her content, when it is so touched by vitality?

... the only way I can read philosophy is by approaching it as poetry ...

Klara du Plessis: I don’t think that seriousness and vitality are mutually exclusive. In fact, seriousness necessitates vitality, in the sense that if something is truly worth attention and extensive thought, it will most certainly spark radically divergent modes of response, implying an energy that cannot be static. There is a reductive division between supposedly hefty, theoretical/historical/political writing, and the creativity and kineticism of, say, poetry. I think it’s pretty clear—especially with a book like Theory, haha—that one of Brand’s major projects is exactly to destabilize that isolation of different approaches to writing, to meld them into a simultaneity or constant interplay of poetic theory and critical poetry … I’ve said this somewhere before, but the only way I can read philosophy is by approaching it as poetry, which is a way to re-articulate its authority toward me as the reader and to engage with it honestly and proximately. Brand moves this strategy from the reading to the writing process, energizing her work by integrating poetic, theoretical, historical, and political material (at least), and allowing all of these modes to strengthen and play off of one another.

---

The Blue Clerk: Visions of Post-Colonial Coloniality

by Linzey Corridon 

how come I anticipate nothing as intimate as history would I have had a different life failing this embrace with broken things —thirsty, Dionne Brand 

Dionne Brand’s The Blue Clerk situates itself around post-colonial coloniality. That describes a colonial society in which we are invested in the act of thinking—about the self, the family, the town, the country, the globe—in a way distinctly different from the colonial era, which is seemingly centuries past. However, this is far from our reality. Third-world colonial spaces, and memories of girlhood and innocence, represent in The Blue Clerk a yearning for the opportunity to reclaim any loss of “noun-ness” (82) or agency , as well as rejecting historical notions of a people embodying only adjectives, or submissiveness. Colonial spaces, designated as of a time past, house a litany of possibilities for non-Canadian bodies not fortunate enough to have descended from European settlers. Of these bodies, those individuals who “behaved well” (161) enough may then transcend the geopolitical limits of third-worldism into the northern hemisphere, a place that promises life that is in essence contrary to the inventory of problematic literary figures and works interrogated in Brand’s meditations.  Men such as the mythical Plato, T.S. Eliot, and John Locke are interlocutors in a linear discourse that would have readers perpetuate the physical and mental cages meant to encircle and enshrine Brand’s figures of the girl, the woman, the clerk, the author, and everyone who lives the experience of Caribbeanness—but also, and most importantly, to perpetuate the inherent volatility of the black experience. One seemingly moves outward from these familiar, standard symbols and reminders of empire toward that which is considered post-colonial: Canada. Here then lies the post-colonial in Brand’s text. Or does it? An elder voice, be it clerk or author, comes to articulate the post-colonial coloniality of the collective we, The North. The speaker, or perhaps speakers, of Blue Clerk moves from the position of spectacle to spectator, from the fringes of the disenfranchised to the centre of the powers which act as manipulators of the body, of experiences of a people that must come to terms with having to “live a smaller life” (139). The Blue Clerk paints for its reader the many portraits of life in the midst of supposed socioeconomic and juridico-cultural progress for the once third-world occupant. Days constitute a bombardment of new kinds of tyranny. From watching wars devastate worlds far from home on television, to indulging the “strange and ghoulish intimacy” (152) that transpires out of police brutality against black children, to observing the maimed, distorted bodies hasting through the streets “who have become quite ugly” (141) in search of perfection, and in coming to terms with two kinds of books—“Books of discomfort and books of discomfort” (215)—Brand’s text realizes a myriad of nuanced ways in which Canadian society continues to perpetuate the weapons of empire that aim to correct any sort of centring of the self by those historically designated as persona non grata.

...Brand’s newest collection provides us with definitive proof that we live in the space of the post-colonial colonial, a space in which highly aesthetic western cultures are productions meant to disguise the persistence of a seemingly colonial past.

The Blue Clerk weaves language and time together into a narrative of confession, into an acknowledgement of that which we ought to not assume are events distinctly separated between the past, the present, and the immediate future. If it is the case that poetry is time itself, that it “has no obligation to the present” (112), then Brand’s newest collection provides us with definitive proof that we live in the space of the post-colonial colonial, a space in which highly aesthetic western cultures are productions meant to disguise the persistence of a seemingly colonial past. History cannot be anticipated because we reside in the midst of Chronos’s goo, not separate and never divorced from the past-present-future. 

FOLLOW UP: EMN: You highlight at least two critiques in your reading of The Blue Clerk. One is that the colonial past is not past, but disguised, and that, indeed, the past itself is a false construct. You also touch on the movement from spectacle to spectator, and from the fringe to the power centre. Both of these contribute to a hidden perpetuation that Brand is uncovering. I am interested in how she uncovers that. It is not solely through argument. How do you read The Blue Clerk embodying, or enacting, that uncovering? What in the form, the style, the very approach, gives life to this vision of the post-colonial coloniality that you describe? 

Linzey Corridon: I think back to the opening of the text, ruminating on the act of withholding that the speaker gestures toward. I linger on the question of withholding and the relationship it may share to uncovering. How can one uncover through withholding? It is a rather frustrating process that leads me to the conclusion that this very act of withholding is revolutionary. It is the very action by which The Blue Clerk is able to hold the mechanisms of empire accountable. I agree that it is not only what is articulated but rather what is seemingly inaudible and invisible to the reader, that which is (un)rendered in opposition to snippets depicting the struggle against the heterogeneous hold of coloniality on peoples relegated to the position of other. Ideas of post-colonial coloniality are magnified in juxtaposition to the echoes of deceiving silence. I think of the more tangible instances of absence which accompany the text. The use of space reinforces the value and the ongoing presence of that which is consciously left unsaid. The seeming lack of a proper book spine, the decision to forgo such a pragmatic choice (aesthetic and support) is another example of the weight that the act of uncovering carries in the text. To hell with pragmatics. Conventional approaches to poetry do not suffice. Poetry is time. Withholding and absence are unconventional tools used to disrupt the status quo.

---

Because they were the same

by Alexei Perry Cox 

The Blue Clerk might be read as informed by an interdisciplinary framework, an analytic scaffolding that allows us to notice the uneasy, migratory, creative, and intellectual spaces that Brand herself inhabits and produces when creating and imagining the world, and the collaborative form of knowledge-making that arises from such histories, events, conversations, debates, and sensory affairs. In The Blue Clerk the work of the artist is the template, the palette, and the insistent reminder that all is not right in our world—but it is beautiful nonetheless. The aesthetic, as the moment of letting the world go and clinging instead to the formal act of knowing it, is given a reunion with the ethical in The Blue Clerk. Brand reunites the poles of subject and object, value and fact, nature and reason, aesthetics and ethics, beauty and devastation, which are often riven apart by social trends or delineated by strict poetic and literary generic conventions or limited-perspective narration. Brand lets it all go and clings to it all, at the same time. And this is part of what makes Brand’s The Blue Clerk a difficult pleasure to read: the insistence on maintaining the cohesion. The closing lines of the twice repeated Verso 33.1 assert: “The dire circumstances in the house behind, the material circumstances, the poverty, are part of this homesickness. Not because, one, the scarcity, and two, the zinnias, set each other off as some might think, but because they were the same,” suggesting that direness resides in the same site as potentiality (242). I would caution against a reading that posits “beauty in/from devastation” in favour of one that recognizes they are truly the same thing. And both are surviving. Brand’s self-awareness informs our seeing and allows us to see both the zinnias and the wrecked mattress at the same time. Brand and her narrator(s)—the clerk and the author—know the inherent difficulty of her projects—and yet we are allowed access. Not accessibility, but access to this difficulty. Her co-mingling of aesthetic choices and ethical deliberations suggest that Brand is grappling with all these constitutive aspects of being a writer’s writer through her self-skeptical idealism. As moral and aesthetic conscience are inextricably linked here, it would be unethical for her not to represent her narrators to the fullest forms of their beings (their being is her being). Thus, the only way Brand (et al) has been able to work through the incompatibilities of scripting life as she knows it and existence as she might desire it to be is through a perspective that embodies all these inconsistencies—through these acts of archivism. There’s one of these mortal/transcendent moments in Verso 41:

Tonight my brain is full of beautiful things collected over three weeks: the rings around Jupiter in the southern hemisphere; three flamingos dancing brine shrimp to the surface, the mirages of harbours only I have seen; the lithium salt of desert; the rush for the local train at Ollantay-tambo; a frantic scramble for a bundle of goods left behind; the electrochemical sky. The silence was the best thing. (203)

It’s enough to make you sigh aloud. The silence was the best thing. It is a sort of mercy that writers must posses to exert, again and again, their ambition in lieu of their own best interests. She knows she fails; she continues. 

FOLLOW UP: EMN: Let's dig into what's happening in that sigh, what it means. Can you elaborate on the quality, shape, and feel of that sigh? What about the sigh captures the way a reader takes in Dionne's particular way of showing us that devastation and beauty are "the same"? 

Alexei Perry Cox: Readers can see Brand’s labouring, and labouring still—unfinished as the work remains throughout the pages of the book, after all. And we, as readers, must labour to see the whole, and the more we scrutinize, the more we see. It’s a constant struggle (sigh - ouf) with exponential moments of consolation and respite (sigh - relief), only to labour all over again. Aesthetic conscience is socially necessary in this book: it is this struggle and tension that develops a conscience in general—if you are aware of your observable behaviour, you can be aware of the repercussions of who you are. But that doesn’t always make you feel good, or like you are doing good but you might sometimes just do good enough. Sometimes you feel beautiful. Sometimes you feel devastated. And it’s the flip of some cosmic coin what lands you into which feeling. Thus, sometimes the sigh takes the shape of being aleatory and sometimes it takes the quality of slogging along, broken, underwritten, undervalued, and underpaid but driven.

Brand’s writing, and the reading-work of her writing, invokes us to both see the world for what it is, and through this witnessing, ask how we might collectively desire to live differently.

That said, there is very little that is solely self-indulgent here, even when it portends to be. The difficult stakes and mistakes that Brand considers throughout provide a pathway, provide many strategies, through which we cannot easily reproduce the world that we live, witness, and survey, though we must try to anyway. Driven by the imperative of making something beautiful, complexity is often obscured, or redacted or made into theorem or manifesto in the fulfillment of linking morality to the artistic aims of lesser writers.  Brand, instead, uses no limits. Brand’s writing, and the reading-work of her writing, invokes us to both see the world for what it is, and through this witnessing, ask how we might collectively desire to live differently. It’s a curse, an undertaking, a project, and a life’s work. Sigh.

---

Threads and loose-ends: “I suppose it is a sign that we continue, says the author (85).”

Threads:  

EMN: So many threads run through this book, and many appear again in your pieces above. I feel the sigh Alexei describes when I read Linzey’s take on Brand’s withholding, especially considering the patience it takes to sort through “the vast contents of this book,” as described by Klara. Yet, the vitality Klara highlights is also captured in Alexei’s “she continues” and would seem to be crucial to the revolutionary patience described by Linzey. What other threads to you notice here? 

 

KdP: Since I focused on the verb, I was curious to see Linzey mention “noun-ness.” I’m particularly interested because, whereas I interpret the noun as static in relation to the active verb (soft quietude of the noun: “It’s useless to speak [...] the author says in a morning voice. Useless, says the clerk. The night passed in more nouns” (213)), you read the noun as “agency.” So I’m wondering how “noun-ness” differs from “noun”? Does the condition of being a certain way endow an object with a glimmer of subject position? Or does “noun-ness” just resemble “nowness” so closely that presence becomes agency?

Is the collection a successful project because of the reoccurring difficulties which plague the author, the clerk, and our own engagement with the act of reading and writing about what one has read or noticed?

LC: Klara, I was also drawn to your argument which advocates for the collection as a kind of action word. When I think of “noun-ness” I think of the act of invention. That act of Invention, the speaker’s willful elevation of the word noun, allows for that possibility of subjectivity. And your assertion that the author is made mute, “filtered through the clerk’s more vibrant and omnipresent documentation”, is a necessary evil which ensures that the grand project, those “acts of archivism” which Alexei speak to can be made organic. The articulation of the organic is something else that I return to in Klara’s piece. Such an ambitious project is overwhelmingly prone to the difficulty that Alexei points out. Is the collection a successful project because of the reoccurring difficulties which plague the author, the clerk, and our own engagement with the act of reading and writing about what one has read or noticed? I am leaning toward saying yes. Of course, my answer to the question I posed is contrived. Access truly does not necessarily translate into accessibility, according to Alexei’s piece, for the reader. 

KdP: I’m weirdly getting obsessed with parts of speech here! And am now wondering about the noun versus verb status of the archive? If the clerk is documenting everything, is that an act of rendering static? And how versatile is ethics? Aesthetics? Alexei’s sigh as expiration, breathing life in and out and between morality and beauty. 

APC: The silence, the withholding, as the “unconventional tools used to disrupt the status quo” that Linzey mentions resonated powerfully with me. Sent echoes through me just as Brand’s line from Verso 41 had struck a similar chord: “The silence was the best thing.” Why exactly? Is it relief or resistance? What does silence mean in the context not only of tackling one’s own moral-dilemmic/aesthetic choices (space to breathe, room to see) in one’s work but also how one’s work is to work against the too-loud powers of post-colonial coloniality? It reminded me of some of Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s work in As We Have Always Done. Silence as a radical rejection of engaging in a contemporary colonialist discourse that is itself given lip service by the wrong tongues, in the wrong voices. Klara’s acknowledgement that seriousness and vitality are mutually informative felt akin to my thinking of devastation and beauty’s co-existence throughout The Blue Clerk. The seeming poles of each give each other their requisite charges and are thus interdependent. And, like me, I felt both surviving in the same virtue of an “energy that cannot be static.” An energy that cannot be static is a great way to describe the writing and reading required for/of this book. It’s also perhaps why we, as artists, choose to do acts of archivism too—knowing that this is how the form continues, through our attention to it and its impact on our energetic presence: collecting and making compositions of the collections helps us to collect ourselves, continuously.  

Loose-Ends: 

EMN: Going back again to Klara’s “vast contents,” what are we leaving out here? No review is ever really complete, and certainly not with such a multidimensional book. We did not, for instance, get to John Coltrane, or Gertrude Stein. If we had a fourth panelist, what perspective would you like to see covered? Why? 

KdP: Brand’s own intertextuality really interests me. I wrote another essay (looking for a publisher haha …) exploring the conversation between The Blue Clerk and thirsty. But there are also other obvious touchpoints such as the references to Ossuaries, and the fact that The Blue Clerk was written more or less concomitantly with Theory and how that potentially expands or negotiates the book’s concerns. 

LC: I have lingering thoughts and questions about the roles that memory and imagination come to play in what the speaker(s) articulate. If it continues to trouble me, I may just have to tackle the question myself. 

APC: Were there to be a fourth panelist, I’d opt for someone to tell me more about all the imperatives, the directions given within. I’d want collected together lines like the ones in Verso 24: “You cannot live the same life as you imagine. You must live a smaller life, a more compact life. The life you imagine is too capacious, you will lose your balance.” Perhaps this is because I am always looking to writers to tell me how to live. I can never do it on my own. I suspect that Brand’s demands are often contradictory and yet, to me, indispensably insightful on how to be precisely because of these inconsistencies of belief.   

EMN: And finally, when you close your eyes and imagine the blue clerk (the character/speaker/figure, not the book) what feeling do you get? What do you see, smell, hear? 

KdP: Blue. Yellow. I can’t say that I’ve ever tried to embody either the clerk or the author, partly because their bipartite structure constantly blinks in and out of duality and convergence. That said, there was a moment during my reading process that I thought I was picking up on some connection between the clerk and the colour blue, and the author and the colour yellow (lemon). I liked this because blue and yellow are mystical in their relevance of sky and light, and created this sense of bright openness which transported me into the robes and halos of religious iconography, or onto a beach. Also, if you mix blue and yellow, you get green, returning to a theme of growth and vitality. Later I thought that I was projecting this thought and that the colours blue and yellow, despite appearing fairly frequently, aren’t systematically mapped onto the figures of clerk and author.

... but there is something to be said for an experience of The Blue Clerk [...] that rides both the wave of lyricism and aesthetics, images, and pigments, and the undercurrent of weight, reality, and consequence.

To continue with my rambling, though, colours are central to The Blue Clerk. Already in the title, obviously. But also in the lists constituted solely of colour descriptors: blue (Versos 18.4.1 and 36.1), yellow/lemon (Versos 18.4.3 and 56), and violet (Versos 8.1, 18.4.2, 35.2, 48, 57, and 59.1). Violet resembles violence: “Violet hand, violet notes, violet metre, violet hammer, violet bed, violet scissors [...] violet incarceration, violet ambulances, immediate violet” (214). The implicit torsion and mobile antagonism of the violet passages shade blue and yellow. (Someone recently sent me a direct message to say they liked my “SM practice.” Maybe I’m just attuned to subliminal, interlinear violence, but it took me 12 hours of deep thought to realize they meant social media practice and not sado masochism.) I’m aware that this response has become utterly affective, but there is something to be said for an experience of The Blue Clerk (in line with Alexei’s interpretation, I think) that rides both the wave of lyricism and aesthetics, images, and pigments, and the undercurrent of weight, reality, and consequence. “And fine with violence, as violence is the only word I know for elegance” (114). 

APC:  I see the body laid bare. Brand here, for me, shows skin. As if it is a blank page that knows the history and troubled relationships with all other blank pages before it. On the precipice. What is to come. What has come. Coming. To lay bare your work and its inherent difficulty to embody is the most physical I can feel outside my own body. So when I close my eyes: sex. Sex with myself somehow. I suppose the right hand really doesn’t always know what the left hand is doing, in the same way that the right hand pages owe a lot to the left-behind ones. Sigh.