REVIEWS
An Autobiography of the Autobiography of Reading is a collection of five essays by Dionne Brand, who turns her critical and uncompromising gaze on herself to understand the afterlives of colonization and the intricate matrix of double consciousness that it creates. In the first essay, Brand remembers posing for a photograph with her sisters and cousin, a photograph to be sent to England, where her mother and aunt are training to be nurses. Brand admits that England “is referred to with reverence as ‘away’ or ‘abroad.’ England is as much the spectator, and for England, standing behind my mother and my aunt, we must make a good appearance.” She goes on to admit that she does not recognize the girl in the photograph, even though she remembers the occasion and actions. Brand hones in on this absence of herself to interrogate events “marked at every step with colonial imperatives,” from the photographer Mr. Wong’s probable historical connection with Chinese indentured labour to her own British education, during which she read novels such as Vanity Fair by William Thackeray and Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte. Brand turns her attention to these novels among others, focusing on her own adolescent identifications with characters and admitting her unconscious dismissal of Black characters, such as that of Miss Swartz in Vanity Fair, described by Thackeray as “the rich woolly-haired mulatto from St. Kitt’s.” Instead, Brand identified with characters who were white and normatively feminine: “good, kind, gentle.” She says that the “geopolitics of empire had already prepared [her] for this identification […] coloniality constructs outsides and insides—worlds to be chosen, disturbed,
interpreted, and navigated—in order to live something like a real self.” Brand’s invigorating close reading unlocks the sites in which Black life is made inanimate and silenced. In so doing, Brand enacts a radical strategy of decentring and undoing coloniality. By inhabiting these absences in her life and in the texts of her education, she insists on “the difficult work of narrativizing the life of Black people.” She offers counternarratives, which insist on unstitching the self from the colonial gaze, speaking the multiplicity of the “I,” changing forms of address, and storying lives that do not revolve around Empire. An Autobiography of the Autobiography of Reading is exemplary and eye-opening. It reckons with coloniality and the narrative demands it makes in our lives and in our stories, examining canonical texts through close-reading strategies and reflexive thinking that are unparalleled in their clarity and rigour. In a mere fifty pages, Brand undoes the crux of colonial academic pedagogy by insisting on the autobiographical specificity of Black lives and of those who cannot see themselves in literature. This is the education we have been waiting for.
THE DYZGRAPHXST Canisia Lubrin (McClelland & Stewart) Reviewed by Nehal El-Hadi The dedication feels prescient: For the impossible citizens of the ill world. This marks Lubrin as a soothsayer, for how else was she to know that her book’s release would occur during what M. NourbeSe Philip has referred to as “these catastrophic Covidian times”? As we shelter in place, I read The Dyzgraphxst as both a truth-speaking work of prophesy and as testimony for what has come before. Lubrin’s follow-up to the alchemical Voodoo Hypothesis (Buckrider Books, 2017) is a book-length poem
REVIEWS // 53
AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF READING Dionne Brand (University of Alberta Press) Reviewed by Shazia Hafiz Ramji
