From Historical Rupture to Cultural Reconstruction: Memory, Diaspora, and Identity in Dionne Brand’s Poetry

This study examines the reconstruction of memory, history, and cultural identity in selected poetry by Dionne Brand with particular attention to the poems “No Language Is Neutral”, “Return,” and Land to Light On. The study argues that Brand, with her innovative use of literary language, transforms poetry into a counter-archival space in which fragmented personal and collective histories can be remembered, interrogated, and reimagined. Primarily drawing on Maurice Halbwachs’s concept of collective memory, Paul Gilroy’s account of the Black Atlantic, Stuart Hall’s formulation of cultural identity, and Erica L. Johnson’s concept of the “neo-archive,” the study explores how slavery, colonialism, migration, and racial displacement shape diasporic experiences. The study focuses on language, ancestry, historical absence, geographical displacement, and belonging. This paper establishes that Brand does not present memory as a transparent recovery of an intact past; rather, memory becomes a reconstructive practice through which fragments, silences, and inherited absences acquire cultural meaning. Her poetry also complicates the relationship between land and belonging by challenging the assumption that geographical rootedness guarantees identity. Eventually, Brand’s poetic practice presents Black Canadian cultural identity as dynamic, diasporic, relational, and continually negotiated through memory, language, history, and place.