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I have crossed an ocean I have lost my tongue from the root of the old one a new one has sprung
Grace Nichols (80)
I have lost my place, or my place has deserted me. ... The pleasure and the paradox of my own exile is that I belong wherever I am.
George Lamming (50)
THE POSTCOLONIAL WRITINGS of women throughout the African diaspora often reflect an ambivalent attitude toward place and language. At times, these writers express both a desire to return to a homeland and a corresponding search for an untainted language in which to articulate an authentic black experience and self; at other times, they are suspicious of nostalgia and of the belief in, and hope for, a neutral language. Dionne Brand's poetry exhibits this ambivalence, yet also moves toward a notion of the exiled self as place and belonging, and a conception of the language that will voice her experience as a multivoiced discourse in both standard English and Caribbean nation language. As a lesbian of colour, Brand is triply aware of language as a powerful sign that creates and regulates racial, gender, and sexual identities. Consequently, she locates her critique of language not in an attempt to resurrect or construct a neutral language, nor from a liminal position between standard English and nation language, but in the heteroglossia of both languages, which articulates, even while it determines, her identity as dialogic and dialectical.
The concept of language as formative of the very subjectivity or experience uttered in it is at the fore of contemporary theory. Language is no longer merely medium or sign but the powerful determiner of that which it signals. One's experience and identity can be denied in the language that one employs to articulate them, an effect that standard English has had upon Caribbean people of colour argues Edward Kamau Brathwaite in History of the Voice: The Development of Nation Language in Anglophone Caribbean Poetry. He asserts that standard English can articulate only Eurocentric experience, an experience alien to Caribbean people of African descent, yet better known to them because of their colonial education than their own experience: "In other words, we haven't got the syllables, the syllabic intelligence, to describe the hurricane, which is our...