A Model for Unsettling Thought in the Anthropocene:A Model for Unsettling Thought in the Anthropocene:
Dionne Brand’s The Blue Clerk: Ars Poetica in 59 Versos
Kostyn Petrunick – kp15le@brocku.ca
Supported by: SSHRC
Overview Dionne Brand’s 2018 book, The Blue Clerk: Ars Poetica in 59 Versos, is, as the subtitle implies, a vast poetic meditation on the role of authors and poets in society, philosophy, political theory, education, and ideology. The book is structured around ongoing conversations between the figures of the author and the clerk who is responsible for the author’s left-hand pages – that is, what she withholds. Their conversation focuses on the life of the author (a figure hard to distinguish from Brand herself) interrogating the ways that she knows what she knows, reflecting on her memories of growing up in Trinidad, reading widely, going to school, moving to Toronto, doing activist work, and writing. Furthermore, the figures watch, and criticize their past selves, which I will argue models a radical self-criticism that often meditates on race, gender and epistemology.
(Richardson)
This form enables Brand’s poetic commentary to move seamlessly from discussing poetry reading events to how one might approach translating the political philosophy of Charles Mingus’ classic jazz album, Pithecanthropus Erectus (1956), and the total inadequacy of such a project (166). The Blue Clerk intertwines moments of the author’s life with global histories. Although this wide, personal-political, local- global scope is not new to Brand’s work – in fact, it is a recurring theme generating substantial scholarly discussion (Almeida; Barrett; Brydon; Vellino) – the formally critical mode through which the author holds a conversation with herself, is new, and therefore necessitates new scholarship.
(Redfern)
(Diego)
the clerk asks.
honestly for once” (my blue 238).
This segment of dialogue in the form of a note,
at the bottom of a page of notes exemplifies the
kinds of work The Blue Clerk does; it unsettles the
author’s honesty with herself, and the ideological
and oppressive roots of her thinking.
(Burston 2019a)
(duncan1890)
Literature Review Most of the existing criticism on Brand’s work that
engages with discussions of environmental issues focuses
on her long poem, Inventory (2006). In Inventory a nameless
figure commits to witnessing all the violence that comes
across her television screen in a year.
Cheryl Lousley argues that Inventory “enables a planetary
ethics” built out of “materialism” and “figured in an
ecological mode … that is attentive to difference and
particularly among but also beyond humans” (38) Lousley
focuses on the relationship between being ethically
compromised by global systems of exploitation,
extraction and violence and responsible witnessing as
enacted “from a partial and singular perspective open to
otherness” (42).
Likewise, in the preface to A Billion Black Anthropocenes or
None (2018), self-described "Inhuman Geographer,"
Kathryn Yusoff, writes that Brand’s “poetic relation,
given without the possibility of resettling, insists that you
must stay with and in the displacement” (xi). In Brand’s
poetry, Yusoff finds “the new languages and structures
of thought that a turn of epoch, the end of the world of
Empire, seems to require” (xi). However, Yusoff ’s
discussion of Brand focuses on pre-Blue Clerk writing.
While all these approaches provide interesting avenues
into Brand criticism, The Blue Clerk is such a radically
different text it needs a different critical approach. For
this, I turn to a theoretical framework which brings two
contemporary thinkers of the so-called “Anthropocene”
together: Timothy Morton and Yusoff.
(University of Minnesota Press)
Well, Dr. Brand, if The Blue Clerk attempts to model appropriate responses to similar ethical- intellectual crises as those in Inventory, why does it develop the seemingly autobiographical author and clerk- interlocutor figures rather than work from a single, impersonal vantage point like in Inventory?
At this stage in my research, I argue that the author-clerk dialogue
resembles staying with the trouble, to use Donna Haraway’s phrase (1),
of ethical and particularly, epistemological, impurity.
Isn’t this a bit much? What
ever happened to trying to
avoid intentional fallacy…?
photographs of me out
getting weird!
(Burston Dionne Brand)
Theoretical Framework: I begin with the story of the Anthropocene – that, to
paraphrase Steffen et al., humans are “Now Overwhelming
the Great Forces of Nature” – which frames the planetary
crises of environmental degradation in terms of urgency
and scale. The Anthropocene is urgent because it is the
new geologic epoch we – that is, the Anthropos – have
characterized through our intervention into natural
processes which has thrown them into varying states of
precarity and collapse. The composition of the
Anthropocene’s myriad crises appear to stem from what
Morton terms, “hyperobjects,” things that individuals can
only glimpse in pieces, if at all, because they “are massively
distributed in time and space relative to humans” (1). If, as
Morton frames it, the epoch’s component elements are so
hard to grasp, the stories we tell to bridge the gap between
unknowable and actionable are vital.
(Vrana)
The name of the epoch itself contains much of its story. In various disciplinary settings, other names (and thus narratives) have been proposed to mixed success though none have displaced the ever popular “Anthropocene.” As many have argued, the problem is that the Anthropocene blames all of humanity, the Anthropos, for the ramifications of the actions of a privileged group of wealthy, mostly Euro-American men which disproportionately disrupt the lives of poor, Indigenous peoples, People of Colour, and those in the so-called “Global South” (Davis et al.; Malm and Hornborg).
In this way, the implied historical narrative of the Anthropocene articulates a Raymond Williams-esque “radically selective” history which ratifies the “contemporary order” (115- 116) by eliding accountability via a radical distribution of culpability.
(Hirschfeld 2020b)
Yusoff proposes an extremely productive counter approach to the narratives of the Anthropocene. She argues for what she calls “a billion Black Anthropocenes,” or countless expressions of the epoch which present “race as central to the [its] geosocial and geo-Poethical formations” (104-105). These Anthropocenes would enable an unsettling of the “White Anthropocene” in which “the terms of humanity” needs “refashioning at a collective level” (105).
While the Anthropocene may not be the best taxonomical categorization for our current geological epoch, this paper takes the position that its prevalence necessitates engagement. My aim is to ensure that the term “Anthropocene” conjures the criticism it provokes – to make sure there is a clerk attached to the word who will constantly problematize it.
(Hirschfeld 2020a)
Methodology My project approaches the issue of poetry in and of the
Anthropocene primarily in terms of form. In addition to
analyzing the conversation between the author and the clerk, I
will close read the book’s various places and environments to
untangle what Nathan Dize calls The Blue Clerk’s “new layers
of meaning and sensation” generated by the effects of
“environmental decay” on “the poet’s papers” (Dize).
Likewise, I will close read the ways book is separated into
carefully numbered and unnumbered notes, “Stipules,” and
“Versos,” reference to and direct quotation of their
Grandfather’s logbook of sea levels and rainfalls (9-11) and
use of the Latinate scientific terms for insects and plants. This
obsession with documenting and taxonomizing is especially
relevant to the universalizing scientism that undergirds the
Anthropocene as a problematic concept, and Brand’s use of
them unsettles and reproposes their legitimacies. (Richardson)
Research Questions
(Burston 2019b)
Slide Show Works Cited (1/3) Almeida, Sandra Regina Goulart. “‘Impossible Citizens’ in the Global City: Dionne Brand’s Discourses of
Resistance.” Ilha Do Desterro, no. 56, 2009, pp. 119–36.
Barrett, Paul. “‘There Are Atomic Openings in My Chest / to Hold the Wounded’: Intimacy, the Body and
Transnational Solidarity in Dionne Brand’s Inventory.” Canadian Woman Studies, vol. 27, no. 2, 3, 2009,
pp. 100–06.
Brand, Dionne. Inventory. McClelland & Stewart, 2006.
---. The Blue Clerk: Ars Poetica in 59 Versos. McClelland & Stewart, 2018.
Brydon, Diana. “Dionne Brand’s Global Intimacies: Practicing Affective Citizenship.” University of Toronto
Quarterly, vol. 76, no. 3, July 2007, pp. 990–1006.
Burston, Cole. Canadian Writer and Poet Dionne Brand Poses for a Photograph in Her Toronto Home on September 10,
2018. 2019a, https://www.thestar.com/entertainment/books/2019/06/13/dionne-brand-robin-
richardson-win-ontarios-trillium-book-awards.html. The Toronto Star.
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Davis, Janae, et al. “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, … Plantationocene?: A Manifesto for Ecological Justice in an
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