Sans Souci: And Other Stories - Softcover

Brand, Dionne

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0932379702 ISBN 13: 9780932379702

Publisher: Firebrand Books, 1989

Synopsis

Eleven stories deal with rape, humiliation, Caribbean life, childhood, teachers, American football, and war

About this title

About the Author:

Dionne Brand is a poet and writer living in Toronto. She has published six books of poetry: 'Fore Day Morning, Earth Magic (children's poetry), Winter Epigrams and Epigrams to Ernesto Cardenal in Defense of Claudia, Primitive Offensive, Chronicles of the Hostile Sun, and No Language Is Neutral, nominated for the Canadian Governor General's Award, 1990. She is co-author of the non-fiction work Rivers Have Sources, Trees Have Roots: Speaking of Racism. Her non-fiction book No Burden to Carry: Narratives of Black Working Women in Ontario 1920s to 1950s is a collection of oral histories. Her book A Map to the Door of No Return explores the importance of identity belonging in a culturally diverse and changing world. It has met with rave reviews. Brand also works in documentary film with the Women's StudioStudio Dof the National Film Board of Canada. She was associate director and writer of Older, Stronger, Wiser, a portrait film about older Black women in Canada, and co-director of Sisters in the Struggle, about contemporary Black activists in Canada. Long Time Comin', released in 1993, looks at two African Canadian artists, Grace Channer and Faith Nolan.

From Publishers Weekly:

Brooding, obsessive stories of contemporary black life in Canada and the Caribbean offer an intimate view of women driven by poverty to leave their homes for a hostile new country. Most works are essentially monologues, capturing the language and experiences of illegal aliens isolated yet further by their sex. Brand, the author of several nonfiction titles including Earth Magic , impresses with her fictional debut; her lyrical gifts are unobtrusively displayed, and her characters are affecting. A black nanny in "No rinsed blue sky, no red flower fences" lower case per book typography holds her little charges' hands "as if they were more precious than she, made of gold, and she just the black earth around." The narrator of "At the Lisbon Plate" detests such black self-abnegation and caustically criticizes the colonial arrogance of books like Camus's The Stranger : "Killing an Arab . . . is not and never has been an alienating experience for a European." Brand's vivid but fragmentary explorations will leave readers eager for a full-length work covering the same terrain.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Firebrand Books
• Publication date: 1989
• ISBN 10: 0932379702
• ISBN 13: 9780932379702
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 150