Parallel: Parallax—The Melancholy Dialectics of Dionne Brand

Abstract

In his discussion of Edward Said’s formulation of the author’s ‘career’, Abdirahman Hussein summarizes a key dilemma of the modern author with two questions. The first, which privileges the text as object, asks whether the author’s ‘pre-literary life is a preparation for a career or a lost opportunity’. The second question, viewed conversely and focusing on the author, asks whether the text’s departure from empirical reality constitutes an ‘affirmation or augmentation’ or a ‘negation’ of the author’s actual existence.³ Given this reflexive relation, Hussein concludes, the writer is ‘condemned to a duality of perspectives engaging himself [sic] in a perpetual inner dialogue’.⁴

That man told me he liked my poetry but not my politics (As if they are different).¹

A map [] is only a life of conversations about a forgotten list of irretrievable selves.²