Ossuaries: Life Underground

Dionne Brand's poetry deals passionately with love, yearning, and the accummulated mistakes that make us who we are.

There’s an urgency in the voice of Yasmine, the speaker in Dionne Brand’s most recent poetry book, Ossuaries. It’s an urgency that comes from the capacity to recognize the accumulation of missteps taken by a culture on a determined path away from democracy and away from life and love, even as it strains to grasp precisely these things. Our path seems also to meander away from democratic ideals explored and embraced by so many 19th- and 20th-century thinkers, writers, and musicians, and instead runs ever deeper into our new century’s nightmares.

The thing that is hard to accept is that our ideals and our nightmares are hopelessly intertwined with one another. “Looking back,” says Yasmine, “my dreams were full of prisons.” Yasmine productively implicates herself in the brutal accumulation of bones that occurs in each of the book’s “ossuaries,” or bone tombs – the structuring metaphor Brand uses to separate her long poem into sections. Yasmine’s voice is so full of grief, rage, and passion that it’s almost unbearable, and yet there is an undeniable and wrenching beauty in it. She lives out her “underground year” sorting through the bones of recent history and trying to work out where a little hope or loveliness might suddenly erupt in spite of the litany of horrors. Though there is bitterness in it, the way in which she holds herself accountable is itself beautiful, as a gesture of hope in world where the most culpable do not interrogate themselves.

Yasmine is a woman with a story. She has an ill-fated love affair. There have been detonations – perhaps she has fled the Algerian Revolution to arrive in Havana with nothing but a duffle bag and an orange dress. For Brand, story matters a great deal, but what happened and who did what to whom is not nearly as important as the interconnectedness of lives, and the traces that remain when connections are broken.

Ossuaries is a book about the possibilities and failures of love – love for other people certainly, but also for ideas and for other living creatures. But the bones themselves are prisons that make love impossible: “… so don’t tell me how love will rescue me,/I was carnivorous about love, I ate love to the ankles,/my thighs are gnawed with love/still and yet I cannot have loved,/since living was all I could do and for that,/I was caged in bone spur endlessly …”

The problem for Yasmine, and for us, is that our ill fortune, our violent actions, our failed hopes have no roots except in ourselves. Our bones, the very structures of our being, are our problem. They are also what accumulate as a consequence of our failures. Yasmine says, “I drowned in vats of sulfurous defenses/the crate of bones I’ve become, good/I was waiting to throw my limbs on the pile ...”

The more the bones accumulate, the more we are charged with the task “to undo, and undo and undo and undo this infinitive/of arrears ...” The devastation is overwhelming, but in the desire to undo it lies a kind of hope, and connectivity to both the life and the love that Yasmine remembers and calls to in the face of her despair. But life itself, in all its variety, exists with all the “nature” sucked out of it. Whenever Yasmine gestures towards something we might think of as “natural” and as existing prior to human interference, she also shows us human interference as a done deal. At the level of image juxtaposition, the organic things in which hope lie are already contaminated when she gives them to us: “… who will see the bedraggled gawping doorways,/the solitary deaths of finches that winters strand,/before smiles were wire, and before knives/ were food and teeth were asphalt,/before sunlight was acid, on cedar porches/and hair was exiled beneath gas stoves ...”

Yasmine gestures desperately to a prior time before there was so much accumulated grief to be undone, but she is fully aware no such time ever existed. “[W]hat species of ants live in sugary maple trees/that are about to die in a former year?” she asks. And elsewhere, thinking of human beings as walking ossuaries: “perhaps we were always lying there,/dead on our feet and recyclable ...” Time in this poem is like “split willows” or music “that couldn’t be music surely,/or was already music anyway ...” We are both ahead of and before the moment she longs for, and yet without longing for that moment, we have no hope at all.

The book is suffused with the kind of resigned and nostalgic yearning for that which one cannot have, which the Portuguese call saudade (or sodade for fans of Cesaria Evora). Yasmine’s yearning is yearning for a parallel present that will never be ours because of all the accumulated errors, the accumulated bones, that now make us who we are.