Interview by Uche Umezurike
Questions of displacement and diaspora haunt Brandon Wint’s poetry. In Divine Animal (Write Bloody North, 2020), Wint traverses the watery routes of memory to unearth the various ways that the spectres of history haunt modernity. Both wayfarer and seeker, Wint recognizes that the brutalities of the present perversely echo the violence of the past. He seeks to untangle the rhizomes of identity while embracing his complicated inheritance, in a world riven with an increasing sense of collapse. In tones incantatory and bracing, tender yet urgent, Wint reminds us to question what we have inherited: family, land, history, economy, sociality, and our planet.
Uche Umezurike: In Divine Animal, the sequence “Incantation: The Memory of War” revolves around oceanic imagery, recalling the transatlantic slave trade, the new world, and its plantation economy. The sea offers you a way to consider genealogy and memory. Could you say a little more about this poem?
Brandon Wint: For perhaps the entirety of my time engaging with poetry in a serious way, I have been interested in the notion of inheritance. I find that poetry writing feeds, or assuages, an unavoidable urge I have to reckon with my personal and familial history. While I was writing the manuscript that became Divine Animal, I was reading books like Dionne Brand’s A Map To The Door of No Return: Notes To Belonging, Christina Sharpe’s In The Wake: On Blackness and Being, and The Black Maria by Aracelis Girmay. In their own ways, each of these books meditates powerfully on water, migration, historical ruptures, and ontologies of Blackness that arise from being subjects of certain colonial processes. Brand, Sharpe, and Girmay are some of my favourite writers, so these things were on my mind. It’s not that I oriented my reading habits toward these subjects, but my favourite writers help me think and write in ways that might otherwise be impossible—these threads of genealogy and memory and Blackness carried from my reading into my writing. I also happened to be on tour in Australia as certain segments of the poem were coming together, so I had time and space to think about the colonial project that created Australia, and the forms of violence visited upon Black populations there. In that way I was primed to write a poem that was expansive and which implicated oceans and seas as sites of history, witness, migration, violence, and transformation.
As the son of people born and raised in Jamaica and Barbados, I have been thinking about how being surrounded by water influences culture and possibility, particularly in the contexts of my Caribbean-Canadian lineage. A poem like “Memory of Water” is an example of the way my thinking on these subjects has evolved over many years of contemplation and reading.
UU: Belonging is a prominent theme in your poetry, and so is longing. In “Nowhere,” the poet intones, “Sometimes thirst is so large / it becomes a country without a name.” What do you find interesting about the idea of longing/belonging?
BW: As I said, I think often about the notion of inheritance, because so much of my capacity for self-awareness and healing stems from an understanding of my family, the people that raised me, and what they inherited from their own parents and ancestors. Perhaps this preoccupation with inheritance does produce, or testify to, a kind of longing; there is naturally a limit to how much I can know or piece together about my family in trying to better understand myself. As I’ve aged, I have grown more interested in who my grandparents were before they were my grandparents, or who they were before they were parents at all. Of course, they don’t owe me the satisfaction of my curiosity about their lives—I don’t ask them to dig up their personal histories often for the sake of my poetry—but yes, many of my poems are about trying to piece together the stories they’ve told about what it felt like to come to Canada from the Caribbean. I think the longing, or the desire for belonging that one might feel in my poetry, is just an outcome of the fact that I cannot reliably answer the questions associated with how I came to be *here*, in this body, in this country, as the inheritor of my particular childhood, my particular life.
I tend to view the human condition as inherently bewildering. In my poetry, I am almost always trying to reconcile this bewilderment, the slippery nature of what it means to know anything as a human being. I suppose this produces a sort of longing. Poetry helps me transform or reconcile the sense of alienation that might otherwise arise from the vastness of that which I do not, or cannot, firmly know—but can feel, nonetheless.
UU: The section titled “Reckoning” deals with colonialism and anti-Black racism, but it also touches upon sea pollution, wildfires, flooding, and ecological degeneration. In “Theory,” the poet asks, “How might our hands animate to solve it?” If I were to ask, considering this moment of planetary crisis, what is the use of poetry—how would you answer me?
BW: In my own experience as a writer of poetry, I would say that poetry’s role in my life is to clarify desire. Of course, poetry can do so many things and be used in so many ways, so there is no way to answer this question in any ultimate sense. Politically, though, or as it relates to poetry’s role in addressing moments of crisis, I think the urgent and distilled nature of poetic language can help clarify the emotional and metaphysical stakes that are at play. It’s not that the act of writing poetry alone will ever be entirely sufficient in a crisis—but that poetry, in so often trying to find language for the inexpressible, can be useful in distilling the crisis into a language that is comprehensible in emotional and cerebral terms. Sometimes, finding the language for a problem liberates us to deal with the problem through action. In all of the crisis areas within my personal life, I have used poetry this way. For larger, more global problems, I think poetry is one tool in helping us manifest a collective/global consciousness that will instruct us toward action.
UU: I would be interested to hear your thoughts about what poetry is to you. Moreover, where do you find inspiration?
BW: Foremostly, poetry is a way for me to come to terms with my humanity. It is a hard thing to put into words, but I think, for me, poetry is the mode by which I study the deepest questions associated with my humanity. As an extension of that, I think writing poetry helps me assess the proximity of the human condition to other natural and spiritual conditions I can bear witness to. I am often trying to write myself into closer spiritual relationships with wind, rain, the sun, the birds I encounter, the snow and ice that have oriented (painfully) so many of my days in Ontario and Alberta. I think poetry is one of the ways that I make a claim to whatever intersections I can see between the human condition and the Divine or spirited underpinnings of life on this planet. Poetry, for me, is a way of being in the world and with the world.
UU: You would agree that doing art in this pandemic period has grown more challenging than ever before. How have you managed to do art throughout this period?
BW: The primary difficulty I’ve felt as a writer in 2021 is related to the inability to write in dynamic indoor spaces. In pre-pandemic times, most of my writing would happen in cafes; I enjoyed that because the people in the cafe were always changing, coming and going. My writing was often sparked by watching people interact, or listening in to the dynamic range of sounds and conversations. Writing in public space was a way for me to be with the world and be a focused writer at the same time. The pandemic made my creative rituals more sedentary, isolated, less connected to a sense of belonging to a neighbourhood of active human and non-human participants. Slowly, I am growing more comfortable being in public space again, but I have not taken my notebook and pen to the cafe in a long, long while. In 2022, I think I’ll be able to reclaim some of my writing rituals.
Brandon Wint is an Ontario born poet and spoken word artist who uses poetry to attend to the joy and devastation and inequity associated with this era of human and ecological history. For more than a decade, Brandon has been a sought-after, touring performer, and has presented his work in the United States, Australia, Lithuania, Latvia, and Jamaica. His poems and essays have been published in national anthologies, including The Great Black North: Contemporary African-Canadian Poetry (Frontenac House, 2013) and Black Writers Matter (University of Regina Press, 2019). Divine Animal is his debut book of poetry.
Uche Peter Umezurike holds a PhD in English from the University of Alberta, Canada. An alumnus of the International Writing Program (USA) and winner of the Nigeria Prize for Literary Criticism, Umezurike is a co-editor of Wreaths for Wayfarers, an anthology of poems. He is the author of Wish Maker (Masobe Books, 2021) and Double Wahala, Double Trouble (Griots Lounge Publishing, 2021).