York University confers honourary doctorate on Dionne Brand
November 17, 2019
October was a banner month for renowned poet, novelist and essayist Dionne Brand.
Starting with her second Toronto Book Award that honours authors of books of literary or artistic merit that are evocative of the city, she was bestowed with a honourary doctorate by York University.
Toronto’s third Poet Laureate has published 11 volumes of poetry, six books of fiction and two non-fiction works.
“To read her words, you are not burdened, but enlightened which is an extraordinary feat,” said John-Justin McMurtry, York University’s Interim Dean of the Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies, in presenting Brand to convocation. “Despite all the awards she has received including the Order of Canada, she’s foremost a storyteller, an advocate and an educator.”
In her address to the graduates, Brand stayed away from telling them what they should go out and do after acquiring their degrees.
“You have been living in the world and surviving it and you know what it is,” she said. “There’s no world outside waiting for you. You are in the world you have experienced. You are living in it and you have plans in it that may be intercepted or curtailed because of racism, sexism, islamophobia, homophobia or ableism and how these determine class and condition. You know all this. The university is not outside the world. You have not being hermetically sealed off from your living. Rather you are in the life of your family and friends and neighbours.”
Brand thanked the graduates for what they have done and what they are embarking on.
“Thank you for sitting in your own thoughts and your own contradictions for imagining where you will be tomorrow or next year or 10 years from now,” said the Fellow of the Academies for Arts, Humanities & Sciences of Canada. “…You have imagined the person with his face down on the ground with a knee in his back. You have imagined the person deciding ‘I can’t live here anymore, what will I do?’ You also imagine music perhaps and poetry perhaps and your next dance move perhaps and the whole possible world around you. I am a poet and a writer and that’s the indivisibility, the utopia I would like to gesture you towards.”
Dionne Brand addresses the graduates
Dr. Andrea Davis, with the support of Leslie Sanders who is an African-American & Black Canadian Literatures Professor, nominated Brand for the honour.
“As an eminent poet, novelist and educator writing in and about Canada, Brand has been singularly important in the articulation of a new Canadian imaginary that reflects the complex race, gender, class and sexual differences that coalesce in the formation of a uniquely Canadian multiculturalism,” said Davis who is the Chair of the Department of Humanities in the Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies. “In being named a member of the Order of Canada in its 50th anniversary year, she was recognized for her exceptional contributions to Canadian Literature and poetry and for promoting awareness of the field of gender studies and intercultural relations. It is this combination of her life’s work as an artist, activist and public intellectual, devoted to the service of humankind, Toronto and Canada, that sets her apart as an extraordinary nominee.”
Davis noted that Brand’s body of work has altered the landscape of Canadian literary and feminist studies by conveying into the mainstream the voices of Black, Caribbean, migrant and LBGTQ women, accounting for the ways in which these new registers contribute both to historical and contemporary narrations of Canada.
“Through her intense engagement with issues of social justice and trenchant critique of Canada’s exclusive assumptions of Whiteness and patriarchy, Brand’s work has revealed a Canada, and Toronto in particular, that derives its artistic, intellectual and cultural energy from the diversity of communities by and through which it is framed,” she added. “This spectacular vision of Canada’s potential as a 20th and 21st century multicultural diasporic space has brought Toronto and Canada to the attention of the world and established Brand as one of our most important interlocutors.”
Chancellor Greg Sorbara & President & Vice-Chancellor Rhonda Lenton with awardee Dionne Brand
Six days after being bestowed with her fourth honourary doctorate, Brand – who has honourary degrees from the University of Windsor, Thorneloe University and the University of Toronto -- returned to York University to deliver the keynote address at an event celebrating the Canadian Writers in Person 20th anniversary.
In the last two decades since its introduction by Rhodes Scholar John Unrau, the program has connected readers with over 200 of Canada’s most talented writers.
To mark the landmark occasion, an endowment was unveiled in support of Canadian Writers in Person that will ensure the reading series is a permanent feature, covering travel expenses and honoraria to bring authors from across Canada to present their work to the York community.
“Canadian Writers in Person is a fantastic program,” said Brand whose dedication to social activism is unyielding. “It is a unique opportunity that brings writers in Canada together with their present and future audiences.”
She won the $10,000 Toronto Book Award for her novel, ‘Theory’, which is a smart, sensual and witty novel about what happens when love and intellect are set on a collision course.
“In this novel of ideas, Dionne Brand dazzles with smart, jazz-like storytelling and the utterly engrossing voice of its narrator,” said the jury. “’Theory’ delivers a potent dose of meticulous attention to both humour and the seriousness of its subject so that Toronto comes to each page anew. What many will recognize as love is turned into a dissertation, and by turns, the other way around. This protagonist is playful, cunning, honest and self-aware and the book surprises from cover to cover. With this wry, beautiful, profoundly philosophical novel, Brand accomplishes something reserved for the most masterful writers of our time.”
In 2006, she captured the award for her novel, ‘What We All Long For’, that tells the overlapping stories of four friends in their early- to mid-20s as they navigate Toronto as queer people, people of color and children of immigrants.
Migrating from Trinidad & Tobago in 1970 after graduating from Naparima Girls High School in San Fernando, Brand completed undergraduate and graduate degrees at the University of Toronto and is a recipient of the Governor General’s Award for Poetry, the Trillium Book Award for ‘Land to Light On’, the Pat Lowther Award for ‘thirsty’, the Griffin Poetry Award for ‘Ossuaries’ and the Harbourfront Festival and Blue Metropolis Violet Prizes.
She teaches Creative Writing and Literature at the University of Guelph.
