The sovereignty of the imagination: Poetic authority and the fiction of North Atlantic universals in Dionne Brand’s Chronicles of the Hostile Sun

Introduction

Near the end of her fifth poetry collection, Chronicles of the Hostile Sun (1984), Dionne Brand writes, “I’m sick of writing history/I’m sick of scribbling dates” (pp. 1–2). She is frustrated after witnessing another imperialist incursion on Caribbean sovereignty, and she dreads the responsibility she feels to use her art as a venue for correcting misconceptions about the region that come about as a result of these incursions. ¹ And yet this is the task that the Trinidadian-Canadian writer takes on as she documents her time as a participant-observer in the Grenada Revolution. She is a chronicler of history and dates. The revolution, led by a young party known as the NJM—or New Jewel Movement—attempted to improve Grenada’s postcolonial condition by bringing socialist principles to the nation. It began on 13 March 1979 with a popular bloodless coup expelling Eric Gairy, the nation’s first Prime Minister, and replacing him with the charismatic lawyer and NJM leader Maurice Bishop. Four and a half years later, the revolution came to a grinding halt, however, when Bishop and his closest allies were murdered by the Grenadian military as a result of internal party conflict. Days later, the American government used the disaster as an opportunity to invade Grenada, citing the need to protect American medical students on the island. This was a transparent ruse. The international community knew that since the revolution’s inception, the US government had been deeply uncomfortable with the NJM’s close ties to Cuba. The Grenada Revolution represented, in part, a victory for Cuban internationalism, and the United States was concerned about what the revolution’s success would indicate to the rest of the region, particularly the recently independent Anglophone nations.

Brand’s personal account of the revolution is an unconventional history. She describes the hypocrisy of the Global North and the double bind faced by small countries in the Global South who are forced to compete on the unlevel playing field created by globalization in the postcolonial era. Brand was a participant-observer working with the People’s Revolutionary Government (PRG) for several months in 1983. Chronicles captures the innocence, energy, optimism, and anger that characterized both the development of the revolution in Grenada and the early stages of Brand’s career as a writer. In her work, the sense of possibility that the revolution initially generated is tainted by the mass violence that marked the collapse of the PRG and the American invasion of Grenada in October 1983. In the immediate aftermath of this violence, Brand uses poetry as a tool to shape memories of the revolution and as a salve in the midst of postrevolution trauma. She contends not only with the literal violence of fratricide within the PRG, and US military aggression, but also with the epistemological violence of how the revolution is narrated by the American government in order to justify their invasion of Grenada. Brand uses poetry to think through what it means to claim sovereignty in the late 20th-century, postindependent Caribbean and to unsettle “facts” about the revolution’s history. The poems in Chronicles discredit US imperialist rhetoric and policy in the Caribbean. Her addressee is the reader living in the North Atlantic and the Grenadian reader, both of whom are targets of imperialist rhetoric. I argue that Brand’s account provides a radical counterpoint from which to reinterpret justifications for the invasion put forward by the administration of US President Ronald Reagan. Her poetry produces a more nuanced reading of the revolution as an historical process, while also shedding light on the impact of the revolution on a Caribbean literary imaginary. While she was sick of “writing history,” her poetry remains an important document for the interpretation of Caribbean history in this period as it articulates the need to question and critique historical narratives about the region that originate from North Atlantic government sources.

North Atlantic fiction

A major theme in Chronicles is the geopolitical situation that maintains conditions of uneven development between former colonial powers in the Global North and former colonies in the Global South. Brand riffs on the cannibalistic nature of neocolonialism. As opposed to the popular image of the Global North providing aid to help feed the poorer nations of the Global South, she brings attention to the policies of Global North governments that cannibalize Global South politics, society, and culture. She spins the trope of the cannibal, from which 16th-century European explorers named the Caribbean, to expose the continued exploitation of the Caribbean via European and North American political and economic interests. ² Brand describes this exploitation alternately as a kind of devouring and as a form of force-feeding: Caribbean people are either consumed by the West or forced to consume the values, political ideologies, and narratives of the West. In his book Global Transformations: Anthropology and the Modern World (2003), anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot analyzes the semiotics by which the North Atlantic orchestrates its domination of the rest of the world. He coins the term “North Atlantic universals” to describe

… words that project the North Atlantic experience on a universal scale that they themselves have helped to create. North Atlantic universals are particulars that have gained a degree of universality, chunks of human history that have become historical standards. Words such as development, progress, democracy, and nation-state are exemplary members of that family that contracts or expands according to contexts and interlocutors. (Trouillot, 2003: 61)

Trouillot argues that these terms are not at all universals and that outside of the North Atlantic any claim of universality for these terms is actually fiction. Their relevance is lost once exported to places like the Caribbean. Unfortunately, the export of North Atlantic universals to the Global South has been a critical part of colonialism and globalization since the early modern period. Part of Brand’s project in Chronicles is to criticize how nations of the North Atlantic use these “universal” concepts in such a way as to silence local histories in (neo)colonized spaces. Reading Brand alongside Trouillot illuminates not only how North Atlantic universals erase local histories but also how they obscure the particularity of the North Atlantic contexts from which the terms themselves arise. Within the framework of North Atlantic universals, Trouillot (2003: 35) points out, terms such as “democracy” achieve descriptive as well as prescriptive power. “That prescription,” he writes, “is inherent in the very projection of a historically limited experience—that of the North Atlantic—on the world stage” (Trouillot, 2003: 35–36). In Trouillot’s conception of the North Atlantic universal as a fiction or colonial construct one finds something akin to Brand’s efforts to undo US narratives of Caribbean revolution as undemocratic and oppressive. She aims to write the Grenada Revolution in a way that reveals the revolution as the collective project of Caribbean people whose goals and values have points of similarity as well as points of difference from those in the Global North. This work recognizes Caribbean societies as being generative of their own epistemologies, philosophies, and ideologies. Brand’s vision of sovereignty, coming as it does by a convergence with the Cold War, the Black Power Movement, and postindependence melancholia, bypasses the nation as the center of its organizing logic and focuses instead on the transnational circulation of texts and ideas. For Caribbean writers, she provides an example of how to create a counterpoetics that insists on regional particularity as opposed to North Atlantic universality. Within this counterpoetics, she not only writes against imperialist histories of the Caribbean but also establishes a different conception of historicity that unsettles historical writing as a genre. Her work is both intimate and political, demonstrating how the two spheres are necessary to register the epistemologies and politics of the Caribbean. ³ Her voice offers a regional perspective given her roots in Trinidad and her experience within two diasporas—the Caribbean and Canada. She writes about Grenada and the wider Caribbean with references to Barbados, Dominica, St Lucia, Guyana, and Nicaragua. ⁴ By using poetry as memoir and history, Brand troubles the distinction between literary invention and historical truth. Can poetry be thought of as a historical source for Caribbean nations whose ability to produce more conventional histories is often thwarted by the collusion of historical convention with imperialist oppression?

The politics of poetic invention

By the early 1980s, Brand had a serious problem with the Black Power Movement in Canada. Immigrating to Toronto as a young adult in the 1970s, she was drawn to the collective movement for Black empowerment and politicization that had been gathering support in Montreal and Toronto. This movement allowed her to connect with Blacks from Canada, the Caribbean, Africa, and the United States. She eventually became disenchanted with the phallocentric rhetoric and tone of this militant activism, however, because it did not provide any significant platforms for women and queer people of color. Unable to see a space for herself in the Black Power Movement in Canada, Brand turned to Grenada—newly immersed in revolution—as a frontier of radical possibility. Grenada was small but it presented the opportunity to make her activist work more impactful. She imagined being able to get on with the business of building the revolution without having to contend with North American racism (Brand, 1994: 59). In 1983 Brand lived the revolution, writing reports on foreign-funded agriculture projects in Grenada (Brand, 1994: 12–13). The sexism she had identified in the Black Power Movement was also apparent in Grenada but she loved the land and the people and this made it easier to stay. She remained in Grenada for 10 months until the murder of Prime Minister Bishop and the subsequent US invasion. She survived the US military assault and returned to Canada embittered after witnessing firsthand the tragedy of neocolonialism.

Brand’s observations from this period are documented in Chronicles. Divided into three sections—Languages, Sieges, Military Occupations—the poems in Chronicles are not only discrete pieces that stand on their own but also fragments of a larger project that seeks to narrate the revolution from the perspective of a Caribbean national returned to the region after time abroad in North America. The term “chronicle” carries multiple connotations that effectively describe this poetry collection. Insofar as the collection gives an account of Brand’s return to the Caribbean from Canada, the title can also be read as a biblical allusion to the two Books of Chronicles, an historical account of the genealogy of Adam and the early Israelites, the exile of the Jewish people in Babylon, and finally their return from exile (Metzger and Murphy, 1994: 503–580). Brand’s move from Canada to Grenada echoes the return of the Israelites from Babylon to Israel. The Oxford English Dictionary defines chronicle as “a detailed and continuous register of events in order of time; a historical record, especially one in which the facts are narrated without philosophic treatment, or any attempt at literary style” and “[a] record, register, [or] narrative, account” (Oxford English Dictionary Online, 2013). Brand’s use of the diary-mode, citing dates and places in the titles and bodies of several of the poems, fits with the first part of this definition, but the presentation of her account, her chronicle, in the poetic form engages the question of literary style and philosophic treatment directly. It is not always clear to readers what material in the poems is fact or fiction, or how to interpret the license that Brand affords herself given the genre she has chosen. The impossibility of clarity on these terms is precisely the point for Brand, I argue: whether it purports to be or not, all information in circulation about Grenada and the revolution is narrated with a philosophic treatment and literary style to suit the intended audience. The “facts” and narrative are altered according to who is telling the story and to what purpose. In essence, Brand’s work challenges readers to accept the view that no historical account can be produced independent of ideology, philosophy, or literary style. Even as she articulates her own history of the Grenada Revolution, her formal choices point to the possibility of plural voices and thus plural histories. Chronicles functions as a critique of the power of US imperialism to dictate facts about the Global South, and the Caribbean in particular, told from the perspective of a diasporic Caribbean national who is also a queer woman. Brand highlights the hegemony of texts (literal and figurative) about the Global South produced in the Global North and the fallacy that allows these texts to be narrated as facts. At the same time as her text emerges from the North American publishing industry (Chronicles was published by the Toronto-based Williams-Wallace Publishers), it offers a corrective to US-narrated versions of the revolution. The authority it carries is different, therefore, from the government narratives it disputes because she invites readers to engage Chronicles as a version of the revolution narrated from a specific and singular subject position, a text that does not strive for the objective but rather the subjective. In this way, her text exists as both counterfact and as a “disarticulation of empire,” a term I borrow from cultural studies critic Sarita See (See, 2009: xviii). This is the contradiction of Chronicles: While Brand refuses North Atlantic discourses on the “facts” about Grenada, her poems are presented as a more factual account of the revolution specifically because they do not claim to speak to a universal experience. They are her own ethnographic account of the events she witnessed.

Poems from the section entitled “Languages” address the need for a grammar of revolution in Grenada, the desire for a language and perspective that would account for the revolution as a unique experience while simultaneously putting Grenada (and the wider Anglophone Caribbean) in the context of late 20th-century radicalism in Latin America and the Spanish- and French-speaking Caribbean. During this period, Caribbean and Latin American radicalism often took the form of socialist (or socialist-inspired) governments and political parties who saw themselves as of a kind with the nations of the Non-Aligned Movement. The Non-Aligned Movement was a political organization composed largely of formerly colonized nations of the Global South with the goal of creating South–South alliances to oppose imperialism (Prashad, 2007: 13). The diversity of the nations involved in the Non-Aligned Movement meant that while most were opposed to capitalism because of its inherent links to colonial oppression, there was no widespread commitment to communism, but rather a focus on ending imperialist exploitation. Brand’s poems locate Grenada in the context of such diffuse resistance to imperialism where governments of the Third World were indeed in search of a “third way”—some direction in which to steer their nations beyond the capitalist/communist dichotomy.

The Grenada Revolution was a period of political exploration for the nation. It was an opportunity to reignite the optimism that had defined earlier political watersheds, including the election of Eric Gairy to political power in the 1950s and independence in 1974. For the revolution’s chief architects, it was a chance to put into practice the radical theory they had studied by figures such as Vladimir Lenin and Frantz Fanon. For all involved, it was a moment of nationalist fervor unlike anything experienced in Grenada before. Those both for and against the change in government suddenly had a vested interest in defining and expressing a Grenadian identity. While some expressed the discomfort they felt with the close alliance between the NJM and the Communist Party of Cuba (CPC), others were willing to look past Castro’s dictatorship, or at least make uncomfortable peace with the fact because the Cuban government was helping Grenada fund several key social projects. ⁵ Those against the revolution claimed that its policies were imported from foreign (usually Cuban) political processes that had little to do with the Grenadian reality. Those who favored the revolution claimed that it was first and foremost autochthonous by pointing to local “revolutionary” predecessors including Julien Fedon, leader of an 18-century rebellion of slaves and people of color, and T.A. Marryshow, a popular statesman and politician who is best known in the region as one of the chief architects of the West Indian Federation. (Conveniently, Gairy was omitted from this narrative of radical Grenadian leaders despite the inroads he made in improving compensation for peasant workers in the 1950s.) This interest in national identity was accompanied by a growing awareness of Grenada’s potential to have a broad impact on regional politics and culture.

Brand’s presence in Grenada is evidence of this regional interest in the revolution. Her poetry is a project of cartography, mapping Grenada as a “real” place with a distinct history and specific material conditions. She catalogs the nation by naming local people and places. I read these local references as an invitation to Grenadian readers to see their experiences reflected in a text that speaks to an international audience and to recognize their role in creating a Caribbean literary imaginary. For the readers who are unfamiliar with Grenada, references to local detail emphasize the documentary and didactic potential of the poem. For all readers these local references make the concept of revolution less abstract and more concrete by situating it in a specific time and place. Through her attention to historical detail in the midst of poetic invention, Brand establishes the poem as an alternate source of history and thus a window into the particularity of the Grenadian experience. By poetic invention, I mean the way in which she authors her own version of the revolution as she seeks to describe it in her writing. Brand examines the radical alterity of Grenada vis-a-vis the North Atlantic, which was decidedly antirevolutionary during the late 20th-century Cold War. In her work, one can read a strategy for the advancement and protection of local epistemologies and political practices even as the threat of imperialism looms. Brand achieves this by making the genre of poetry itself a site for theorizing knowledge production.

“This night may make it to a poem”: Poetry as countersurveillance

The opening poem in Chronicles, “Night—Mt. Panby Beach—25 March 1983,” describes an exercise where members of the militia, including the poet-speaker, are staked out overnight on a beach in Grenada, practicing a maneuver in preparation for a possible military invasion (Brand, 1984: 7). Throughout the poem, Brand repeats the phrase “this night may make it to a poem,” drawing attention to the process whereby she edits her memories of the revolution to produce poetry. There is a documentary aspect to the poem, a sense that it gives readers access to events that Brand actually witnessed. Brand lays bare the apparatus of historical invention by making readers hyperaware of her authorship and situating the poem as a metatext. The poem introduces the Grenada–US conflict by describing the threat “of american war ships in barbados” ready to approach Grenada (Brand, 1984: 7). Throughout the revolution, the PRG repeatedly warned the nation that a US invasion of Grenada was likely. They knew that they were under US government surveillance. They were also aware of an American Navy maneuver (code named “Amber and the Amberdines”) performed near Puerto Rico where marines practiced invading a fictional island nation (Meeks, 1993: 168). On the stark difference between the Reagan administration and the Grenadian militia she writes, “they are comfy at Camp David/we are wet and always startled/though for once we have guns” (Brand, 1984: 7). The “we” Brand constructs using the first person plural in this poem (and several others) suggests a collective Grenadian people, represented in characters she refers to such as the “boy” and “Rose.” “Rose belongs to the militia,” she writes, and so does the boy who “must put on his boots and his greens and wake me up at 4 a.m.” (Brand, 1984: 7). The poet-speaker sees herself as part of this community signaling a broader Caribbean solidarity.

As the militia gathers on the beach to practice protecting the nation from foreign invasion, the poet-speaker sees the constellation Orion “like an imperialist/straddle the half sky” (Brand, 1984: 7). Brand’s simile compares the image of the constellation in the shape of a hunter to the menacing presence of imperialism in the region. Orion, one of the most visible constellations, gets its name from the hunter Orion in Greek mythology. The image offers a sense of the imbalance of power between the Caribbean as the hunted and seemingly omniscient imperialist forces as the hunter. The sky is a stage for the play of the stars in imperialist formation. She further develops the image of the sky and omniscience when she describes the practice of surveillance, including satellite photography, used by the United States to chart Grenada as a threat to democracy in the region. The American government also used surveillance to boost its influence in the region. The knowledge produced by this surveillance took various forms including photographs used to claim that Grenada was building military installations in aid of the Cubans and Soviets and against the United States. Brand critiques the process by which this knowledge is produced solely in service of Cold War ideology and yet presented as fact. It results in ideological discourse that is limited in its ability to understand local Caribbean life and politics:

they have classified photographs

these American warships

secret snapshots of public spaces

technologically touched up

soviet obstacle courses

they want to invade

they want to fill our mouths

with medium range missiles

that is our considered opinion (Brand, 1984: 9)

The poet-speaker mocks the American surveillance as “secret snapshots of public places,” suggesting that it is only the process of classifying these photographs that makes them secret; otherwise they are simply pictures of sites that are accessible to the Grenadian public. The ability of the American intelligence community to deem information on Grenada “classified” is, in part, a function of Grenada’s lack of visibility in an American public sphere and its hyper visibility in the US intelligence community. The US government depended on the fact that most of their citizens knew very little about Grenada, thus making it easier for the government to shape public opinion against revolution in Grenada and the Caribbean and Latin America more generally. The production of this “knowledge” about Grenada also helped the US government create a narrative in which it was possible to imagine that notwithstanding Grenada’s small size (less than a 140 square miles with a population of 100,000 people), its ties to Cuba, Nicaragua, and Russia could mean a threat to US sovereignty. The denial of freedom and democracy to Grenadians was a less important though constant refrain in this narrative. In this way, an American intervention would secure US sovereignty and serve as a humanitarian act freeing Grenadians of communism, a political system that was branded as undemocratic and unethical according to North Atlantic ideals. Brand appropriates the rhetoric of US aid in the Third World with the image of Caribbean mouths being filled. Instead of aid, however, they receive “medium range missiles,” symbolizing the spread of violent imperialism under the guise of international humanitarianism (Brand, 1984: 9).

The poem details a process of Grenadian resistance to American imperialism enacted on the ground via the militia, but it also enacts a form of resistance itself by functioning as counterintelligence to American surveillance. Brand’s description of Mt Panby as a place that “is only good for drinking beer/and looking at St Georges/and not even the fishmarket” offers an alternative perspective to the “technologically touched up/soviet obstacle courses” that the American government wanted people to believe were being built in Grenada (Brand, 1994: 9). In their justification for invading Grenada, US officials often cited the stockpiling of arms and the construction of the international airport in Point Salines, on the island’s southwest tip, as evidence of a Soviet plan to establish a military airfield in Grenada (Reagan, 1983). In the process of building this narrative, US intelligence suppressed information about plans by the previous Grenadian government, led by Gairy, to build an airport on that very site with Canadian and British financial support. Under both governments (Gairy’s and Bishop’s) the primary intended function of the airport was to accommodate commercial aircraft that would bring more tourism to Grenada. ⁶ This American narrative about Grenada and the PRG had currency not only in the United States but also in Grenada and throughout the Caribbean, where there was much speculation about the PRG’s plans for the nation. The NJM waged an uphill battle against American propaganda from early on in the revolution until the end. Their problem was not lack of transparency with their constituents; the NJM did not appear to be any more or less transparent than the previous government. What gave the American propaganda leverage, I argue, was the rhetoric of socialist revolution promoted by the NJM. As far back as the administration of President John F Kennedy, the American government and press had already established their view that Cuban socialism stood against universal principles of freedom and democracy. The idea of revolution was at the center of the NJM’s public and private identity. The style of governance—via “revolution”—was something wholly new in the 20th-century Anglophone Caribbean, and in some ways the NJM was unable to get in front of the story and control the narrative. Grenadians wanted to know precisely what it meant to live in a revolutionary society, but they did not necessarily wait for their political leaders to define the process for them. Brand’s poetry offers insights into how citizens on the ground defined the process for themselves. The poems recount her personal experience, but they also describe the experiences of Grenadians and their work during the revolution. ⁷ For many Grenadians, the work of the revolution was defined by a collective imagining of possibilities that superseded the nation as polity because it was apparent that at the unit of state Grenada could easily be subject to the whims of larger, more economically powerful countries. By engaging the poetic mode, Brand follows the lead of the Grenadian people, writing in a genre that renders her history unavailable for thwarting by imperialist powers. Poetry is a site for the sovereignty of the imagination.

No language is neutral: The problem of press freedom

In the poem “On eavesdropping on a delegation of conventioners at Barbados Airport,” Brand offers a defense for the PRG’s decision to close down The Torchlight, a local privately owned newspaper, in October 1979 (Brand, 1984: 20). The poet-speaker calls out critics of the PRG as hypocrites who accept control of North American and British print media by a select group of individuals, while coming down on the Grenadian government for disrupting the freedom of the press. The poem specifically indicts media moguls Rupert Murdoch and Kenneth Thomson for their monopoly of North Atlantic media. ⁸ Brand writes,

because your wrist watches are one hour behind

the whole damn Caribbean must wait

because you do not know that Murdoch and Thompson [sic]

owning all the newspapers in the world

is a violation of free speech,

we cannot close down the Torchlight. (Brand, 1984: 20)

Her argument is that the media in the First World is constrained by the interests of a few very wealthy men and that their grip on the public is so hegemonic as to mask the scope and reach of their power and influence. That is, in terms of media production, the nations of the North Atlantic are not as democratic as they might seem on first glance. The domination of the media by a few powerful individuals is an example of the “violation of free speech,” she contends, but it remains invisible because it occurs in the First World. The very concept of the First World evokes a society that is shielded from such violations because it upholds values such as democracy and free market economics. She references time to stress the need to recognize difference between Caribbean and North Atlantic realities. This difference is what makes First World ideas of “development” in the Third World (including International Monetary Fund (IMF) loans, structural adjustment, and open markets) so unpalatable and oppressive for many in the Caribbean. The poet-speaker points out that when North Atlantic governments violate the sovereignty of Caribbean and Latin American nations by interfering in their politics, the actions of these governments are either ignored or reported on uncritically by the American and English media. She repeats the refrain “where were you,” taking to task the Associated Press, Reuters, and other “liberal” North Atlantic organizations for not reporting on instances of political injustice in Latin America and the Caribbean:

you law unions and conventions of wellwishers

looking to be delighted at problems

where were you when they assassinated Allende

and when El Mercurio tried to steal the people’s revolution

and when the gleaner shot down that timid Jamaican,

Manley (Brand, 1984: 20)

Her accusatory “you” creates an angry tone that expresses the sense of combativeness between American imperialism and those supportive of various forms of socialist government in Latin America and the Caribbean. As she evokes Salvador Allende’s Socialist Party of Chile and Michael Manley’s People’s National Party (PNP; which tried to bring democratic socialism to Jamaica), the implications here are threefold: first, that the governments of Chile, Jamaica, and Grenada shared a common political project; second, that political opposition, aided by American interference, deployed El Mercurio and the Jamaica Gleaner to destabilize leftist governments in Chile and Jamaica, respectively; and third, that a similar tactic was deployed in the case of Grenada via reports printed in The Torchlight newspaper. ⁹ She uses personification to represent the Gleaner as the violent agent that “shot down” social democracy in Jamaica. Brand’s characterization of Manley as “timid,” however, suggests that the forces of imperialism are not solely to blame in the events that led to the departure of the PNP from government, and that the social democracy project failed in Jamaica in part because of Manley’s own personal failings. I have argued elsewhere that The Torchlight was unfairly censored by the PRG. While I disagree with Brand’s evaluation of The Torchlight–PRG conflict, I think her poem highlights the frustration the PRG experienced at not being able to sufficiently control the narrative of the revolution given the international and local forces at play. ¹⁰ It also illustrates the power of the American public sphere to manipulate the politics of authority and authorship in the Caribbean because American media circulates more easily in a transnational context.

The poem represents North American convention-goers as only coming to the Caribbean for the sun. ¹¹ Unwilling to recognize the particularity of Caribbean people and politics, North Americans and Europeans instead expect to import into the Caribbean politics and values rooted in North Atlantic historical experiences. According to Brand, this North Atlantic hegemony in the Caribbean creates a context where “truth is free to be fiction” and “counting is not an exact science” (Brand, 1984: 20). At stake here are radically different definitions of freedom and truth. For Brand the “truth” of the Global North is often fiction when translated in a Caribbean context. The maps to freedom and sovereignty proposed by the United States for the Caribbean, with the promise of greater democracy and development, often lead to greater US influence in the region without improving the lives of Caribbean citizens. Discourses on economics and “objective” reporting can become as subjective as literary language when these North Atlantic universals are forced on the Caribbean.

Writing history, scribbling dates

In the final section of Chronicles, subtitled “Military Occupations,” Brand is most engaged with the concept of poetry as personal chronicle as she details the end of the revolution. The first poem announces the section as memoir with the title “Diary—The Grenada crisis,” and others follow with dates as titles—“October 19th, 1983,” “October 25th, 1983,” “October 26th, 1983,” “October 27th, 1983,” “October 27th, 1983—evening”—as if subsequent diary entries. “Diary—The Grenada crisis” describes the scene of the US invasion from a vantage point near St George’s, Grenada’s capital (Brand, 1984: 37–39). Hours after Bishop was murdered, a new organization, the Revolutionary Military Council (RMC), claimed to have taken over the island’s governance. The spokesperson for this group was Hudson Austin. ¹² The RMC imposed a 24-hour “shoot-to-kill” curfew on the nation. The country was in total shock and chaos. Grenadians were frightened for their lives and were made to feel that external forces were necessary to restore order. For most Grenadians, the restoration of order meant bringing to justice those responsible for Bishop’s death: that was more urgent than the need to protest an unlawful military invasion. It could be argued that a large percentage of Grenadians accepted the American invasion because they saw US and regional involvement as the only way to restore order to the nation. Brand represents the invasion as a war, stressing the often-overlooked fact that invading American forces met with armed resistance from Grenadians. ¹³ The Reagan administration sold the invasion to the American public as an effort to rescue American medical students at St George’s School of Medicine and to liberate the Grenadian people from the clutches of communism. A New York Times article from 22 October 1983 cites a Department of Defense official who claims that US Marines were being sent to Grenada to protect the 1200 American citizens on the island (Ayres, 1983: 1). Another New York Times article quotes Reagan referring to Grenada as a “‘Soviet-Cuban colony being readied’ to export terrorism” (Taubman, 1983: 1). The US government prevented their own journalists and other foreign reporters from traveling to Grenada until several days into the invasion, when the initial military assault was completed (Farrell, 1983: 13). In so doing, the American government and military could dictate the narrative of the invasion, focusing on images of Grenadians and American medical students welcoming the marines. This narrative of rescue did not recognize the complexity of the situation facing Grenadians, the majority of whom had supported the revolution and were aghast both at the murders of 19 October and at the military invasion. The images offered by Brand communicate the banality, fear, and shock that the violence of invasion brings to Grenada. The incursion of American military personnel by sea and air seems out of place in the picturesque beauty of the island. The Grenada that is familiar to the poet-speaker is violated and transformed by the invasion:

the ship and the cement drop against the metal skies

a yankee paratrooper strangles in his sheet.

prayers for rain,

instead again this wonderful sky;

an evening of the war and those of us looking with our mouths open

see beauty become appalling,

sunset, breaths of grey clouds streaked red,

we are watching a house burn (Brand, 1984: 38)

The hostile sun is evoked in the image of the “wonderful sky” that provides the backdrop for the invasion. Here the sun’s hostility is defined in the way it produces a clear day for the invaders instead of the rain that the poet-speaker hopes would interrupt the progress of the American forces. ¹⁴ The sky is not only “wonderful” but also somehow “metal,” transformed by the machinery of war. But Grenadians are not the only victims of the hostile sun. American paratroopers are strangled in their parachutes, falling like Icarus too close to the sun.

The reference to “our open mouths,” again, aligns the poet-speaker with the Grenadian people and echoes the imagery of mouths being filled with American missiles in the earlier poem “Night—Mt. Panby Beach.” The scenes described in the poems of this section fulfill, in many ways, the dark promises of the earlier poems. The time “five a.m.” is repeated throughout as if time stands still while the island is under siege (Brand, 1984: 37–39). The shock of invasion, and the onset of a new colonial reality, is represented as keeping Grenadians in a liminal state between sleep and wakefulness, not unlike the feeling of the militia on the practice maneuver in “Mt Panby Beach.” American military strategy is illustrated as key government buildings are bombed in sequence, including Butler House where the office of Prime Minister Bishop was located:

All afternoon and all night

each night we watch a different

fire burn,

Tuesday, Butler House

Wednesday, Radio Free Grenada

Thursday, The Police Station (Brand, 1984: 38)

The invasion targeted sites that were important repositories of local knowledge and places from which national communication would have been facilitated. The phrase “fire burn” is isolated on its own line where it does the double work of describing the destruction of the buildings while also evoking the dread talk phrase “fyah bun,” which is used as an objection to immoral practices (usually those practices associated with Babylon or the West). ¹⁵ In the second to last stanza, the poet-speaker refers to “the last evening” of the war and the feeling of suffocation experienced by the survivors: “no air comes up,/we have breathed the last of it” (Brand, 1984: 39). The revolution was like oxygen for Grenadians, and it was sucked up by the invasion, marking the end of freedom and sovereignty. Grenada is left in darkness as the “hard sky” dispatches “military transports” across the island. The poet-speaker describes a process of keeping vigil throughout the war, but there seems to be a combination of astonishment and inertia which prevents the speaker and those described in the poem from resisting. They are static, crunched in defensive positions as they hope to stay alive (Brand, 1984: 39). That an internal NJM conflict would set the stage for an American invasion is not something many Grenadians would have expected, although the PRG had warned of the threat of military invasion since the early days of the revolution. The American military was facing a completely fractured nation.

This sense of resignation to a tragic fate is communicated in the poem “October 19th, 1983” (Brand, 1984: 40). The poem’s opening translates shock as the inability of words to sufficiently account for the situation. At the same time as words are not enough, they must be put in service of all the emotions that the end of the revolution triggers:

this poem cannot find words

this poem repeats itself

Maurice is dead

Jackie is dead

Uni is dead

dream is dead (Brand, 1984: 40)

Brand does not equate the revolution with Bishop, Creft, Unison, and Noel; however, she suggests that the betrayal of trust that led to their murders signaled the end of the revolution. The construction “is dead” appears to remove fault or agency from the act of their murders and instead emphasizes the finality of the fact. Further down, however, the poet-speaker names four other members of the NJM and holds them accountable:

Bernard, Phyllis, Owusu, H.A.!

what now!

back to jails in these antilles!

back to shackles! back to slavery! (Brand, 1984: 41)

In naming Bernard and Phyllis Coard, Liam “Owusu” James, and Hudson Austin, the poet-speaker, echoing Grenadian public opinion, holds the surviving members of the NJM leadership responsible for the deaths of Bishop and his colleagues. Brand uses the term “fratricide” to describe the murders (Brand, 1984: 41). It is one of the rare moments where she complicates her critique of the United States by acknowledging the problems arising from within the NJM itself. ¹⁶ The moment is important to the poem and to the wider text because it clears space for ideological complexity by highlighting ways in which the problem of postcolonial sovereignty cannot be solved by either capitalism or socialism. Here she not only names those who many Caribbean people believed were responsible for Bishop’s murder but also assesses the fate that now awaits Grenadians and the Caribbean more broadly—that is imprisonment, foreign encroachment, and servitude. The self-inflicted violence under which the NJM collapsed left the Caribbean open to further violation by imperialist interests.

The United States led the military invasion with the support of a handful of Caribbean nations including Barbados and Dominica. Leaders such as Dominica’s Eugenia Charles and Barbados’s Tom Adams were uncomfortable with the NJM from the revolution’s beginning for multiple reasons. They led conservative-leaning governments who, along with most newly decolonized nations in the Anglophone Caribbean, had accepted a political structure for their nations based on the British Parliamentary system. They were concerned that the NJM had acquired leadership of Grenada by way of a coup as opposed to elections. In an interview with journalist and Trinidad Express owner Kenneth Gordon, Bishop had made reference to elections early on in the PRG’s tenure but did not seem to be moving in that direction 4 years later (Gordon, 1999). In deciding to support the invasion, Charles (who made appearances in Washington, DC, on Capitol Hill and on American news programs) and Adams demonstrated the extent to which American economic power in the Americas played a role in determining key aspects of Caribbean politics. What repercussions would these governments have faced if they had not supported the American invasion of Grenada?

There were no clear international laws to support the US invasion of a sovereign territory and worldwide reaction to the invasion was mixed. According to a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Grenada Situation Report dated 26 October 1983, representatives from Cuba, Democratic Yemen, Guyana, Libya, Mexico, Nicaragua, and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) argued that the invasion was “without justification” at a United Nations (UN) Security Council debate (CIA, 1983c: 5). France, Spain, and the People’s Republic of China also expressed their displeasure with US actions, with the French government implying “that the attack had contravened international law” (CIA, 1983c: 5). The same document takes note especially of responses from Latin American nations, which were mainly against US intervention in Grenada. As revealed in the transcript for a 26 October conversation between Reagan and British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, the British government found the invasion extremely problematic (Margaret Thatcher Foundation Archives, 1983). Reagan proved that Thatcher could do little about it except complain, however, since as Britain’s influence in the region had waned, the United States had asserted itself as the chief neocolonial power.

Another determining factor in the creation of an opening for the United States in Grenada was the power vacuum that the NJM’s collapse produced on the island. When they seized power, the PRG suspended the Grenadian constitution, and there was no official political opposition even though they maintained ties to Britain via the Governor General Sir Paul Scoon. The murder of Bishop and his closest political supporters (coupled with Coard’s earlier resignation from the post of Deputy Prime Minister), therefore, severed any logical chain of command for the transference of power in a time of crisis. In the documentary aspect of her poetry, Brand captures the urgency of the immediate aftermath of the NJM leadership crisis.

The earliest reports on Bishop’s death issued by the RMC claimed, falsely, that he and his comrades were killed in an exchange of fire (Scott, 2010: 124, 129; Wilder, 2009). The truth was that Bishop and his fellow ministers were executed after being disarmed and lined up against a wall at Fort Rupert. ¹⁷ Even as the RMC spread its false report, whispers of the truth circulated around the island. Continuing her narration of 19 October, she describes those responsible for Bishop’s murder as “skulking,” alluding to the sense of shame that would have accompanied their actions. She writes,

how did they feel

murdering the revolution

skulking back along the road

the people watchful,

the white flare

the shots (Brand, 1984: 41)

It is in this reality, of a nation formerly emerged in the process of revolution, then suddenly thrust into the hands of the US military after a deadly power struggle, that Brand sees tragedy. This is the sense in which the end of the Grenada Revolution symbolizes a metaphorical return to the shackles and imprisonment of slavery. The first American invasion of an Anglophone Caribbean nation would only serve as a precedent for further illegal incursions in the region. Hence Brand’s lament, “dream is dead/lesser and greater/drowned and buried/windward, leeward” (Brand, 1984: 41). The radical potential for nations in the Lesser and Greater Antilles, the Windward and Leeward Islands seems suddenly lost—a tragedy for the entire region. Brand’s words here are both descriptive and prophetic. Around the same time as the NJM came to power, several Caribbean nations elected right-leaning governments (e.g. Jamaica, Barbados, Dominica). In this sense, the end of the dream describes the postcolonial condition of Caribbean nations who succumbed to the influence of their most powerful neighbor to the North. Brand’s lines are also prophetic in that they describe the flight of the Caribbean left from mainstream politics at the end of the revolution in Grenada. Leftist Caribbean political parties lost legitimacy in the eyes of the public following such a violent chain of events, which many blamed on overly doctrinaire and extreme political views. The poet-speaker refers to the poem self-reflexively as a funeral song for the revolution, “a dirge sung for ever/and in flesh” (Brand, 1984: 41). The survivors and the collective memory of those who died embody the mournful quality of the literary dirge. These lines can also be read as a reference to all Grenadians who embody the revolution long after the Americans leave (Brand, 1984: 40–41).

Conclusion: Awaiting guerrillas

The last three lines of “October 19th, 1983” describe the feeling that the revolution ended prematurely. Brand writes: “it is only October 19th, 1983/and dream is dead/in these antilles” (Brand, 1984: 41). The poem, which began with a tone of consternation, ends on a note of resignation and finality. “October 19th” ends very differently from “Diary—The Grenada crisis.” While “October 19th” conveys a sense of how the NJM failed to deliver on its promises in a dramatic and violent fashion, “Diary” turns to the Grenadian landscape, people, and history to imagine a way forward. At the end of “Diary,” Brand expresses an underlying spirit of resistance—one that tolerates the US invasion while lying in wait, as if for another opportunity, to combat imperialism:

In the Grand Etang

mist and damp

the road to Fedon

fern, sturdy,

hesitate

awaiting guerrillas (Brand, 1984: 39)

These lines express a continued belief in the ability of the Grenadian people to find strength in their history, embodied in the land. Grand Etang is a large crater-lake and inactive submarine volcano in the parish of St Andrews. Brand moves the poem from the destruction of St George’s, Grenada’s most urban area, to the mountains of the countryside. She references Julien Fedon, leader of a 1765 slave uprising on the island, whose military camp was located within the mountains and linked to Grand Etang through a series of trails, as well as the PRA military camp that was named for Fedon. ¹⁸ The image of awaiting guerrillas at Grand Etang conjures both the memory of Fedon’s army laying in wait to battle the British, as well as the remaining members of the PRA and People’s Revolutionary Militia, who under the leadership of the RMC, decided to fight against the invading Americans. This image could also be read as the ferns awaiting the arrival of new guerrillas to continue the struggle. Unlike “Diary,” “October 19th, 1983” assigns responsibility for the end of the revolution to the NJM, as opposed to the American government. This choice does not make the end of the revolution any less tragic or devastating in Brand’s writing, but it is an important warning for future guerrillas to note the potential internal pitfalls to national liberation and what Fanon called “national consciousness” (Fanon, 2004: 97). Beyond the militia, the guerrillas in “Diary” may represent the Grenadian people more generally as descendants of Fedon. They submerge signs of their desire for sovereignty (like the inactive volcanoes below Grenada and other Caribbean islands) until another opportunity for uprising presents itself.

Reading Brand’s poetry offers readers some insight into the ambivalence many Grenadians felt about the American invasion—simultaneously resenting foreign intervention while understanding the need for it. This ambivalence was compounded by the profound sense of betrayal many Grenadians felt from those who led the revolution. Caught between these perspectives, her writing—memoir, poetry, and history—helps readers grasp the complicated circumstances brought on by the end of the revolution.

In my interpretation the poet-speakers in Brand’s work are chroniclers stating the case for the revolution and the grievances of Caribbean people against the Global North. Brand supplements and contradicts more conventional archives of the revolution. Her poems talk back to North American audiences—including neocolonial interests and sympathetic members of the left. The “you” in her poems reflects this North American orientation and functions as a sign of her status as an immigrant writer balanced at times unevenly between the Caribbean and Canada. The idealization of the revolution that is apparent occasionally in Chronicles is a product of the time and place out of which the book emerges—and of the constant modes of comparison between the North and the South that Brand’s diasporic condition elicits. In this sense, her poetry is outward facing, imagining a Caribbean for those outside of the region while challenging the “universal” status of North Atlantic values that Trouillot warns against. Brand’s intention is not to ignore the Grenadian people and the role they played in the rise and fall of the revolution, but rather to address the misinformation about Grenada that was spread to justify the US invasion. These poems showcase Brand’s use of poetry to deconstruct mainstream historical narratives based on North Atlantic perspectives. Later in her career, Brand would publish autobiographical essays, a novel, and further poems about Grenada (Brand 1990, 1994, 1996). In each case she offers a literary genre as defense against the epistemological violence of US narratives. With each text she makes the case that Caribbean sovereignty, in its political sense, is not a threat to US sovereignty, but it is a threat to US domination of regional politics and as such Caribbean states can expect to be frustrated in their attempts at true self-determination. The path to sovereignty she imagines is, therefore, one where Caribbean chroniclers are defiant, keeping vigil over the region’s histories so that the imagination might remain unfettered even as the state is put upon. In this sense, Chronicles of the Hostile Sun is an important feminist contribution to writing—both historical and literary—on the Grenada Revolution.