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

Abstract

In her 1984 poetry collection, Chronicles of the Hostile Sun, Trinidadian-Canadian author Dionne Brand examines the radicalism of the Grenada Revolution (1979–1983) vis-a-vis mainstream North American politics, which were decidedly antirevolutionary during the late 20th-century Cold War. Brand uses poetry to imagine what it means to claim sovereignty in the postindependence Caribbean. This article argues that Brand’s poetry unsettles “facts” about the revolution’s history by discrediting American imperialist rhetoric and policy in the Caribbean. Drawing on Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s concept of the North Atlantic universal as a fiction or colonial construct, I examine Brand’s efforts to undo US narratives that portray the Grenada Revolution as undemocratic and oppressive. Brand writes the Grenada Revolution in a way that reveals it as a 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. My analysis explores the way in which Brand sets up literary texts, and poetry in particular, as an alternative form of historical narrative in response to US-centered North Atlantic universals.