Author Dionne Brand tells NGC Bocas Lit Fest audience: Be true to your characters

AUTHOR and poet Dionne Brand said while her novel, At the Full and Change of the Moon, has seemingly touched many lives and reaching a wide audience, when she was writing the book, the audience was not her first priority.

Speaking at the Big Black Box in Woodbrook on the night of April 26, Brand told Newsday, that for novelists, the characters one creates come first.

“When I write I really don’t think of the audience first. That would send you into a spiral. You have to stay true to the thing that you are writing, the thing that you are trying to work out in the book. A deep attention to that will bring those who live like you and with you into the book,” she said.

At the Full and Change of the Moon, Brand’s second novel was published 25 years ago.

A review on Amazon described it as an epic of the African diaspora across the globe. It starts with Marie-Ursula, who, as queen of a secret society of slaves plans a mass suicide.

But her daughter, Bola escapes and lives free. The story then follows her descendants spread across the Caribbean, North America and Europe.

“That is the audience,” she said.

“As a novelist, if you are faithful to that body and you are true to the characters that you write and think about, then it will be alright, even if it is not in the beginning.”

The Bocas Lit Fest, now in its 14th year, which honours Caribbean writers annually paid homage to the novel and to Brand, with excerpts being read at the Big Black Box by Elisha Efua Bartels, Conrad Parris and Mandisa Granderson.

The language of the book was reminiscent of the works of Sam Selvon but had a sort of magical realistic style that lit the work on fire.

Brand told Newsday that she did in fact take some influence from Selvon, but as a poet, and one who has published poems, language bears great importance.

“One is always influenced by what has come before, and one tries to stick with that because those people give you what kind of language to work with – a sense of how to think about the world.

“The use of language is very important in order to describe the lives described in this book, the lives of the people living in this global south and in particular these people in the Caribbean and the dispersal of those people in the world and how to live in the world and what that experience teaches you historically.”

She expressed gratitude to the Bocas Lit Fest for recognising her work and said she was stunned to hear that it was being honoured.

“It has done a lot of work in the world, I hope,” she said.

“I am kind of surprised at the reception of the book, as a writer often is – how it worked in the world, how it worked with people and how it is remembered. I am just gratified and kind of stunned that the Bocas decided to mark that moment.”