Wreckognition: Archival Ruins in Dionne Brand’s The Blue Clerk

Abstract

Dionne Brand’s The Blue Clerk: Ars Poetica in 59 Versos (2018) is an exquisite address to the problem of the colonial archive and the challenges it poses to literature. Brand has long engaged this issue in her writing, and in her recent work of poetry she structures her interrogation with two figures, the “author” and the “clerk.” The author and clerk sometimes spar and sometimes mirror one another in their ongoing arguments and conversations about the poet’s writing and the clerk’s duty to the unwritten record of what is left out of the archive. The structuring debate between the clerk, the archivist and keeper of bales of paper, and the author, the keeper of memory and experience, addresses the fact that in a Caribbean context, archival records are not so much historical evidence as they are remains and ruins of histories untold. Remnants, ruins, and wrecks, colonial archives entice artists and writers to do counter-archival work that dives into the wreck, that does the work Brand does in The Blue Clerk, of what I call in this chapter, wreckognition.

Sitting among a rapt audience at a conference in 2013, I listened to Dionne Brand’s incantatory reading of her manuscript in progress, which she invited us to picture as a book printed only on the right-hand pages; the left pages, left blank.¹ Even as she sketched this mental image, Brand acknowledged that her proposed book would be too expensive to find acceptance with any publishing board and yet, five years later when The Blue Clerk: Ars Poetica in 59 Versos appeared in print it contained seemingly equal parts of inscribed and blank page. The format is not that of empty left-hand pages but the versos vary in length from a single word to several pages of text with the result that many pages are lightly touched by text and, in fact, several left-hand pages remain blank by coincidence as well as design. This gesture toward the blank page is one that other Caribbean women writers including M. NourbeSe Philip and Michelle Cliff have explored in their use of scattered text across the white space of the page, most notably in Philip’s Zong! in which she leaves intentional blankness around words and their fragments, and Cliff uses lists and fragments in several of her short stories and novels. In the most recent example of poetic use of “blank” left-hand pages, Claudia Rankine preserves the left-hand pages of Just Us (2020) for annotation of the prose and poetry that appear on the right-hand pages; on the few occasions where the right-hand page requires no annotation, the left-hand page is left blank.² The blank page is a reflection of the absent archive, the paucity of record, and the literal and figurative white space surrounding Black histories. In Brand’s book the blank spaces illustrate the structuring debate of the book between the blue clerk, the archivist, and keeper of bales of paper, and the author, the keeper of memory and experience. It may seem contradictory that the archivist’s bales are full of blank pages but that is precisely the point: in a Caribbean context and in postcolonial contexts more generally, archival records are not so much historical evidence as they are remains and ruins of histories untold.³ Their internal logic privileges presence—the presence of newspaper articles, court records, property deeds, letters, photographs, and so forth; however, to read these items as a record of absence, as material remains of what has chipped away from history, is to defy their power. Remnants, ruins, and wrecks, colonial archives prompt authors to engage in counter-archival writing that dives into the wreck, as does The Blue Clerk.

In her engagement with the wreckage of the archive, I want to argue that Brand practices a strategy of wreckognition, an idea that plays with a metaphorical understanding of the colonial archive as a site of ruin in the sense that Ann Laura Stoler explores in both Duress and in her edited volume Imperial Debris: Reflections on Ruins and Ruination. She argues that the tensions of imperial history chaff against one another, doing inevitable damage: “To speak of colonial ruination,” she says, “is to trace the visible and visceral senses in which the effects of empire are reactivated and remain” (Stoler 2013, 196). It is noteworthy that her explanation is indebted to Caribbean literature: she draws from Derek Walcott’s line, “the rot remains,” spinning out both the materiality of “rot” and the temporality of “remains,” and she sums up her line of inquiry as one of “how empire’s ruins contour and curve through the psychic and material space in which people live and what compounded layers of imperial debris do to them” (Stoler 2016, 2).⁴ In addition to the kind of historical connectivity that Stoler stipulates here, archival ruination is as Saidiya Hartman puts it, an episteme: for all that researchers are drawn to records from the past, colonial archives are evidence of occlusion, violence, and absence from those very records. Writing specifically of the colonial archive surrounding slavery, Hartman observes, “This silence in the archive in combination with the robustness of the fort or barracoon, not as a holding cell or space of confinement but as an episteme, has for the most part focused the historiography of the slave trade on quantitative matters and on issues of markets and trade relations” (Hartman 2008, 3–4). Hartman’s characterization of the archive as silent and blinded by its own raison d’être, of underwriting capital, describes its wreckage, or the extent to which records lie in shards of representation from the moment of their inscription.

To return to the metaphor of ruination, a structure is deemed a ruin when it starts to go missing, when it crumbles into its own absence. Cliff presents the concept of ruination in its Caribbean specificity through not only her aesthetic but also her attention to the word itself throughout her oeuvre; in a prominent example, she opens No Telephone to Heaven (1996 [1987]) with a chapter entitled “Ruinate” and a footnote about its distinctive Jamaican creole use to refer to colonial structures—in the metaphor of the receding agricultural landscape—growing back into the wilderness that preceded them.⁵ The status of the archive as a crumbling colonial structure prompts writers like Hartman and Brand to read these texts through a method of wreckognition, or a tacit acknowledgment that the act of research must expand upon an academic tradition of discovering and marshaling evidence; rather, they recognize from the outset that the material with which they engage is itself a wreck of history replete with repressed voices and unrecorded experiences. Again, Hartman leads the way on this kind of counter-archival mode of inquiry across her body of work engaging the scant evidence of enslaved people’s experiences and lives. In Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, she brings her methodology to bear on the lives of Black girls and women at the turn of the century who “refused the terms of visibility imposed on them” (Hartman 2019, 18) by the social workers, sociologists, and police who compiled the extant archive of records and photographs of their resistant subjects. Hartman engages this material in all of its failure to represent its subjects, writing frequently in the subjunctive and in interrogative sentences and proposing stories that directly challenge the “notebooks, monographs, case files, and photographs” that compel her to “speculate, listen intently, read between the lines, attend to the disorder and mess of the archive, and to honor silence” (34).

This messy disorder is in keeping with the metaphor of archival ruination and wreckage. In a Caribbean context, such wreckage is not confined to metaphor in the sense that record keeping in the region is beset by material forces of ruination that run the gamut from sparse and dehumanizing record keeping in the first place to the fact that most Caribbean countries were under a succession of imperial powers that leeched even these limited records out of local contexts and hid them away in different European institutions, to the fact that the climate of the Caribbean works on printed and other material records with a distinct power of heat, damp, and other sources of destruction.⁶ In an important address to the status of Caribbean archives, Jeannette Bastian establishes the paradox of their power: she cites the importance of “a community of records” to community itself in that “archives can be both physical spaces and memory spaces … containers of the collective memory of their creators as well as their users and interpreters” (Bastian 2003, 13). At the same time, the graphomania surrounding archives is central to their power to corroborate colonial endeavor. Whatever lies in the archive (including cryptic fragments and violent forms of representation), as a discipline it props up exclusive forms of citizenship and imperial identities in a variety of contexts. Moreover, the removal of Caribbean archives to European libraries imposes a geopolitical form of forgetting on Caribbean societies, as Bastian and the dozens of contributors to her volume, Decolonizing the Caribbean Record: An Archives Reader, demonstrate in their approach to archival materials as deeply problematic yet essential building blocks of cultural memory and identity.

As complicit and foundational colonial materials and valuable sources of counter-discourse alike, archives are not a discreet body of materials but rather an idea in ongoing construction as The Blue Clerk demonstrates in its iterative practices. While issues of archival absence and erasure have long been central to postcolonial studies (and arguably the field’s primary impetus by way of Subaltern Studies), once again the notion of archival absence is not only metaphorical in a Caribbean context. In a fascinating study of the archival records pertaining to Dionne Brand’s childhood home, Trinidad and Tobago, Roma Wong Sang explains the role of archives in the cultural memory of postcoloniality, arguing that “a community of records […] may be pivotal in recasting an inclusive past that may lay a foundation for forging a strong national identity and democratizing heritage in Trinidad and Tobago” (2018, 594). Such records are particularly important for a diverse nation like Trinidad and Tobago, whose two major islands, annexed to one another in 1889, have distinct histories and demographics that give rise to a complex narrative of nationhood. Rita Pemberton (2018) describes how Tobago staged effective resistance against a series of colonizers for centuries with the result that it changed colonial hands some fourteen times, with each transfer of power divesting the colony of more of its historical records and scattering them to sites as far flung as London, Stockholm, Madrid, and, thanks to the Moravian missionary presence, Pennsylvania.⁷ Thus the colonial archive of the Caribbean is not just a body of misrepresentative records but its state of ruin is such that it is not even accessible as a sum of its remaining parts, spread out as it is across the hemisphere.

Brand plays with the disjointed, ruinous state of this archive in The Blue Clerk, which Hartman describes in an interview with Brand as an address to “the economy of the colonial archive.”⁸ Indeed, the recurring image of the clerk waiting on a dock, standing guard over bales of paper, invokes the impression of records and the recording of information. Aside an unnamed sea: “There are bales of paper on a wharf somewhere; at a port, somewhere. There is a clerk inspecting and abating them. She is the blue clerk” (Brand 4). These are the left-hand pages that Brand theorized in her conception of her book and that she realized in an approximated presentation of blank pages throughout her versos. As left-hand pages, the bales of paper are blank and not blank in the sense that they hold all that is “withheld,” “all that is left out,” as Brand puts it in the conversation with Hartman (2018). This intermingling of absence and presence in the metaphor of the archive theorizes its power of record and its failure to record. The clerk approaches the bales’ “abilities” that she “is forever curtailing and marshalling” (4), a line that implies that they contain information or evidence of some kind. They are also “brightly scored, crisp and cunning” (4) though, which speaks to the deceptive nature of whatever evidence they hold.

From this opening presentation of the clerk, Brand offers a gendered twist on the archive, the vast majority of which would have been written by white men. The author’s clerk, however, is identified as “she” from the beginning of the text, as is the author later on. In the clerk’s first appearance, “She is dressed in a blue ink coat, her right hand is dry, her left hand is dripping; she is expecting a ship. She is preparing […] She keeps account of cubic metres of senses, perceptions, and resistant facts” (4). The gendered affiliation that underscores the tensions between author and clerk point the reader toward possible alliance between creativity and the archive even as the book explores the impasse between them as well. This alliance is a foundational source of the wreckognition that exists between the clerk and author in that they often mirror one another even as they struggle with missing or false histories. As a feminist collective of artists and writers noted in a recent roundtable, archivists are not only attached to national collections but are also librarians, mothers, and gardeners (Belle et al. 2020); moreover, to the extent that cultural memory is embodied, there is such a thing as an affective archive that runs counter to the records created over centuries by men. The reference to the clerk’s dripping hand emphasizes her embodiment even beyond gender and makes the body a significant factor in archival engagement; in a later verso, she remembers having lived a previous life with a boyfriend who “slapped her and left her without her clothes in a motel” (137) and a subsequent encounter with another man seeking to attack her. Not only is the clerk’s female embodiment illustrated in all of its vulnerabilities here, but her memory runs through her body as, turning her attention back to the bales on the dock, she does so with a “shiver” (138). Because of their embodiment, the clerk is both an adversary and an intimate of the author. Moreover, even though the colonial archive was scripted primarily by white men, Brand claims that power for Black artists by noting that only they have a clerk. She refers to dozens of writers but the only other writer and artist with a clerk are Ralph Ellison and Wynton Marsalis, whose clerks attach in singular relationships. She observes that Marsalis has a fearsome and demanding clerk while Ellison and his clerk share such depths of understanding that they are the only team to have written a book entirely of left-hand pages. The prominent embodiment and gendering of the blue clerk opens a line of possibility that flows counter to the abstract tensions between author and archivist and suggests at least the potential of mutual productivity between them. Brand emphasizes their embodied perspective in several passages including one in which the two of them condemn the anti-Black racism of canonical Western writers including Charles Baudelaire, Walter Benjamin, T. S. Eliot, and John Locke, who “when he wrote ‘An Essay Concerning Human Understanding,’ in 1689 he had already been the Secretary of the Board of Trade and Plantations […] I cannot get past this” (168); they also discuss the “micro-abrasions” of Gertrude Stein’s Melanctha and her dismissive comments about African art (116). Whatever the clerk’s blind spots, she and the author find some reciprocity in the implicit embodied alliances of race and gender.

And yet, Brand sustains the tension between the archivist’s obsessive watchfulness over the crisp and cunning pages and the author’s frustration with having to constantly negotiate with the clerk over her artistic vision. She does this in both the poetry and the structure of her book. While the empty left-hand pages did not make it to production, Brand nonetheless incorporates the principle of the partial and ruined archive into the structure of her book as Hartman notes in her mention of what she terms the book’s “wayward index.” As Brand prefaces the index, “Every listing generates a new listing. Every map another road” (233, italics in original). Like the iterative nature of her deeply intraconnected oeuvre, The Blue Clerk draws on intertextual references to the characters of Bola, Maya, and Kamena in her 1999 novel At the Full and Change of the Moon (albeit without naming them) and is a poetic version of the otherwise entirely unique genre of memoir/history/archival intervention she created with A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes on Belonging (2001). The index of The Blue Clerk presents the arbitrary nature of documentation in graphic form. Speaking of the book in an interview with Dionne Brand and Canisia Lubrin (2018), Brand remarks on the endeavor of collecting documents, saying, “This collecting is involuntary on the part of the clerk. And the clerk would rather not. The author has an archive; the clerk has a living library whose records are always undone, always changing. That living, breathing, elliptical, complicated, undone thing is [the subject of] the actual discussion that they’re having.”⁹ The clerk’s work is not methodical but random, and as Brand says in her interview with Hartman, “all coloniality is order” with the result that the disruption of referentiality both with regard to the archive and with regard to the contents of the versos and their index goes against the grain of coloniality.

Emphasizing the iterative dynamic of the book, Brand explains to Hartman how she wrote a poem that “could go on forever” and indeed the index illustrates this by weaving referentiality back and forth between the versos and their catalogued contents in the index—contents that range from the primary colors of the book (blue, violet, and lemon) to typical index content such as references to musicians, writers, and Brand’s other books. As a wayward index, though, it also repeats such seemingly random points of reference as aphids, ladybirds, and the act of furrowing. In a note in the index, the clerk asks, “Why do you have this fetish with bibliography? It’s the fever of coloniality, the author answers honestly for once” (238). Brand seems to be invoking Derrida’s Archive Fever in this exchange, a foundational text on the pathology of compiling and endowing archival material with power.¹⁰ As a feverish symptom, the wayward index to the versos creates a loop of referentiality that does not privilege either poetry or its catalogue as a primary versus secondary source.¹¹ Similarly, archival materials are not, in effect, “sources” so much as they are texts in play with the literary texts that invoke, interrogate, and challenge them in much the same way that Brand’s index and poems both highlight and hide from one another. For example, the index draws attention to the frequent appearance of aphids in the poem, a detail that might go as unnoticed as the tiny creature to which it refers. And yet, the indexing and highlighting of aphids underscores that which is not indexed; of the seven versos indexed for aphids, one of them, verso 25.1, presents one of the most extended stories/memories in the entire book, a tale of an epic relay race among schoolgirls. The verso describes the drama of the race during which one of the girls drops the baton, and then the team’s joy at a recovery and second-place finish. The clerk is witness to the race and celebration, and while her focus, too, is on the girls she at one point gives a sidelong glance at “the bales and the aphids and the midges and all the insects who had gathered on her papers” (146). Of this ecstatic memory, what is indexed, what is archived, is the aphid in the story’s marginalia. The closing sentence of the verso comes from the clerk, who reflects on her appreciation of obituaries because “there was a lengthy life crushed into a few sentences as the author and the author’s family would crush hers into parentheses” (148). The index crushes the verso’s emotions and experiences into a small detail that, while not an inaccurate reference to the verso, absents the poem’s meaning.

The interplay of index and text forms an element of what Beth A. McCoy and Jasmine Y. Montgomery (2019) have identified as an important dimension of Brand’s work, her “peritext, Genette’s term for authorial elements inserted into the interstices of the text” (McCoy and Montgomery 2019, 137). The Blue Clerk is of a pair with Brand’s A Map to the Door of No Return in its peritextual strategies and in its interrogation of archives.¹² In their reading of A Map to the Door of No Return, McCoy and Montgomery look at the object of the book through Brand’s concept of “the cognitive schema [of] captivity” (McCoy and Montgomery 131). They offer a reading of Brand’s methods of leveraging the peritext to disrupt the “closure and containment” (McCoy and Montgomery 134) that a book’s boundaries offer a reader. They point to her use of numbers as well as words for chapter titles, observing the way that in A Map to the Door of No Return Brand creates small anti-patterns of numerical series, some of which “stop at 4; at other times the series stops at 13. At 2. At 6 or at 10” (McCoy and Montgomery 137). The Blue Clerk’s peritext is all about numbers starting with its subtitle, Ars Poetica in 59 Versos. And yet it includes an additional, free-standing poem placed after the wayward index, a poem labeled as verso 33.1 that appears without context well after the 59th verso of the “59 Versos.” The lingering poem breaks the progress from the opening “stipules” and first numbered verso, 1.1.01 to a concluding endpoint—particularly in light of the fact that verso 59 is followed by 59.1 and 59.2, indicating a continuing series that might or might not end at any point in spite of the given framework of 59 versos. Moreover, Brand breaks down many (but not all) of the verso numbers with iterative decimals in much the same way that she arranges number series in A Map to disorient rather than orient her reader.¹³ Her 59 versos technically include 178 distinct prose poems including the introductory verses that are not numbered. McCoy and Montgomery, writing before the publication of The Blue Clerk but drawing on their notes from the same presentation with which I opened, turn to Brand’s theorization of a book composed of inscribed right-hand pages and blank left-hand pages that pile up next to them (with all that is withheld) as a means of wrecking the cognitive schema of the book, its episteme.

Indeed, unlike the cognitive schema of most books, The Blue Clerk dispenses with narrative as an organizing principle. One way in which Brand does this is to explore the extent to which the archive is not a scaffolding for narrative but rather an element in shifting and changeable versions of the past. In 1.1.01 she interrogates another childhood memory about the local library “in a town by the sea,” which she plays out against her grandfather’s “logs and notebooks.” She recalls “the white library with wide steps, but when I ask, there is no white library with wide steps, they tell me, but an ochre library at a corner with great steps leading up. What made me think it was a white library?” (8). This wonderful interrogation of the library, the very architectural vessel of records and texts—of cultural capital and power—is presented as a misremembered fragment from when the author was “agile and small” (9).¹⁴ She free-associates her memory of the library with that of her grandfather and his extensive collection of notebooks in which he tracked purchases and merchandise as well as the sea and the rain: “he filled many logbooks with rain and its types: showers, sprinkles, deluges, slanted, boulders, pebbles, sheets, needles, slivers, pepper … Relief rain he wrote in his logbook in his small office, and the rain came in from the sea like pepper, then pebbles, then boulders” (10). The strands of memory and documentation come together at the end of the verso when the author “walked into the library and it was raining rain and my grandfather’s logs were there, and the wooden window was open” (11). This verso captures Bastian’s point that a “community of records” can be integral to the lived experience of community and communal memory in that the grandfather’s records provide the author with a prompt for childhood memories. The dynamic between the logs and the memories is one of equivocation and not that of primary and secondary source material. The verso’s closing line affirms this: “Now you sound like me, the clerk says. I am you, the author says” (11).

This expression is one of mutual wreckognition between the clerk and the author. Both work with the ruins of historical evidence, the clerk that of cunningly inscribed, crisp pages and the author with that of faulty memory. In a verso that includes multiple moments of mirroring between the author and the clerk, 16.3, the clerk brings the conversation to bear on the body as an archival site, musing, “I do know that the bodies that we inhabit now are corpses of the humanist narrative” (91). Casting the narrators themselves as figures in a state of decay, the clerk addresses the false wholeness attributed to bodies under the rubric of humanism, a school of thought that Europeans developed in the same historical moment that they institutionalized dehumanization during the height of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Brand refers to bodies in terms of parts that do not make a sum, detailing feet, arms, legs, mouths, and vaginas along with muscle, fat, and bones. The author, referred to also as the poet in this verso, picks up on this gesture to say, “Well, I can only give you a glimpse of these bits and pieces of a body that has been deconstructed as itself, and reconstructed as a set of practices in un-freedom” (93). Their shared vision is one that perceives a lack of wholeness, the failure of humanism in the face of the history of slavery with its trade in and destruction of humans. In the face of the humanistic conceit that bodies map onto contained, sovereign individuals, the clerk scoffs at this “ethical development of a certain subject whom is not we” (91). Throughout the verso, the clerk and poet address what Julietta Singh, in No Archive Will Restore You, names “the body archive.” She defines her own “body archive” as “an assembly of history’s traces deposited in me” (Singh 2018, 29). Her discussion of the body archive focuses on the disintegration of bodily wholeness under the weight of affective flows anchored in but also in excess of the body. Singh also seems to invoke liberal humanism when she remarks, “the body archive is an attunement, a hopeful gathering, an act of love against the foreclosure of reason. It is a way of knowing the body-self as a becoming and unbecoming thing, of scrambling time and matter […] of thinking-feeling the body’s unbounded relation to other bodies” (Singh 2018, 29, emphasis mine). Similarly, the author and the clerk explore the affective interconnectivity of bodies in their exposure of “the death of a certain set of narratives, the death of the aesthetic of imperialism. It is an aesthetic that contains narratives of the body” (92) based in humanistic concepts. Their shared vision is one of wreckognition as they glance back at imperial and intellectual history and the “body that has been deconstructed as itself.” Brand also emphasizes their bodily interconnectivity in the language of mirroring in this verso as when, “My job, it seems, is to notice, the clerk says. My job it seems is to notice, the author says” (91); “That is when I left you, the clerk says, that is when I created you, the author says, that is when I created you, the clerk says, that is when you left me, the author says” (91–2).

Beyond the verso’s theme of bodily ruins and embodied archives, that of mutual wreckognition provides an exceptional depiction of how an archivist and an author might regard one another. The relationship between the archive and archivist is an active one. What is saved, and why, and by whom? What materials are catalogued and where are they kept? How is the material organized and labeled? Hartman makes this point in her reflections on how young Black women’s lives “were under surveillance and targeted not only by the police but also by the sociologists and the reformers who gathered the information and made the case against them, forging their lives into tragic biographies of crime and pathology” (Hartman 2019, 236) from which she, as an author, had to wrest their stories, their subjectivity. An alliance between such an author and the pathologizing archival material with which she has to work seems unlikely. However, Brand’s clerk is wreckognizable by her author because although she claims that “I can only collect” (53), she collects that which is withheld—a working subtitle Brand used for the book prior to its publication.¹⁵ The blue clerk can be a genuine interlocuter because of her own powers of wreckognition: although she guards them closely and fusses over them, she sees that the bales of archival material are composed of blankness, that they are unwritten. In this way, the author’s writing and the clerk’s unwritten pages enter into a mutual production of memory. What is more, this mutual regard between author and clerk is a counter-archival move in the sense that it displaces archival material as a primary source, one that artistic engagements interpret or challenge secondarily. Along the same lines of the wayward index (Hartman) that reconfigures referentiality between primary and secondary sourcing in the format of the book as a whole, the wreckognition between author and clerk forms a relationship that does inherently counter-archival work by undoing the primary power of archival contents.

In Brand’s eschewal of narrative arc in The Blue Clerk, she embraces an iterative vision of art and archiving as ongoing negotiations and processes. The porous, open-ended nature of the archive is something that Belle emphasizes in referring to it as “pastpresentfuture” (Belle et al. 2020, 35) and Singh speaks of envisioning a “future-archive” (35), both concepts that expand upon the archive’s attachment to and ability to represent the past. As when: “the clerk climbs out, looks back at the dock, the freight, the whole enterprise, the temblous archive. When I was, … the author begins. I hate the past, the clerk concludes that sentence” (180). Not only does the clerk reject any emphasis on the past in this passage, but Brand’s neologism, temblous, points to the archive’s impossibility, its partial existence, and its non-referentiality. The word also conjures the tremendous, tremulous, trembling waves of the sea in the stanza. Brand’s deep engagement in The Blue Clerk with the relationship between archive and art, on both theoretical and poetic levels, redefines this crucial conversation within Caribbean art and literature.

At that 2013 presentation of her work in progress, Brand asked those of us in her audience to envision her book as an art object. The book’s structure with its blank left-hand pages was meant to signify visually as well as poetically. I have thus always thought of The Blue Clerk as a work of visual art and its appearance in print corroborated its status as such: the book is so beautiful that it became my first ever coffee-table book along with Brand’s similarly stunning novel Theory, both of which were designed by C. S. Richardson, who won a major book design award for The Blue Clerk in 2018.¹⁶ Given the ontological significance of the book as an object, as demonstrated by McCoy and Montgomery, the design schema of Brand’s book aptly mirrors its conversations and debates about the role of archives in art. The cover indicates bound paper—paper that may be inscribed or, depending on how you look at it, may provide a blank background image on which the publisher stamped the title, subtitle, and author’s name. Given The Blue Clerk’s multi-tiered and comprehensive engagement with its own artistry, I was astonished and thrilled to see it on the wall of the Whitney Museum in a painting by Cauleen Smith.¹⁷ Part of her series entitled Mutualities, in which Smith reflects on memory and African diasporic histories, the painting is of a copy of The Blue Clerk being held up and cradled in strong brown hands. As a further iteration of Brand’s endlessly iterative poetry, the painting archives the book in an ongoing project of citing Black and Indigenous women’s work and creating an interconnected body of referentiality, an open-ended wayward index that exceeds any single text. Entitled “Natalie holds Dionne Brand,” the painting is one in a series, Firespitters, of writers holding up a work that inspires them, and Brand’s book is held by Mojave American poet Natalie Diaz. The Whitney catalogue describes this image as the essence of Smith’s exhibition in that it is designed to witness “the embodied labor of literary production” and “the notion of mutuality that is at the crux of this exhibition.”¹⁸ The Blue Clerk arises from mutualities as well—mutual mistrust, mutual frustration, mutual commitments, and mutual wreckognition of the pastpresentfuture (Belle) nature of counter-archival art. This is a comment that Brand has made in several interviews, that the clerk lives in time—in the perpetual present—exclusive of place. Indeed, she includes no geographical references in The Blue Clerk in contrast to the narrative position she creates in A Map to the Door of No Return of the perpetual traveler, the visitor to multiple continents. These two works explore an underlying crossroads of Caribbean space and time insofar as the earlier memoir maps out geographies and draws heavily on the archives to trace journeys both imperial and decolonial. Brand’s emphasis on global routes and passageways in A Map shifts in the later book with the inclusion of the clerk, for “The clerk lives in time like this, several and simultaneous. The author lives in place and not in time. Weighted. In place” (135). The recognition between the clerk, who states “I would like therefore, to live in time, and not in space,” (135) and the “weighted” author occurs at a Caribbean axis that Brand explores in much of her work. If A Map is Brand’s memoir about how history is a place on the map, The Blue Clerk is about how a haunting past occupies our ever-unfolding present moment in time.

Artist/copyright holder: Cauleen Smith. Photo credit: Matthew Sherman