Winter, Innocence, and Lost Ancestry

Reading Dionne Brand, the culture shock of winter, and the inevitable “tear” of modern migration

Photo by a friend (used with consent) https://www.flickr.com/photos/mageshb/

Dionne Brand’s ***Winter Epigrams*** reads deliberately and excessively anti-aesthetic. It rejects any romanticism of winter, and whatever is seen as beautiful about the season is stripped away.

I must disclose that this reading is based only on 13 of the 40+ epigrams that make up Brand’s poem Winter Epigrams — the ones I had access to. This is perhaps fitting, too, given that each of these “winter fragments” seems meant to be read as a standalone piece. And reading this set, Epigrams 1–10 and 21–23, took me on a meandering thought-path of my own.

I give you these epigrams, Toronto, these winter fragments (Epigram 9)

Luckily, one of the epigrams I came across (Epigram 22) refers to Ernesto Cardenal, a Nicaraguan poet, whose *Epigramas* seems to have inspired Brand’s epigrams. Lucky, because it gives me a larger context for the set of epigrams I was reading.

here! take these epigrams, Toronto, I stole them from Ernesto Cardenal, he deserves a better thief but you deserve these epigrams.

Brand says she ‘stole’ the epigrams, but I take it that she means that she is merely acknowledging the inheritance of the tone and form from Cardenal. It is interesting to note that Cardenal’s Epigramas seems to combine romantic poetry and political protest. Brand’s epigrams, at least those I read, feel like a protest against both the politics and the romanticisation of winter.

Someone in our poetry reading group pointed out that Brand is anti-narrative too, and that she may not want us to read these epigrams as being connected by a narrative. While I see the point, it also gives me the feeling that she has creatively split these epigrammatic fragments from an originally continuous emotional piece, each one heavy, laden with mystery and awe on its own. What connects them is not plot, but a cold estrangement that makes the fragments read almost like a narrative.

A white boy with a dead voice sings about autumn. who knows what he means ! (Epigram 1) …

they think it’s pretty, this falling of leaves. something is dying! (Epigram 4) …

then months in the snow dashed in this icy gutter quartered by a Yonge Street wind snowflakes, brutal as rapists. (Epigram 5)

Even if it means that “fall” is not really death, and even if snowflakes are not really brutal like rapists, the poem aggressively dismantles that romance. This feels excessive. Perhaps that excess is the point. A “white boy” sings about autumn, carrying an inherited sense of how these regions and weather should be felt and enjoyed. For someone who has migrated to Toronto and is facing the Yonge Street wind, this is a culture shock; the idea of beauty in it is almost unimaginable.

But who is her wrath against?

This question keeps me in an investigative mode, close-reading the poem not only for meaning, but for the source of an anger that makes me curious and unsettled.

As early settlers, white populations perhaps developed a culture to ensure belonging to a place they themselves were alien to. The conditions may have been similar to Europe, but it was still far from home. You build a culture by making traditions and embracing local conditions. So, as a later immigrant, why is the speaker questioning the cultural meaning or ownership of a place that has been inhabited by that “white boy” for years before she arrived?

The “violence of innocence” angle from this Lux magazine article helps. The answer seems to lie in the anger against the violence of innocence.

I understand this as anger against an enforced narrative: that winter and autumn, as experienced by the “white boy,” are normal, beautiful, and available to everyone in the same way. His way of experiencing the season becomes the accepted way. Against this, Brand’s anti-romanticizing of fall and snow is made to appear dark, excessive, or unnatural. Thus, the purported “innocence” in singing the beauty of autumn hides the quiet, yet violent undertone of forcing that experience on everyone who encounters the same weather.

This friction points to a broader phenomenon of migration, which Brand herself calls “a tear in the world.” I do not want to trivialise the struggles of Brand’s ancestors. Their alienation was not born of a choice to seek a better life, but of violent, forced displacement, slavery, and generations of systemic suppression. That is not the same as someone who moves for opportunities or aspirations. But even with that vital distinction, in a world that is more deliberately immigrant today, this tearing continues in quieter forms. People setting out to seek active opportunities abroad also risk forgetting their ancestry in a couple of generations.

There is an inherent inability to preserve cultures and remember ancestry across geographies. As a new immigrant to a different country where my children were born and raised, I can paint a picture of our culture and ancestry to them, but they don’t experience it. And hence, they may never be compelled to impart this knowledge to their own progeny. This is how the tear continues to happen.

I am always seeking some compromise and going towards a place where everything is agreeable, but I don’t think the alienation really comes to an end. People probably try to live with it, come to terms with it, and still claim their place in a not very hospitable environment. The alienation of the initial settlers, such as the white boy, changes into ownership and belonging through new culture and traditions. But the alienation faced by the likes of Brand remains something to be contended with.

Then, there are emotional outlets like Brand’s poetry, where such alienation can be held, questioned, and voiced. Continuing to address Toronto, she says in her Epigram 22

I give you winter epigrams because you are a liar, there is no other season here.

I read this as a cry of despair against alienation, addressed to a city that offers no warmth.

Even when her voice becomes a standard part of Canada’s cultural and literary scene, the alienation doesn’t vanish. Rather, her poetry forces the environment to give equal importance to both the innocent appreciation of beauty and the rejection of the violence hidden within that innocence.

Ultimately, I am secretly rooting for all these tears and tattered pieces of cultures and ancestry to become a collage as people, families, languages, and memories intermingle. Perhaps that collage gets crushed in the passage of time, and the pulp gives birth to a new culture and ancestry to remember.