Exposing the Violence of Empire in the Novels It Left Behind

Bertha Mason, the famous “madwoman in the attic,” in “Jane Eyre.” In Bertha’s groans, Dionne Brand writes, we can hear the suffering of the enslaved under Britain’s colonial rule. SALVAGE: Readings From the Wreck , by Dionne Brand Dionne Brand is a poet, novelist and essayist who was born in Trinidad and moved to Canada in 1970. She seeks, across all her work, to interrupt history. Or, as she puts it in her new book, “Salvage: Readings From the Wreck,” describing how the fiction writer John Keene blows “life into the collapsed world of coloniality,” she exposes histories that have not previously come to the surface, finding traces that were of little importance to the white writers of England’s colonial past. In “Salvage,” which Brand calls “an autobiography of the autobiography of reading,” she returns to some of the 18th- and 19th-century social-realist novels — “Vanity Fair,” “Jane Eyre,” “Robinson Crusoe” and “Mansfield Park” — that she read as a young person, along with more recent spinoffs such as Jean Rhys’s “Wide Sargasso Sea”and J.M. Coetzee’s “Foe.” Having been trained to read the classics as an Anglophile Commonwealth subject, first in the West Indies and then in Canada, Brand rereads them to recover the Black and Indigenous lives that English realism obscured. It’s not that Black and Indigenous bodies are simply pushed aside in these novels; they’re kept in sight just long enough for their presence to underscore and intensify their absence. In short, Brand shows that learning to read English literature involved learning not to notice who, or what, was missing. The most striking instance she discovers of her past misreading occurs when she returns to Thackeray’s “Vanity Fair.” She cites the Trinidadian historian and activist C.L.R. James, who wrote, in Brand’s paraphrase, “that Thackeray, not Marx, made him.” James meant by this that literature was always an “active, interested” part of the “imperializing project,” collaborating in colonialism’s disparaging of Blackness by relegating it to the margins of fiction. When Brand rereads “Vanity Fair,” she notes that Becky Sharp’s status as an aggrieved social misfit “gestured toward Blackness […]

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