Winner! - What We All Long For
by Dionne Brand
Alfred A. Knopf Canada
What We All Long For tells the story a circle of second-generation twenty-somethings living in downtown Toronto. There's Tuyen, a lesbian avant-garde artist and the daughter of Vietnamese parents who've never recovered from losing one of their children in the crush to board a boat out of Vietnam in the 1970s. She's in love with her best friend Carla, a biracial bicycle courier. Oku is a jazz-loving poet who, unbeknownst to his Jamaican-born parents, has dropped out of university; he's in love with Jackie, a gorgeous black woman who runs a hip clothing shop on Queen West and dates only white men. The four characters try to make a life for themselves in the city, supporting one another through their struggles. Quy is the fifth main character, the child who Tuyen's parents lost in Vietnam. After many years, he has finally made his way to Toronto and will soon be reunited with his family - whether to love them or hurt them, it's not clear. What We All Long For is a gripping and, at times, heart-rending story about identity, longing and loss in a cosmopolitan city.
Dionne Brand
Dionne Brand is a poet, novelist and essayist living in Toronto. Her eight volumes of poetry include Land to Light On which won the Governor General's Award for Poetry and the Trillium Award for Literature in 1997. Brand's thirsty was nominated for the Trillium Prize for Literature, the Toronto Book Awards and the Griffin Poetry Prize in 2003. It won the Pat Lowther Award for Poetry. Her latest volume of poetry is called Inventory.
Dionne Brand's most recent novel What We All Long For was published to great acclaim in Canada and Italy. Her fiction includes the acclaimed novel In Another Place Not Here - a 1998 New York Times notable book - and Sans Souci and Other Stories. Her second work of fiction, At the Full and Change of the Moon is a novel spanning six generations, two wars and the violence of the late twentieth century. The Village Voice included her in their 1999 Writers on the Verge Literary supplement. It was a Los Angeles Times Notable Book of the Year, 1999.
Her works of non fiction include Bread Out Of Stone, a book of essays, and, A Map to the Door of No Return a meditation on Blackness in the diaspora. - Photo credit: Jason W. Chow
Excerpt from What We All Long For
THIS CITY HOVERS above the forty-third parallel; that's illusory of course. Winters on the other hand, there's nothing vague about them. Winters here are inevitable, sometimes unforgiving. Two years ago, they had to bring the army in to dig the city out from under the snow. The streets were glacial, the electrical wires were brittle, the telephones were useless. The whole city stood still; the trees more than usual. The cars and driveways were obliterated. Politicians were falling over each other to explain what had happened and who was to blame—who had privatized the snow plows and why the city wasn't prepared. The truth is you can't prepare for something like that. It's fate. Nature will do that sort of thing—dump thousands of tons of snow on the city just to say, Don't make too many plans or assumptions, don't get ahead of yourself. Spring this year couldn't come too soon—and it didn't. It took its time-melting at its own pace, over running ice—blocked sewer drains, swelling the Humber River and the Don River stretching to the lake. The sound of the city was of trickling water.
Have you ever smelled this city at the beginning of spring? Dead winter circling still, it smells of eagerness and embarrassment and, most of all, longing.
It's 8 A.M. on a Wednesday of this early spring, and the subway train rumbles across the bridge over the Humber River. People are packed in tightly, and they all look dazed, as if recovering from a blow. There's the smell of perfume and sweat, and wet hair and mint, coffee and burned toast. There is a tension, holding in all the sounds that bodies make in the morning. Mostly people are quiet, unless they're young, like the three who just got on—no annoying boss to be endured all day. They grab hold of the upper hand-bars and as the train moves off they crash into one another, giggling. Their laughter rattles around in the car, then they grow mockingly self-conscious and quiet, noticing the uptightness on the train, but they can't stay serious and explode again into laughter.
One of them has a camera, she's Asian, she's wearing an old oilskin coat, and you want to look at her, she's beautiful in a strange way. Not the pouting corporate beauty on the ad for shampoo above her head, she has the beauty a falcon has: watchful, feathered, clawed, and probing. Another one's a young black man; he's carrying a drum in a duffel bag. He's trying to find space for it on the floor, and he's getting annoyed looks all around. There's an enviable loose physical allure to him. He has a few days' growth on his face, and when he smiles his eyebrows, his eyes—his whole face can't help its seduction. The third is another woman, she might be Italian, southern. She's bony like a mantis in her yellow slick plastic coat, except her mouth has a voluptuousness to it, and her eyes, the long eyelashes weigh them down. The Asian woman points the camera at her, coaxes her for a smile, and the flash goes off and she looks startled. It's obvious they've been out all night. They're talking now about some friend of theirs whom the young man loves. But all three are finally subdued by the taut silence around them, as if succumbing to some law they'd broken. Who wants to hear about love so early in the morning?
Mornings are like that on the subway trains—everyone having left their sovereign houses and apartments and rooms to enter the crossroads of the city, they first try at not letting the city touch them, holding on to the meagre privacy of a city with three million people. But eventually they're disrupted like this. Anonymity is the big lie of a city. You aren't anonymous at all. You're common, really, common like so many pebbles, so many specks of dirt, so many atoms of materiality.
From What We All Long For by Dionne Brand. Published by Alfred A. Knopf Canada. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.
Read the Committee's comments on this book.
2006 short list:
