The Poetic Journey of Return: An Analysis of At the Full and Change of the Moon Natasha Borden College

“Poetry is my first language”. — Dionne Brand, Abbas 18

Dionne Brand’s novel At the Full and Change of the Moon reads as part poem and part novel combining powerfully evocative images of sight, sound, and smell, with a multigenerational story spanning two centuries. Brand builds her story using echoing words and images, doubling characters and spaces, and a series of loosely connected narratives which spread out in a rhizomic structure (Evans 1). Held together by common threads and broken lines of descent, these images and structures give voice through poetic representations to the experiences of the Black Atlantic Diaspora and the lingering effects of the Atlantic slave trade. Many critics have noted the way in which Brand uses her writing style and subject to create a politically charged text that questions the hegemony of Western Enlightenment, colonialism, and patriarchy, and Brand herself states that “we are living in a politically charged moment, that is suffused in race and racism... [and that] all art is politically charged and should be read through a political lens” (Cavalli 3).

As Brand’s novel interrogates the notions of history and identity, Barrett points out that Brand “rewrites the absence of origins, nation,...