SOURCE: Wiens, Jason. “‘Language Seemed to Split in Two’: National Ambivalence(s) and Dionne Brand's ‘No Language Is Neutral’.” Essays on Canadian Writing (spring 2000): 81-102.

In the following essay, Wiens discusses the poem “No Language Is Neutral” as an ambivalent work that deals with two cultural locations—Trinidad and Toronto.

In his recent essay “Half-Bred Poetics,” Fred Wah locates the site of a racialized, transformative poetics in the hyphen, “that marked (or unmarked) space that both binds and divides,” a “crucial location for working at the ambivalences in hybridity” (60). For Wah, as for other writers working in “opposition to a nationalistic aesthetic that continually attempts to expropriate difference into its own consuming narrative,” the hyphen further helps to develop what he terms a “‘synchronous foreignicity’: the ability to remain within an ambivalence without succumbing to the pull of any single culture (cadence, closure)” (62). While Wah usefully explicates how...