“Quite here you reach” T(h)inking Language, Place, Extraction with Brand’s Land to Light on

Abstract

Perfomatively exhibiting its argument for ’t(h)inking’—para- the usual verb ‘think’, a process that meditates, studies, and undoes extractive Euro-Western logics by which stitched meaning becomes undone, unfurled to fray—this essay communes with Dionne Brand’s Land to Light on. It t(h)inks with apposite “tinker,” fiddling to no particular end, with particular regard to themes of language, place, and extraction in Brand’s collection of poems. Intertwined with deeply personal vignettes on its author’s first return to Trinidad after moving to so-called Canada, this unconventional prose/poem/essay avers that we might understand what has been noted as “ambiguity” by literary scholars in readings of Land as instead representative of para/ontological notions of Blackness: movings across, along, outside, adjacent to ontological nothingness and paraontological fugitivity for Black meaning-making energy in the Western world.