No argument in the world is ever resolved. Resolving would suggest some liquid in which arguments could be immersed, perhaps love. But it must be love enough.Love Enough by Dionne Brand is more a collection of impressions than a complete narrative, and as such, it made for an uneven reading experience for me.
In a multicultural city like Toronto, it's appropriate for the Trinidad-born Brand to note in passing and document the Somali economist who speaks five languages and now drives a cab, the Chilean journalist who fled Pinochet's regime, the broken woman who wanders the streets and washes her hands and face with Clorox. Many domestic scenes are lingering in my brain: the middle-aged Italian woman who seeks respectability in dowdy housedresses when her daughter goes wild (a wildness she secretly supports); the thug who pressures his hard-working sister for money but runs to her like a little boy when he thinks she just wants to talk; the woman who believes that the radio said the City of Toronto was sending one hundred musicians – not the one hundred policemen her partner insists that she heard – to confront the violence of the Jane and Finch neighbourhood. In all of these situations, all anyone is looking for is love; love enough.
Brand is a novelist and a poet (she was Poet Laureate of Toronto from 2009-12) and she brings a poetic sensibility to her writing. Sometimes this results in some brain-bending grasps at profundity like, “She had forgotten, of course, that when you are not in a position to order your life, disorder has its own order. Which is not like the disorder of order but like the order of disorder.” Or even more head-scratchingly:
And as much as people might think otherwise, sex is a limited idiom, not a whole language – it gets exhausted. Like a conversation that peters out into what we don't know and can't express. No doubt there are bursts of eloquence, but the prosody isn't always affective. And sometimes, just sometimes, the sex becomes less and less compelling like a stilted idiolect.But more often, I felt like Brand was capturing the essence of Toronto and the people who live there; in a way that only this poetic sensibility could:
The best way of looking at a summer sunset in this city is in the rear-view mirror. Or better, the side mirrors of a car. So startling. The subtlety, the outerworldliness of the sunset follows you. If only you could drive that way forever. It's counterintuitive, you understand, but you get a wide measure of that quotidian beauty. If you ever travel east along Dupont Street, at that time, look back. Despite this not being a particularly handsome street – in fact it is most often grim – you may see, looking back, looking west, something breathtaking. It is perhaps because this street is so ugly; car-wrecking shops, taxi dispatch sheds, rooming houses, hardware stores, desolate all-night diners and front yards eaten up by a hundred winters' salt; it is because of all this that a sunset is in the perfect location here. Needed.As a meditation on love and relationships, and how and where we find ourselves in the world, Brand has assembled a collection of vignettes of varying degrees of wisdom – not all equally necessary or enjoyable to this reader – and I am left somewhat unsatisfied by the lack of arc and closure for the several storylines. But, in the end, a character seems to justify this scattershot approach when she notes, “There is nothing universal or timeless about this love business”. Perhaps the only universal factor is that we all seek love enough.
