As Christina Sharpe notes in her critical introduction, Brand "makes scalar leaps from the
'eroding present' and the 'intimacy of history' to 'unknown galaxies' and 'as yet / unarmed
moons,' as her work threads multiple temporal worlds—past, present, and futures."
Though
Nomenclature
does not cover Brand's entire output, it reaches as far back as 1982,
to
Primitive Offensive
, and its chronological progression through the poet's oeuvre reveals a
complicated relationship with oceans and seas as sites of loss, with frequent mentions of the
color blue: "the blue seas' limning screens / are saturated with experts on terror." In Brand's
visual lexicon, blue signals the potential for brutality with "hair nets of violence, blue, / like
machine guns, of course knives, extensions / of blueness." In Canto II from
Primitive
Offensive
, the speaker says:
you want to kill me
press me into jade
grind me into blue stone
From "analgesics of indigo" and a "cobalt path," to "the deepest suicidal blue waters," we
observe the poet struggle to square away the beauty she observes in the world with so many
postcolonial horrors:
[...] I have tried to imagine a sea not
bleeding, a girl's glance full as a verse, a woman
growing old and never crying to a radio hissing of a
black boy's murder. [...]
The splendor of the sea cannot be trusted, nor can the history that's been handed to us,
because the "illuminated manuscripts are just the gaudy // sacredness of violence," because
"the wars they recorded were the wars they won." Taken together, these poems reflect the
work of someone aching to find a place where "to be awake is / more lovely than dreams."
