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Dionne Brand: Love Enough
Jun. 19th, 2018 10:13 pmIn Dionne Brand’s novel Love Enough, people cross paths in unlikely and tangential ways, creating and fighting for and losing relationships, finding their path through emotional tangles of past and present, obligation and expectation, all against the backdrop of the sprawling multicultural metropolis of Toronto. Indeed, the sense of place is strong enough to almost make the city one of the characters, the cycle of vignettes that illuminate the lives of the people also serving to illustrate the untidy diversity of the city itself.
The narrative swirls around its broken, struggling characters and the people who move into and out of their lives. June, a social activist who wanted to be a dancer. Bedri, one of June’s clients at the drop-in centre where she works, and his friend Ghost, petty thugs high on the aftermath of a violent carjacking. Bedri's cab-driving father, Dau'ud, a Somali immigrant who was once an economist. Lia, Ghost's sister, like him the survivor of abandonment by a drug-addicted mother, and a series of foster homes.
Characters that seek love, love enough to get by, at least. Or perhaps Brand’s title is an imperative, exhorting her characters, and by extension her readers, to love enough that the pain and rootlessness can be ameliorated, at least a little. Or a plea, a prayer, for love enough to overcome the distances between us.
The novel opens with an image of driving down Dupont Street - which is, truly, not anywhere near the prettiest street that Toronto has to offer - seeing it transformed by the vision of the sunset seen through the rear view mirror. Perhaps in that sunset, just enough beauty to alter the ugliness around it, is a parallel to the remembered touch of love, somehow just enough to keep us going through the night.
And the novel ends with these thoughts from June’s lover: “There is nothing universal or timeless about this love business, Sydney now suspects for the first time. It is hard if you really want to do it right.”
The narrative swirls around its broken, struggling characters and the people who move into and out of their lives. June, a social activist who wanted to be a dancer. Bedri, one of June’s clients at the drop-in centre where she works, and his friend Ghost, petty thugs high on the aftermath of a violent carjacking. Bedri's cab-driving father, Dau'ud, a Somali immigrant who was once an economist. Lia, Ghost's sister, like him the survivor of abandonment by a drug-addicted mother, and a series of foster homes.
Characters that seek love, love enough to get by, at least. Or perhaps Brand’s title is an imperative, exhorting her characters, and by extension her readers, to love enough that the pain and rootlessness can be ameliorated, at least a little. Or a plea, a prayer, for love enough to overcome the distances between us.
The novel opens with an image of driving down Dupont Street - which is, truly, not anywhere near the prettiest street that Toronto has to offer - seeing it transformed by the vision of the sunset seen through the rear view mirror. Perhaps in that sunset, just enough beauty to alter the ugliness around it, is a parallel to the remembered touch of love, somehow just enough to keep us going through the night.
And the novel ends with these thoughts from June’s lover: “There is nothing universal or timeless about this love business, Sydney now suspects for the first time. It is hard if you really want to do it right.”
