Further, the philosophies are important interventions that resemble the work of David Chariandy, Christina Sharpe, Rinaldo Walcott and others, as Brand seamlessly writes their voices into the narrator’s monologues.

In an interview, published in Quill & Quire, Brand says that “the thesis that the narrator tries to attend to walks into the novel the thesis is performed in the novel.” While the academic sermons, like one about art and artists as the narrator musters up courage to call the artist-activist Yara, can be exhausting at times, one realizes that graduate students, like myself, actually do sound like that. Now you should read their story.Ītypical in Brand’s corpus and released alongside her poetry collection The Blue Clerk, Theory is a collection of intimate moments depicted through a prism of philosophical deliberations. They will misread people, events, and experiences in their life, Brand seems to say. Brand immediately alerts the reader to this narrator’s unreliability. We are given a narrator who misunderstands Occam’s razor as they name their three lovers as the reasons, rather than the solutions, for their incomplete dissertation. Abiding by the principle of Occam’s razor, the narrator simplifies the reasons to three women: Selah, Yara, and Odalys, each of whom are accorded a chapter.īrand, a doyenne of Canadian literature, wastes no time establishing the curious, vain, and misinterpreting narrator. They decide to take stock of the reasons for why the dissertation is incomplete. The visit reminds the narrator how kinships and lovers have interrupted their intellectual pursuits.

This anything-but-simple footnote fills the remainder of the page, spilling over to the next, in which the narrator speaks about turning 40 soon, their incomplete and ambitious PhD dissertation, and a recent uneasy visit from their brother. Dionne Brand’s novel Theory opens with a short, footnoted, epigraphic introduction: “Occam’s razor.” Occam’s razor is a principle for solving problems in which the simplest solutions are considered the most truthful.

Theory by Dionne Brand