That I have scrapped and restarted this review many times is, I think, a testament to this book’s own depth of consideration: I want to get it right, to do justice to the layers of complexity we find here. I am almost tempted to call Salvage: Readings from the Wreck ‘timely’, but I think it would be much more accurate to say it’s been a long time coming. Brand’s study of the canonical and colonial in English literature—a study that keeps the broader global picture in mind—is vital, both on collective and individual levels. We (readers, students, teachers, systems of pedagogy) need this book. I have been waiting for it.
Brand’s larger literary project is a many-genre oeuvre that includes works such as At the Full and Change of the Moon (one of my personal favourite novels, a diasporic saga beginning with a woman’s refusal of the conditions of slavery), her seminal nonfiction book A Map to the Door of No Return (an extraordinary exploration of identity and belonging in the Black diaspora), and numerous groundbreaking volumes of poetry such as Ossuaries and No Language is Neutral. Brand has a long history of reworking received literary forms, faithful to the concord between a work’s intention and the structure of its execution.
Salvage is no exception. It arrives—meticulously, tenderly, wryly—to address a dishonesty, a bad-faith elision in Euro-America’s relationship to its own literature. This elision, which we inherit, is a kind of shipwreck reproduced at the heart of the English novel: in narrative, in character, in aesthetic, in language. It is evident in the books Brand analyses—including William Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko, Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, and Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe—and in the particular way those books are valued, used, read. This is an elision that influences not only the way we see the past and the present, but also how we see ourselves, how we narrativise our lives and those of others. Brand considers what work each of these books did in normalising the empires and power relations of their times (reproducing and embedding them ‘in the structure and form of storytelling’), but also what work they do now, within the structures of the present, when they are uncritically aestheticised.
In the narratives and narrative structures that form a literary canon, there are norms and preconceptions, centres and margins, foregrounds and backgrounds. There are silences and subtexts, contexts and meta-texts. The lessons a reader draws (or is meant to draw) from these are sometimes explicit, but usually they accumulate unacknowledged, constructing a foundation we are meant to understand as ‘normal’ or ‘natural’.
Brand digs down into this foundation, the bedrock of the reading self produced by the English-language canon. ´What is a life making its way through this monopoly of interpretation (as Frederic Jameson calls it) that colonial narratives represent? Well, it might be a life animated but also destroyed by books—that is, animated but also destroyed by stories that override life, that overlay experience, that deny experience or quantify experience or adjust experience.´ Reading can animate, give a person the ability to understand their own humanity, but it can also transport and normalise corrosive ways of knowing and seeing.
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Brand is fundamentally interested in how this reading works to shape a subject. ‘I have been trying to think of how one is made and how one makes oneself’, she writes. ‘I have been thinking that one is made through events—historical, familial, known and unknown; one is made also by what one reads, by what one experiences—all this underpins how one comes to know oneself; and one is made through the action, realisation, and analysis that constructs a self.’ In short: ‘One is made by works of literature, and one is made by narrative.’
Born in Trinidad in 1953 and attending school there before emigrating to Canada aged seventeen, Brand herself was made in this way—made and unmade, constructed and corroded. England and America both cast shadows over the island: the cultural products of both nations created centres she was expected to orbit. Of her secondary school’s literary education, she writes: ‘There, we will be schooled in many things, but most significantly in the racial work of literature, whose most abiding feature will be our absence, on the one hand, and our eternal subjugate presence, on the other hand.’ This paradox is foisted upon the psyche of the young Black reader, the subject of colony, who finds themself present specifically as wallpaper, caricature, plot device, unspoken source of another family’s fortune, ‘perpetually escaping from and being captured in unwanted and unrecognisable signification.’
Part of the joy Salvage gives me is in Brand’s centring of the perspective of a ‘reader like [her]’, which returns me to the making of my own reading self. As I’m sure is true of many other readers of the global majority who grew up in or underneath nations like the UK or the US, I understood my perspective as distant from the centre of classic novels. The things I saw from my vantage point felt fringe—beside the point. I understood myself to be beside the point. I saw (or rather, felt) versions of the patterns Brand examines in Salvage, but I didn’t have the language for them; I didn’t know how to shape them into something self-evident. (‘We were trained to read the books, but not to understand the words and their larger contexts.’) Brand’s vantage point is affirming in the ways it is near mine and refreshing in the ways that it isn’t.
I have thought long and hard about how to speak to her carefully composed arguments and revelations here: I don’t want to do Brand the disservice of oversimplification, but I want to do more than describe or summarise her brilliance. Perhaps the best way is by reconstructing one core thread of her thinking, using as much of her own language as possible.
‘Reading narrative requires, demands, acts of identification, association, affiliation, sympathy, and empathy, acts of inhabiting’, Brand writes in her section on Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, which moves through the reader’s potential relationship to various characters. A female reader of the novel, she notes, is invited to inhabit Amelia Sedley ‘by the mere presentation of her as innocence and goodness, silence, inaction and vapidity’ and to reject Becky Sharp, ‘too worldly, too clever, too grasping, too knowledgeable, and therefore doomed.’ And then there are the Black and Indian characters: Miss Schwartz, described as ‘the rich wooly-haired mulatto from St. Kitts’; Sambo (yes, Sambo), described as ‘the black servant’; Loll Jewab, ‘variously described as mistaken for the devil or having yellow eyes and white teeth.’ The narrative schema of Thackeray’s novel is ultimately uninterested in these figures: ‘We are as curious about these characters as we are about a necessary bit of described, denotative furniture.’ The action takes place in other characters, who have trajectories—lives—instead of utilitarian purposes.
Just as a novel’s plot gives us a structure with which to make narrative sense of our lives, a novel’s characters influence our understanding of ourselves and other people. ‘Character,’ Brand writes, is not ‘neutral or empty; it is a live and active mode, transporting sedimented ideas.’ In a novel’s characters—and, importantly, in a canon, where character tropes accrue mass—we find ideas about what constitutes a human subject: what kind of person we recognise as reasonable, justified, or sympathetic and, crucially, what kind of person we don’t. In novels of manners like Vanity Fair, but also in adventure novels like Robinson Crusoe or in the racial romantic genre of Oroonoko, Brand reminds us that ‘the dominant literary intelligence […] posits white sociality as the default for, and a priori essential to, the “protagonist”.’ It is true that a novel reflects the mores of the era it’s written in, but it’s also true that a novel like this—popular, then canonised—helps define or codify those mores.
The plot elements of novels like Vanity Fair (and Austen’s Mansfield Park) are enabled by a wealth that conditions characters’ comfort, familial and other relationships, and marriage prospects. Though Vanity Fair is a ‘scathing indictment’ of the mores of the British aristocracy, it never satirises the colonial exploitation this wealth is built on; that is simply ‘a given—not the subject in question.’ (Brand notes that Thackeray himself was born in India, and that his father was a secretary of the East India Company). ‘Slavery is never mentioned in the text, but virtue, modesty, goodness and religion and God are.’ These values are not inconsequently linked to slavery, or to colony. Brand argues, following scholar Simon Gikandi (Slavery and the Culture of Taste), that ‘the colonial event is the aesthetic´: its ´pleasures, tastes, manners´ all centre on this juxtaposition between decorum and the exploitation that makes that decorous life possible. The violence of empire is part of what gives the novel’s (and the era’s) conceptions of virtue, modesty, goodness, and religion their significance. People in this era had at least an implicit understanding of this, just as we perceive the charged and coded meanings in our own era. ‘We know the words; we demur the meanings. As those earlier readers did. Or, we love the meanings. As they did.’
A reader like Brand is pulled in two directions when she encounters novels like these. On the one hand, she is asked by these books to identify with the interests of empire, to learn that ‘This is what literature is. This is what beauty is. These are the people deserving of a beautiful life. These are the travails that accompany their achievement of life. This is not you.’ On the other, she is unable to ignore the abjection of those like her, so the emotional and sentimental logic that takes this abjection for granted does not necessarily have its full intended effect. This is exemplified in her response to a different Thackeray novel, The History of Henry Esmond, Esq, in which, in one passage, a character describes how ‘It was not until after that dreadful siege of our house by the Indians […] that my dear mother’s health broke. She never recovered from the terror and anxiety of those days.’ Brand writes: ‘I have to admit to reading this with cold-bloodedness—or at least I cannot do what a reader is hailed to do, which is juxtapose the refinement, good taste, beauty and rectitude of the mother, ergo England, against the dreadful siege of the Indians.’ To access the one-sided sympathy the passage is asking for, she would have to take the violent occupation of Native land as a given. Even the terms in which she understands her refusal to do so are shaped by the expectations of literary taste. ‘That I say I have to admit and call myself cold-blooded,’ she writes, ‘speaks to the presumption that the vehicular language has transported the pathos to the correct narrative subject, and that I am the reading subject who must respond to the material as if so transported’; ‘some moral tenet, some tenet of proper aesthetic appreciation’ depends on it.
Brand draws out the consequences of these selective sympathies by tying them to contemporary frameworks: eliding the ‘shipwreck’ of violent exploitation that underlies ethical, economic, and aesthetic concepts leads to failures of imagination with material consequences.
One example, which starts the book, comes from the early days of COVID-19. With the beginning of the pandemic came the beginnings of a recognition that ‘we’, the planet’s human inhabitants, were in a shared crisis, that all of our safety and livelihood was under threat. ‘We suddenly felt the earth as if our feet were on the same shaky surface. The earth compressed its air and time together—and briefly made all distinctions superfluous.’ This was not a tragedy ‘happening elsewhere, but everywhere.’ We even gestured towards the next step: an understanding that this crisis was unevenly distributed, that our hope of survival lay in attending to the threats posed to the most vulnerable (rather, those we have made the most vulnerable). ‘We’ in the global North ‘briefly felt the way it is to live in the global South—under siege, under lack, under restraint’ and were therefore ‘forced to come to terms with the rest of the world.’
But it didn’t last, and ‘we’ didn’t reach the new conclusions we gestured towards, instead ‘right-sliding toward a killing, stratifying, death-dealing normal.’ Brand points to the selective sympathies that go hand in hand with this failure of imagination. When reporters went looking for accounts of confinement and precarity throughout history, the literary lodestars they assembled—as in the Guardian article ‘What We Can Learn from Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Years in Lockdown’—were united through whiteness: ‘the white “we”, metonym for every “we”, innocently, casually summoned’, ‘reproducing only white bourgeoise experience as “meaning”’.
Rarely or never did Brand see commentators turn to Black writers or writers from the geopolitical South. Yet, as she reminds us, many Black and post-colonial texts are ‘novels of endurance and survival through times of material and existential dread and confinement.’ There are numerous books in these traditions that consider what happens when the world ends and still keeps turning, books filled with ‘meaning’ and humanity (in the face of forces that seek to snuff out the human). Brand suggests a few such books: Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions, Sam Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners, Edwidge Danticat’s The Farming of Bones, and John Keene’s Counternarratives. ‘Read these works to understand how sustained, intense pressure shuts a life down, curtails its movement, makes all plans indefinite, shapes all days, yet does not frame its purpose. Read there about waiting. Read there about patience and cunning and imagination and laughter.’
Another joy of Salvage is that Brand writes—with excitement, with care, with passion—about the works that serve as alternatives or addendums to this canon. In doing so, she addresses differences not only of content or perspective but also of form: the architecture of these works brings a greater honesty about colony, empire, and its relations. Brand uses these pages both to explain the library as a kind of shipwreck and to outpace it: “the salvage is the life which exceeds the wreck.”
The (multidisciplinary) archive of alternative works Brand explores includes: Wilson Harris’s Palace of the Peacock, a novel that meets the colonial desire ‘to order its human objects in particular ways’ with complex refusal; Werner Herzog’s 1972 film Aguirre, the Wrath of God, ‘perhaps the most honest European account of conquest I’ve experienced in a European work of the imagination’; Hyper Shapes, a series of paintings and sculptures where Torkwase Dyson imagines ‘the myriad and intricate angles, aspects, distances, and scales of “looking” from the holds of the ships of the Middle Passage’; and the incredible Maud Martha, where poet Gwendolyn Brooks ‘arranges an ordinary life, without a spectator who is interested in violence as the only mode of, or code for, referencing that life.’ Brand also situates her thought in a constellation of other thinkers: C.L.R. James, Édouard Glissant, Simon Gikandi, Christina Sharpe, Rinaldo Walcott, Frantz Fanon, Sylvia Wynter, and Edward Said are just some of these.
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Brand is deeply aware of the stakes and broader global picture of the work she undertakes. The structures of feeling, narrative, character, language, and aesthetic transported and normalised in the novels she examines impact our tangible lived reality at all levels, not only limited to the study of literature.
Salvage asks us to consider, for example, the uneven distribution of empathy in global conflicts and inter/national policy; the prioritisation of a nation’s or empire’s or corporation’s interests over human life; the drawing of lines between lives worthy of protection and lives destroyed in the name of this protection (with one group pulled to the centre and the other expelled to the margins). Colonial and imperial narrative structures have been paramount in justifications from Israel and the US for the genocide in Gaza and attacks on Iran or Lebanon, or in Russia’s story of its assault on Ukraine. The conflict in the DRC and the civil war in Sudan can’t be untangled from the extraction of those countries’ resources, an extraction enabled by a narrative logic that sets the plot in the wealth and comfort of the geopolitical North and makes all other lives and spaces background, furniture. Or the global ‘refugee crisis’, the bodies made unwelcome by the very entities that set their flight in motion. Or the recent US and UK attacks on the freedoms of trans people, which work to codify the border between those lives included in the ‘common good’ and those considered antagonistic or superfluous to it. Or ICE’s reign of terror, its violent efforts to cinch the line of citizen as tightly around American whiteness as possible. The disappeared children. The detention centres. The list goes on.
Though the above wreckage forecloses on our imagination, Brand is here to tell us that there is salvage to be found. There are works of art that destabilise these dominant stories, that seek to give us more honest or nuanced or plural forms to hold our world in—and there are more to be created. There are many of us who fit, in some way or another, into Brand’s category of ‘readers like me’, who have been looking for structures of language that hold us better than the ones we were taught. Salvage, an extraordinary ‘autobiography of the autobiography of reading’, has found a form that is not quite literary criticism, not quite autobiography, but that troubles the architecture of both. For readers like Brand, it will interrupt constriction and blow life ‘into the collapsed world of coloniality’ (as Brand says of John Keene’s Counternarratives). This book shows us we can do both things: look soberly at the wreckage and find salvage in it.