ABSTRACT
This chapter begins by examining the difference between personal and collective memories, history and the past, and the political struggle over the meaning of memory within Euro-American culture. It explores Dionne Brand's practices of remembrances, such as her engagements with the cultural traumas of slavery in her earlier novel At the Full and Change of the Moon, and the cultural traumas of the Vietnam War in her novel What We All Long For. One of the practices of remembrance Dionne Brand engages with, particularly in her novel At the Full and Change of the Moon, is the cultural trauma of slavery, how slavery is passed down to us as transgenerational memory. In What We All Long For, Brand is exploring the memory and trauma of other diasporic communities, and how that affects the multicultural communities living in the global city of Toronto.
