Fragmented Lines: the Impossibility of Ancestry in Dionne Brand's "At the Full and Change of the Moon"

This study aims to offer an interpretation of the variety of existing diasporic realities through the analysis of Dionne Brand’s novel At the Full and Change of the Moon in order to prove how the experience of diaspora contributes to the erasure of genealogy. The book directly and indirectly addresses the majority of the central themes discussed in both seminal and innovative works in the postcolonial field, thus presenting the reader with a comprehensive overview of the multiple consequences of the black diasporic experience. Brand’s novel spaces from the Caribbean to Europe, passing through Canada, Venezuela and the United States. The coral narration of the characters is often interrupted by the haunting intrusion of their common ancestors, who appear as ghostly presences or voices. All the characters, having different degrees of memory loss and trauma, navigate times and spaces that endlessly force them to question their identity; in doing so, the author portrays how each of them developed their own way of surviving. Given the diversity of the stories presented in the book, the analysis carried out in this dissertation has multiple focuses: it provides an introduction to the concept of the Black Atlantic from a historical and cultural standpoint; it addresses the role of water both in the novel and in postcolonial theories; it analyses the interplay of masculinity and femininity and the characters’ position as subalterns; it offers a rhizomatic reading of the concept of ancestry and, finally, it focuses on trauma and on how the cycle of remembering and forgetting leads to the development of feelings of longing and haunting.