In contrast to Levy, Dionne Brand’s novel represents a more radical postcolonial intervention in historiography. It demands a reassessment of the meaning of history and kinship, and their relationship to each other, in Black Atlantic contexts, suggesting that the experiences of slavery and the afterlife of slavery require and create alternative modes of relationality and subjectivity. Both normative kinship and history prove elusive and desirable, yet limiting and oppressive. National histories and colonial historiography are revealed as profoundly heteronormative, and it becomes clear that the diasporic lives of the novel's characters are queered by their displacement from national heteronormativity - yet queer does not necessarily mean liberating. Narrating these experience demands a similarly fractured, non-linear mode of writing, in which history and present subjectivities are generated in interaction with one another.
