Kind(s) of Blue: The poetics and politics of blueness in Dionne Brand’s The Blue Clerk and Lorna Simpson’s Ghost Note and Time

Abstract

This paper explores the chromapolitics of the colour blue as it becomes manifest in Dionne Brand’s long prose poem The Blue Clerk: Ars Poetica in 59 Versos (2018) and Lorna Simpson’s unsettling and terribly beautiful portraits Ghost Note (2021) and Time (2021). Brand’s poem is articulated as a dialogical sequence between an author and a blue Clerk in a blue coat, who acts as a metonymical figure for the blueness of ink, the sky, the sea, indigo, the night, the blues, and the connection of blue with melancholy. The two characters discuss writing (especially of poetry), the violence of colonial discourses, the histories of dispossession and race thinking, but also the unsaid and unwritten stories of Black communities’ resistance and survival. Simpson’s large-scale ink screenprints juxtapose blue, black, violet, and grey to frame and impress the photographic portraits of women whose fragmented bodies and blueblack flesh persist and survive as counterarchives despite the violence and expropriation of modernity, from the Middle Passage to slavery and the long durée of racisms in the North American context. The Blue Clerk, Ghost Note, and Time confront the lacunae and absences of the colonial archive and deconstruct the monolithic grammars of reading and looking at the colour blue, which obscure the polyvocality of its hues, shades, textures, and relations to adjacent colours—and mainly the colour black. Both the poetic and visual texts perform and incarnate an otherwise, paraontological gaze on blueness, blackness, and the spectres that they conjure in our precarious now-time.

Keywords: blue, black, chromapolitics, counterarchive, paraontology