"Near enough to smell and far enough to desire”: Archipelagos of Desire in Canisia Lubrin’s Voodoo Hypothesis and Dionne Brand’s In Another Place, Not Here

In her essay memoir A Map to the Door of No Return, Dionne Brand reflects on the meaning of desire by describing formative childhood reading experiences that evoked the feeling of desire which would later reverberate in her reading and writing practice. There, desire is framed as something expansive and powerful: “Desire’s province widened to the flying pieces, their occasional collection into a movement or a colour or a sigh, ever shifting, ever reimagined.” 1 Desire, thus, hints at a set of continued pos-sibili ties. As Deleuze observes, desire is “a positive force, it is not purely psychic, not a lack as usually understood but productive in nature; like labour, desire is actualised in the course of practice.” 2 Desire as actualized in practice presupposes movement: It is generated through a kind of inward movement and reaches outward, extending a relation to something or someone else. In this essay, we read desire across two books — Dionne Brand’s novel In Another Place, Not Here (1996) and Canisia Lubrin’s poetry collection Voodoo Hypothesis (2017) — which extend these relations across the archi-pelago spanning Canada and the Caribbean. For Brand, though desire does appear as an active force in Door of No Return , it is impossible t o be grasped as a whole; it remains opaque: “I want to say something else about desire. I really do not know what it is. I experience something which, some-Gfoellner