Remembering Rain: Pluvial Poesis and Marronage in Dionne Brand’s At the Full and Change of the Moon

Abstract

Figured as fleeting and impermanent rain has been underappreciated in the ecology of memory. Reading weather has, however, received recent attention in black studies (Sharpe 2016) and the environmental humanities (Hamilton 2017). Pivotally, Sarah Nuttall has coined pluviality and “pluvial time” to redress colonial notions of exploitation bound to the earth (Nuttall 2020; Interventions 2021). In this chapter I attend to the memory of Atlantic slavery in Dionne Brand's transgenerational novel At The Full and Change of the Moon (1999) not only through the ocean but by accommodating a hydrologic continuum that incorporates rain, botanical growth and embodiment. From the initial rain-covered escape by the character Kamena with the infant Bola, rain feeds the forest cover of maroon communities, and a watery memory ecology seeps into the melancholic lives of Bola’s descendants in twentieth-century diaspora. Read alongside recent literature in maroon ecology and geography (Winston 2021; Wright 2020; Ferdinand 2022), rain acts as an insurgent agent with world making potential, what I call a pluvial poesis. However, the freedom sought in these maroon ecologies remains unfulfilled as it is transmitted across generations through a watery memoryscape of damp corners and the flooding of bodies with the weight of memory.