Refusing the logic which allows ‘heterosexuality to masquerade as History itself’, 4 the text offers a diasporic queerness which results in a representation both of ‘modes of being that refuse the consequential promise of “history”’ 5 and of the transformational challenge posed by, and transformational potential promised by the narration of those lives to that history. Containing only fragments of each character’s life story and thus working against the ‘narrative coherence’ 3 of the temporality of a normative life, this is a queer family history in which the lives sketched in the fragments rarely follow the prescribed sequences of national heteronormativity. Rather than ‘yearning for a different past’, 2 in the sense of erasing the shame and suffering of slavery, the novel charts multiple desires for a new mode of relating to the past and thus new ways of being in the present and alternative futures for black diasporic subjects. Brand’s novel starts from the margins of the colonial archives, but it suggests that colonial historiography, while still powerful, is neither an adequate recourse for the injustices of the black Atlantic past nor a vehicle for the diasporic longings of black Atlantic subjects today. 1 Rather than exploring and exposing the shortcomings of colonial historiography in order to demand a place for enslaved peoples and their descendants within an expanded version of that history, the novel highlights the continuities between past colonial violence, including the violence contained within the gaps of the colonial archive, and the violences and silences of contemporary social and economic relations. At the Full and Change of the Moon chronicles a family story with no pretensions to completeness or continuity, but rather one which ‘bursts forth in snatches and fragments’.

Theory dionne brand