Liquid Metaphors in Caribbean-Canadian and Chicano ‘Sea(e)scapes’: Confronting Dionne Brand and Gloria Anzaldúa

This essay explores the significance of liquid metaphors in American imagination with a specific focus on the literary production of Chicana writer Gloria Anzaldúa (1942-2004) and the Caribbean-Canadian Dionne Brand (1953 -). The aim is providing a parallel and comparative reading of the narratives, images and language used by the authors as a form of ‘sea(e)scape’, a way of transcending their personal and communal socio-cultural and emotional reality through writing. The standpoints around which investigation is constructed are: 1) The middle passage, at the core of Brand’s literary and family experience in the Caribbean’s, since it is connected with the African diaspora, and; 2) the Chicano American dream that the crossers of the Rio Grande embody and that Anzaldúa puts into question both emotionally and culturally in