Blossom

Dionne Brand's short story Blossom is a story about a Trinidadian woman living in Toronto and the way she embarks upon one enterprise after another to fetch a sustainable existence in a cultural space that is not immediately identifiable to her. The writer decides to write it in a way so as to draw the readers close to his work rather than himself drawing close to the readers through his writing. The story is written in English but the language is made to be shifted from its ''Queen english'' stature to something as close as possible that could mould itself in the skin of the protagonist. The way Blossom phrases her words is not very distinguishable from the way the narrator of the story poses his way of phrasing. Blossom struggles hard to break something in the five years that she is living in Canada, yet she cannot make it that fine as probably as she had thought before migrating to Toronto. She is nevertheless a strong soul. She even proves smart enough when she politicises racism, upholding placards that read that Dr. So and So was a 'white' rapist. The doctor finally escapes to Florida with his entire family. After having worked as a baby sitter, domestic, Blossom finally blossomes into an obeah woman and soon becomes the spiritual icon in that very alien 'white' world to which she had migrated. She now faces a double staged migration, one was when she migrated to Toronto from Trinidad and another is now when she migrates from an ordinary black woman's disturbed mental space to a spiritually enhanced as well as empowered space.These spaces become the fruitful zones where identities merge,mix and get reshaped to born anew. The question arises, can this phenomenon of multiple transformations be read as something that provides a positive value to the diasporic existence? It is nevertheless understood that in such transformations or the metamorphosis of the self, unwanted compromises, compulsions, adjustments are implied.