Bread out of Stone is a raging river of personal revelations, analysis and criticism of patriarchy, racism, lesbophobia, capitalism, cultural domination and other things I can't remember.

She starts with lesbianism, probing the scorn of African-Canadian heterosexual men and women.  While very esoteric, "This Body For Itself," shows how the portrayal of Black women in literature mirror[s] their position as sexual property and vessels for the sexual gratification of men.
The essay is thick in obscurity, but plain in message: Black womanhood is restrictive, debilitating and unjust.

Brand is interested in the shadowy meaning hidden in language and cultural forms. Most interesting for her is White disregard for African oppression.
 
Canada for Whites, Brand argues, is "a space without a painful history, a past antiseptic and innocent;" so Whites dismiss a Black consciousness riddled with a brutalized history.

"We do not wish to run from our history;" Brand writes, "our history is to us redemptive and restorative."

The outspoken author mixes personal experience and analysis well, whether she's discussing Canada's "lily-white" cultural institutions or the U.S.'s invasion of Grenada.

Two essays stand out: "Bathurst," which documents the Black power movement in Toronto in the 70s and "Brownman, Tiger," a gripping piece on the psychological destruction of Black youth.

Sometimes, Brand's analysis becomes strained. Her argument that Canada was founded on the notion of "Whiteness" is so simplistic it makes the writer appear petty.

Nevertheless, there are too few with Brand's guts and eloquence today.