Dionne Brand

A Map to the Door of No Return is a timely book that explores the relevance and nature of identity and belonging in a culturally diverse and rapidly changing world. It is an insightful, sensitive and poetic book of discovery. Drawing on cartography, travels, narratives of childhood in the Caribbean, journeys across the Canadian landscape, African ancestry, histories, politics, philosophies and literature, Dionne Brand sketches the shifting borders of home and nation, the connection to place in Canada and the world beyond. The title, A Map to the Door of No Return, refers to both a place in imagination and a point in history -- the Middle Passage. The quest for identity and place has profound meaning and resonance in an age of heterogenous identities. In this exquisitely written and thought-provoking new work, Dionne Brand creates a map of her own art.

Notes to Belonging

A Map to the Door of No Return

Marion

To live in the Black Diaspora is I think to live as a fiction — a creation of empires, and also self-creation.

Black experience in any modern city or town in the Americas is a haunting. One enters a room and history follows; one enters a room and history precedes. History is already seated in the chair in the empty room when one arrives.

One hears that all the time in Canada; about what people feel they are and are not responsible for. People use these arguments as reasons for not doing what is right or just. It never occurs to them that they live on the cumulative hurt of others. They want to start the clock of social justice only when they arrived. But one is born into history, one isn't born into a void.

To enter Toni Morrison's fiction is to enter her rewriting of the myth of America, and so it is also a conversation about grace, redemption, and that quintessential American ideal, happiness. Against the official American narrative, Morrison narrates the African-American presence that underpins the official story but is rarely, truly braided among the narratives of the "pilgrims," the "founding fathers," the "west," and so on.

In a society so invested in its "inherent goodness" and moral superiority, Morrison's voice is always trenchant. Her project to write myth is nothing less than trying to take command of that national narrative — to call it to account for the injustice it elides.

Writing is an act of desire, as is reading. Why does someone enclose a set of apprehensions within a book? Why does someone else open that book if not because of the act of wanting to be wanted, to be understood, to be seen, to be loved?

The ruin of history visited on a people does not wipe out the steadfastness of beauty. Not a naive beauty but a hard one. Beauty, it seems is constantly made. It is both fortunate and unfortunate.

Edouard Glissant, the Martiniquan critic, says, “History is destined to be pleasure or distress... is capable of quarrying deep within us, as a consciousness or the emergence of a consciousness, as a neurosis and a contraction of the self."

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