A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging

by 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.


From the Trade Paperback edition.

Genres: Nonfiction, Poetry, Memoir, History, Theory, Essays, Race

242 pages, Kindle Edition

First published September 25, 2001

About the author

As a young girl growing up in Trinidad, Dionne Brand submitted poems to the newspapers under the pseudonym Xavier Simone, an homage to Nina Simone, whom she would listen to late at night on the radio. Brand moved to Canada when she was 17 to attend the University of Toronto, where she earned a degree in Philosophy and English, a Masters in the Philosophy of Education and pursued PhD studies in Women’s History but left the program to make time for creative writing.

Dionne Brand first came to prominence in Canada as a poet. Her books of poetry include No Language Is Neutral, a finalist for the Governor General’s Award, and Land to Light On, winner of the Governor General’s Award and the Trillium Award and thirsty, finalist for the Griffin Prize and winner of the Pat Lowther Award for poetry. Brand is also the author of the acclaimed novels In Another Place, Not Here, which was shortlisted for the Chapters/Books in Canada First Novel Award and the Trillium Award, and At the Full and Change of the Moon. Her works of non-fiction include Bread Out of Stone and A Map to the Door of No Return.

What We All Long For was published to great critical acclaim in 2005. While writing the novel, Brand would find herself gazing out the window of a restaurant in the very Toronto neighbourhood occupied by her characters. “I’d be looking through the window and I’d think this is like the frame of the book, the frame of reality: ‘There they are: a young Asian woman passing by with a young black woman passing by, with a young Italian man passing by,” she says in an interview with The Toronto Star. A recent Vanity Fair article quotes her as saying “I’ve ‘read’ New York and London and Paris. And I thought this city needs to be written like that, too.”

In addition to her literary accomplishments, Brand is Professor of English in the School of English and Theatre Studies at the University of Guelph.

For more information, please see http://www.answers.com/topic/dionne-b...

Reviews

[Rowena · Rating 5 out of 5]

"I have not visited the Door of No Return, but by relying on random shards of history and unwritten memoir of descendants of those who passed through it, including me, I am constructing a map of the region, paying attention to faces, to the unknowable, to unintended acts of returning, to impressions of doorways. Any act of recollection is important, even looks of dismay and discomfort. Any wisp of a dream is evidence."- Dionne Brand, A Journey to the Door of No Return

There's a short list of books that I'd say have recently changed my worldview and how I view things. This is one of them. From my research into the black diaspora through literature, art, and stories, etc, I always marvel at is what was saved and what was lost. This book goes a lot into what was lost and I read it from a personal place, identifying strongly with many of its themes.

The main premise of this book is the Door of No Return in the Black diaspora. The door in the book's title is defined as "a place, real, imaginary and imagined...The door out of which Africans were captured, loaded onto ships heading for the New World. It was the door of a million exits multiplied. It is a door many of us wish never existed." I think I'm fortunate to know where my "door" is; but for others in the diaspora this relationship is much more fraught with confusion. Because The Door is not an imagining for me, I initially felt that the book was more suited to North American and Caribbean Black people who might not know their origins, but the more I read the more I saw that oppression was universal and the Diaspora has a strong connection:

"Having no name to call on was having no past; having no past pointed to the fissure between the past and the present. That fissure is represented in the Door of No Return: that place where our ancestors departed one world for another; the Old World for the New. The place where all names were forgotten and all beginnings recast."

It never occurred to me until a few years ago how the importance of maps goes further than just showing us where a place is situated. In a lot of literature I've read, it's clear that maps are very political. In a lot of black literature in particular, there seems to be a focus on redrawing maps metaphorically, creating maps, changing frontier lines and so on. I thought about this poetry excerpt I wrote down a year or so ago by Jamaican poet Kei Miller:

"We speak to navigate ourselves

away from dark corners and we become,

each one of us, cartographers."

(from: The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion)

I enjoyed how Brand used her life experiences to support the theories she came up with. Her life in the Caribbean, moving to Canada, and travelling to Africa, Asia, Europe, South America, and Oceania: all her observations and experiences tie in to discussions of belonging, blackness, identity, and diasporic connections. Colonialism and its violence is evident in a lot of the places that Brand travels to.

Brand is Canadian and as I live in Canada I can relate to her even further on that point. She discusses erasure of blackness, something Black Canadians know well. There was so much in her writing about Canada which I wish was discussed on a more national scale. About Canada she says:

"How do we read these complicated juxtapositions of belonging and not belonging , belonging and intrabelonging. In a place such as this, so full of immigrants, everyone is deeply interested in belonging."

And:

"National identity is a dance of artificiality, since what it dances must essentially be unchanging. Some would say, well, no, Canadian identity has changed over the last thirty or fifty years. Not at all. We are drawn constantly to the European shape in its definition. A shape, by the way, which obscures it own multiplicity. And when we read the hyphenated narratives we see the angst produced by this unchanging quality."

It's important to say that Brand is a poet because her metaphorical and intuitive language really illuminated a lot for me. This book is rich and extra-sensory, great depictions of history, the land, the people. Reading this was like going on a journey with Brand and learning a little something about myself and my place in society and history at every stop. It was a very enjoyable and thought-provoking process., and she leaves us to think about how true the following is: "To live in the Black Diaspora is I think to live as a fiction--a creation of empires, and also self-creation."

[Stephanie Spines · Rating 5 out of 5]

The easiest 5 stars.

Brand is a literary genius.

[Jimmy · Rating 5 out of 5]

"One is mislead when one looks at the sails and majesty of tall ships instead of their cargo."

Essays, ruminations, and meditations on finding something you know you can never find, because you never lost it, because you never had it, because it was taken from you before you were born. Personal, philosophical, poetic, political. This book has some of the most beautiful and deep prose I've read this year, and probably ever, and I love love loved every word of it. I've been wanting to write a review of it for months now, unable to find the sufficient words. I love it in a strange way that thrills and ails me, in a way that only great literature does: it both overjoys me to read and discover something so true and beautiful, and profoundly saddens me by revealing that truth.

The map to the door of no return is:

"a place, real, imaginary and imagined. As islands and dark continents are. It is a place which exists or existed. The door out of which Africans were captured, loaded onto ships heading for the New World. It was the door of a million exits multiplied. It is a door many of us wish never existed. It is a door which makes the word door impossible and dangerous, cunning and disagreeable.”

I found myself slowing down, savoring every word, sometimes reading paragraphs out loud, sometimes re-reading paragraphs many times. It's a prose that I read breathlessly in excitement, then in despair, then again to take long breaks staring out the window in between paragraphs thinking about what I just read.

Some quotes, because I have no words:

“People here believe in uncontrollable passion, in mad rages, and in the brusque inevitability of death. Or damage. As if a face would not be a face without a scar, a finger not a finger without being broken, or a foot not a foot without a limp. Or a life not a life without tragedy. These things I knew before I knew they had something to do with the Door of No Return and the sea. I knew that everyone here was unhappy and haunted in some way. Life spoke in the blunt language of brutality, even beauty was brutal. I did not know what we were haunted by at the time. Or why it would be imperfect to have a smooth face, or why a moment of hatred would take hold so easily as if the sun had simply come out. But I had a visceral understanding of a wound much deeper than the physical, a wound which somehow erupted in profound self-disappointment, self-hatred, and disaffection.”

“The Door of No Return — real and metaphoric as some places are, mythic to those of us scattered in the Americas today. To have one’s belonging lodged in a metaphor is voluptuous intrigue; to inhabit a trope; to be a kind of fiction. To live in the Black Diaspora is I think to live as a fiction — a creation of empires, and also self-creation. It is to be a being living inside and outside of herself. It is to apprehend the sign one makes yet to be unable to escape it except in radiant moments of ordinariness made like art. To be a fiction in search of its most resonant metaphor then is even more intriguing. So I am scouring maps of all kinds, the way that some fictions do, discursively, elliptically, trying to locate their own transferred selves.”

“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. Where one stands in a society seems always related to this historical experience. Where one can be observed is relative to that history. All human effort seems to emanate from this door. How do I know this? Only by self-observation, only by looking. Only by feeling. Only by being a part, sitting in the room with history.”

“One does not return to the Diaspora with good news from the door except the news that it exists and that its existence is the truth. Its perpetual “no” denies them relief, denies an ending or reconciliation. Some have recorded a sense of familiarity beyond the door; some have spoken of a welcome, or of no welcome. But their grief, our grief, remains unassuageable at a profound level. No seeing can truly verify the door, no real place can actualize the lost place. Not in any personal sense.”

“This dreary door which I’ve been thinking about, though its effects are unremitting, does not claim the human being unremittingly. All that emanates from it is not dread but also creativity.”

“'Pray for a life without plot, a day without narrative.' I happened on this line by Derek Walcott in his book The Bounty. I cannot know precisely what he means but I recognized something in it. Or perhaps something in it called me. It described perfectly my desire for relief from the persistent trope of colonialism. To be without this story of captivity, to dis-remember it, or to have this story forget me, would be heavenly. But of course in that line too is the indifference, the supplication of prayer. Yet I want to think that perhaps there is also regeneration in its meaning.”

“This self which is unobservable is a mystery. It is imprisoned in the observed. It is constantly struggling to wrest itself from the warp of its public ownerships. Its own language is plain yet secret. Rather, obscured.”

“Only the brazen can say, “I was not here, I did not do this and feel that.” 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. And so Leslie stands at train stations in Germany cringing at the trains’ punctuality.”

“Eduardo Galeano falls open at this time: “I’m nostalgic for a country which doesn’t yet exist on a map.” Dear Eduardo, I am not nostalgic. Belonging does not interest me. I had once thought that it did. Until I examined the underpinnings. One is mislead when one looks at the sails and majesty of tall ships instead of their cargo.”

On 'Political' writing: “There is a city here where I walk to see how others live. I could, I suppose, see about myself only. I could be unaffected. I could come to the easy belief that, really, what is there to speak against? I could develop that voice so full of cold address to beauty. I could with some self-defacement go about the business of making my living. I could say in that way that many do: oh, it’s not so bad, your writing need not show your skin, it need not speak of trouble, history is a burden after all. But Neruda summons me, is waiting for me at the end of every sentence. I cannot ignore my hands “stained with garbage and sadness.”

“These are people on the edges of the city, some would say, not emblematic. I know they might be the edges and easily ignored, but they curl into the middle. The middle of the city, where what looks like an ordinary life is composed of what is beaten into or calculated and chalked up to the world. What is accepted with a shrug but erodes the soul, burns it like so much acid. We’ll go around again, they say, we admit, we confess to not being fit for your world. The exhaustion of it.”

On Seeing: “I have crumpled Neruda in my hand to visit this room because I think it is difficult to see here in this city; no one wants to see, or seeing is a charity they submit to. Everything far away is visible; everything close is viewed with distrust or disbelief, is viewed as imaginary.”

Parking lot joke: “He takes the money. I ask him, “What’s happening?” smiling, needing to leave quickly anyway, my question only to preserve the thin camaraderie of the Diaspora; really, only to speed him. He says calmly, “Look,” gesturing with his languid hand, “Look, I come from one of the oldest cities in the world. The oldest civilization. They build a parking lot and they think that it is a civilization.” Stunned, I burst out laughing. And he joins me. We laugh and laugh and I reply, “True, true.” “The oldest civilization,” he says again. “True,” I repeat. I don’t care if I am late now. Neruda’s letter is in my hand, and this man’s words are in my head.”

Same here: “Sometimes I look at children deep in discussion and I cannot remember what we spoke of as children. What talk did we fill all that time with? We rushed outside of houses, of classrooms, to be with each other and we chattered away at our own lives. So many hours we filled, but I cannot now remember how.”

On Desire: “Desire, too, is the discovery of beauty as miraculous. Desire in the face of ruin. How in these lines there is such wreckage and that too is beauty, how in those lines there is such clear-eyed dread, such deeply mocking knowledge, and that too is desire. ”

“He was someone in his own gesture, the thing that writers envy.”

"To desire may also be to complicate."

More on desire: “The word seems to me to fall apart under the pull and drag of its commodified shapes, under the weight of our artifice and our conceit. It is sometimes impossible to tell what is real from what is manufactured. We live in a world filled with commodified images of desire. Desire clings to widgets, chairs, fridges, cars, perfumes, shoes, jackets, golf clubs, basketballs, telephones, water, soap powder, houses, neighbourhoods. Even god. It clings to an endless list of objects. It clings to the face of television sets and movie screens. It is glaciered in assigned objects, it is petrified in repetitive clichéd gestures.”

“His forgetting was understandable; after all, when he was born the Door of No Return was hardly closed, forgetting was urgent.”

[Khadijah · Rating 5 out of 5]

I want to give this book infinite stars. Part travelogue, part cartographic/geographic history, simultaneous unraveling/definition of diasporic Blackness, this book is gorgeous and brilliant and required.

[Kiki · Rating 5 out of 5]

The five stars have no meaning.

Bookstagram | Twitter

[Sally Elhennawy · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is exquisite!! Lyrical, captivating, heartbreaking, brooding. Dionne Brand’s way with words and images is like none other—this was an urgent and breathtakingly beautiful read. I will never be able to stop thinking about the Door of No Return…

[Shivanee Ramlochan · Rating 5 out of 5]

If there is a book that might call you to yourself, across the vast and wild and violent years of your life, then let it be this one. It will not be tender or merciful. But it will tell you your name every time, as clear and sharp as a bone kissing another bone.

[Lotte · Rating 5 out of 5]

With that subtitle, y'all knew this was the book for me

[Miguel · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is given to its reader as a precious gift. It is, as stated, a map. The subtitle, "Notes to Belonging," announces this counterintuitive project. Brand writes, "Too much has been made of origins. All origins are arbitrary. This is not to say that they are not also nurturing, but they are also coercive and indifferent" (64). She goes on, "Too much has been made of origins. And so if I reject this notion of origins I have also to reject its mirror, which is the sense of origins used by the powerless to contest power in a society" (69). Finally, emphatically, Brand writes, "Belonging does not interest me. I had once thought that it did. Until I examined the underpinnings. One is misled when one looks at the sails and majesty of tall ships instead of their cargo" (85). So, then, the counterintuitiveness is here. This is a map that is not a map. A map of words. And a map to nowhere that is somewhere, a map to a place where one does not belong but is not violently, furiously rejected. A map to a place that is located in the relationship between individuals. In Brand's writing, located in the relationship between individuals "marooned in the diaspora."

This book is a map, so it is more than words. There are meditations on capitalism. On commodity racism. On quotidian discrimination. But also on electric connection, unexpected kinship, familiarity in unfamiliar places. To find that familiarity is to belong, but Brand struggles to refuse where she has been forcefully positioned to seize a new position. This new position, though, defies belonging, defies logic, defies categorization, defies liberal humanist projects, and defies reformism.

This is a map to self-love and self-recognition, but also to reject recognition and accept infinite contradiction. This is an essential book.

[Yara Cloudt · Rating 3 out of 5]

maybe one day when i dont have a deadline due every week i will get around to finishing this

[Areeb Ahmad (Bankrupt_Bookworm) · Rating 4 out of 5]

"To have one's belonging lodged in a metaphor is voluptuous intrigue; to inhabit a trope; to be a kind of fiction. To live in the Black Diaspora I think is to live in a fiction—a creation of empires, and also self-creation. It is to be being living inside and outside herself. It is to apprehend the the sign one makes yet to be unable to escape it except in radiant moments of ordinariness made like art. To be a fiction in search of its most resonant metaphor then is even more intriguing."

Dionne Brand contends that while there may be maps to the physical Door(s) of No Return that are scattered across the West African Coast in various erstwhile slave-trading castles, it's also "illuminated in the consciousness of the Blacks in the Diaspora" and therefore can't be mapped. "This door," she says, "is not mere physicality. It is a spiritual location." Since this departure was forced and a result of enslavement, the need to return is paramount, "however deeply buried." It is impossible to return, to turn back the rush of mad history, as is predicated in the name itself.

She expands on W. E. B. DuBois' idea of double consciousness. For the Black diaspora, bearing an enduring psychic brand of the Door means to live self-consciously and "always aware of your presence as a presence outside of yourself." So, one is captive of, as well as captivated by it, no matter the distance of time and space from the shared past. Brand states, "A map, then, is only a life of conversations about a forgotten list of irretrievable selves." Here, the fraught exercise of mapmaking directs self-assertive navigation outside of the rut of belonging and totalization.

[Maryam · Rating 5 out of 5]

As a dweller at the Door of No Return, from a slightly different context (a Canadian, with heritage from India via indentured laborers brought to Caribbean Trinidad), Brand’s book spoke to me not only from an academic level, but an intimate level that at times discomforts. A Map to the Door of No Return is beautiful, tragic, bleak yet stunning in its ability to capture poetry, memoir, travelogue, non-fiction, essay and slippages between languages, while also demarcating what does locationality and space actually mean? Exploring the nature of identity, the first part of the book is heavily theoretical in nature to explicate the inherent contradiction in placeness, loyalty to nationhood and understanding personal identity, while the second memoir-like half imbibes that theoretical understanding into everyday through example of Brand’s lived experience that is borderless. While at times, one may struggle with the amount of referenced literature within A Map to the Door of No Return, the central message always remains clear and intact. A must read that transcends generations and countries, a pivotal book to read if one wants to understand critical race theory and modernity.

[Jacob Wilson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reading this felt like following Brand's meandering maps through portals to a profound Nowhere-in-Particular. The nameless places long ancestral memories intentionally repress loom large and provocatively in the background of the text, and Brand's confessional, intimate style sketches out a dense but pleasant web of metaphors which lead the way there. Brand occasionally gobsmacked me with a profound and clever turn of phrase, but she always guided me there with a wit and brilliance I've come to expect from her writing

[Rosie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Loved this so much🤎

Always beautiful to read and re-read

[Scott · Rating 5 out of 5]

A stunning, wrenching read. Part memoir, part travelogue, part poetry, part literary review, part critical theory, at all times engaging, at certain moments breathtaking.

Brand's literal and metaphoric Door of No Return - that nonexistent, all-too-real, long past, ever-present - door, moment, episteme, paradigm guides the text as she examines Blackness in the Diaspora and transports us through cartographies and geographies both internal and external, from the Caribbean to Canada, from Africa to Amsterdam. It is a journey with a definite beginning, one of erasure, but with an undefined destination, or the possibility of no arrival at all, just points on a map and not one of them labelled "home."

[Tina · Rating 4 out of 5]

I’ve heard a lot about this author’s writing so I was very excited to read my first book by this author and listen to the audiobook of A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes on Belonging by Dionne Brand. Brand narrates and it’s great to listen to her recite her own words. This book was originally published in 2001 and still feels relevant today. Brand shares her experiences from her childhood in the Caribbean to living in Canada and African ancestry and the connection to place and history. It was interesting to read about the places in Toronto I’ve been to before like the Danforth. This line stood out to me: “writing is an open conversation”. I really enjoyed this insightful book and I’m very curious to read more of this author’s work now.

Thank you to the publisher via NetGalley for my ALC!

[Abby]

I am almost offended that no one ever recommended this to me. Maps, belonging, books, museums, travel–I am connected to these sentences by more than just the experience of the Americas. But by that, too. All the Black women academics are obsessed with this and now I understand why. It’s a burrowing book, one that lives somewhere close to the heart. These sentences. The kind of “place writing” I want most. It’s a book getting just old and influential enough to be called classic–the sense of classic as rediscoverable, always relevant in the most unfortunate but tender ways. And yet I had to ask the library to buy a copy, so some of us are astonishingly late to the party.

[Jueria · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book took my breath away. Lyrical, philosophical, and simply poetic, Brand is an extraordinary writer. I had to pause so many times while reading this book because it was filled with a plethora of profound gems. My entire book is practically underlined! I can’t wait to check out more of Dionne Brand’s work ❤️

[Margot DV]

Wow! This is a super cool book - great mix of poetry, academia, personal history and fictional history. Sometimes the poetics of it detracted from my reading as I got a bit confused at what was actually being said, but overall really liked

[Michelle · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm grateful for my colleague who pushed me to read more Dionne Brand after I'd initially disliked Theory. This was a captivating read.

[Gregory Duke · Rating 3 out of 5]

Redundant and a bit long regardless of the shorter length, but it still holds a sense of power. The literary criticism is the most substantial for me, even if some of it feels underbaked and underevidenced.

[Kristine · Rating 5 out of 5]

🗃🛣🗺🔜🌊🕴🏿👩🏾‍🏫🏝🚪🗝

[Indira · Rating 4 out of 5]

As a child of the Indo-Caribbean diaspora I turn to Ms Brand's words and analysis frequently. She writes with such deep insight, her perspective and discourses provide such well of wisdom to reflect my own history and thinking, and give context my own family histories and our place in capital H History and the world.

I have the footnotes on all the resonate and relatable passages in this text... But we shall engage with that here, on another day ... More to come.

[Ixchel Wilson · Rating 5 out of 5]

A very captivating part of the book for me: Brand tells us a story of ‘the man from the oldest city in the
world’- he is an Ethiopian man, he is a parking attendant in a lot she has pulled into. He tells her
not to worry so much about her keys and the responsibilities held in the parking lot- “They build
a parking lot and they think that it is a civilization,” he says (102), and they both uncontrollably
laugh out loud. The parking attendant and Brand both know who ‘they’ are, ‘they’ being the
colonizers. I think this simple interaction seems representative of a practice of decolonization since
it works against geology’s racist gravitational force by denying the legitimacy of the colonizer’s
so-called land and the so-called parking lot.

Incredible read. More than five stars.

[Basil · Rating 5 out of 5]

“My grandfather came from a people whose name he could not remember. His forgetting was understandable; after all, when he was born the Door of No Return was hardly closed, forgetting was urgent.”

“Does all terror become literary? These are the places that made everyone who went through forget their names. Here, walls ate the skin, footsteps took the mind. My grandfather’s forgetting was not personal. It had been passed on to him by many, most especially the one in my family who stepped through the Door of No Return. It was a gift. Forgetting. The only gift that one, the one bending reluctantly toward the opening, could give.”

“To travel without a map, to travel without a way. They did, long ago. That misdirection became the way. After the Door of No Return, a map was only a set of impossibilities, a set of changing locations.”

“A map, then, is only a life of conversations about a forgotten list of irretrievable selves.”

[Tai · Rating 4 out of 5]

Este libro ha llegado por primera vez al español de la mano de la editorial chilena Banda Propia en la traducción de Lucía Stecher. Una joya literaria que tenemos el honor de ahora leer en español, traducido con una gran riqueza de lenguaje.

Este es un libro para sumergirse en las páginas, perderse en el tiempo y divagar por la mente de esta autora a través de crónicas, recuerdos, poemas, extractos, pensamientos y una serie de escritos sobre la pertenencia, los orígenes y los recuerdos.

Es una gran obra literaria, con un uso del lenguaje maravilloso, con frases poéticas que te llevan del presente al pasado y del dolor a la nostalgia. Gracias a esta autora por abrir así sus pensamientos, bajo el alero de un dolor provocado por el colonialismo que arrastra a generaciones y generaciones de negros en la diáspora.

Recomiendo mucho esta lectura y perderse en sus páginas y representaciones.

[Comradeocean · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some lingering ambivalence about the door metaphor.

[Irene · Rating 5 out of 5]

on my list of 5 texts if i was teaching a course on Black studies through poetics

[Jean · Rating 5 out of 5]

Amazing book. Evocative, startling, lyrical.

[Hannah Thiessen · Rating 5 out of 5]

My prof! Super cool lady, amazing poet