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

This book has been so powerful and so influential on so much of the most creative and dynamic theoretical work out there. And it's an absolute pleasure to read.

It is odd that such a personal telling can open such long-hidden doors in a reader's brain. I read a few pages at night and each time it was like walking down a street in a strange, beautiful city (as i imagine Toronto to be) and suddenly coming on a familiar block. I knew these houses, these stores, the way the sunlight struck a tree or the corner of a window. I learned, in the end, more about myself than I ever thought to. More than I did of the external life of this remarkable writer. Though I feel I know - or almost know - her habits of thought, and her experiences in her home island, in Granada, in Burnt River are forever alive in my heart and mind.

A book everyone should read!! I doubt you will be able to stop reading once you read its first lines.

great

boring and oddly written. didn't finish it.

A book I should have read 20 years ago at least. Brilliant, lyrical writing on some difficult subjects.

'"History is already seated in the chair in the empty room when one arrives.'"In A Map to the Door of No Return, Dionne Brand acknowledges history's presence while filling the room with ruminations collected from the far corners of her memory. She plots personal and public history onto a map with layers of origin, place, belonging and identity. The book''s pages could be patchworks of newspaper clippings and ephemera held in place with yellowed scotch tape, so closely do they resemble a scrapbook of her life.Brand’s Land To Light On (one of my favourite books of poetry) includes the lines “here is the history of the body” and elsewhere, “we stumble on the romance of origins.” I like to think of these lines as poem-seeds that were developed into prose, eventually becoming A Map to the Door of No Return.Brand refers to 'a method of way-finding' which could be applied to the book as a whole. It is part freeform memoir, part op-ed. We follow the meandering path of her journey to find 'relief from the persistent trope of colonialism,' guided by sporadic signposts in the form of headings: "'Maps,"' "'Forgetting,"' "'Up Here,"' "'More Maps."'The '"Door of No Return"' in the title is described as "'a site of belonging or unbelonging."' In the vignettes woven throughout this book, Brand explores her experiences of belonging and unbelonging in the diverse sites of her life. Lost luggage and other airport hassles, a stalled car in a rural winter, a primary school teacher''s insistence on calling her by a name that is not her own: all these scenarios are dissected with an eye and ear for seeking origins.And yet, she claims to spurn the idea of origins. This seems to be a contradiction in a book that consists of poetic ramblings focused on origins: the looseness of origins for immigrants, the lack of origins in cities, the strong origins of ancestors. I am equally bewildered when she claims that belonging does not interest her.As a Toronto resident, I appreciate the geographical references peppered throughout the book, pinning Brand''s history in the city to the Lakeshore during Caribana, Oakwood en route to Eglinton and the Allen Expressway, highrises at Kipling and Dixon, a parking lot at King and John, a young woman panhandling at Bathurst and College. For me, the familiar routes and intersections give life to Brand''s focus on the geography of colonization.A Map to the Door of No Return works in conversation with other writers theorizing on settler colonialism and antiblackness. In The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism, Jodi Byrd explains her choice of a term to describe peoples who were brought to Turtle Island forcibly and enslaved. She settles on borrowing poet Kamau Braithwaite''s term '"arrivants,"' which some scholars take issue with. Brand contributes to the conversation in a deliberation over the terms taking and leaving, in reference to Black peoples being transported away from their land through the Door of No Return. "'Taking, taking too might suggest a benevolence, so, no, it was not taking.'" Brand''s reflections on the courthouse and going through airport customs connect with the work of Simone Browne, who explores Black women''s experiences in airports in Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness.Brand''s writing is rich with passages that linger in your mind. Her interaction with three children playing outside on the island of St. Vincent is one of those. '"We arrive at the top, a baked village, houses along the road and some farther in on the sides of the hills; some hidden in the recesses of the volcano. Near the school, I meet the children.'" Brand contrasts their sense of place with her own, adding another layer to her map. '"They were from some place...This was where they lived and I, I lived in the air.'"

“Writing is an act of desire, as is reading.”As written in her dedication, this is a book for those who are adrift. It is for those who, at some point, were looking for something – for belonging, a place, a sense of self. It is a book for those who are her “fellow dwellers of the door.”Dionne Brand’s A Map to the Door of No Return is a search. It is poetry. It is a negotiation – contradictory and unbound by time. As she traces a map to the Door of No Return, Brand charts a search for identity and belonging in the Black diaspora, taking readers on a passage through time and place, weaving in philosophy, poetry and politics. From Toronto to St. Lucia, Toni Morrison to Neruda, Brand traces a map to the Door of No Return that highlights the complexities of a diasporic relationship to land, identity and belonging.“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 Door of No Return is not a physical door – rather, it is accessed through the mind and represents a place of forgetting and the forgotten. It is a rupture in history. It is the “door out of which Africans were captured, loaded onto ships heading for the New World” on a journey that required an urgent forgetting – a journey that laid the burden of trauma on the backs of the generations to follow.As Brand negotiates this burden of trauma and forgetting, she whisks readers through a series of moments that are intricately woven together even as they are unrestricted by time and place. Her expertly crafted prose leads the reader to pause and re-read the beautiful passages that provide a window to her memories, her interactions, her confusion and disappointment. In a Map to the Door of No Return, Brand is a generous and passionate guide on an impossible journey toward belonging.

I am proud to own a copy of this autobiography of Dionne Brand, formerly Poet Laureate of Toronto.