Paperback, 240 pages
English language
Published Jan. 10, 2022 by Knopf Canada.
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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.
Since its first publication in 2001, Dionne Brand's groundbreaking disquisition on being in the Black diaspora, A Map to the Door of No Return, has emerged as a modern classic. The door, in Brand's iconic schema, represents the point of rupture where the ancestors of the Black diaspora departed one world for another: the place where all names were forgotten, and all beginnings recast. "This door," writes Brand, "is not mere physicality. It is a spiritual location.... Since leaving was never voluntary, return was, and still may be, an intention, however deeply buried. There is as it says no way in; no return." Through shards of history, memoir, lyrical investigation, and the unwritten experience of so many descendants of those who passed …
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.
Since its first publication in 2001, Dionne Brand's groundbreaking disquisition on being in the Black diaspora, A Map to the Door of No Return, has emerged as a modern classic. The door, in Brand's iconic schema, represents the point of rupture where the ancestors of the Black diaspora departed one world for another: the place where all names were forgotten, and all beginnings recast. "This door," writes Brand, "is not mere physicality. It is a spiritual location.... Since leaving was never voluntary, return was, and still may be, an intention, however deeply buried. There is as it says no way in; no return." Through shards of history, memoir, lyrical investigation, and the unwritten experience of so many descendants of those who passed through the door, Brand constructs a map of this indelible region, culminating in an enduring expression, both definitive and seeking, of what it is to live, think, and create in the wake of colonization.