The body is the place of captivity. The Black body is situated as a sign of particular cultural and political mean- ings in the Diaspora. All of these meanings return to the Door of No Return — as if those leaping bodies, those prostrate bodies, those bodies made to dance and then to work, those bodies curdling under the singing of whips, those bodies cursed, those bodies valued, those bodies remain curved in these attitudes. They remain fixed in the ether of history. They leap onto the backs of the contemporary — they cleave not only to the collective and acquired memories of their descendants but also to the collective and acquired memories of the other. We all enter those bodies.

— A Map to the Door of No Return by Dionne Brand (Page 35)