Book Review: A Map to the Door of No Return by Dionne Brand

Dionne Brand’s A MAP TO THE DOOR OF NO RETURN: NOTES TO BELONGING is just that: a map.

The central questions of this book relate to the juxtaposition between belonging & not-belonging. Who exactly belongs in this New World, and what exactly is an origin story?

The door of no return is the metaphysical name for an actual place, and also an idea: the last door in West Africa that enslaved Black people walked through before boarding ships for the western hemisphere. For America, Canada, the Caribbean, and so forth.

Brand sums it up best: “The door 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.”

This door signifies not only a break with the past for individuals, but a break with a cultural grounding for entire groups of people. Thus, many generations after an African Diasporan looks back across that boundless Atlantic and wonders what it must have been like for their ancestors to stand at that door.

The maps that colonizers made to demarcate boundaries, both physical and intellectual, still serve to reinforce notions of superiority which were used to justify the dehumanization of Black people. But, this book looks at all sides of the equation. It’s not merely a tale of Black longing to belong, to a place they may no longer recognize, but still inherently know.

Brand also talks of people like VS Naipaul, whose ancestors came to (were brought?) the Caribbean several generations before his birth. He takes a trip to his ancestral homeland in India and feels fear, contempt, un-belonging. He writes of them in unsavory terms, perhaps because he sees so little of himself in them. Which is a feeling commonly felt by people of the global diaspora returning to their ancestral homelands: I feel out of place in a place that should be home – just as I felt out of place in the place I grew up calling home.

Brand uses this to highlight what leaving (being forced to leave) a place does to sever generational ties. Often, we are brought back to shores in this book, are shown someone standing there, wondering if there is a better place, a more familiar place, on the other side of it.

There is a concerted focus on irony painted on the maps in this book. One particular passage is striking:

“This irony in the NEW YORK TIMES, Friday, December 11, 1998:

American and Canadian authorities announced today that they had broken up a sophisticated ring that smuggled Chinese immigrants into the united states and ultimately to New York City, through a Mohawk reservation along the border. The authorities said the ring, made up primarily of Chinese citizens and members of the Mohawk tribe, transported more than 3600 Chinese immigrants across the lightly patrolled border along the St Lawrence River and into upstate New York during the last two years. ‘This is the first large-scale alien smuggling operation we have encountered on the northern border,’ Doris Meissner, the Commissioner of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, said in announcing the indictments.

One wants to ask who better able or authorized to give safe passage to anyone across North America than the Mohawk or any of the people who inhabited this continent before its New World settlers. Nevertheless, the language of the piece asserts the identities “American” and “Canadian” as dominant over “Mohawk” and “Chinese.”

The piece continues:

Today’s announcement highlighted the extent to which the 28-square-mile Indian reservation that straddles two Canadian provinces and one AMERICAN state has become a haven for smugglers. The foggy creeks and wooded islands of the Indian territory which is known as the St Regis Mohawk reservation on the American side and the Akwesasne Indian territory in Canada, have long been used to spirit gasoline, cigarettes, tobacco and drugs between the two countries. In recent years more and more of the contraband has been human… A look at a map shows you how easy it is to use the place as a vehicle for smuggling. It isn’t just aliens, though…

Notice how this territory is wrapped in the crypto-fascist romances of both dominant nations — the “foggy creeks,” the “wooded islands,” and foundational to this romance, the “human contraband.” Hundreds of years after the making of its neo-origins these Canadians and Americans who police these fresh borders, materially as well as intellectually, play and dwell in the same language of their conquest. A language which summons mystery and wilderness. The passage could have been written two hundred years ago.” (Brand, P. 65-67)”

It is interesting to think of ourselves as Diasporans longing for a home that is physically distant from us – but what of the Native peoples who have the same longing, but who still live on the same physical land that should be home? To be an outsider in your own home is a feeling that can’t be easily described or felt. All this writer can say is that he emphasizes, to as great an extent as I can, though I recognize that I am an outsider living on land that does not belong to me. And so many of us are victims of the same perpetrator: whiteness and all its violence.

If there is a map to the door of no return, perhaps it exists in our ability to visualize passage to a more sacred place, a safer place, than we find ourselves today. Whether that place is here on earth or not is for every person to find, and often, we find that the search for that place becomes the place itself.

Perhaps there is no physical door at the end of this map, but Brand sums it up best:

“The door is a place, real, imaginary and imagined… 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.”

And:

“Forgetting

David Turnbull writes in Maps Are Territories, “In Order to find our way successfully, it is not enough just to have a map. We need a cognitive schema as well as practical mastery of way-finding.”

In order to find our way successfully…”

And:

“An oral ruttier is a long poem containing navigational instructions which sails learned by heart and recited from memory. The poem contained the routes and tides, the stars and maybe the taste and flavour of the waters, the coolness, the saltiness; all for finding one’s way at sea. Perhaps, too, the reflection and texture of the sea bed, also the sight of birds, the direction of their flight. This and an instrument called a Kamal which measured the altitude of stars from the horizon.”

And:

“5

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.

6

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