A Map to the Door of No Return

Notes to Belonging

by

Hardcover, 230 pages

English language

Published Sept. 25, 2001 by Doubleday Canada.

ISBN:
978-0-385-25865-4
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5 stars (2 reviews)

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.

2 editions

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5 stars

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."

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Subjects

  • Brand, Dionne, 1953-
  • Authors, Canadian -- 20th century -- Biography
  • Women, Black -- Canada -- Social conditions
  • West Indians -- Canada -- Social conditions