Hardcover - 240 pages (September 25, 2001)
Editorial Reviews
Amazon.ca
Dionne
Brand's A Map to the Door of No Return is an abstract literary jam
grooved on "the fissure between past and present," with the Toronto
resident and Afro-Caribbean poet, writer, and activist bashing around the
global "spillage."
It opens with flickers of her childhood in Trinidad,
where "life spoke in the blunt language of brutality," from which the
young Brand seeks solace via BBC radio. There are tender moments with her
grandfather, who can't quite remember who his own people are, and a father
who sires kids by his wife and daughters simultaneously.
The hyper-powered prose in these "Notes to Belonging"--dedicated to
fellow creatures of the door--traces a map through a hostile habitat where
blacks "obscure themselves as much as they are obscured" and "the black
body is culturally encoded as physical prowess, sexual fantasy, moral
transgression, violence, magical musical artistry."
Along the way there
are disturbing letters penned from slave ships, mass media critiques, and
the author's own ground zero account of the U.S. invasion of Grenada.
Freely musing on myriad contemporary subjects close to her heart, she
opines that "multiculturalism is relative to the state of white fear."
Brand's consideration of identity issues is as politically potent as
her 1997 Governor General's Award poetry champ, Land to Light On.
The Door is a gateway to consciousness of "that place where our
ancestors departed one world for another; Old World for the New."
