A Map to the Door of No Return
by Dionne Brand

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."

--sigcino moyo

original publication: Amazon.ca