(A)Drift: A Method and Theory of Black Temporality in Map

Abstract

Taking seriously Brand’s conception that we “have no such immediate sense of belonging, only of drift” ( Brand 2001 , 118), this commentary meditates on Brand’s conception of “drift” as both a theory and method of Black temporality. Dionne Brand’s A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging (2001) draws us towards the uncharted/able expanse of the Door of No Return, and particularly the ways the Door overwhelms temporal senses and experiences. The Door, Brand describes, is a passport from a territory so vast that “[w]e are always in the middle of the journey” ( Brand 2001 , 49). Map invites us not only to consider the inadequacies of origins and nation-state boundaries. Map also theorizes the inability of normative temporal schemas to render sensible the “past’s” ongoing presence in Black life in the wake(s) of the Door and the Middle Passage of racial slavery. Mirroring Brand’s weaving of personal narrative and theory, this reflection turns to the relationship between forgetting and time, particularly in intergenerational conversations, to understand how the Door disorients normative logics of time as a dimension of Black psychic life that people share in. In doing so, this reflection sits with how Map names a temporality of the Door that is not about fantastical change or transformation, but about continuous arrivals to the experience of a suspension that one never quite leaves.