“Finding My Way to Freedom”: Dionne Brand’s A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging

Abstract

This paper explores Dionne Brand‘s A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging (2011) as a non-traditional archive, yet idealistically a poetic narrative map, beginning epically at the Door of No Return on the west coast of Africa and spreading out infinitely. I argue the main focus is freedom as marronage mapped out through a set of hyperlinked tension-filled stories across time and space that collectively connect geography and/to history; its method is collecting and recording “conversations” (224), both spoken and observed, about Black diasporic lives and encounters across time and space. In Map Brand’s desire for freedom leads her to interrogate and challenge selected old world maps, charts journeys, and, in narrative and poetry, re/call and re/invent the past and actively re/imagine the present and future of new world liberated Black people as self-created individuals. The result is a modern literary artifact: as memorial to the marooned, with a ruttier for freedom for the marooned. This work forms part of a neo-archive of Black Diasporic texts that collectively perform reparative story-telling. Brand maps and builds a different (non-traditional) repository by recording selected experiences of Black people in the New World Diaspora—connecting paths forged from “a place emptied of beginnings” (6). Map charts the points on a journey to a liberatory future, one based on, as Brand describes it, “a life of conversations about a forgotten list of irretrievable selves” (224)—human dignity. Brand’s Map, then, for inspiration, preserves selected histories that might have otherwise remained unexplored. It makes future retrieval possible, and the possibility of forgetting impossible—and ultimately this is the ageless beauty of this provocative work.