Longing Across the Black Diaspora: Love, Being and the Door of No Return

Abstract

In this paper I argue that in Map to the Door of No Return, Dionne Brand is an ethnographer of Black interiority and gives us a poetics of Black psychoanalysis rejoining our slaveness to a less alienated geo-environmental social. I argue that we might read Brand alongside Saidiya Hartman and Paule Marshall as writers coming to terms with Black being as one consecrated in disruption and producing a “tribe of the Middle Passage.” I further suggest that they do so without a demand for a common unity beyond the logic of survival, and without a demand for an official or proper name.