The Bottom Drawer, or, The Beginning of Reading

Abstract

A meditation on an image in Dionne Brand’s A Map to the Door of No Return, in which a young Dionne Brand discovers a book, The Black Napoleon, in the bottom drawer of her grandmother’s wardrobe, and begins to read it. “The Bottom Drawer, or, The Beginning of Reading” is also a meditation on the act of reading as related to tactility, initiation, and transformation; on ancestors and where descendants imagine their ancestors gathering; the pose of the subject in a photograph by Manuel Álvarez Bravo; the influence of The Black Napoleon in Dionne Brand’s writing/life; and the genesis, in reading, of the writer Dionne Brand.