“Touch”

Abstract

The different registers of Dionne Brand’s A Map to the Door of No Return, part essay, part memoir, part theory, part criticism, and part literary retrospective, operate as a kind of way finding, while also questioning the epistemological bases from which we understand the systems and libidinal economies around us, before we find our way within them. A Map asks us how we find each other, how the wounds and hauntings that stand between us overdetermine our movement, desire, and flesh, and how we still then find each other. But once we do find each other, how do we find touch? What kind of “way finding” leads us past brutality and into the kind of touch we desire? In this reflection, I try to track touch within Brand’s Map by lingering in the passages where it appears and disappears. I track touch to reflect on my own map, to illuminate an essential aspect of the rupture with which this work is concerned, and to think generatively about how we attend to this intersection of the personal and the political.