Dionne Brand Research Articles

From Moruga: a Reflection on A Map to the Door of No Return

A reflection on Dionne Brand’s A Map to the Door of No Return for the A Map to the Door of No Return at 20 on November 3–6, 2021.

Page 46, Line 2 from Below

Page 46, Line 2 from Below” presents itself as a part of an ongoing African Diasporan world, map and route making. A summoning of navigational instructions along the way. In this text, the navigational directions laid out in Dionne Brand’s seminal A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging (2001) provide the space for the retelling of an unexpected encounter with name, place and memory. And while moving through the ebbs and flows of various time-spaces—Toronto, Mannheim, Elmina and Traiskirchen, a town close to the Austrian capital Vienna—memories of police violence and Black death, of resistance and imagining and ultimately of belonging wash up on its shores.

Sweetness in the Key of Black: Notes on Baking and Belonging

Few commodities have shaped and continue to haunt the lives of Black people across the diaspora as much as sugar. Yet, to only view Black people’s relationship to sugar through violent histories and presents is to miss a sweetness—belonging, intimacy, connection—that exceeds it. Inspired by Dionne Brand’s assertion that reclaiming the Black body is an ongoing creative project, this article uses baking as a method toward answering the question, How might we map a distinction between sugar—a product of racial capitalism—and sweetness, a necessary component of Black life?

A State of Permanent War

Where are the current doors of non return? Françoise Vergès seeks to answer this question by looking at refugees trapped in zones of non being, hunted, chased and criminalised. They cross doors that State, its police and army as well as private militia transformed into dangerous and deadly passages. Even if these doors are not places that “ made everyone forget their names” as Dionne Brand has written, they echo the initial door of no return. Vergès then speaks of the refuges and sanctuaries that refugees build creating spaces of freedom in a world of unfreedom.

No Theories for the Liquidity of This Desire

No Theories for the Liquidity of This Desire is a visual and poetic meditation on desire as an embodied practice of cartography. The short film responds to and reflects (on) Dionne Brand’s liquid theories of self-creation and way-finding as a Black being in diaspora. A collection of still frames accompanies the transcription of the original work, which can be accessed in full at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_fdymeQxPYs&t=183s . No Theories was shot in Anguilla during February 2021.

On Capture Land

Among the narratives recounted in Dionne Brand’s A Map to the Door of No Return, is a story of Rastafari longing for return. This discussion considers that story, told to Brand by a friend, alongside Chronixx’s song “Capture Land” and Nabil Elderkin’s short film, “Captureland.” In reading these works together, I use the concept of “capture land” to engage with the question of the authority of maps. I also examine how these works narrate land, coloniality and the politics of longing and belonging in diaspora and how they each locate Black life in and through different sites and scenes of (dis)orientation.

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

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.

Sitting in Narrative: Second-Person Narration in Dionne Brand’sMap

Returning to Dionne Brand’s A Map to the Door of No Return ( 2001 ) in light of its scholarly reception and Brand’s subsequent works, this article focuses on narration as a form of post-colonial redress with particular attention to Brand’s use of second-person narration as a device of counter-estrangement. Taking a cue from Brian Richardson’s description of the second person as an “unnatural” register of narration, it explores Brand’s use of the second person as a voice of commingled alterity that has strong ethical implications for readers. With Brand’s analysis of “what sits in narrative” in An Autobiography of an Autobiography of Reading ( 2020 ) as a hermeneutic, the article demonstrates how, by blurring the gap between narratee and reader, Brand puts the reader “in the room with history.”

Map at 20: A Black Diasporic Grammar Book

This article details the central role Dionne Brand’s A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging has had in the development of not only my current book project: Black Grammars: On Difference and Belonging but the broader field of Black diasporic studies more generally. On the occasion of the twentieth anniversary of the text, the article revisits the text’s central provocations and its discipline-rattling engagements.

Splinters and Fragments: Looking into a Map, Finding Wonder

In this reflection, I offer some thoughts on my introduction to Dionne Brand’s Map to the Door of No Return, and invite the reader to consider the text as a guide for an archipelagic reading practice, offering signposts for reading other works of poetry from the Caribbean in particular, and threading these pieces together in a manner that is ‘symphonic.’ In this symphonic arrangement, I offer examples of the texts that MTTDNR taught me to read—including Derek Walcott, Sylvia Wynter, Kamau Brathwaite, and others—and underscore the call and response between MTTDNR and these texts. Ultimately, Brand’s work has allowed my own participation in this call and response due to its role as the connective tissue in my own reading practice.

“Touch”

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.

Entropic Monuments

To join Dionne Brand in A Map to the Door of No Return is to take a journey divergent from the West’s well-worn genre of the epic that fetes great white men whose great risks meet with even greater rewards. By contrast, Brand sutures her transatlantic bricolage of time and space with disruptions and displacements. Her redactions and erasures illuminate the efficacy of forgetting in a world where the colonizers have frozen the historical time of Empire in marble, granite, and bronze.

Quantum Particularity: For Audre Lorde and Dionne Brand

This essay brings together the writing of Audre Lorde and Dionne Brand and their responses to their visits, decades apart to the dungeons of Elmina. The essay proposes that Elmina Castle and the other forts used for the purposes of trading enslaved Africans can be understood as particle accelerators because of their reduction of key components of communities into individuals for sale. The word “particular” in the writing and speaking of Lorde and Brand offer us a poetics beyond individuality.

Black Myopia

On page 89 of A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging, Dionne Brand writes, “The door is not a map. The door is on my retina.” Jon Jon Moore reflects on how this line, from this book preyed on his senses – permanently marking his skin, contextualizing his own myopia, and mending the gap of retinal detachment.

Pinery Road and Concession 11

In “Pinery Road & Concession 11”, writer, academic and musician Leanne Betasamosake Simpson reflects on the chapter of the same name in Dionne Brand’s A Map to the Door of No Return. By physically traveling to the same corner in rural Ontario that Brand’s car broke down two decades earlier, Simpson considers place, belonging, diaspora, property, and foreclosure in her own Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg homeland. Simpson’s companion on part of the journey is an 80 year old Black Ash Basket which she repatriates to Curve Lake First Nation on the way. What follows is the text of the piece originally presented at the Map to the Door At 20 gathering. Simpson presented the piece over looped time lapse photography of the journey and surveillance footage of the intersection of Pinery Road & Concession 11. Simpson’s sister, Ansley Simpson provided a soundscape for the piece, repurposed from Leanne’s track “Solidification” (Noopiming Sessions, Giizhiwe Music, 2021). “Pinery Road & Concession 11” is an honour song to Brand’s constellation of thought that has traveled the world, and back to the Burnt River, near Kinmount, Ontario.

Introduction

Introduction

Archiving Black Diasporas

Archiving Black Diasporas

Beautiful the beauty—Dionne Brand’s Theory and Canisia Lubrin’s Voodoo Hypothesis

Against the reductive and the often universalizing poetics of much poetry and much theoretical discourse that abandons feelings from its rhetoric, the works of Dionne Brand’s Theory and Canisia Lubrin’s Voodoo Hypothesis promote layered, black and multivocal reflections on beauty. They act out self-interrogating dialectics rather than provide symbolic clarity of their subjects. There is no aesthetic consolation in these works and that’s where the beauty lies. Their works ask readers to enter into irreducible complexity as a form of attention. I posit that these black creative politics – in this poetry – are tied up in reading-work that can newly anticipate our global condition through ethical collectivity.

Situating the Ecological in Dionne Brand’s Ossuaries

What does it mean to read a poem about anti-Blackness as ecopoetics? How do we account for the ecological in such a work? How does this kind of reading unsettle the notion that ecological literatures are tethered to the environment? These are the questions I tackle in this paper as I undertake a reading of Dionne Brand’s Ossuaries as ecopoetry—a poem that explores the entanglements between the human and nonhuman worlds. I argue that through this poem, Brand pushes against such simple definitions of ecocritical works as focused on the impact of human activities on the environment. Her work suggests that woven into the fabric of the narratives that govern such activities are evidence of the destruction of marginalized bodies. As such, I approach Ossuaries from the angle of the key elements identified by scholars like Lawrence Buell, Laura-Gray Street, and Ann Fisher-Wirth as evident in ecological literatures. I examine how Brand deploys these features in her poem, using them to nudge us towards exploring Black histories in the context of what Kathryn Yusoff calls “geologic narratives.” I contend that these features situate Ossuaries within the context of ecopoetics, and therefore allow us to critique the impact of Anthropocenic origin narratives on both the environment, human body, and human history specifically, Black histories.

Is There Comfort in Language? A Look at the Polyglot Poetics of Julia Alvarez and Zeina Hashem Beck

Is There Comfort in Language? A Look at the Polyglot Poetics of Julia Alvarez and Zeina Hashem Beck Doris Hambuch According to Sarah Dowling, translingual poetics refers to “poetry that is self-consciously situated between languages and that attends to the complex processes of domination and refusal that can be observed and interpreted from the discursive context of each” (5). This article studies the translingual poetics of two contemporary women and argues that the texts of the younger, Lebanese poet, Zeina Hashem Beck, are more explicit in their representations of respective processes of domination than those of the older, Dominican-American poet, Julia Alvarez. Both Hashem Beck and Alvarez can be considered Anglophone writers, but neither grew up with English as a first language. Neither fits entirely within Dowling’s frame of settler monolingualism and neoliberal multiculturalism, yet certain elements of these contexts are relevant for the following readings. Employing the concept of comfort, the resulting comparative analysis understands the varying representations of languages other than English through discussions of creative inspiration and forms of delivery. It observes that the contrast with a non-European language enforces the challenges polyglot poetry poses for the current global language and for what Yasemin Yildiz terms the “monolingual paradigm” (2–3). “Bilingual verse in English renders the flipside of the global hegemony of English visible and audible” (253), Laura O’Connor writes at the beginning of her comparative study of poetry by Dominican-American author Julia Alvarez and Irish author Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin. Building on O’Connor’s argument, my comparative study of the former with the Lebanese poet Zeina Hashem Beck adds a non-Western angle to the discourse at hand. O’Connor’s focus is on a common choice of form and vocabulary that allows both poets in her study, Alvarez and Ní Chuilleanáin, to reveal the intricacies of the monolingual paradigm that “marginalize the (m)other tongue” (269). An analysis of Hashem Beck’s poems demonstrates how this technique works [End Page 274] when the “other tongue” is further removed through a different script and its affiliation with the so-called “Orient.” I further argue that younger generations, including poets such as Hashem Beck, can take this strategy further, to marginalize the dominant language in selected texts. The comfort language, if one is willing to consider the other tongue as such, thus receives greater prominence and power. At the outset of Multilingual Currents in Literature, Translation and Culture (2018), Rachael Gilmour and Tamar Steinitz claim that “monolingual paradigms are inadequate in a world dominated by globalization and migration” (1). Likewise, in the introduction to Multilingual Literature as World Literature (2021), Jane Hiddleston and Wen-chin Ouyang write that their anthology “argues not only, with Spivak and Mufti, against the dominance of English, but also against a dominant concept of monolingualism that has further served to limit and skew the scope of world literature” (3). Relying on Edward Said’s “Traveling Theory,” Hiddleston and Ouyang advocate a “worldly” kind of text and critic as they reject hierarchies among cultures (2). Creative multilingualism that necessarily escapes affiliation with a single culture seems best suited to lay bare and contest the power structures at stake. This can happen even in polyphonic texts written in a single language, as Michelle Hartman argues in her study of the anticolonial framework of Lebanese novels in French. In the preface to her book, Hartman refers to the poet Nadia Tuéni, who claims to write “Arabic in French” (x), in an attempt to expose the political power of languages. Aptly captured in the title of a poetry collection by Trinidadian-Canadian Dionne Brand, No Language Is Neutral (1990), this connection between language and power has been the subject of ongoing debates among sociolinguists and poets for several decades. Since Pierre Bourdieu’s pathbreaking research in the 1970s, linguists, most recently Claire Kramsch, for example, have emphasized the symbolic power of language (Kramsch ix). In a comprehensive textbook, Kramsch points to the effect that digitalization has had on language dynamics because of its impact on distribution: “The symbolic universe that language learners are entering today requires them to have a much greater awareness of the...