- Brand, Dionne
A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging
Now in its first American edition, Dionne Brand's groundbreaking A Map to the Door of No Return has emerged as a modern classic, a highly influential exploration of "being" in the Black Diaspora.
Since its first publication in 2001, Dionne Brand's groundbreaking exploration of being in the Black Diaspora, A Map to the Door of No Return, has emerged as a modern classic. The door, in Brand's iconic schema, represents the point of rupture where the ancestors of the Black Diaspora departed one world for another: the place where all names were forgotten, and all beginnings recast. "This door," writes Brand, "is not mere physicality. It is a spiritual location . . . Since leaving was never voluntary, return was, and still may be, an intention, however deeply buried. There is as it says no way in; no return."