A Map to the Door of No Return Read online

  Also by Dionne Brand

  FICTION

  At the Full and Change of the Moon

  In Another Place, Not Here

  NON-FICTION

  Bread out of Stone

  POETRY

  No Language is Neutral

  Land to Light On

  Chronicles of the Hostile Sun

  VINTAGE CANADA EDITION

  Copyright © 2001 Dionne Brand

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.

  Published in Canada by Vintage Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in Canada by Doubleday Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto, in 2001. Distributed by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto

  Vintage Canada and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House of Canada Limited.

  “Arriving at Desire” appeared in Desire in Seven Voices, edited by Lorna Crozier; sections of “Up Here” were previously published in Toronto Life.

  National Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication Data

  Brand, Dionne, 1953–

  A map to the door of no return : notes to belonging / Dionne Brand.

  eISBN: 978-0-385-67483-6

  1. Brand, Dionne, 1953– . 2. Authors, Canadian (English)—20th century—Biography. 3. Blacks—Canada—Race identity. 4. Blacks—Canada—Social conditions. I. Title.

  PS8553.R275Z53 2002 c818’.5409 C2002-902620-2

  PR9199.3.B683Z47 2002

  www.randomhouse.ca

  v3.1

  Dedicated

  to the other dwellers of the door

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  First Page

  Acknowledgements

  Selected Reading

  A Note on the Author

  There are maps to the Door of No Return. The physical door. They are well worn, gone over by cartographer after cartographer, refined from Ptolemy’s Geographia to orbital photographs and magnetic field imaging satellites. But to the Door of No Return which is illuminated in the consciousness of Blacks in the Diaspora there are no maps. This door is not mere physicality. It is a spiritual location. It is also perhaps a psychic destination. 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.

  A Circumstantial Account of a State of Things

  My grandfather said he knew what people we came from. I reeled off all the names I knew. Yoruba? Ibo? Ashanti? Mandingo? He said no to all of them, saying that he would know it if he heard it. I was thirteen. I was anxious for him to remember.

  I pestered him for days. He told me to stop bothering him and that he would remember. Or stop bothering or else he would not remember. I hovered about him in any room in which he rested. I followed him around asking him if he wanted me to do this or that for him, clean his glasses, polish his shoes, bring his tea. I studied him intently when he came home. I searched the grey bristles of his moustache for any flicker which might suggest he was about to speak. He raised his Sunday Guardian newspaper to block my view. He shooed me away, telling me to find some book to read or work to do. At times it seemed as if Papa was on the brink of remembering. I imagined pulling the word off his tongue if only I knew the first syllable.

  I scoured the San Fernando library and found no other lists of names at the time. Having no way of finding other names, I could only repeat the ones I knew, asking him if he was sure it wasn’t Yoruba, how about Ashanti? I couldn’t help myself. I wanted to be either one. I had heard that they were noble people. But I could also be Ibo; I had heard that they were gentle. And I had followed the war in Biafra. I was on their side.

  Papa never remembered. Each week he came I asked him had he remembered. Each week he told me no. Then I stopped asking. He was disappointed. I was disappointed. We lived after that in this mutual disappointment. It was a rift between us. It gathered into a kind of estrangement. After that he grew old. I grew young. A small space opened in me.

  I carried this space with me. Over time it has changed shape and light as the question it evoked has changed in appearance and angle. The name of the people we came from has ceased to matter. A name would have comforted a thirteen-year-old. The question however was more complicated, more nuanced. That moment between my grandfather and I several decades ago revealed a tear in the world. A steady answer would have mended this fault line quickly. I would have proceeded happily with a simple name. I may have played with it for a few days and then stored it away. Forgotten. But the rupture this exchange with my grandfather revealed was greater than the need for familial bonds. It was a rupture in history, a rupture in the quality of being. It was also a physical rupture, a rupture of geography.

  My grandfather and I recognized this, which is why we were mutually disappointed. And which is why he could not lie to me. It would have been very easy to confirm any of the names I’d proposed to him. But he could not do this because he too faced this moment of rupture. We were not from the place where we lived and we could not remember where we were from or who we were. My grandfather could not summon up a vision of landscape or a people which would add up to a name. And it was profoundly disturbing.

  Having no name to call on was having no past; having no past pointed to the fissure between the past and the present. That fissure is represented in the Door of No Return: that place where our ancestors departed one world for another; the Old World for the New. The place where all names were forgotten and all beginnings recast. In some desolate sense it was the creation place of Blacks in the New World Diaspora at the same time that it signified the end of traceable beginnings. Beginnings that can be noted through a name or a set of family stories that extend farther into the past than five hundred or so years, or the kinds of beginnings that can be expressed in a name which in turn marked out territory or occupation. I am interested in exploring this creation place — the Door of No Return, a place emptied of beginnings — as a site of belonging or unbelonging.

  Maps

  The rufous hummingbird travels five thousand miles from summer home to winter home and back. This hummingbird can fit into the palm of a hand. Its body defies the known physics of energy and flight. It knew its way before all known map-makers. It is a bird whose origins and paths are the blood of its small body. It is a bird whose desire to find its way depends on drops of nectar from flowers.

  Water

  Water is the first thing in my imagination. Over the reaches of the eyes at Guaya when I was a little girl, I knew that there was still more water. All beginning in water, all ending in water. Turquoise, aquamarine, deep green, deep blue, ink blue, navy, blue-black cerulean water.

  To the south of this island on a clear day you could see the mainland of South America. Women and men with a tinge of red in the black of their faces and a burnt copper to their hair would arrive from the mainland to this island fleeing husbands or the law, or fleeing life. To the north was the hinterland of Trinidad, leading to the city which someone with great ambition in another century called Port-of-Spain. To the west was the bird’s beak of Venezuela and to the east, the immense Atlantic gaping to Africa.

  The sea behind the house where I was born was a rough country sea, with a long wide shining white beach. I recall waking up each day to discov
er what it had brought us, and what it had carried away. The word gaze only applies to water. To look into this water was to look into the world, or what I thought was the world, because the sea gave one an immediate sense of how large the world was, how magnificent and how terrifying. The sea was its own country, its own sovereignty. There was always some uncontrollable news from it. Either it had taken a fisherman or it was about to wash a house away. It was either taking a child or would take a child. To take a child away. That type of away was the most fearsome news. The sea was feared and loved, generous to a fault. Boats laden with kingfish, red snapper, lobster, and bonito came in with a fisherman who had cut his foot on a fatal coral. Logs and stone which once were churches, sand which once was human, or animal bones arrived on surprising tides. “Never turn your back on the ocean,” was the counsel.

  Water is the first thing in my memory. The sea sounded like a thousand secrets, all whispered at the same time. In the daytime it was indistinguishable to me from air. It seemed to be made of the same substance. The same substance which carried voices or smells, music or emotion. The water misted the air in a continuous fine spray. It insulated the place where we lived so much so that when you entered Guaya from the bend in the Mayaro Road it felt like a surprise. A quiet, peaceful surprise.

  Right there at the bend, the sea sighed as at the end of a long journey. Guayguayare is where the sea came to rest. You would not know that there in that place there were fierce quarrels and illicit romances. You would not know that old age did not limit your sexual encounters or seductions; I know this from the hushed whispers of my grandfather’s infidelities. You would not know that runaway madmen lived there; I know this from the madman who so loved my grandfather he came to the door at night, his voice disguised as a woman, calling. You would not know there were men who fathered their daughters’ children; I know this about the man named Sonny who lived in the estate workers’ barracks, fathering the children of his wife and daughters simultaneously. Sonny was the only one happy there. His wife and daughters always seemed washed with dread and exhaustion.

  You would probably go past the small shop owned by Miss Jeanne and think the bottles of dinner mints and sweet plums dull. You would not know how dazzling they were on a Sunday to a girl in black patent-leather shoes and a pink dress stiffened with starch and pressed to perfection by a doting aunt. The perfume of roasting bakes and smoked herring lulls anyone into a thing like paradise; the sea and the bush multiplied a laugh into daylong echoes; and early morning smoke and mist could muffle the screams of children pleading not to be washed or combed. A braying donkey can be heard as if from far away, a horse’s sneeze, a high-pitched threatening calling from everywhere, in men’s voices, women’s voices — a harsh ululation which was the waking-up sound of this place some mornings. As if one had to be cruel to approach the coming day, or be hard at least. But whatever human din and rumble, whatever unhappinesses or raptures, the sea took it in and flung it back like nothing.

  It’s difficult to live near the sea. It overwhelms. Well, not true. It owns. Your small life is nothing to it. The sea uses everything. Small things like bits of black bottles and rusty bottle tops, smoothed transparent fish, fish bone, cockles against small rocks. New houses poised in concrete at its mouth could end up kilometres away days later. The sea can make a tree into spongy bits, it can wear away a button to a shell. It can wash away blood and heal wounds.

  When I was small this is what I noticed. One day two men got into a fight on the beach at Guaya. They parried glistening, sharpened cutlasses. Their faces were chiselled and murderous. I cannot recall what the fight was about. I could not know anyway. People tried to part them, their wives and their friends, but they were relentless. In the end, people gave up and left them to murder each other. In their rage one man raised his cutlass high to lay it on the other’s neck; the other slipped quickly sideways, slicing his own weapon through the muscle of the man’s arm. A seam of blood opened over a long flap of flesh from shoulder to wrist, exposing for a moment bloodless white fat. The man looked down at his arm; the other ran toward land. Then the man with the bloody, limp arm fled for the sea, his cutlass still hanging from his other arm. The sea took his blood. He tried to cauterize the wound with the sea’s salt; the sea became pink. I saw him standing there still enraged, his flesh wide open and the green wave with its swatch of pink steaming toward the beach. It wasn’t over. In a small place nothing is ever over. People here believe in uncontrollable passion, in mad rages, and in the brusque inevitability of death. Or damage. As if a face would not be a face without a scar, a finger not a finger without being broken, or a foot not a foot without a limp. Or a life not a life without tragedy. These things I knew before I knew they had something to do with the Door of No Return and the sea. I knew that everyone here was unhappy and haunted in some way. Life spoke in the blunt language of brutality, even beauty was brutal. I did not know what we were haunted by at the time. Or why it would be imperfect to have a smooth face, or why a moment of hatred would take hold so easily as if the sun had simply come out. But I had a visceral understanding of a wound much deeper than the physical, a wound which somehow erupted in profound self-disappointment, self-hatred, and disaffection. Someday the man with the bloody seam in his arm would catch the other man and do him the same harm. This I saw when I was small.

  The sea would forever be larger than me. My eyes hit only its waist. I saw a wave’s belly looking backwards, I saw froth rolling toward my feet as the sea moved into my spot on the beach. It always came in a jagged circle, frothing and steaming. It reduced all life to its unimportant random meaning. Only we were changing and struggling, living as if everything was urgent, feeling — the ocean was bigger than feeling. It lay at the back of us, on the borders of quarrels and disagreements. It took our happiness as minor and transitory. My family was large and unwieldy, and then it also contained far cousins, and friends so old they shared the same skin and blood. In that place anyone could tell your family by the mere tracing of your hairline or tilt of your head or by the way you walked. How we ended up there in a place my family jokingly called “quite to quite” is unknown to me. Our origins seemed to be in the sea. It had brought the whole of Guayguayare there from unknown places, unknown origins. Unknown to me at the time and even more unknown now.

  My grandfather, who knew everything, had forgotten, as if it was not worth remembering, the name of our tribe in that deeply unknown place before the trade. Derek Walcott wrote, “the sea is history.” I knew that before I knew it was history I was looking at.

  Maps

  According to Cosmas Indicopleustes Topographia Christiana the world was an oblong shaped like the tabernacle Moses built. Beyond the earth lay Paradise, which was the source of four rivers that watered the earth.

  In a blue while

  At eight in the morning the radio in the living room crackles over the gulls and roosters and then there is a sound like the sound of a shell with your ear in it and in the middle is the ovular sound of the BBC. It is the news from away. Once in a while an island is mentioned, once in a blue while.

  You hear that you are living elsewhere. The BBC announcer is calling you. Telling you the news. Elsewhere is not a bad place at all. It is simply elsewhere. You have heard it described as an island. You have read of islands, such as in the Tempest described as uninhabited except for monsters and spirits, as in Treasure Island described as uninhabited except for monsters and spirits; you have read of pirates and buccaneers on islands; you have read of people banished to islands, prisoners. You have seen on the borders of maps of islands, natives, nubile and fierce. You are living on an island, banished or uninhabited, or so it seems through the voice of the BBC. You are therefore already mythic.

  A long strip of sun-scarred beach, an anticipation of natives, pleasant or unpleasant, a full unending gasp of water called ocean or the savage sea which has shipwrecked you on this island, and which is the barrier between you and civilization. Since it is myth, time
does not mark this island, nor progress, except that which you may fashion out of its primitive tools. It is otherwise unchanging. And you, your ear against the radio again at four in the afternoon, the living room crackling and humming with more news from away, you listening.

  The news of the BBC is a door to “over there,” it is the door to being in the big world. Your grandfather positions the radio so that the sea’s spray does not rust out the wires. He twists and turns the aerial for cleaner reception. Your grandmother and grandfather silence all when the BBC is on. They too are shipwrecked and waiting for news of rescue. Something important is about to be said. A hush falls over the living room, the front door is closed. The neighbours who have no radio are shut out. Gamal Abdel Nasser is dead … Mahatma Gandhi is fasting … Lady Baden Powell is to visit the islands, the Suez Canal is to be opened … President Charles de Gaulle is to visit England on a state visit … Generalissimo Franco has declared martial law … President John F. Kennedy has been shot in Dallas, Texas … The plane carrying Patrice Lumumba has crashed … The war in Biafra has escalated … The writer V.S. Naipaul has received the Booker Prize … The queen has knighted … The cricketer … Dieppe commemoration … In Flanders field we shall not sleep till poppies grow …

  The world kept coming. We listened. Year in, year out. Except for Sundays. There were no BBC broadcasts on Sundays. Sundays, the island was the island; the island was itself, quiet, cicadas signalling across fields. Sun absorbing everything into light, sleep blessing the eyes after lunch at two o’clock; or the rain dipping the island grey, drenching it into the same silence. I found Sundays boring. I could not wait for them to pass to listen again to the world outside. To feel the strange intimacy of coveted estrangement, of envied cosmopolitanism.