A Map to the Door of No Return

by Dionne Brand

  One may not call these ways practical but they certainly suggest a mastery of way-finding. So much so that no known map is necessary, nor any known methods of conveyance. Except escaping the body.

  The religious ritual across North and South America and the archipelago of being inhabited by the gods, goddesses, and spirits of Africa may be another method of way-finding. A neighbour from my childhood once told me that she was a Shango mother and that she knew many people who could go back to Africa when they “caught the power.” Another even further back in my memory, one called Neighbour Lorna, lived in a house whose yard she had turned into a shrine, when at night the scent of a certain white flower emanated. She was said to deal in spirits whose renown came straight from Africa. She could inveigle them to help the lonely, the heartbroken, the sick, or the wicked.

  Getting to the Door of No Return then needs no physical apparatus except the mind; the body is the prison. It is the body which makes the sign for sanction and regulation. It precedes its appearances, forecasting … It is why Baby Suggs performs the spiritual ritual of reclaiming and cleansing the body in the clearing in Toni Morrison’s Beloved.

  “Here,” she said, “in this place, we flesh; flesh that weeps, laughs; flesh that dances on bare feet in grass. Love it. Love it hard. Yonder they do not love your flesh. They despise it. They do not love your eyes; they’d just as soon pick ’em out. No more do they love the skin on your back. Yonder they flay it. And o my people they do not love your hands. Those they only use, tie, bind, chop off and leave empty. Love your hands! Love them.”

  2

  The North Star, the Big Dipper, a dark sky, a clear night, a rabbit’s foot, a juju bag, maljo beads, holy water, water of compassion, success powder, single bible leaf. Signs of rescue. With these their only compasses Africans escaped slavery in the Americas, made their way to remote places, maroonages. These signs were not signs to the way home but signs to somewhere free of signs for the body. But of course by this time the Black body was so freighted with the excesses and needs of the New World culture that even somewhere free was not quite sufficient. The signs did not fall away.

  3

  Guardian Weekly, March 30-April 5, 2000

  (Austria)

  … In January this year, when police raided the home of Black Africans in Trainskuche. “One hundred and forty police stormed the home looking for drugs, but nothing was found,” he [a witness] said. “They then carried out painful anal searches, simply because there was some suspicion that there might be drugs there. All you need is a black face to be considered suspicious.” … The focal point of Amnesty’s allegations is the case of 25-year-old Marcus Omofuma, a Nigerian asylum seeker, who died while being deported from Vienna to Sofia in May last year. He was bound and gagged “like a mummy stuck to the seat” by the three officers who accompanied him, and arrived unconscious in Sofia where doctors pronounced him dead. No charges were brought.

  “New York Times,” Jack E. White (Time, June 7, 1999)

  Suppose that on one fateful night in August 1997, New York City cop Justin Volpe had contented himself with pummeling Abner Louima with his nightstick instead of ramming a broom handle into Louima’s rectum and then waving it in front of his face. Suppose that after that vicious assault, Volpe had not pranced around the precinct house with the blood-and-feces-stained stick, inviting other cops to examine it.… There would be a good chance that we would never have heard of Louima and that Volpe would still be patrolling the beat in Brooklyn.

  (Time, October 19, 2000)

  Diallo, an unarmed African immigrant living in the Bronx, was shot 41 times by four white police officers.… A police detective testified that Diallo’s body was so riddled with bullets that some actually fell out of him as he was taken away from the scene.

  4

  There are other bodies in the world which are brutalized. These examples are not a case for exclusivity. Women in Afghanistan are entombed alive in burquas. The Taliban has forced them out of the public space; one cannot help but think that these men wish all women dead. They seem to require more than subservience, as they’ve constructed a vanishing of hundreds of thousands of women. There are countless other examples of brutalized bodies, bodies which play a role as talisman and sign. Not sobered by the emaciated bodies of death camps of the Holocaust, Europe revived these spectres in Bosnia. An endless parade of starved and famined bodies of ghostlike children in Ethiopia, Sudan, and Eritrea find television cameras and rich countries unaffected and racially superior. So, no, these examples are not a case for exclusivity, only for a certain particularity. A particularity which has its resonances against those other brutalized bodies.

  5

  The thing is that I think Blacks in the Diaspora carry the Door of No Return in our senses. It is a passport which, after boarding the plane, we are unable to make disappear by tearing it up and throwing it into the toilet. We arrive with its coat of arms, its love knot, its streamers, its bugle, its emblem attesting to our impossible origins. This passport is from the territory of the Door. The territory is vast, its nature shiftable. We are always in the middle of the journey.

  I know many nationalists along this journey. Each square foot of the Americas has its nationalism. And probably the most powerful of these nationalisms can be experienced in the U.S. But Jamaica, Brazil, Antigua, even the volcanic Montserrat are no less virulent. There are flags and anthems, even a real love for each place — the ways and objects and events which collect into nations. But the Door of No Return opens all nationalisms to their imaginative void.

  One stands on a street corner in Ocho Rios or in a marketplace in Montevideo or at a newspaper kiosk in Chicago or Sofia, one stands there and imagines another territory, another history, and in that moment the fake emblems fall away. The cigarette falls from the fingers, its light singing into the gutter, the newspaper rustles in a catch of alien wind, the passion fruit feels leaden in the hand at the market, and one simply cannot make sense of one’s time or one’s unassuageable desire; one feels a strange discomfort and one sighs and takes off again into a life, a life against oneself.

  6

  To live at the Door of No Return is to live self-consciously. To be always aware of your presence as a presence outside of yourself. And to have “others” constantly remark on your presence as outside of itself. If to think is to exist, then we exist doubly. An ordinary conversation is never an ordinary conversation. One cannot say the simplest thing without doubling or being doubled for the image that emerged from the doorway. At a party you remark enthusiastically that you have been away, someplace where the sun has deliciously deepened the shade of your skin, and you look up from your bronzed shoulder to bewilderment. The self which is unobservable is a mystery. The mystery also plays out in the “private” space of the family in the Diaspora, where light or dark shading is related as proximity to the Door of No Return and to its secret ineffable quality. This mystery evades all the simplest powers of discernment in the public space. Every space you occupy is public space, that is, space which is definable by everyone. That is, the image which emerges from the Door of No Return is public property belonging to a public exclusive of the Black bodies which signify it. One is aware of this ownership. One is constantly refuting it, or ignoring it, or troubling it, or parodying it, or tragically reaffirming it.

  7

  Blacks in the Diaspora obscure themselves as much as they are obscured. They observe and rectify incessantly. Hair, skin tone, talk, fashion. Fashions are not fashions at all but refashioning; language is not communication but reinvention. They are never in place but on display. Curiously the dynamism of these circumlocutions are the wellspring of culture in the Americas and with the dubious help of mass marketing they are the creative legs of an even more dubious globalization. Let me break it down. What is called Black culture, including aesthetic tastes and sensibilities, is used daily as creative backdrop to multinational markets. But more interestingly, what is produced in Black homes, and neig
hbourhoods, the simplest exchanges in communities — expressions, gestures, understandings, dress — these are taken up in the generalizing, homogenizing culture. In the language, for example; certain colloquialisms created in a city block of New York or Oakland or Kingston, Jamaica or Ladbrooke Grove, London become communal sayings far beyond.

  8

  This self which is unobservable is a mystery. It is imprisoned in the observed. It is constantly struggling to wrest itself from the warp of its public ownerships. Its own language is plain yet secret. Rather, obscured.

  9

  If I can say it. Let me. I think that Blacks in the Diaspora feel captive despite the patent freedom we experience, despite the fact that we are several hundred years away from the Door of No Return, despite the fact that the door does not exist; despite the fact that we live in every state of self-agency, some exceedingly powerful, some less so of course but self-agency nonetheless. One might even argue for the sheer magnificence of our survival against history. Yet …

  Maps

  A portolan — a written description of the course along which ships sailed, indicating bays, capes, coves, ports, magnetic rhumb lines, and the distances between places.

  Finding a Compass

  1

  It is 4:45 a.m. I awake in the foreign country of silence. The lone intermittent car going by; someone trying to find shelter or someone running from it. I am doing what I do every time I drink too much wine and wake up suddenly at 4:45 a.m. I read. Eduardo Galeano falls open at this time: “I’m nostalgic for a country which doesn’t yet exist on a map.”

  2

  In cities at 4:45 a.m., Toronto or Calgary or Halifax, there are these other inhabitants of silence. Two hundred miles outside, north of any place, or in the middle of it, circumnavigating absence. For a moment it is a sweet country, in that moment you know perhaps someone else is awake reading Galeano.

  3

  At seventeen on Raglan Avenue, it wasn’t wine but loneliness that woke me up to reach for Prevert, whose Paroles I had found in an old book shop. “Pierre tell me the truth” hissing through my sleep. Unable to leave those two in that street, Rue de Seine, in the middle of hopelessness. The man with the hat and the raincoat, the woman who “has a furious desire to live.” Both of them in the middle of war and therefore impossible questions. Perhaps at seventeen I too felt in the middle of war with forces arrayed against the pleasure of being human. The German occupation of France was Prevert’s canvas. The ubiquitous occupation of coloniality, mine. I didn’t put this into those words then. I only felt an affinity across a continent, thirty years, and a translation of his words into English.

  4

  The street on the north side of St. Clair between Bathurst and Vaughan was a small one lodging a mix of people: Europeans, Africans, Indians. The superintendent of the building I lived in drank heavily. His face and that of his wife like paste softened in alcohol in the mornings. My neighbour to the left was a man, a young Italian, who woke every morning at five to go to his job in construction. On Saturday nights he bombarded my left wall with music that sounded like crashing machinery. The woman across the hall was saving every penny of her money to send to St. Vincent and the Grenadines for her mother. Someone downstairs decided to take up the recorder, and to my right was a neighbour who complained to the super about my three-month-old nephew crying all night with colic.

  The view from this apartment was wonderful. Another building filled with windows into other apartments. A middle-aged eastern European woman in flowered dresses; how could I tell she was eastern European. I couldn’t. I assumed by the light frills around her shoulders. The knick-knacks on the windowsill. The not-quite-here feel of her. She could have been from anywhere, really. A man, probably English, with a small hawk’s face, who drank coffee incessantly and looked worriedly out the window. I’d say he had no work; I’d say he was in his forties. He smoked cigarettes to the quick. A window with a dark red curtain which didn’t open. Two students, male, the apartment curtainless and scruffy, beer bottles on the windowsill. A cat at another window whose job it was to watch me watching. A few other lights are on at 4:45 a.m., the people there thinking of their own rough doorways. I never saw a party through those windows. Why, I wonder. I loved looking at the slow, unimportant movement of those lives — the flowerpots and beer bottles, the evening incandescence of the window frames.

  5

  One time in Antigonish, Nova Scotia, when it was winter and when my head was thick with questions, John Arthur Murphy met me off the bus from Halifax and took me to his house, where his wife gave me a warm quilt. John Arthur made jokes, his body stiffened and pained with arthritis, his children wanting to be lifted up anyway, and we talked about another war. Another country where we had stood in a room together with people dancing and talking about revolution. Then the next day, all of us, the internationalists, had boarded a bus and driven out to see farms as if we knew anything about them at all. The poor farmers impressed us with heads of lettuce growing but more with how weak our own bodies were and how childish our plans and our visit. John Arthur joked self-effacingly. After the war there, John Arthur Murphy met me half-dead and dazed at that bus in Antigonish. I remember that quilt and John Arthur’s body, which fought its own conflict.

  6

  Every identity is irremediably destabilized by its “exterior.”

  Chantal Mouffe

  7

  Water is another country. We are in Charlottesville boarding a small boat to head out to sea. The two men running the boat look at us, sizing us up to see if we are fit for the journey. One of them says, “It might get rainy.” We ask, “Well, should we still go?” The other says, “Oh, yes, no problem. The water is as smooth as a baby’s bottom.” Assured and amused, we climb on. The two men head for the shade of the canopy on the dory. We sit out in the sun. Leleti sits on the prow. I grip one of the seating planks; Margaret grips another. We are bare headed. We are heading out to nowhere in particular. The sea is another country. The two men know the landmarks. Swells succeed us and precede us like mountains rising and subsiding. The crinkle of the water changes shade every millisecond. The ocean feels like land. The two men point out this or that area as if it were a patch of ground, a small hill, or an inhabited vista. Fishing boats whiz by us over the next watery hill, thin fishing rods antennaed to the side give them the look of insects flitting.

  8

  I see two men through a keyhole; one is my grandfather, the other is the man who is supposed to be my father. My grandfather is saying something quietly. The man who is supposed to be my father is a man dressed as if he is from another country. My grandfather is commanding him softly. The man who is supposed to be my father has given me a butternut candy; it is wrapped in gold and brown cellophane paper. My grandfather is moving him, the man who is supposed to be my father, off the doorstep with his quiet language. I am sucking the sweet nutty juice of the candy as my grandfather speaks gently, perhaps threateningly. The man who is supposed to be my father, his mother is from another country. She puts on airs. She thinks her son too good for us. Her son is a scamp. He hangs behind his mother’s dress-tail. He has no scruples. He has no pride. My grandfather cautions him with incorruptible civility. The man who is supposed to be my father moves outside of the frame of the keyhole. My grandfather’s white shirt cuff raises itself and disappears; he steps toward the man who is supposed to be my father, who is himself out of sight. I see my grandfather’s moustache as he turns toward the unseen man who is supposed to be my father whose mother is “Portugee” and from another country. My grandfather is unimpressed by the fading unscrupulous man who is drifting into the street beyond the hibiscus fence. The quiet of my grandfather, as he tells the man never to step in our doorway, is as ironed as my grandfather’s white shirt, as pressed as the disciplined seam in his trousers, as blistering as the shine on his black shoes.

  9

  In the room at 4:45 a.m. Aimé Césaire is writing:

  I should disco
ver once again the secret of great

  communication and great combustions. I

  should say storm. I should say river. I should

  say tornado. I should say leaf. I should say tree.

  I should be wet by all rains, made damp with

  all dews.

  In the room at 4:50 a.m., reading this, I decide to be a poet. Césaire is still writing:

  And you ghosts rise bluely from the chemistry

  of a forest of hunted beasts, twisted machines

  jujube trees of rotted flesh, a basket of oysters

  of eyes, a lace of straps cut in the beautiful sisal of the skin.

  I have words vast enough to

  contain you and you, earth, tense drunken earth, …

  10

  At 4:45 a.m. the Door of No Return is visible. Bowed to a page, the pen moves in scars. One’s body emerging naked through its rough portal. One can feel the stone of its sides with one’s hands, and that is how I felt at 4:45 a.m.

  Maps

  In an early essay in The Overcrowded Barracoon, V.S. Naipaul wrote, “Yet always the obvious is overwhelming. One is a traveller and as soon as the dread of a particular district has been lessened by familiarity, it is time to move on again, through vast tracts which will never become familiar, which will sadden and the urge to escape will return.” Written in 1962 for the Illustrated Weekly of India, it is an essay about travelling in India called “In the Middle of the Journey.” These two sentences occur among many mis-sightings of India and Indians that Naipaul describes in his book. He is determined, it seems at the outset, to conclude that India is wanting in some sociopathic way — the landscape is “monotonous,” its “simplicity” is “frightening,” its people are Philistine and myopic. The essay mentions wanting to escape or wanting to separate himself from the country. The essay is less interesting for what it may offer by way of any description of India than for Naipaul’s choices of words and emotions that indicate his state of mind. Of course India is overwhelming, of course it is vast, but that does not give one the sense of dread that Naipaul attaches to these words. This dread one suspects arrived with him. The stories he must have heard as a child of the Kala Pani, the black water of the journey of indentured labourers from India to the Caribbean, the experience of those workers for whom India might have been both a curse from which they left or a haven from which they were plucked. When Naipaul travels to India to send this report he is making the return trip across the Kala Pani … the Sargasso … the middle passage … the door: “Vast tracts which will never become familiar, which will sadden.” They will never become familiar because two generations have missed their shape, more than one hundred years have passed since his family has been there. It exists only in memory, which is sometimes untrustworthy; it exists in the stories of his family passed down, each image dependent on the storyteller’s gifts and skills.