A Map to the Door of No Return

by Dionne Brand

  Many read Naipaul as spiteful; even his former best friend Paul Theroux has confirmed that spitefulness (though we might question how a man can stay friends with another for half a lifetime and remain as pure as Theroux). But in some ways I read Naipaul as spitefully sorrowful. Like Morrison’s character Beloved. Those vast tracts which will never become familiar are not merely description of a physical landscape but discourse on ancestral estrangement and filial longing. The dread he feels in the essay and the urge to escape are even more interesting. It is the dread of the unknown, the unfamiliar, the possibility of rejection — the same possibilities which faced Henry Louis Gates on his televisual journey back to Africa — the possibility that in fact one is unwanted back home, perhaps hated, perhaps even forgotten. The wound of forced exile generations ago is made more acute by indifference, by forgetfulness. No one in India remembers him or the experience he represents. Yet he carries within him this particularly accursed ancestral memory and this crushing dislocation of the self which the landscape does not solve. Instead he finds himself afraid and wishing to escape — to escape the “endless repetition of exhaustion and decay.” To anyone else this sounds like merely “life” — its existential dilemma. To the descendants of the nineteenth-century Indian and African Diaspora, a nervous temporariness is our existential dilemma, our descent quicker, our decay faster, our existence far more tenuous; the routine of life is continually upheaved by colonial troublings. We have no ancestry except the black water and the Door of No Return. They signify space and not land. A “vastness” indeed “beyond imagination.” It is not India which is beyond imagination; it is the black water.

  Fear is repeated so many times in his essay, Naipaul in fact admits that “the despair lies more with the observer than the people.” Though his admission is an attempt to be superior, his language here and all through the essay betrays someone trying to get a grasp of himself; trying to grasp something unfathomable, not in a landscape or in the regularity of abject poverty or slovenly wealth, but in oneself, in one’s connection to anything. The superior voice of the text is directed to a particular audience in the metropole in which he has a provisional footing; the fear leaks out as an expression of that self-doubting, self-conscious being who is at the core of the discourse — author and autobiographer. Naipaul’s subsequent books on India grow more self-assured in the former project, his voice more veiled and recalcitrant. But always spotted in between for those who wish to read there is that personal wounding, still fresh — fresher still the older it grows.

  1

  Origins. A city is not a place of origins. It is a place of transmigrations and transmogrifications. Cities collect people, stray and lost and deliberate arrivants. Origins are rehabilitated and rebuilt here. A torturer in Chile becomes a taxi driver, an English thief becomes a stock hawker, an Eritrean warlord becomes a bicycle courier. An Indian businessman a security guard, a Hong Kong policeman a waiter, a sixth-generation Ukrainian girl a murderer, a teacher from the Caribbean a housekeeper, a farmer from Azores a construction worker.

  A city is a place where the old migrants transmogrify into citizens with disappeared origins who look at new migrants as if at strangers, forgetting their own flights. And the new migrants remain immigrants until they too can disappear their origins.

  2

  Belonging. A friend of mine told me this story. It was emancipation day 1998 in Kingston, Jamaica. The prime minister of Ghana was on a state visit. He was making a speech to a great gathering for these celebrations when a delegation of Rastafarians requesting to speak to him pressed toward the stage. He continued speaking about the wonderful developments in Jamaica, the long way they had come from slavery, etc. The Rastafarians continued their urgings to have a word with him. Security tried to keep them back, but they pressed on toward the stage. Finally the prime minister addressed them again, declaiming his admiration for the country. They, cutting him off, said to him in exasperation, “But we want to go home!” Home meaning Africa.

  3

  Home. I was never sure that I wanted to go home. I liked the streets of the city. I liked other people’s houses, other people’s lives. I would look into a yard and imagine there a life unlike mine. I did not imagine this because mine was unhappy; I only imagined it because it was possible to imagine. Home suggests order and routine, tradition, family. Someone else’s order struck me as fascinating — truthfully, suffocating. I would pass by those same houses at night and feel a sense of suffocation, enclosure, cloister. Houses with a single light, perhaps a bit of the radio playing, a child’s voice; these houses, so secure, seemed stifling. It was as if they said that there was no more about the world to happen, no more to know.

  4

  Too much has been made of origins. All origins are arbitrary. This is not to say that they are not also nurturing, but they are essentially coercive and indifferent. Country, nation, these concepts are of course deeply indebted to origins, family, tradition, home. Nation-states are configurations of origins as exclusionary power structures which have legitimacy based solely on conquest and acquisition. Here at home, in Canada, we are all implicated in this sense of origins. It is a manufactured origin nevertheless playing to our need for home, however tyrannical. This country, in the main a country of immigrants, is always redefining origins, jockeying and smarming for degrees of belonging. Erasing aspects of complicated origins by shedding accents, shedding dress, shedding tastes, shedding tyrannies; taking on other aspects of other complicated origins no matter the new tyrannies. Entry into nation and therefore home pervades the public discourse.

  5

  In 1999 a ship carrying children, teenagers, from China was apprehended off the coast of British Columbia. Newspapers and televisions referred to them as “migrants” and migrants they no doubt were, but one cannot help reading the exclusion of these “migrants” from the category of “children,” which would make it possible to include them in a definition of family reserved for the people within the nation. All the accoutrement of outsider could then be brought to regulate and choreograph their appearance both on the television screens and in newspaper photographs as well as the interior of the body politic.

  6

  This irony in the New York Times, Friday, December 11, 1998:

  American and Canadian authorities announced today that they had broken up a sophisticated ring that smuggled Chinese immigrants into the United States and ultimately to New York City, through a Mohawk reservation along the border. The authorities said the ring made up primarily of Chinese citizens and members of the Mohawk tribe, transported more than 3600 Chinese immigrants across the lightly patrolled border along the St Lawrence River and into upstate New York during the last two years. “This is the first large-scale alien smuggling operation we have encountered on the northern border,” Doris Meissner, the Commissioner of the Immigration and Naturalisation Service, said in announcing the indictments.

  One wants to ask who better able or authorized to give safe passage to anyone across North America than the Mohawk or any of the people who inhabited this continent before its New World settlers. Nevertheless, the language of the piece asserts the identities “American” and “Canadian” as dominant over “Mohawk” and “Chinese.”

  The piece continues:

  Today’s announcement highlighted the extent to which the 28-square-mile Indian reservation that straddles two Canadian provinces and one American state has become a haven for smugglers. The foggy creeks and wooded islands of the Indian territory which is known as the St Regis Mohawk reservation on the American side and the Akwesasne Indian territory in Canada, have long been used to spirit gasoline, cigarettes, tobacco and drugs between the two countries. In recent years more and more of the contraband has been human.… A look at a map shows you how easy it is to use the place as a vehicle for smuggling. It isn’t just aliens, though …

  Notice how this territory is wrapped in the crypto-fascist romances of both dominant nations — the “foggy creeks,” th
e “wooded islands,” and foundational to this romance, the “human contraband.” Hundreds of years after the making of its neo-origins these Canadians and Americans who police these fresh borders, materially as well as intellectually, play and dwell in the same language of their conquest. A language which summons mystery and wilderness. The passage could have been written two hundred years ago.

  7

  Some of us want entry into the home and nation that are signified by these romances. Some of us in the Diaspora long so for nation — some continuous thread of biological or communal association, some bloodline or legacy which will cement our rights in the place we live. The problem of course is that even if those existed — and they certainly do, even if it is in the human contraband which we represent in the romance — they do not guarantee nation for Blacks in the Diaspora.

  A piece in The Globe and Mail, Friday, November 28, 1998, gives us a sense of this: “Thousands of Black slaves fought for the British in the American Revolution on the promise they would get their freedom and land after the war. But after the British lost and thousands of loyalists fled to Nova Scotia from New England states, the 3,500 Blacks among them had two fears: that they would be sent back to their masters under the mutual Slave Act and that they would starve waiting to get land.” Starve they did, or were driven out of towns to barren and desolate reaches. Some left to resettle in Sierra Leone. The British Loyalists transmuted into the Canadian nation, the Black Loyalists found themselves immutable.

  It is of course tempting to try to enter this nation of Canada. It is even more tempting to see that desire as a rightful thing. Fugitives from slavery, Black Loyalists, sleeping car porters, immigrant workers — from the earliest Black presence to the present it would be easy, given the terms of entry for white settlers and immigrants, to presume that these same terms can be legitimately used to cement such a right. The right to nation. What we have to ask ourselves is, as everyone else in the nation should ask themselves also, nation predicated on what?

  8

  I am driving toward Eglinton Avenue, about to leave the city. Going toward the Allen Expressway I take Oakwood, stop at the Petro-Canada to fill up before taking the highway. It is winter. I always fill up here on my way up north. The same man, in his thirties, dark hair, Italian, comes out of the office. I pop the gas lid, lower the window. It is redundantly cold. Old snow is piled up anywhere there’s space. It is rusty and muddy and oily; it is so old some of it is stone. The man is wearing a red down vest; he pats his body, removes one glove to lift the gas nozzle. I ask him, not wanting to know but just to be courteous, “How’re you doing … cold, eh?” He shapes his face to emit a sigh of resignation and says, “This is not a country to live in. It’s a country to make money, but not a country to live.” Can I tell him otherwise? We both shrug in acknowledgement of the deep truth he’s just articulated. And the lie just beside it. I pay him and head for the highway.

  9

  Too much has been made of origins. And so if I reject this notion of origins I have also to reject its mirror, which is the sense of origins used by the powerless to contest power in a society. The overstrong arguments about “culture,” which are made both by defenders of what is “Canadian” as well as defenders of what is labelled “immigrant.” These are mirror/image-image/mirror of each other and are invariably conservative. Because they must draw very definite borders both to contain their constituencies as well as, in the case of the powerful, to aggressively exclude the other and, in the case of the powerless, to weakly do the same while waving a white flag to the powerful for inclusion. Each of these arguments select and calcify origins. Out of a multiplicity of stories, they cobble together a narrative glossing over accident, opportunism, necessity, and misdirection. They uplift aggression and carnage into courage, they exaggerate cunning into pride. In opposition to the calcified Canadian nation narrative we read calcified hyphenated narratives, without exception, from all other groups in the nation which stand outside of that narrative.

  10

  A brief look at a Black community newspaper in Toronto reveals a swagger of superlative claims — “Canada’s largest ethnic paper” and “making our voice heard”; an epidemic of crossnationalist beauty pageants — Miss Guyana Canada, Miss Africa Canada, for which twelve beauties would vie; a film festival called the “other film festival”; news stories intoning this same crossnationalism and “otherness” about West Indian family days in Etobicoke; Grenadian Canadians honouring a doctor; making desserts à la Jamaica; a mother who is refused a visa to see her daughter who died unexpectedly in Canada; an editorial about the differential treatment of Black festivals by city officials and police in the city; numerous articles on religion and faith. Surrounding these stories is a veritable blizzard of advertisements for travel deals to every Caribbean location and New York, Detroit, and Buffalo, bolstered by ads for shipping barrels to every Caribbean location, buttressed by an intimidating phalanx of ads for immigration lawyers, overlaid with ads for goat, coconut milk, and red snapper, and finally riotously decked out with ads for banquet halls, reggae celebrations, and calypso extravangazas.

  How do we read these complicated juxtapositions of belonging and not belonging, belonging and intrabelonging. In a place such as this, so full of immigrants, everyone is deeply interested in belonging. The Blacks addressed in this newspaper are in the main of Caribbean origin, which is not to say the half of it. They switch from the more specific nationalisms of island and territory to region throughout their discourse with Canada. They also gesture to the continent of Africa and at times also to India and China, since there are several diasporas that come together in those Caribbean origins. They claim a Canada qualified by these tenuous origins. They quarrel with the Canadian nation on counts of racism and exclusion from kind treatment. They travel — journey — back and forth from these origins to their neo-origins. They are legally embattled with the Canadian nation-state on points of physical entry into the nation. Their pleasures and desires seem human enough: food and music.

  11

  The imperative for these crossnationalisms bores me. It puts into play an exhausting, stultifying set of practices which are repeated and repeated without change. It makes people cling to the most narrow of definitions of culture and identity, and deploy the most banal characteristics as exemplary. National identity is a dance of artificiality, since what it dances must essentially be unchanging. Some would say, well, no, Canadian identity has changed over the last thirty or fifty years. Not at all. We are drawn constantly to the European shape in its definition. A shape, by the way, which obscures its own multiplicity. And when we read the hyphenated narratives we see the angst produced by this unchanging quality.

  12

  Why consider the Door of No Return? Because it exists without prompting. It exists despite all efforts to obscure it or change it or reinterpret it by its carpenters or its passengers. The Door of No Return is ocular. It is propitious. From it one may reflect, grasp.

  13

  Roads

  I dreamed of Gabriel García Márquez. He needed a pen and I searched for one, giving him one, then another, then finally a fountain pen with peacock blue ink.

  Once I dreamed of Wilson Harris and a steep slate incline of mountain with a river below and the sound of strange birds. Once I had Neruda within sight, on a bus on a cold night in China, a cold night of old faces, a night of intentions.

  Compass

  That dislocation, that suddenly not knowing where you are or from which point to ascertain your bearings. A point of certainty, a “where” from which to sort out the next destination.

  I recall as a child spending hours in the ocean, or what seemed like hours to a child at any rate. I would spend hours there in the water, emerging legs heavy and disoriented. On those days when I simply could not leave the ocean, running back time and again to fall into it when I was called out, I would later dream of being floated and rocked. I would dream of the ocean at my throat rocking and swelling.
I liked these dreams. Lying in my sleep I would feel as if I were still in the sea, my head dipped in the water, the sharp disconcerting taste of water in my nostrils, the feeling of breathing water instead of air.