A Map to the Door of No Return

by Dionne Brand

  nothing they can do

  but rent a room across the street, and tail us

  so they can learn to laugh and cry like us.

  The city is a labyrinth of grim hurts and sweet ironies. Former citizens of old cities, failed translators of ideologies, speechless interlocutors of inexpressible feeling.

  It is Monday morning, 9 a.m., at the courthouse on Jarvis Street. To get into the courthouse one has to go through the obligatory metal detector and pass by several policemen. Even though one is merely an observer one cannot help but feel an immediate loss of control and a sense of surveillance. The crowd standing outside waiting for the doors to open is mostly young … children. Here, they are called juveniles. They are anywhere from eleven to seventeen years old. They all look eight. Some of them are trying to look older, tougher. Some of them are scared. Most are alone, some with a grim-faced mother or grandmother. Some are smoking cigarettes nonchalantly. They are grouped in little packs, those of them without mothers or grandmothers, trying to appear unperturbed. But perhaps they are unperturbed; some of them are veterans. The doors open and we all troop in through the turnstiles and the metal detectors.

  The corridors and vestibules fill up; there aren’t enough seats in Courtroom No. 1 for the crowd. A policewoman stands at the door of the courtroom. She answers a few questions from those who don’t know the rules. Most wait. She looks as if she thinks all of it wearisome — so do many of the children. They are urban children — cool and bored is their emotional attire. Baggy pants worn below the hips, underwear showing, skintight pants, belly buttons pierced; hair frosted, streaked, one curl down the side of the forehead; baseball caps — this is the outer attire, affecting that same cool, bored, knowledgeable-beyond-their-years look. And perhaps they are cool, bored, knowledgeable beyond their years. I don’t know. A city can do that. The doors to Courtroom No. 1 open. The crowd walks in, filling the seats. The policewoman, joined by a policeman, instructs boys to take off their caps. We stand as the judge enters. Two court clerks sit below him to his right. They are Black women, one older, one younger, one in glasses. The judge is not formidable as one imagines judges. He is white. The Crown attorney and the legal aid attorneys look weary, and it’s only 9:30 or so. They obviously know each other; they decide some dates, drop into the legal talk, settle what to do with the defendants. It is a routine they practise each day. They could probably do this asleep. As each case is called and a date is set or postponed the children walk to the middle of the courtroom, stand, then are instructed to go to the clerks, where they are given a pink piece of paper with a new date. The charges aren’t read out; this is only a court for setting dates and issuing warrants for those who haven’t appeared. Before the judge arrived, six or so teenagers in cuffs were brought up from the holding area downstairs. They affect an even more bored look, glazed really. They’ve been in custody. They are either heroes or scarecrows to the other teenagers in the room. One by one names are called and I see the children at first tentatively stand, knees weak, and make their way the ten feet or so to the bar. Something curious happens to most of them in their walk up the aisle. They transform from scared and teary to bold and accomplished, as if this is routine, as if they did this yesterday. I see their backs straighten and their heads lift from shame to insolent dignity. Inside they’re making some decision — some resistance — “this is what I am then.” Something else is noticeable in Courtroom No. 1. The defendants are Chinese, Hispanic, Portuguese, Italian, African/Caribbean, Vietnamese, Russian. But not really. None of them know these origins except through their parents or grandparents. They were all born in this city. Some are a mix of a few of those specifics, some are co-defendants across those specifics. As they go up one by one to collect the pink sheets of paper, emotions changing now from insolent dignity to ennui, the clerks who seem Caribbean in origin give each child a look of reprimand, as if they’re disappointed in this bunch of children who have wasted their parents’ sacrifice. They look at these children like disgusted relatives, aunts who are fed up with bad behaviour. The bleached-blond Chinese boy, the red-streaked Indian girl take on these looks and swagger off, smirking, out of the courtroom. Three young women saunter up the aisle as their names are called. Candace Premdass, Stacy Zeballos, and June Nguyen. Candace Premdass is wearing a Catholic girls’ school uniform, the plaid skirt hiked up to mid-thigh, blue calf socks, platform shoes. Stacy Zeballos is in a baggy sweatshirt; June Nguyen is wraithlike in bell-bottoms. Their transatlantic names are the mystery of this city, its hybridization. Candace Premdass, Stacey Zeballos, June Nguyen. They walk lazily toward the judge. “See what you can do with us,” they seem to say, “deal with this.” Candace and Premdass, Stacy and Zeballos, June and Nguyen. Other and other. How did they all get together, I wonder. Not just their first and last names but the three of them. Friends, co-conspirators, co-defendants. They met as outsiders, no doubt. Outsiders to the city and outsiders in their own homes; the homes, the families that gave them the last names, the same families that gave them the first names to protect them from the last names. What they did isn’t clear: shoplifting, perhaps; fighting three other girls, perhaps. Anyway, three of them did whatever it was together. Candace has a swagger; June has a supermodel runway walk — she’s the tallest; Stacey is the only one who looks mildly nervous. She stands between the other two. They keep each other company in the desolate courtroom in the desolate city, this transatlantic space trio. But those are my words, my sentiments. For them, the city is beautiful and reckless, a roller coaster of laughter and lipstick, of talking and dissing and high-fiving and wide eyes of mock offence and wonder, of rap music and boys they cruise, and of just, well, cool. This courtroom is a rite of passage for these diasporic children; they would give up their lives like the boys in cuffs behind the Plexiglas with the guard from Mimico, just as soon as they will saunter out of Courtroom No. 1, relieved, and in the hallway giggle about how awesome it was. A date is set and they approach the two clerks, who give them each a reproachful look. The one giving out the pink slips puts them down on the bar, refusing to hand them to the girls. Candace Premdass snatches her paper, her posse right after her, and leaves the courtroom rolling her eyes in exasperation.

  In this parking lot of a civilization I meet a girl with a murmurous baby at the Mimico Youth Detention. She is waiting to see her boyfriend. She knows the ropes: she tells me where to put my ID for the guard, she tells me what noises mean, she tells me where to sit, she says the baby resembles her boyfriend inside. The baby’s going to be tall like him. She hopes he knows he has to stop this, the boy is inside for possession. He can’t be around bad people, she says, and not expect to get in trouble, too. She sounds like she’s fifty. She’s seventeen. So’s the boy she’s waiting on. She’s finishing high school; she wants a Jeep like mine. After we each finish our hour behind Plexiglas talking to the boys we know in detention there, making conversation we each try to infuse with a sense of the boys we knew on the outside — she perhaps accomplishing this better than I, she’s younger — I give her a ride to the subway. She was, she wants … I can feel a never-going-to-be-sated hunger there.

  We, she and I, move in this normal world of jail and babies and wants, thinking nothing of cumbersome baby strollers and teenage mothers in high school. Our families are full of rap musicians and basketball dunking champions, runners and comedians who father children, give up chances, make babies instead, live in leaky Ontario housing projects, hang themselves or take pills and leave their bodies for even more tragic aunts, uncles, and sisters to find floating in bathtubs. She and I live in the living of it.

  What happiness, Miguel!

  Are you going to ask where I am?

  I’ll tell you — giving only details useful to the state.

  Here, Neruda, it is as if poetry does not matter. The state does not have to look for us. We walk to their building, give them our wrists upheld. Muriel Rukeyser knew it, too. She said, “They say there is no penalty for poets,/ There is no pe
nalty for writing poems./ They say this. This is the penalty.”

  The man from the oldest city in the world and I are shaking with laughter. Then I walk toward the theatre. Its glittering glass doors, its self-conscious newness, its disposable modernity. Years ago it, too, was a parking lot; in another decade it will become one. Around me is the parking lot, the great parking lot temporarily occupied by buildings. This is what he looks out on every day, his curly head shaking. He is fitted into a box four feet or so by four feet in the middle of it. In the winter he has a heater. I imagine him on those ash-cold days beginning the desolate night shift, surveying “their” civilization. He himself has arrived at the parking lot probably spilled up by a war, lucky enough to have escaped it. Brooding over the parking lot he thinks of this chance, some mishap or fortune now indistinguishable, which has landed him here. He lives somewhere in the place called the “jungle” at Lawrence and Bathurst, or in the high-rises at Kipling and Dixon, but he spends most of these days in this unending parking lot, which is the sum of its civilization, laughing sardonically at himself and waiting for a woman in a hurry to listen to his joke. I do not come from any old city. My civilization is the parking lot, but for a moment I recognize the attendant’s “they.” It is a grim laughter we share. Yes, it is at the ironic circumstances of belonging to this civilization of parking lots. I am the citizen of the parking lot.

  So much goes on in this city. Somewhere among its millions of people someone is sitting in a four-foot-square box and thinking about an older city, thinking, “They build a parking lot and they think that it is a civilization.” He is shaking his head at his own predicament and laughing to himself. Someone else is walking toward a theatre, a concert hall, with the cadence of Neruda’s letter in her head, and a joke from the man from the oldest city in the world. Somehow she is comforted by this joke, somehow it helps her make it across the street and into the concert hall, it makes her walk to the podium and read Neruda’s letter with all the more certainty that there’s a country with an old city and a letter.

  Ossington to Christie, Toronto

  In a new city there are ghosts of old cities. There are lies and re-creations. Everyone thinks that a city is full of hope, but it isn’t. Sometimes it is the end of imagination. It is where everyone comes to put a stop to the hard things in life and to become perfect. Those who are born there think they know perfection. What they know is useless after one hundred miles, unless in another city. But this uselessness humbles ghosts. Ghosts try to step into life. Selam Restaurant, Jeonghysa Buddhist Temple, Oneda’s Market, West Indian and Latin American Foods, Afro Sound, Lalibela Ethiopian Cuisine, Longo’s Vegetable and Fruits, Astoria Athens Restaurant, Coffee Time, Star Falafel, Vince Gasparos Meats, Eagle Travel, Taygetos Café and Greek Social Club, Pathfinder Bookstore, African Wings Travel, DEC Bookroom and Centre for Social Justice, PCI House-Internet Café, Khosla Travel, Greek Credit Union, Menalon, Asmaria Restaurant and Bar, Turkish Restaurant, Café Jose, African Paradise, Sawa, Manolito Bar Café, Wing Po Variety, El Jaroleto Restaurant, Ramon Humeres — Dentist, Universal Beauty Supply.

  Beat

  1

  I sat in a dark smoke-filled bar in New York City wearing a black turtleneck sweater, black jeans, and black boots. My hair was cut in a sharp pageboy, my eyebrows were plucked to arrows. I sat there thinking this thought: Journeys are perhaps always imaginary. This bar was filled with others like me, smoking cigarettes and drinking. We were listening intently (yet languidly) to poets like us who stood in a small spotlight declaiming on the ache in human beings. I snapped my fingers in appreciation, murmuring “cool” when some profound thought had been expressed. My hair formed a soft halo in the spotlight as I too rose to speak a glimmer of wisdom into the urban void. The bar, dark and spectral with smoke and enlightenment, snapped its approval. Then Ginsberg walked in and read “Howl” for the first time. Journeys are always imaginary.

  I was twelve and sitting in Miss Sirju’s English class. Miss Sirju called me Deanne and insisted that I answer to this name, which I had never been called but which a careless registry clerk had attached to my birth certificate when an aunt had gone to the Mayaro registry, some miles away from Guayguayare, where I was born, to register my birth. This clerk had not bothered to listen closely to my aunt or had thought my aunt’s opinion on the matter of my name worthless. My aunt, I don’t know which one of them, I don’t even know if it was an aunt, my aunt did not look at the birth certificate, nor did anyone else in my family, nor did anyone else in any school administration or church or neighbourhood or playground until Miss Sirju, my first form mistress. Not Miss Greenidge, my fastidious ABC dame school teacher; not Miss James, my primary school headmistress; not Miss Palmer, my standard one teacher, who would have had a perfect right to investigate me had she caught me cheating at poetry recital; not even Miss Meighu, my high school principal. None of these authorities had challenged the name my family had called me since I was born. None of them had questioned my authenticity or my identity until Miss Sirju, who decided to teach me my real name when I was twelve years old.

  The transformation into the girl Miss Sirju called Deanne was distasteful to me even though there were many girls I had read of whom I was willing to embody. The girls in Little Women, for example, or the girls in Enid Blyton mysteries, or the girl in “Oh Mary, go and call the cattle home.” But this Deanne seemed to be a girl without a story. When Miss Sirju called Deanne, I did not answer. I was not being wilful. I looked around like all the other girls waiting for this Deanne to answer. Soon enough the other girls looked at me as if the word Deanne were an accusation. Miss Sirju gave me a bad conduct mark for being rude and ignoring her when she called “Deanne.” She somehow did not understand that I did not hear my name, my name not being Deanne, and therefore could not answer. Her class became a torture chamber for me. Some days I remembered her problem and answered just to keep the peace. Some days I forgot this obsession of hers, my mind on my own life and not any fiction of Miss Sirju’s. On the days that I remembered her problem, she played a cat and mouse game with me. After calling “Deanne” once, which I answered to when I was alert, she would call “Deanne” again unexpectedly to catch me out. Miss Sirju’s English class was therefore a painful place. I could not concentrate on William Wordsworth or William Makepeace Thackeray, who were definitely Williams and never had to endure someone like Miss Sirju, I’d wager. So in order therefore to transcend Miss Sirju, I sat in a dark smoke-filled bar in New York City wearing a black turtleneck sweater, waiting to stand in the natural halo of my hair preceding Ginsberg’s “Howl.”

  I had arrived at the bar following various pieces of information as to its whereabouts. A magazine, an arts report on the radio, a reading of a poem, a novel set in New York City, a piece of jazz heard on Radio Antilles, a glimpse over a shoulder at a neighbour’s television set of people calling themselves beatniks. These led me to the bar, down the steps of a New York brownstone, a brownstone such as the one Paule Marshall described in Brown Girl, Brownstones, describing a girl such as me living in New York City. Down the steps of this brownstone with a blue light small in its window on any evening there could be music — a solo saxophonist or a guitarist. I also played the guitar from time to time in this bar. Sometimes a singer with a plaintive voice would sing. On any evening there could be extemporizing on the nature of life and the world; on any evening, pulling a menthol through my lungs, I could obtain cool — a oneness with the hard city and the uninvolved universe.

  2

  When you embark on a journey, you have already arrived. The world you are going to is already in your head. You have already walked in it, eaten in it; you have already made friends; a lover is already waiting.

  When I arrived at the apartment on Keele Street, Toronto, I was in America. Somewhere downtown was the hip fast world of jazz and poetry, esoteric arguments and utopian ideas. I had sat for six hours on the airplane, excited, air sick and afraid. Up the Atlantic, perhaps over the Baha
mas, my resolve had dwindled, my plans had been thrown into crisis. America had seemed too big an idea for me. I felt small; who was I to plan such a journey? I felt presumptuous, forward, putting myself on this plane and believing that I could arrive anywhere that would require my presence. I was not used to the buffeting of air against steel, the slightest movement made me queasy. And just as a weak person would betray a cause, I felt like turning back. Of course, thankfully I had no control of the plane so I sat it out, not because I had not weakened but because I had no choice. What in fact was I to return to? A dreadful house, a dubious future, an alienated present. I had made no friendships that I could sustain, no friendships that take one through life — friendships for me were a burden. I had been distracted the moment I heard the faraway BBC voice beckoning me; I had become dissociated the moment I had read Jane Eyre, the moment I had played Portia in the Merchant of Venice, the moment I had pranced about my high school stage as King Herod. The very moment I had walked onto the stage of the Naparima Bowl and recited, “No one was in the field but Polly Flint and me” from a poem I do not recall. I had been snatched away by James Baldwin, first to Harlem and then to Paris. So here I was on a plane, and my body felt weak and incapable. My plan to get to America now seemed shaky, as tendrilled as the sky outside, which I now could not look at. I regretted the window seat. It startled me that a little physical discomfort, a small inconvenience surely, would make me want to turn back. How was I going to handle the large inconveniences, the demonstrations, the sit-ins, the jailings I had planned to be part of when I arrived? But even in this depth, back was nowhere. Forward, if I did not die of fear, was America.