A Map to the Door of No Return

by Dionne Brand

  So when I arrived at the sixteenth-floor apartment in the west end of Toronto, I was relieved. I was in America. America was a world already conceived in my mind, long before I set foot in that apartment, long before I ever saw it. In fact, when I saw it I did not see it; I saw what I had imagined. One knows where one is going before one arrives. The map is in your head. You merely have to begin moving to have it confirmed. My city was a city busy with people, with purposes. It was inhabited by lye-slick-haired dudes, as in Malcolm X’s autobiography; there were dashikied cadres as in don lee’s poem “But he was cool.” Mothers like Paule Marshall’s, little girls like Toni Cade Bambara’s, protesters at snack counters and on buses heading south, militants on courthouse steps with rifles. All the inhabitants of this city in America were African-American. I was prepared to speak on Nina Simone’s “Mississippi God damn” and Trane’s “Afro Blue.” I was longing to sit someplace and listen to James Baldwin warn of the fire the next time. Owusu Saduki was to come from Buffalo to speak in my city. I was already living in my city long before boarding the air-sickening jet to make the journey. The plane landed in Canada, but I was in America. I had come to meet my compatriots at the barricades, to face the dogs and the water hoses of Bull Connors, to defy George Wallace. These moments were my city.

  3

  In a newspaper in another country, any country is a monograph of energetic and elliptical dispatches. This I had taken note of while discoursing my way along latitudes of newsprint, making a compendium of the salient points. In fact, I had memorized the monograph itself — the streets it sketched, the particular contours, the landmarks. So when I embarked, I was already its citizen. I was dressed in a leatherette suit, approximating as well as I could under the circumstances the iconography of a woman in my situation, my hair was bursting from its orthodox perm, my family was already not my family, my road was already laid down. My city was a city in my imagination where someone suddenly and plainly appears as if belonging and not belonging, where someone may disappear also into nothing or everything. When I landed in Toronto I put my luggage down in the apartment on Keele Street and headed for Harlem, the Apollo, 125th Street.

  4

  I stepped into the cool opening of the Door of No Return. My feet landed where my thoughts were. This is the trick of the door — to step through and be where you want to be. Our ancestors were bewildered because they had a sense of origins — some country, some village, some family where they belonged and from which they were rent. We, on the other hand, have no such immediate sense of belonging, only of drift.

  Maps

  Isabella of Castille commissioned a polyptych altarpiece in 1496. Juan de Flandes and Michel Sittow were retained to work on the miniature altarpiece. In one panel called “The Multiplication of the Loaves and Fishes,” Isabella and Ferdinand are inserted into the scene at the front of the crowd near Jesus Christ. Isabella is kneeling; Ferdinand is standing.

  What can be inferred here is that Isabella led a fabulous religious fantasy life. To see herself and Ferdinand at this occasion attests to the fertility of her imagination. But perhaps it was Juan de Flandes’ attempt to ingratiate himself further with Isabella of Castille; perhaps he said to her one day, “Dearest Queen, this scene would be nothing without you. You simply must be in it.” Then again, the idea of multiplying loaves and fishes, this particular miracle, must have appealed to Isabella as she and Ferdinand acquired more and more wealth.

  Copper

  My uncle used to work copper. He was a tall dark man. His face was beautiful and chiselled, as chiselled as the scars that cut into the auburn face of the sheet of copper. His teeth were white and even in his sculpted jaw; he grinned easily. Just as easily he took a smile back, his face turning stern in admonition of some small weakness of nieces and nephews like a stolen mango or a too lazy Sunday when the shoes weren’t whitened. But my uncle used to work copper. With screwdriver, knife, pick, and hammer, he would chisel and pound some image out of the flat surface of a sheet of copper. He worked from no photograph or drawing but from a pattern he must have had inside himself. A mask emerged which at the time, having no other words for it, we called African — serene eyes, broad nose, full lips — not a recognizable face but an image, a presentiment of a face. This face came out of my uncle. My uncle was a teacher. He wore dark trousers and starched white long-sleeved shirts to go to his job as a teacher. He spoke and enforced proper English in our house and in his classrooms like he beat out African masks from copper. My second uncle wore these masks from copper. My second uncle wore these masks on carnival day — sometimes as breastplates or headdresses on whatever ’mas he was playing. My first uncle never played ’mas. He only coaxed the face out of the blank sheet of copper. Over months he would pick and mark, beat and drum out whatever spirit lay there. Eyes, jaws, cheeks, foreheads would emerge.

  Scarifications mirrored in scarifications — the ones my uncle made of the ones on the face of the image. My uncle’s hands were deft, his fingers black on the back of his hands, pink on the flat of his palms. The other uncle would wear this mask on his chest or his forehead surrounded by feathers and beads and dance under the burning sun — singing nonsensical chants that stood for African or Amerindian words.

  My uncle would take months to draw and cut out the masks; he would leave it for days, frustrated that a cheekbone would not level out. My uncle was not a scholar of African art of any kind. He did not know of the personal masks of the Bassa people, he did not know of the men’s society masks of the Manding people or Guinea, nor the dance mask of the Igbo or the Bawa or Bamana people. He had no recall of the Baule, the Oan, the Mossi, the Ogoni, the Sennefo, the Ngbaka, or the Akwaya. My uncle only had the gaping Door of No Return, a memory resembling a memory of a thing that he remembered. And not so much remembered as felt. And not so much felt as a memory which held him.

  He beat these masks out of himself every afternoon after he came home from school. What happened at school we did not know. What happened to make him search the copper face of the metal hoping for and drilling an image of a self he suspected lay in him. And he oriented that self to Africa. What made him appear at seven in the morning, a conservative young man, dutiful to his family, dressed in dark pants and white shirt, a white handkerchief to sop his forehead in the early brilliant sun, peeking evenly out of his back pocket, his shoes black and shiny, the crease in his trousers razor sharp. Then after school his chest bare, his mouth slightly open, his tongue emphasizing his hands beating and burnishing the metal face, brightly, brilliantly copper.

  My second uncle had no such reserve to beat out. He was an electrician; he went to work as he liked, played ’mas, drank, ran women and card games; he was always looking for an angle. He had no discipline, as his parents said, nothing out of which to beat copper into an African face. So he made ’mas all the time. His only discipline were his mother and father but my first uncle’s discipline was larger. He was trying to become someone. Which meant to be a schoolteacher or better. Which meant to lead a respectful life, an exemplary life — a life which negated the effects of the Door of No Return — to be lifted above the stereotype of “uncivilized.” Not an ordinary life, not a life that was simple, but a life always dedicated to self-conscious goodness, self-conscious excellence.

  My first uncle also carved wood. He carved a profile of a man, sometimes a woman, the cheekbone high, the eye serene, the lips full, the jaw strong. He carved this profile in wood, polished it black and smooth. He carved this profile over and over again. When I was small the house seemed full of jet black heads, smooth and shiny, their foreheads serene as if looking down on some land, some jewel, some thing they owned and were happy with. These heads were as serene as my uncle’s coppers were ferocious. In the burning carnival sun, laying on my second uncle’s chest or over his brow, my first uncle’s copper masks shone to blinding. My first uncle did not go to ’mas; he stayed home, sending instead his ferocious copper into the street battling the sun itself. His will an
d what was inside him screamed brilliantly over San Fernando. Dancing along, stopping to inspire awe and fear, my uncle’s copper masks visited these faraway streets as emissaries, spirits from a lost place. In our house my uncle carved his serene profiles, which he never felt complete enough, over and over again.

  How he must have felt. That he could not perfect serenity. He would walk around the house carving and smoothing. He would pick up one wooden face, shine it for an hour or so, finding a spot he loved, then another, smoothing the brow, glossing the cheekbone.

  My uncle moved to Canada later. First to Hamilton, then to Toronto, and then to Sudbury. I do not know where his passions went then. I do not think that his hand carved any more wood or beat out any more metal. Steel and nickel parenthesized him. I do not know what he thought of that town, Hamilton, wreathed in deadly smoke and steel rust; I do not know what he thought of the equally toxic frozen smoke of Sudbury, the slag heaps close to his house, the dominant brown rock that seemed to dull every sound, every echo there. I do not know what became of him, the fierce him he tried to carve — he tried to calm to serenity. I suspect that he was drowned the way one drowns, often willingly, in any metropole. The city drowns out your longings and your fears, replacing them with its own anonymous desire. These three cities in the northern hemisphere took him to the more mundane vulgar acts of acquisition, away from any contemplation of the self into the hurly-burly of a packaged life, property and consumption. And he may have been grateful.

  More Maps

  According to my uncle the world was its books, its words, its languages. His evenings of grammar drills induced illnesses, panic attacks, nausea, and sleepiness. “ ‘It’ could never ‘have,’ ” he would shout to some child saying, “Uncle, it have a man outside asking for you.” “ ‘There is,’ ‘there are’ for the plural, but ‘it’ could never ‘have.’ ” No simple request or statement went without such correction, until this child forgot or regretted what he or she wanted. Soon there was pure silence around my uncle.

  What is the Spanish word for butter? Mantequilla. What is the Spanish word for bread? Pan. What is the Spanish word for butterfly? Mariposa. Girl? Niña. Water? Agua. Beach? Playa. And for dreams? Suenos. Hope? Esperanza. Help? Socorro. Sometimes this child would discover quite by mistake his or her own hopeless desire for esperanza, socorro, suenos against this endless schooling.

  Out of the blue my uncle’s face turning from laughter to seriousness would say, “Conjugate the verb tener.” Just as he was teaching you the waltz by having you step on his feet as he danced to Pete d’Ulyut’s Band playing “Stardust,” he would surprise you with the difficult declension of the verb llevar.

  Conjugations in Disgrace and Paradise

  Well, I suppose then, my uncle taught me to hang on to the world from the arms of books, or words at any rate. To be alert to translation even as your feet dance. Even if “Stardust” is playing, or “Via Con Dios, My Darling,” one must be alert to questions of meaning that may be lying in ambush or bearing down on you, or lurking in the soft recesses of the livingroom like your beautiful schoolteacher uncle. To read is to traverse the limnal space between laughter and spelling, between syntax and dancing.

  So I am on a plane going to Australia, reading J.M. Coetzee’s novel Disgrace. It is his only novel where one can clearly read race as its subject. His earlier books seemed to refuse race. Who could blame him? Since South Africa reduced human beings to its arbitrary biological tyranny, for a writer working under the totalitarian state of apartheid, allegory was an obvious literary strategy. A way of surviving apartheid’s ruthless violence. The victory over apartheid seemed to free Coetzee to realism, to more plain terms about race. That moment must have been odd — stunning, euphoric. When the world changes, even when it is the change you have longed for and dreamed, it must be destabilizing. It turned Coetzee’s style from allegory to a kind of journalism.

  As I read Disgrace, these thoughts come to me. Writers do not lead, they follow, however prescient their works might seem at times. It is only that they, unlike most people, cannot shut up. They gush out what they see — whatever thought they have, and everyone around them is startled because they’ve said what everyone’s been thinking. Sometimes they see too early, sometimes too late. Sometime they gush their fears, and then sometimes they blurt out their affinities.

  To enter Coetzee’s earlier work was to enter that odd trope, the “universal,” the “human.” At least some of us could. Others of us who saw a less noble and more vulgar world may have been untouched. Or may have, being more cynical, read that trope as “white”; or may have read the helplessness of his characters as luxury and, more telling, may have read his characters’ inaction as hardly remarkable. I for one always felt a slight discomfort in his texts even though I longed for inclusion in his “human.” As I had yearned decades before to dance with my uncle but had dreaded his jolting conjugations. For me, Coetzee’s narratives, for all their universality, could not contest or enlighten the other narratives emanating from South Africa. I mean the crowds of demonstrators being shot by deadly bullets or whipped with sjamboks, the desert-like hunger of townships, the imprisonments, the detainees being thrown from multi-storied police buildings, the physical tortures, the political prisoners whose bodies were braced in the eloquent language of resistance. Perhaps the “universal” could not compete or respond to this din of narrations. Himself freed of the trope in post-apartheid South Africa, the results in Coetzee’s novel Disgrace are startling and revealing.

  On the plane to Australia, traversing Coetzee’s South Africa, Toni Morrison’s Paradise limns on the horizon. These two, Disgrace and Paradise, seem to be in conversation with each other. At least now in my mind. Writing is, after all, an open conversation. Works find each other. They live in the same world. The narrative of race is embedded in all narratives. My uncle loved James Baldwin at the same time he loved Lawrence Durrell. At once he cut his hair and dressed like Sam Cooke, then he enforced the proper use of English and berated the use of the demotic. So you see, reading is full of complications.

  To enter Toni Morrison’s fiction is to enter her rewriting of the myth of America, and so it is also a conversation about grace, redemption, and that quintessential American ideal, happiness. Against the official American narrative, Morrison narrates the African-American presence that underpins the official story but is rarely, truly braided among the narratives of the “pilgrims,” the “founding fathers,” the “west,” and so on.

  In a society so invested in its “inherent goodness” and moral superiority, Morrison’s voice is always trenchant. Her project to write myth is nothing less than trying to take command of that national narrative — to call it to account for the injustice it elides. Her language is biblical the way the Bible is more than story but narrative, more than narrative myth-wide in its reach of event and meaning. Yet within all that grand beauty is a palpable disillusion, an inexorable tragedy. Myth is of course seductive, but it needs material power to enforce it. The dominant myth overwhelms Morrison’s mythmaking, leaving her characters stranded in a kind of inevitable failure. In history. The daily bulletins on Black America seen through mass media encroach on the space of Morrison’s narratives. She cannot write fast enough to counter them. In Paradise, Morrison’s voice is finally sepulchral. As if having offered America Genesis she now curses it with Revelations.

  Any representation of blackness interests me. Coetzee’s English professor Lurie, is on a collision course with blackness however obtuse. When he is charged by a student with sexual harassment, Coetzee slyly brings him before a committee of inquiry. One cannot help but draw the parallel between this committee of inquiry and the Truth and Reconciliation Committee in South Africa. I notice that Coetzee awkwardly collapses the so-called “political correctness” of feminism with that of post-apartheid “black rule.” The committee of inquiry is racially marked by their names revealing a strange assortment of “modern” and ascendant interests — Blacks, Asians,
aspiring women and a token holdover from the past. Significantly the chair of the committee is a Professor of Religious Studies (shades of Desmond Tutu).

  A cunning voice from my childhood living room asks if anyone else notices all this interpolation and what it might mean.

  I recall one character in Paradise saying “Slavery is our past. Nothing can change that, certainly not Africa.” Another answers too feebly perhaps against this weighty legacy, “We live in the world, Pat. The whole world.” Morrison’s America is the painful void of the Diaspora. Paradise is about the nature of blackness. When the novel begins in the 1960s these debates are at a height in Ruby and they have found a focus in a nearby unconventional convent of stray and destitute women. The first chapter starts with the murders by the men of Ruby of women in the convent. It reads provocatively, “They kill the white girl first.”

  As if Paradise and Disgrace were a call and answer chant, blackness and whiteness angle and parry perilously. Everyone else is asleep on the plane to Australia when Lurie is read the charges against him. He replies “I am sure the members of this committee have better things to do with their time than rehash a story over which there will be no dispute. I plead guilty to both charges. Pass sentence, and let us get on with our lives.” He refuses repentance or contrition. It is probably true, I think as I stretch my body across four seats in the middle aisle, that repentance or contrition or a going over of the story or even any attempts at the truth may not be sufficient for the atrocities of apartheid. I have a mind that these may be the preoccupations of victims. The “why” that wracks them even more than the “who.”