by Dionne Brand
Marooned on salted highways, in high grass, on lumpy beds, in squares with lights, in knowledge plantations and cunning bridges grasping two cities at the same time. Marooned in the mouth where things escape before they are said, are useless before they are given or echo. Marooned in realms of drift, massacres of doubt, implications. Marooned where the body burns with longing for everything and nothing, where it circles unable to escape a single century; tenements and restagings of alien, new landings. Marooned in outcropping, up-crops of cities already abandoned for outposts in suburbs. Deserted in the fragility of concrete rooms, the chalked clammy dust of dry walls, the rot of sewer pipes and the blanket of city grates.
Marooned in music, dark nightclubs of weeping, in never-sufficient verses, uncommunicated sentences, strict tears, in copper throats. Where days are prisons this spirit is a tenant. She moves along incognito on foot, retreating into unknowing, retreating into always orphanages, dew light, paradise, eclipses, bruised skies, atomic stars, an undeviating ever.
So if now and then they slump on beds in exhaustion it is hallowed pain. If they sink in the ear it is subversions that change their minds even before they are deployed, unexpected architectures of ambivalent longing, cargoes of wilderness. It is their solitudes’ wet desolations. If they finger a string across a piece of wood and a tremolo attacks a room, toccata erupt, coloratura saturate the walls, it is their lost and found dereliction. If virtuosity eludes them, relinquishes them, cast away to themselves only, gaping limbs and topographies, it is just as much spiritoso, madrigal, mute chirping, ululating twilight unvisiting.
It is now and she, they whisper in Walkmans, in cities’ streets with two million people gazing at advertisements. It is now and he, they run his fingers over a moustache flicking frost away, breathing mist like a horse. Cities and public squares and public places corral their gifts of imagined suns and imagined families, where they would have been and who they might have been and when. Cities make them pause and wonder at what they might have thought had it been ever, and had it been dew light and had it been some other shore, and had it been time in their own time when now they are out of step with themselves as spirits are. Electric lights and neon and cars’ metal humming convince them of cultivated gateways and generations of water, of necessities they cannot put back together. Their coherence is incoherence, provocations of scars and knives and paradise, of tumbling wooden rivers and liquid hills.
Maps
There is an old man who walks back and forth at Shuter and Parliament. He has all his belongings in a bag on his back and another in his hand. Every time I pass by, year in, year out, he is pacing, pacing back and forth. The story goes that many years ago he used to live with his daughter, who struggled to keep him with her but eventually had to give up. He had Alzheimer’s disease. His daughter finally and reluctantly brought him to the mission to stay, as she could no longer care for him. He, not understanding that he now lives at the mission, paces back and forth with all his belongings in readiness, waiting for his daughter to return and take him home.
Maps
It is not a question of rootlessness but of the miracle of roots, the miracle of a dialogue with eclipsed selves which appearances may deny us or into which they may lead us.
Wilson Harris
1
Vancouver, 2000. Waiting for the bus at Granville and Robson. The bus arrives. A Black man is driving it. This city has few Black people. So few that when they meet on the street they nod to each other in surprise, perhaps delight, certainly some odd recognition. Two stops along a Salish woman gets on. She asks the driver for directions — if she is on the right bus, if she is headed in the right direction, where she is situated, how much does the fare cost …
This road along which the bus travels may have been a path hundreds of years ago. This jutting of land through which this path travels has lost its true name. It is now surrounded by English Bay, False Creek, and Burrard Inlet. And Granville Street, whose sure name has vanished, once was or was not a path through. That woman asking directions might have known these names several hundred years ago. Today when she enters the bus she is lost. She looks into the face of another, a man who surely must be lost, too, but who knows the way newly mapped, superimposed on this piece of land; she asks this man the way and sits down. The man driving the bus is driving across a path which is only the latest redrawing of old paths. He is not from here. Where he is from is indescribable and equally vanished from his memory or the memory of anyone he may remember. He is here most recently perhaps from Regina, Saskatchewan, where his mother arrived with her new husband from Toronto, and before that Chicago and still again Bridgetown. And then again the Door of No Return, El Mina or Gorée Island, somewhere along the west coast of the continent, somewhere safe and deep enough to be a harbour and a door to nothing. This driver knows some paths that are unrecoverable even to himself. He is the driver of lost paths. And here he is telling the Salish woman where to go. The woman from this land walks as one blindfolded, no promontory or dip of water is recognizable. She has not been careless, no. No, she has tried to remember, she has an inkling, but certain disasters have occurred and the street, the path in her mind, is all rubble, so she asks the driver through lost paths to conduct her through her own country. So the driver through lost maps tells the woman of a lost country her way and the price she should pay, which seems little enough — $1.50 — to find your way. The woman with no country pays and sits down. The man with no country drives on.
It is only the Granville bus, surely. But a bus where a ragged mirage of histories comes into a momentary realization.
I am sitting on the bus driving along Granville with a friend. She and I observe this transaction. We just made a similar one ourselves with the bus driver of lost paths. The bus is full, but there are really only four of us on it. The driver through lost paths stops and lets someone on and someone off, people who don’t realize that the bus is empty but for the four of us. The four of us pause at these intrusions, but we go on. We have perfected something — each of us something different. One drives through lost paths, one asks the way redundantly, one floats and looks, one looks and floats — all marvel at their ability to learn and forget the way of lost maps. We all feign ignorance at the rupture in mind and body, in place, in time. We all feel it.
2
I am going to Seattle. I have just crossed the Winnebago Indian Reservation and the White Earth Indian Reservation. It is not my fault that I notice the earth is scarred. Crow Indian Reservation, Little Belt Mountain, Big Baldy Mountain, Custer’s Battlefield Monument, Yakima Indian Reservation. This continent’s ancestry is beneath this aircraft. I will talk in a room in Seattle about another ancestry, of which I have none.
3
It was said in my family that my grandfather was part Carib. The parts of my grandfather which were part Carib were his cheekbones, which were high, not in an African-high way but in a square flat way — a Carib-high way. Then there was the tawny hue sometimes visible under the dark brown of his skin. Then the occasional straightness of regions of hair on his head. The rest of my grandfather, his height, the remaining territories of his hair, the dominant colour of his skin, the majority of him, was African. There were, too, indefinite parts of him which either hegemony could claim. But there was no war, there never had been, both had settled calmly in my grandfather. They shared a common history. The Carib part grateful for its small survival in my grandfather’s face. A survival once recorded in a letter by Pero Vaz de Caminha to Dom Manuel I of Portugal as “bestial people, with little knowledge … they are like birds or mountain animals … brown men all nude with nothing to cover their shameful parts.” The African part of my grandfather carried him as a courtesy and a welcome obligation and perhaps also in gratitude himself for sharing with him the knowledge of the islands. My grandfather was an agriculturist.
My grandfather came from a country which was devastated by a volcano. This was the island where my grandfather collected the Car
ib in him. He left when he was a boy. Perhaps the Carib in him, after 2000 years of knowing islands, felt the tremors of Montserrat and propelled my grandfather to a boat heading south a lifetime earlier. My grandfather came from a people whose name he could not remember. His forgetting was understandable; after all, when he was born the Door of No Return was hardly closed, forgetting was urgent.
4
I’ve seen that castle in photographs, the one at Elmina. I’ve seen it from the angle of the sea, whitewashed and sprawling. There are photographs of what look like narrow low-ceilinged corridors; bats hang in these corridors’ dark reaches. I know that if I go to that place I will be destroyed. Its photographs take my breath away. Places like this are dotted along the west coast of Africa. These places became known as the Gate of No Return, the Door of No Return. Does all terror become literary? These are the places that made everyone who went through forget their names. Here, walls ate the skin, footsteps took the mind. My grandfather’s forgetting was not personal. It had been passed on to him by many, most especially the one in my family who stepped through the Door of No Return. It was a gift. Forgetting. The only gift that one, the one bending reluctantly toward the opening, could give.
5
To travel without a map, to travel without a way. They did, long ago. That misdirection became the way. After the Door of No Return, a map was only a set of impossibilities, a set of changing locations.
6
A map, then, is only a life of conversations about a forgotten list of irretrievable selves.
Acknowledgements
I am deeply grateful to my editor, Maya Mavjee, for her immense patience and her extraordinary skill. I simply cannot thank her sufficiently for her work here.
I owe much of the information on maps, mapmaking and New World exploration to four texts: Landmarks of Mapmaking: An Illustrated Survey of Maps and Mapmakers, chosen and displayed by R. V. Tooley; Maps Are Territories, by David Turnbull; Great Explorers, by William Bosman, et al.; and Circa 1492: Art in the Age of Exploration, by Jay A. Levenson, et al.
Thank you to Nuzhat Abbas, Ted Chamberlin, Dateje Green, Michael Ondaatje and Jean Pearce for the loan of these and other books, which after two years in some cases I have yet to return. Thanks too to Leslie Saunders and Rinaldo Walcott for many glasses of wine and much reading of the manuscript at various stages. Most deep thanks and praise to Kwame Dawes for his reading, criticism and generous comradeship. Thanks also to my research assistants Charmaine Perkins and Dara Romain. And to the Ruth Wynn Woodward Professorship of the Women’s Studies Department of Simon Fraser University. Without this last, this book could not have been completed.
I am particularly indebted to these remarkable writers: Ezio Bassani, Charles Bricker, Aimé Césaire, J.M. Coetzee, Leonardo da Vinci, Pero Vaz de Caminha, Olaudah Equiano, Eduardo Galeano, Andre Gidé, James Jess Hannon, Wilson Harris, Joy Harjo, Cecil Howard, Thomas Jefferys, D.H. Lawrence, Toni Morrison, Chantal Mouffe, V.S. Naipaul, Pablo Neruda, Jacques Prevert, Jean Rhys, Muriel Rukeyser, David Turnbull, Derek Walcott, and Jack E. White.
Selected Reading
Bassani, Ezio. from Circa 1492: Art in the Age of Exploration, by Jay A. Levenson, et al. Yale, 1992.
Bricker, Charles. Landmarks of Mapmaking: An Illustrated Survey of Maps and Mapmakers. Dorset, 1981.
Césaire, Aimé. Cahier D’Un Retour Au Pays Natal. Ohio State University Press, 2000.
Coetzee, J.M. Disgrace. Viking, 1999.
Equiano, Olaudah. The African: The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano. X-Press, 1999.
Galeano Eduardo. Walking Words. Norton, 1995
Gidé, Andre. Voyage au Congo et la Retour du Chad. Knopf, 1929.
Hannon, James Jess. The Black Napoleon: Toussaint L’Ouverture Liberator of Haiti. 1st Books Library, 2000.
Howard, Cecil. West African Explorers. Oxford University Press. 1951.
Lawrence, D.H. Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Grove, 1993.
Morrison, Toni. Paradise. Knopf, 1998.
Morrison, Toni. Beloved. Plume, 1988.
Morrison, Toni. Song of Solomon. Plume, 1987
Naipaul, V. S. The Loss of Eldorado. Knopf, 1970
Naipaul, V.S. The Overcrowded Barracoon and Other Articles. Knopf, 1973
Neruda, Pablo. Letter to Miguel Otero Silva, in Caracas. Curbstone Press, 1982.
Prevert, Jacques. Selections from Paroles. City Lights, 1958.
Rhys, Jean. Wide Sargasso Sea. Norton, 1996.
Time Magazine: October 19, 2000.
Turnbull, David. Maps Are Territories : Science Is an Atlas: A Portfolio of Exhibits. University of Chicago Press, 1994.
Walcott, Derek. The Bounty. Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1997.
White, Jack E. “New York Times,” Time Magazine: June 7, 1999.
A note on the author
Dionne Brand won the Governor General’s Award for Poetry and the Trillium Award in 1997 for Land to Light On. Her novel, In Another Place, Not Here, was shortlisted for the Chapters/Books in Canada First Novel Award and the Trillium Award, and was published in the US and the UK to great acclaim. She lives in Toronto.