A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging – Dionne Brand

A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging

Author: Dionne Brand

Publisher: Vintage Canada

Print Length: 240 pages

Genre: Poetry, Non-Fiction / Autobiography or Memoir, Literary Criticism, Philosophy, Travel Writing

Area: Canada, The Caribbean

People: Afro-Caribbean, Black People

Topic: Belonging, Identity, Borders, Race, Nation, History, Cartography, Philosophy, Poetics, Colonialism & Post-Colonialism, Culture & Society, Diaspora, Diversity, Children & Childhood, Imagination, Language & Literature, Lived Experience, Politics & Power, Geopolitics, Social Justice

A Map to the Door of No Return is a timely book that explores the relevance and nature of identity and belonging in a culturally diverse and rapidly changing world. It is an insightful, sensitive and poetic book of discovery.

Drawing on cartography, travels, narratives of childhood in the Caribbean, journeys across the Canadian landscape, African ancestry, histories, politics, philosophies and literature, Dionne Brand sketches the shifting borders of home and nation, the connection to place in Canada and the world beyond.

The title, A Map to the Door of No Return, refers to both a place in imagination and a point in history—the Middle Passage. The quest for identity and place has profound meaning and resonance in an age of heterogenous identities.

In this exquisitely written and thought-provoking new work, Dionne Brand creates a map of her own art.

  • A Circumstantial Account of a State of Things
  • Maps
  • Water
  • Maps
  • In a blue while
  • Maps
  • Forgetting: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10
  • Maps: I, II
  • Captive and Inhabited: I (1, 2, 3, 4, 5), II (1, 2, 3, 4)
  • “Pray for a life without plot, a day without narrative.”: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9
  • Maps
  • Finding a Compass: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10
  • Maps: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, Compass, June 1999, London, England; May 2000, Sydney, Australia; July 2000, Mannheim, Germany; August 1984, Toronto, Canada; July 2000, at the corner of Primrose and Davenport; Circa 2000, Associated Press; Circa 1492, 14, 15
  • Maps
  • Maps
  • Voyage: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14
  • Maps
  • The Man from the Oldest City in the World: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
  • Ossington to Christie, Toronto
  • Beat: 1, 2, 3, 4
  • Maps
  • Copper
  • More Maps
  • Conjugations in Disgrace and Paradise
  • Maps
  • Up Here
  • Maps
  • Armour
  • Maps
  • Pinery Road and Concession 11
  • More Maps
  • October: 1, 2
  • Maps
  • Soufrière, St. Lucia
  • Maps
  • Town
  • Maps
  • Arriving at Desire
  • Maps
  • Museums
  • Maps
  • Ruttier for the Marooned in the Diaspora
  • Maps
  • Maps: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6

 

Acknowledgements

Selected Reading

A note on the author

Dionne Brand is a renowned poet, novelist, and essayist. Her writing is notable for the beauty of its language, and for its intense engagement with issues of social justice, including particularly issues of gender and race. Her writing has won the Governor General’s Award for Poetry, the Trillium Prize for Literature, the Pat Lowther Award for Poetry, the Harbourfront Writers’ Prize and the Toronto Book Award. She has published eighteen books, contributed to seventeen anthologies, written dozens of essays and articles, and in the 1990’s made four documentary films for the National Film Board. She was a Distinguished Visiting Professor at St. Lawrence University in the U.S. and has taught literature and creative writing at universities in both British Columbia and Ontario. She has also held the Ruth Wynn Woodward Chair in Women’s Studies at Simon Fraser University.

Source: https://www.uoguelph.ca/arts/sets/people/dionne-brand

More from Dionne Brand in this library, click here.