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

by Dionne Brand (Author), Saidiya Hartman (Afterword by)

Now in its first American edition, Dionne Brand's groundbreaking A Map to the Door of No Return has emerged as a modern classic, a highly influential exploration of "being" in the Black Diaspora.

Since its first publication in 2001, Dionne Brand's groundbreaking exploration of being in the Black Diaspora, A Map to the Door of No Return, has emerged as a modern classic. The door, in Brand's iconic schema, represents the point of rupture where the ancestors of the Black Diaspora departed one world for another: the place where all names were forgotten, and all beginnings recast. "This door," writes Brand, "is not mere physicality. It is a spiritual location . . . Since leaving was never voluntary, return was, and still may be, an intention, however deeply buried. There is as it says no way in; no return."

Through shards of history, memoir, lyrical investigation, and the unwritten experience of so many descendants of those who passed through the door, Brand constructs a map of this indelible region, culminating in an enduring expression, both definitive and seeking, of what it is to live, think, and create in the wake of colonization.

With a new preface by the author, and an afterword by Saidiya Hartman.

Author Biography

Dionne Brand is the author of numerous volumes of fiction, poetry, and nonfiction. Her latest poetry collection, Nomenclature: New and Collected Poems, won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Poetry. Her other poetry collections have won the Griffin Poetry Prize, the Governor General's Literary Award, and the Trillium Book Award. Her works of nonfiction include Bread Out of Stone and A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging. From 2009 to 2012 Brand served as Toronto's Poet Laureate. In 2021 Brand was awarded a Windham-Campbell Prize in Fiction. She lives in Toronto.