A Map to the Door of No Return Quotes

“Books leave gestures in the body; a certain way of moving, of turning, a certain closing of the eyes, a way of leaving, hesitations. Books leave certain sounds, a certain pacing; mostly they leave the elusive, which is all the story. They leave much more than the words.”
― Dionne Brand, A Map to the Door of No Return

“I am not nostalgic. Belonging does not interest me. I had once thought that it did. Until I examined the underpinnings. One is mislead when one looks at the sails and majesty of tall ships instead of their cargo.”
― Dionne Brand, A Map to the Door of No Return

“The Door of No Return - real and metaphoric as some places are, mythic to those of us who are scattered in the Americas today. To have one’s belonging lodged in a metaphor is voluptuous intrigue; to inhabit a trope; to be a kind of fiction. To live in the Black Diaspora I think is to live in a fiction - a creation of empires, and also self-creation. It is to be being living inside and outside herself. It is to apprehend the the sign one makes yet to be unable to escape it except in radiant moments of ordinariness made like art. To be a fiction in search of its most resonant metaphor then is even more intriguing.”
― Dionne Brand, A Map to the Door of No Return

“Cities collect people, stray and lost and deliberate arrivants.”
― Dionne Brand, A Map to the Door of No Return

“People here believe in uncontrollable passion, in mad rages, and in the brusque inevitability of death.”
― Dionne Brand, A Map to the Door of No Return

“If I see someone I see the ghost of them, the air around them, and where they’ve been. If I see a city I see it’s living ghostliness—the stray looks, the dying hands. I see it’s needs and its discomforts locked in apartments.”
― Dionne Brand, A Map to the Door of No Return

“Fashions are not fashions at all but refashioning; language is not communication but reinvention. They are never in place but on display.”
― Dionne Brand, A Map to the Door of No Return

“The sea sounded like a thousand secrets, all whispered at the same time.”
― Dionne Brand, A Map to the Door of No Return

“I am not nostalgic for a country which doesn’t yet exist on a map.” [...] I am not nostalgic. Belonging does not interest me. I had once thought that it did. Until I examined the underpinnings. One is mislead when on looks at the sails and majesty of tall ships instead of their cargo.”
― Dionne Brand, A Map to the Door of No Return

“I want to say something else about desire. I really do not know what it is. I experience something which, sometimes, if I pull it apart, I cannot make reason of. The word seems to me to fall apart under the pull and drag of its commodified shapes, under the weight of our artifice and our conceit. It is sometimes impossible to tell what is real from what is manufactured. We live in a world filled with commodified images of desire. Desire clings to widgets, chairs, fridges, cars, perfumes, shoes, jackets, golf clubs, basketballs, telephones, water, soap powder, houses, neighbourhoods. Even god. It clings to an endless list of objects. It clings to the face of television sets and movie screens. It is glaciered in assigned objects, it is petrified in repetitive cliched gestures. Their repetition is tedious, the look and sound of them tedious. We become the repetition despite our best efforts. We become numb. And though against the impressive strength of this I can't hope to say all that desire might be, I wanted to talk about it not as it is sold to us but as one collects it, piece by piece, proceeding through a life. I wanted to say that life, if we are lucky, is a collection of aesthetic experiences as it is a collection of pratical experiences, which may be one and the same sometimes, and which if we are lucky we make a sense of. Making sense may be what desire is. Or, putting the senses back together.”
― Dionne Brand, A Map to the Door of No Return

“I run each morning, two, three, sometimes four kilometers. Part of March, all of April, all of May. I can’t run five. I am eating up kilometers on my way to where it is always twilight. I am running out of this world.”
― Dionne Brand, A Map to the Door of No Return

“For some, to find beauty is to search through ruins.”
― Dionne Brand, A Map to the Door of No Return

“Having no name to call on was having no past; having no past pointed to the fissure between the past and the present. That fissure is represented in the Door of No Return: that place where our ancestors departed one world for another; the Old World for the New. The place where all names were forgotten and all beginnings recast.”
― Dionne Brand, A Map to the Door of No Return

“Leaving? To leave? Left? Language can be deceptive. The moment when they ‘left’ the Old World and entered the New. Forced to leave? To ‘leave’ one would have to have a destination in mind. Of course one could rush out of a door with no destination in mind, but ‘to rush’ or ‘to leave’ would suggest some self-possession; rushing would suggest a purpose, a purpose with some urgency, some reason. Their ‘taking’? Taking, taking too might suggest a benevolence so, no, it was not taking. So having not ‘left,’ having no ‘destination,’ having no ‘self-possession,’ no purpose and no urgency, their departure was unexpected; and in the way that some unexpected events can be horrific, their ‘leaving,’ or rather their ‘taking,’ was horrific. What language would describe that lost of bearings or the sudden awful liability of one’s own body? The hitting or the whipping or the driving, which was shocking, the dragging in the bruising it involved, the epidemic sickness with life which would become hereditary? And the antipathy which would shadow all subsequent events”
― Dionne Brand, A Map to the Door of No Return

“Books leave gestures in the body; a certain way of moving, of turning, a certain closing of the eyes, a way of leaving, hesitations. Books leave certain sounds, a certain pacing; mostly they leave the elusive, which is all the story. They leave much more than the words. Words can be thrown together. It is their order and when they catch you - their time.”
― Dionne Brand, A Map to the Door of No Return

“People use these arguments as reasons for not doing what is right or just. It never occurs to them that they live on the cumulative hurt of others. They want to start the clock of social justice only when they arrived. But one is born into history, one isn’t born into a void.”
― Dionne Brand, A Map to the Door of No Return