No Direction Home

[bibliogramma]

I've recently finished reading Dionne Brand's A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging.

Her publisher describes this book thusly:

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.

It is a profound meditation on the "sense of place" of a people who had all common ways of establishing that sense obliterated in slaving posts (like the infamous The Door of No Return on Senegal's Gorée Island) and the Middle Passage.

Most other diasporic groups know where to find their ancestral home, have some idea of how to go home again, even if the road is barred by political changes, migrations of other groups onto ancestral soil, despotic regimes, poverty, or a host of other human causes. As a member of the Hebridean diaspora, I know the lands of my ancestors have passed into other hands since they were forced out of their homes and into overcrowded boats bound for the Colonies. But I know my name and my clan. I know which island they were driven from. I could go back.

Descendants of Africans sold into slavery cannot.

I knew this intellectually before I read this book, but Brand allowed me to glimpse, as through a glass, darkly, the feeling of having been torn away from the heartroot with no chance of reconnection, and left me grateful for the lessoning of pain.