Abstract
This thesis explores contemporary writer Dionne Brand’s profound meditation on and concern with the representation of Black people in the diaspora as presented in her recent work of creative nonfiction A Map to the Door of No Return (2001). Brand has received the Governor General’s Award for her poetry and the Trillium Award in 1997 for Land to Light On; she has also distinguished herself with her collections of essays: Bread out of Stone (1994), No Burden to Carry (1991), and Rivers Have Sources, Trees Have Roots (1986); her novels: Sans Souci and Other Stories (1989), In Another Place, Not Here (1996), At the Full and Change of the Moon (1999), and What We All Long For (2005); and her films: Long Time Comin' (1993), Older, Stronger, Wiser (1989), and Sisters in the Struggle (1991). Having realized that Black people—in particular Black women—have long been marginalized and forgotten in the Canadian history and literary representations, Brand is determined to speak for them through her literary and cultural productions. Her oeuvre rewrites Canadian historiography for those disarticulated Black people. Most of her writings, which are closely connected to those oppressed margins, deal with a variety of issues ranging from racism and sexism to capitalism. Among her writings, A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging, written in the form of a note-narrative, is an important text that distinguishes itself not only from other forms of black literature but also from Brand’s previous writings. It portrays the experiences of Black diaspora and expresses a variety of feelings and emotions, including perception, desire, and anxiety. In this important work, Brand examines closely the very situation of the disarticulated diasporic Black people, who are still confronted with conflicts of racism and inequality in their lives. Attracted by her lyrical mapping of and complex (be)longing to/for home, I propose that Brand, from the perspective of Black diaspora, not only attempts to represent Black history and cultural genealogy but also problematizes the current conflicting relationship within the Black diaspora, which is located at multiple disjunctures of history, identity and culture. This thesis will investigate how Brand’s text represents the question of diaspora identification in a culturally hybridized world. How does the “map” it proposes connect—or attempt to connect—black people in the diaspora? This thesis is divided into five chapters. Chapter One is an introduction to the project as a whole. It focuses on the discussion of the theoretical framework of diaspora and traces African Canadian history and literature in order to explore how the blacks are forgotten within a matrix of white-centered education and history. In addition, it highlights the position of Brand in Black Canadian Literature and places her texts in a proper context with special attention to A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging, a work which makes a significant contribution to diaspora discourse and diasporic historiography. Chapter Two is concerned with how Brand explores the problem of diaspora identification in her work. Through her journeys real and imagined, Brand oscillates between the past and the present and simultaneously incorporates her memories and struggles. Brand’s migrancy contributes to Canadian historiography and allows us to view the dynamics of dislocation: how do the blacks in diaspora relocate themselves in a heterogeneous situation? As Brand writes, “We’re [Blacks in the diaspora are] in the middle of becoming,” both “inside” and simultaneously “outside” Canadian histories and culture. Chapter Three analyzes the genre of A Map to the Door of No Return. I will use Homi Bhabha’s conception of “in-between spaces” to analyze the genre of A Map. In his “Diaspora Culture and Dialogic Imagination,” Kobena Mercer asks the following thought-provoking question: “How can the ‘colonized’ express an authentic self in an alien language imposed by the imperial power of the ‘colonizer’?” This chapter will provide answers to the following questions raised by Mercer: in what ways does the text foreground the very position/existence of both the text itself and the black people in diaspora? How does the language used by Brand represent alternative modes of black aesthetics to contest a single authoritative language? What kind of distinctive position and experiences do African Canadians occupy? What makes them belong neither to merely African nor Canadian culture but to more complex sites of becoming? Chapter Four draws on Brand’s techniques of writing home. Brand incorporates her loss and displacement into her works and at the same time reflects on her pressing need to go “home.” This text in question is a book of mapping that re-draws the space through water/ocean to locate blacks in the diaspora. For those black people in diaspora, the water/ocean paradoxically recalls the trauma of the Middle Passage and connects the way to home and hope. To elaborate on the idea of mapping, this chapter draws mainly on Paul Gilroy’s discussion of the “Black Atlantic” and Brand’s (im)possible homecoming by her cartographic project. Her roots/routes of homecoming will be examined in the light of James Clifford’s and Stuart Hall’s theoretic notions of diaspora. The concluding chapter summarizes the arguments of the thesis and Brand’s contribution to our understanding of the Black diaspora.