Dionne Brand

Dionne Brand (born 7 January 1953) is a Canadian poet, novelist, essayist and documentarian.

She graduated from Naparima Girls' High School in San Fernando, Trinidad, in 1970, and emigrated to Canada.

She attended the University of Toronto and earned a BA degree (English and Philosophy) in 1975 and later attained an MA in Philosophy of Education from the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE) in 1989.

Her first book, Fore Day Morning: Poems, came out in 1978, since then Brand has published numerous works of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, as well as editing anthologies and working on documentary films with the National Film Board of Canada.

She has held a number of academic positions, including:

She was Toronto's third Poet Laureate from September 2009 to November 2012 and first Black Poet Laureate.

She was admitted to the Order of Canada in 2017 and 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.

Brand currently resides in Toronto.

Dionne Brand was born in Guayaguayare, Trinidad and Tobago.

In 2017 she was appointed as poetry editor of McClelland & Stewart, an imprint of Penguin Random House Canada.

Brand is also a co-editor of Toronto-based literary journal Brick.

Brand explores themes of gender, race, sexuality and feminism, white male domination, injustices and "the moral hypocrisies of Canada" Despite being often characterized as a Caribbean writer, Brand identifies as a "black Canadian".

She has contributed to many anthologies opposing the violent killings of Black men and women, the massacre of 14 women in Montreal, and racism and inequality as experienced by Aboriginal women of Canada, particularly Helen Betty Osborne's death in the Pas.

Brand explores intergenerational trauma and post memory in her piece A Map to A Door of No Return.

Using a variety of different elements, she explores her own experiences through an autobiographical perspective as well as diving into explain a concept she calls "The Door of No Return".

The Door is the space in which the history of black people is lost, specifically when slaves from Africa were transported through the Atlantic slave trade.

Brand defines the Door of No Return as "that place where our ancestors departed one world for another; the Old World for the New."

It is a place that is as metaphorical as it is psychological, as imaginary as it is real.

It is not a physical door, in the sense that it be found at a single location, but rather a collection of locations.

At the same time, however, the Door can bring profound grief and pain to many in the Diaspora when they visit it—for example, at the slave caves in Ghana or Gorée Island—or encounter it, as Brand does when she flies over it and feels overwhelmed, tense, consumed with thoughts and feelings and images.

The Door is a site of traceable beginnings that are left at the doorsteps, eventually forgotten and lost in historical and familial memory, as demonstrated when Brand's grandfather can no longer remember the name of the ancestral people they belong to.

When passing through The Door, people lost their history, their humanity, and their ancestry.

This trauma is still felt by black people today, which is the perspective from which Brand explores the concept.

She gives examples of this through sports.

she writes: "I hear my neighbour downstairs enter Shaquille O'Neal's body every night of the NBA Championships this year" Brand also describes how her interactions with her grandfather eventually became "mutually disappointing" and led to estrangement, as he could not remember the name of their tribe, the people they came from, and could not, thus, remember their family history.

Essentially, Brand's short anecdote is about the insufficiency of memory and how incredibly limiting that is.

The "fissure" that developed between her grandfather and herself parallels the "fissure between the past and the present", that gap in memory, as represented by the Door of No Return.

There is a sort of historical, intergenerational trauma that is associated with this loss of memory, as those in the Diaspora can feel profound grief and pain from their interactions with the Door of No Return ("one does not return to the Diaspora with good news from the door" ).

Brand begins A Map to the Door of No Return by recounting her long-standing struggle with her grandfather to remember where their ancestors were from.

She marks this as being the first time she felt a burning desire to know her ancestry, stating that "a small space opened in [her]" (Brand 4) and that not knowing was "profoundly disturbing" (Brand 5).

She describes this moment of recognition as reaching the door of no return; a place where our ancestors departed one world for another (Brand 5).

In this moment, she is confronted with the reality that her life will consist of a never ending battle to complete her identity.

Brand is intentional to note that her desire only came into full effect when she was denied knowledge of her ancestry.

Contrary to Frantz Fanon's theory that the pivotal moment in a Black Child's life is the moment when they come in contact with the white world and are confronted with the full weight of their blackness, Brand's awakening was not dependent on the white world.

The onset of her inner struggle to find belonging and self-assuredness occurred in an entirely black space.

This feeling of being incomplete is common among Black people throughout the diaspora and, as Brand demonstrates, and is one of the driving forces in her desire to know her ancestry.

As with her struggle to remember her ancestors, Brand suggests that black individuals experience the sort of "double consciousness" that W. E. B. Du Bois discusses in his work ''The Souls of Black Folk', the idea of having to understand two different approaches as they go through life.

Another theme explored in A Map to the Door of No Return is the theory and praxis of geography.

In the text, Brand references several maps, geographers, and ideas related to geography and navigation (e.g. the Babylonian map, David Turnbull and "way-finding", Charles Bricker, the North Star and the Big Dipper, etc.) Juxtaposing these references to her analyses and reflections, she begins to deconstruct and challenge the systems of logic that constitute geography and borders, the way geography has been constructed and hailed as truth, and the emphasis we place on origins when we should not, as origins are not only arbitrary, but they also reproduce the violence of the nation-state.

As seen in her explanation, analysis, and subsequent application of Charles Bricker's notes on Ludolf and how asinine he (Ludolf) was, it's apparent that geography and the knowledge that is produced from this discipline is flawed.