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I
pestered him for days. He told me to stop bothering him and that
he would remember. Or stop bothering or else he would not remember.
I hovered about him in any room in which he rested. I followed
him around asking him if he wanted me to do this or that for him,
clean his glasses, polish his shoes, bring his tea. I studied
him intently when he came home. I searched the grey bristles of
his moustache for any flicker which might suggest he was about
to speak. He raised his Sunday Guardian newspaper to block my
view. He shooed me away, telling me to find some book to read
or work to do. At times it seemed as if Papa was on the brink
of remembering. I imagined pulling the word off his tongue if
only I knew the first syllable.
I
scoured the San Fernando library and found no other lists of names
at the time. Having no way of finding other names, I could only
repeat the ones I knew, asking him if he was sure it wasn’t
Yoruba, how about Ashanti? I couldn’t help myself. I wanted
to be either one. I had heard that they were noble people. But
I could also be Ibo; I had heard that they were gentle. And I
had followed the war in Biafra. I was on their side.
Papa
never remembered. Each week he came I asked him had he remembered.
Each week he told me no. Then I stopped asking. He was disappointed.
I was disappointed. We lived after that in this mutual disappointment.
It was a rift between us. It gathered into a kind of estrangement.
After that he grew old. I grew young. A small space opened in
me.
I
carried this space with me. Over time it has changed shape and
light as the question it evoked has changed in appearance and
angle. The name of the people we came from has ceased to matter.
A name would have comforted a thirteen-year-old. The question
however was more complicated, more nuanced. That moment between
my grandfather and I several decades ago revealed a tear in the
world. A steady answer would have mended this fault line quickly.
I would have proceeded happily with a simple name. I may have
played with it for a few days and then stored it away. Forgotten.
But the rupture this exchange with my grandfather revealed was
greater than the need for familial bonds. It was a rupture in
history, a rupture in the quality of being. It was also a physical
rupture, a rupture of geography.
My
grandfather and I recognized this, which is why we were mutually
disappointed. And which is why he could not lie to me. It would
have been very easy to confirm any of the names I’d proposed
to him. But he could not do this because he too faced this moment
of rupture. We were not from the place where we lived and we could
not remember where we were from or who we were. My grandfather
could not summon up a vision of landscape or a people which would
add up to a name. And it was profoundly disturbing.
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. In some desolate sense it was the creation place of Blacks
in the New World Diaspora at the same time that it signified the
end of traceable beginnings. Beginnings that can be noted through
a name or a set of family stories that extend farther into the
past than five hundred or so years, or the kinds of beginnings
that can be expressed in a name which in turn marked out territory
or occupation. I am interested in exploring this creation place
– the Door of No Return, a place emptied of beginnings –
as a site of belonging or unbelonging.
Maps
The rufous hummingbird travels five thousand miles from summer
home to winter home and back. This hummingbird can fit into the
palm of a hand. Its body defies the known physics of energy and
flight. It knew its way before all known map-makers. It is a bird
whose origins and paths are the blood of its small body. It is
a bird whose desire to find its way depends on drops of nectar
from flowers.
Water
Water is the first thing in my imagination. Over the reaches of
the eyes at Guaya when I was a little girl, I knew that there
was still more water. All beginning in water, all ending in water.
Turquoise, aquamarine, deep green, deep blue, ink blue, navy,
blue-black cerulean water.
To
the south of this island on a clear day you could see the mainland
of South America. Women and men with a tinge of red in the black
of their faces and a burnt copper to their hair would arrive from
the mainland to this island fleeing husbands or the law, or fleeing
life. To the north was the hinterland of Trinidad, leading to
the city which someone with great ambition in another century
called Port-of-Spain. To the west was the bird’s beak of
Venezuela and to the east, the immense Atlantic gaping to Africa.
Excerpted from A Map to the Door of No Return by Dionne
Brand Copyright 2001 by Dionne Brand. Excerpted by permission
of Doubleday Canada, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights
reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted
without permission in writing from the publisher.
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