Dionne Brand writes that every map a Black person makes begins at the door of no return — the rupture where the connection to origin was severed, where the Atlantic became the site of a dispossession so total that what it organized was not a journey with a destination but a navigation from a breaking that has no other side. The door does not draw you back through it. There is no back. What it produces instead is a particular structure of navigation: the body moving through geographies it did not choose, on land it arrived to under conditions not of its choosing, making maps from a point of irresolvable loss rather than from a legible origin. The water is where this structure is felt most honestly — not because it holds what was lost or promises what was severed, but because it is where the breaking happened and keeps happening, the ongoing condition of dispossession that the body is inside whether or not it has language for it. The St. Lawrence running east toward the Atlantic is not pulling the body toward something waiting on the other side. It is the body registering, near this specific water in this specific diaspora geography, the structure that has been organizing its navigation all along — the triangular piece of ice that pointed east from this river on a blustery February morning, the eastward orientation I keep returning to without deciding to, the body finding the water cities not because they were calling but because it is navigating from a rupture that makes every geography partial, every belonging conditional, every map a document of what cannot be returned to as much as of where you are. The body near Tiohtià:ke’s water, carrying what Kjipuktuk drew out of it, living inside Sharpe’s weather, navigating from Brand’s door — these are not separate conditions pressing on the same body but one condition, the structure of Black life in diaspora, felt here at the water’s edge.
“The ecosystems I was born into, and that form my body, are a boundary, a border between two separate and linked systems. On a macro scale, the boreal and mixed hardwood forests came together to create something new: a zone of overlapping presence that requires care, kindness, sacrifice and reciprocity to continue to bring forth a diversity and abundance of new life.”
— Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Theory of Water: Nishnaabe Maps to the Times Ahead, p. 68
« L'omniprésence de la mort, l'habitude des deuils, la dévalorisation de la vie noire, l'exposition à l'aliénation, à l'expropriation et au génocide lui donnent une signification particulière. Il s'agit moins d'une forme-de-vie que d'une forme-de-mort. Non pas un refus de la mort, une absolue volonté de survie, mais une capacité à habiter la mort. Vivants parmi les morts ; morts parmi les vivants. L'une des raisons de la ténacité des populations noires partout où elles ont eu à subir des violences démesurées tient à leurs propres traditions de pensée. S'ils étaient déshumanisés, abandonnés à un flou entre la mort et la vie, leur dignité résidait dans des imaginaires, des ontologies, des visions de la mort et de la vie qui les rendaient aptes à faire face à ces catastrophes. »
— Norman Ajari, Le manifeste afro-décolonial, p. 57
« Pour qui se donne la peine d'observer l'histoire de la négrophobie à travers le regard des intellectuels et des activistes afrodescendants qui l'ont étudiée et combattue, un tout autre tableau se dessine. La déshumanisation des Noirs cesse d'apparaître comme un phénomène générique et se présente comme une singularité. Les navires négriers et les plantations du Nouveau Monde furent des laboratoires de la discipline et de l'exploitation capitalistes. Ils se sont bâtis pour accompagner un déplacement de populations sans précédent : des lieux comme les Antilles, le sud des actuels États-Unis, le Brésil ont été repeuplés de captifs noirs qui n'étaient pas conduits là pour fonder sociétés et civilisations, mais pour travailler beaucoup, enfanter parfois, crever toujours. La colonisation du continent africain l'a balafré de frontières hasardeuses, a imposé une économie dévouée au monde blanc et une dévalorisation intégrale de la vie noire. La mutilation, la réécriture et la confiscation de l'histoire, des œuvres d'art, des sciences et des savoirs africains demeurent sans précédent. Aujourd'hui, aux États-Unis, en Grande-Bretagne, en France, au Canada, les Noirs sont largement surreprésentés dans les prisons. »
—Norman Ajari, Le manifeste afro-décolonial, pp. 19-20
“Society takes no responsibility for Black people’s poverty and their social exclusion and isolation, even though the history of our continuing mistreatment and subjection at the hands of that very same society is well-known; rather, our poverty and exclusion are offered as evidence of our inherent inferiority.”
“The thing is that I think Blacks in the Diaspora carry the Door of No Return in our senses. It is a passport which, after boarding the plane, we are unable to make disappear by tearing it up and throwing it in the toilet. We arrive with its coat of arms, its love knot, its streamers, its bugle, its emblem attesting to our impossible origins. This passport is from the territory of the Door. The territory is vast, its nature shiftable. We are always in the middle of the journey.” (pp. 48-49)
— Dionne Brand, A Map to the Door of No Return, pp. 48-49
“To live at the Door of No Return is to live self-consciously. To be always aware of your presence as a presence outside of yourself. And to have ‘others’ constantly remark on your presence as outside of itself. If to think is to exist, then we exist doubly. An ordinary conversation is never an ordinary conversation. One cannot say the simplest thing without doubling or being doubled for the image that emerged from the doorway.”
— Dionne Brand, A Map to the Door of No Return, pp. 49-50
