An instructive prologue to Salvage, Dionne Brand’s first non-fiction book in two decades, is A Map to the Door of No Return, from 2001, for it is here that readers can find key emblems, transactions, and tropes that have dominated the consciousness of this author, an exceptionally gifted voice of the Black diaspora. Oceans, maps, and doors are featured as ways of exploring the relevance and nature of identity and belonging in a culturally diverse and changing world.
The poet Derek Walcott once wrote that “the sea is history,” to which Brand would add that oceans are their own sovereignty. To look into their waters is to look into the world; their immensity is bigger than feelings. They have been used as channels for journeys, just as maps are ways of finding places and destinations. Metaphorically, doors are a means of entering or exiting places we wish to know or pass through. Doors can be spiritual spaces with psychic significance. But, as Brand...
Keith Garebian has published thirty books and five chapbooks, including the poetry collections Three-Way Renegade and, most recently, Stay. He is featured in the third volume of Laurence Hutchman’s In the Writers’ Words.
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