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pearamour's review
challenging
dark
emotional
informative
reflective
sad
medium-paced
4.75
This is not a happy book - at times it is so devestating its hard to keep going but Dionne’s writing is so stunning. It feels uncomfortable sometimes to think of how beautiful the writing is when what she is saying is so deeply sad. Highly recommend to anyone reconsidering diaspora, rejecting the loss of our ancestry, and doing reconnecting/healing work
wanderingwavelength's review against another edition
emotional
informative
reflective
sad
slow-paced
4.5
maeveaickin's review
challenging
emotional
reflective
fast-paced
"He was someone in his own gesture, the thing that writers envy. It is clever and cold, edgy, and it belonged to him. To desire then, to read and translate, may also be to envy, to want to become. What is it that I wanted to pour myself into—his grief, his cold sweat, his life uncertain of its next step? And I wanted to do it only for the moment it took to put it on a page, to feel its texture, and then to run back quickly to my uncomplicated hotel room and my as-yet-uncomplicated page. To desire may also be to complicate."
jimmylorunning's review
5.0
"One is mislead when one looks at the sails and majesty of tall ships instead of their cargo."Essays, ruminations, and meditations on finding something you know you can never find, because you never lost it, because you never had it, because it was taken from you before you were born. Personal, philosophical, poetic, political. This book has some of the most beautiful and deep prose I've read this year, and probably ever, and I love love loved every word of it. I've been wanting to write a review of it for months now, unable to find the sufficient words. I love it in a strange way that thrills and ails me, in a way that only great literature does: it both overjoys me to read and discover something so true and beautiful, and profoundly saddens me by revealing that truth.
The map to the door of no return is:
"a place, real, imaginary and imagined. As islands and dark continents are. It is a place which exists or existed. The door out of which Africans were captured, loaded onto ships heading for the New World. It was the door of a million exits multiplied. It is a door many of us wish never existed. It is a door which makes the word door impossible and dangerous, cunning and disagreeable.”I found myself slowing down, savoring every word, sometimes reading paragraphs out loud, sometimes re-reading paragraphs many times. It's a prose that I read breathlessly in excitement, then in despair, then again to take long breaks staring out the window in between paragraphs thinking about what I just read.
Some quotes, because I have no words:
“People here believe in uncontrollable passion, in mad rages, and in the brusque inevitability of death. Or damage. As if a face would not be a face without a scar, a finger not a finger without being broken, or a foot not a foot without a limp. Or a life not a life without tragedy. These things I knew before I knew they had something to do with the Door of No Return and the sea. I knew that everyone here was unhappy and haunted in some way. Life spoke in the blunt language of brutality, even beauty was brutal. I did not know what we were haunted by at the time. Or why it would be imperfect to have a smooth face, or why a moment of hatred would take hold so easily as if the sun had simply come out. But I had a visceral understanding of a wound much deeper than the physical, a wound which somehow erupted in profound self-disappointment, self-hatred, and disaffection.”
“The Door of No Return — real and metaphoric as some places are, mythic to those of us scattered in the Americas today. To have one’s belonging lodged in a metaphor is voluptuous intrigue; to inhabit a trope; to be a kind of fiction. To live in the Black Diaspora is I think to live as a fiction — a creation of empires, and also self-creation. It is to be a being living inside and outside of herself. It is to apprehend the sign one makes yet to be unable to escape it except in radiant moments of ordinariness made like art. To be a fiction in search of its most resonant metaphor then is even more intriguing. So I am scouring maps of all kinds, the way that some fictions do, discursively, elliptically, trying to locate their own transferred selves.”
“Black experience in any modern city or town in the Americas is a haunting. One enters a room and history follows; one enters a room and history precedes. History is already seated in the chair in the empty room when one arrives. Where one stands in a society seems always related to this historical experience. Where one can be observed is relative to that history. All human effort seems to emanate from this door. How do I know this? Only by self-observation, only by looking. Only by feeling. Only by being a part, sitting in the room with history.”
“One does not return to the Diaspora with good news from the door except the news that it exists and that its existence is the truth. Its perpetual “no” denies them relief, denies an ending or reconciliation. Some have recorded a sense of familiarity beyond the door; some have spoken of a welcome, or of no welcome. But their grief, our grief, remains unassuageable at a profound level. No seeing can truly verify the door, no real place can actualize the lost place. Not in any personal sense.”
“This dreary door which I’ve been thinking about, though its effects are unremitting, does not claim the human being unremittingly. All that emanates from it is not dread but also creativity.”
“'Pray for a life without plot, a day without narrative.' I happened on this line by Derek Walcott in his book The Bounty. I cannot know precisely what he means but I recognized something in it. Or perhaps something in it called me. It described perfectly my desire for relief from the persistent trope of colonialism. To be without this story of captivity, to dis-remember it, or to have this story forget me, would be heavenly. But of course in that line too is the indifference, the supplication of prayer. Yet I want to think that perhaps there is also regeneration in its meaning.”
“This self which is unobservable is a mystery. It is imprisoned in the observed. It is constantly struggling to wrest itself from the warp of its public ownerships. Its own language is plain yet secret. Rather, obscured.”
“Only the brazen can say, “I was not here, I did not do this and feel that.” One hears that all the time in Canada; about what people feel they are and are not responsible for. People use these arguments as reasons for not doing what is right or just. It never occurs to them that they live on the cumulative hurt of others. They want to start the clock of social justice only when they arrived. But one is born into history, one isn’t born into a void. And so Leslie stands at train stations in Germany cringing at the trains’ punctuality.”
“Eduardo Galeano falls open at this time: “I’m nostalgic for a country which doesn’t yet exist on a map.” Dear Eduardo, I am not nostalgic. Belonging does not interest me. I had once thought that it did. Until I examined the underpinnings. One is mislead when one looks at the sails and majesty of tall ships instead of their cargo.”
On 'Political' writing: “There is a city here where I walk to see how others live. I could, I suppose, see about myself only. I could be unaffected. I could come to the easy belief that, really, what is there to speak against? I could develop that voice so full of cold address to beauty. I could with some self-defacement go about the business of making my living. I could say in that way that many do: oh, it’s not so bad, your writing need not show your skin, it need not speak of trouble, history is a burden after all. But Neruda summons me, is waiting for me at the end of every sentence. I cannot ignore my hands “stained with garbage and sadness.”
“These are people on the edges of the city, some would say, not emblematic. I know they might be the edges and easily ignored, but they curl into the middle. The middle of the city, where what looks like an ordinary life is composed of what is beaten into or calculated and chalked up to the world. What is accepted with a shrug but erodes the soul, burns it like so much acid. We’ll go around again, they say, we admit, we confess to not being fit for your world. The exhaustion of it.”
On Seeing: “I have crumpled Neruda in my hand to visit this room because I think it is difficult to see here in this city; no one wants to see, or seeing is a charity they submit to. Everything far away is visible; everything close is viewed with distrust or disbelief, is viewed as imaginary.”
Parking lot joke: “He takes the money. I ask him, “What’s happening?” smiling, needing to leave quickly anyway, my question only to preserve the thin camaraderie of the Diaspora; really, only to speed him. He says calmly, “Look,” gesturing with his languid hand, “Look, I come from one of the oldest cities in the world. The oldest civilization. They build a parking lot and they think that it is a civilization.” Stunned, I burst out laughing. And he joins me. We laugh and laugh and I reply, “True, true.” “The oldest civilization,” he says again. “True,” I repeat. I don’t care if I am late now. Neruda’s letter is in my hand, and this man’s words are in my head.”
Same here: “Sometimes I look at children deep in discussion and I cannot remember what we spoke of as children. What talk did we fill all that time with? We rushed outside of houses, of classrooms, to be with each other and we chattered away at our own lives. So many hours we filled, but I cannot now remember how.”
On Desire: “Desire, too, is the discovery of beauty as miraculous. Desire in the face of ruin. How in these lines there is such wreckage and that too is beauty, how in those lines there is such clear-eyed dread, such deeply mocking knowledge, and that too is desire. ”
“He was someone in his own gesture, the thing that writers envy.”
"To desire may also be to complicate."
More on desire: “The word seems to me to fall apart under the pull and drag of its commodified shapes, under the weight of our artifice and our conceit. It is sometimes impossible to tell what is real from what is manufactured. We live in a world filled with commodified images of desire. Desire clings to widgets, chairs, fridges, cars, perfumes, shoes, jackets, golf clubs, basketballs, telephones, water, soap powder, houses, neighbourhoods. Even god. It clings to an endless list of objects. It clings to the face of television sets and movie screens. It is glaciered in assigned objects, it is petrified in repetitive clichéd gestures.”
“His forgetting was understandable; after all, when he was born the Door of No Return was hardly closed, forgetting was urgent.”
nipqueen's review against another edition
challenging
emotional
hopeful
inspiring
reflective
sad
slow-paced
5.0
kalinczi's review against another edition
challenging
informative
reflective
sad
slow-paced
4.5
Content Warnings
Moderate: Slavery and Racism