Searching for the Door way : Dionne Brand's Thirsty

It was the rough and early days of oil. Every week a well blew, every month someone was killed. This Thursday was Dovett's father's turn. The well blew sending fire into his plaid shirt that his mother, the serious-eyed girl, had ironed fresh that morning. Dovett's father had one thought, to go home to his mother so that she could douse his whole body in water ... When he arrived home he was singed to nothing and fell on the doorstep calling his mother to put the flames out.

Brand, At the Full, 198

In works such as At the Full and Change of the Moon, Dionne Brand plays with the possibility of the phenomenal return of the repressed, with the repetitions of history that tell us that the past is not quite closed. Dovett's granddaughter Maya, for example, breaks the glass of the Amsterdam display window in which she earns her living; as she flees this frame, she thinks that her life is connected to the past by 'circumstances': 'her father falling into his grave or for that matter his father falling in flames at the doorstep. There was no way to know, really, which thing led to which, if there was a sequence' (224). Both Dovett and Maya experience crises within the limits of doors and windows, which suggests that the violence of their lives is connected, that it is somehow able to return of its own volition.

In her theoretical and sometimes autobiographical meditation on memory, A Map to the Door of No Return, Brand forges links among memory, history, and haunting by returning to the image of the door. The door of no return acts as a metaphor for all of the forts through which African slaves passed as they were taken from the west coast of Africa. Brand conceptualizes this door as a paradox – both a horrific place where origin and history were forgotten and a site where forgetting engenders creative possibilities for diasporic Afro–North Americans. In her recent long poem Thirsty, Brand explores this paradoxical theme of the door of no return by using the doorway as a trope for the door of no return and its legacies. The doorways of Thirsty, like the door of no return, can be both limiting and enabling spaces.

In the first half of this paper, I will argue that the door functions as a trope for fixed forms, such as slavery and capitalism, that limit our ability to understand how past and present experience interact. Like the disabling aspect of the door of no return, the sundering of memory and history, these fixed forms cannot adequately account for the lived present. The ghosts of Thirsty, however, insist that past injustices continue to assert themselves in the present in material ways, particularly in the sites of bodies. Aided by Avery Gordon's theorization of haunting, I will analyse how Brand's use of the trope of haunting might be understood as a 'structure of feeling.' Using Raymond Williams's term, Gordon posits that ghosts can signal that which fixed social forms do not recognize and often misconstrue. A reckoning with ghosts, Gordon argues, can change our way of seeing and apprehending experience. In the latter half of my argument, I will examine how Brand engages with this reckoning through the trope of the opening doorway. The doorway is the enabling aspect of the door of no return – the 'creation place' that is also the 'end of traceable beginnings' (A Map, 5); and it is the site from which Brand conceives of another kind of world that holds the emergent possibility of seeing our ghosts and, ultimately, of social transformation.

In A Map, the door is described as both a physical place – the door through which African slaves passed in their passage to the New World – and a psychic space: 'The door, of course, is not on the continent but in the mind; not a physical place – though it is – but a space in the imagination' (96–97). Brand describes the door of no return as both the 'creation...