"No moon to speak of" Identity and Place in Dionne Brand's In

Another Place, Not Here

Huebener, Paul.
Callaloo, Volume 30, Number 2, Spring 2007, pp. 615-625 (Article)
Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press

For additional information about this article

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No moon to speak of
Identity and Place in Dionne Brands In Another Place, Not Here

by Paul Huebener

Trinidadian by birth, but having spent most of her life in Canada, Dionne Brand is an
uneasy member of the African-Caribbean Diaspora and a writer who grapples with the
problems of identity-making for people who have fractured or confused connections to
multiple places. Much of her work deals with the dependence of identity upon context:
with the ways in which self-knowledge and well-being are inextricably tied to the relationships that people form with their human and nonhuman surroundings, and with the
difficulties that arise when people are cut off from their homelands or come to know a
new place. I would like to investigate Brands approach to these issues in her first novel,
In Another Place, Not Here (1996), by looking at how identity is depicted in the text as a
function of relationships and by considering her characters manipulation of language and
naming as a response to the mutable nature of these relationships and the transformative
potential of their own identities.
In Another Place, Not Here lends itself to readings informed by theoretical approaches,
such as that of Charles Taylor: one of many theorists whose work has problematized the
idea that identity can be understood as a pure, stable, or inwardly-generated quality by
drawing attention to the ways in which identity is always negotiated, performed, or subject
to transformation. Taylor describes what he calls the fundamentally dialogical character
of human life (102)the idea that we are able to understand and define ourselves only
through our interactions with others. My discovering my own identity, he says, doesnt
mean that I work it out in isolation, but that I negotiate it through dialogue, partly overt,
partly internal, with others. [. . .] My own identity crucially depends on my dialogical
relations with others (111). Ecological theorist Neil Evernden draws a similar conclusion in his investigation of human and nonhuman identity, but goes one step further by
suggesting that to understand identity one might say that the relationships are the main
event, and that we deceive ourselves in concentrating on the beings rather than on the
relationship between them (133). Whether or not we are prepared to follow Evernden
in his belief that relationships are more fundamental a category of identity analysis than
individuals, the need to consider context when attempting to understand an individual
is clear. At the same time, Everndens insistence on the importance of relationships for
identity formation extends explicitly (and, for many students of the humanities, perhaps
surprisingly) to relationships with the nonhuman: for Evernden, identity is not just a
dialogue between oneself and other people, but a multiplicitous conversation involving all that is present in the perceptual field, whether human, floral, stone, or otherwise.
The relevance of this approach to identity and relationships becomes clear early on in In
Another Place, Not Here.
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Elizete, a manual laborer in the Caribbean who serves as the narrator for much of the
novel, tells in episodic fragments the story of Adela, a woman who was taken from Africa
against her will and transported to the Caribbean long before Elizete was born. To the
best of Elizetes knowledge, she is a fifth-generation descendant of Adela by adoption,
and while she knows of Adela only through stories that have been passed down within
the family, Elizete feels a close spiritual bond with her and provides insight into the sense
of loss that Adela experienced after being taken from her home. For Adela, we learn, the
anguish of being cut off irremediably from the place in which she had grown up resulted
in feelings of alienation and disconnection, the symptoms of which were intensely and,
surprisingly, physical. After Adela was taken to the Caribbean, Elizete tells us, she
was grieving bad for where she come from. And when she done
calculate the heart of this place, that it could not yield to her grief,
she decide that this place was not nowhere and is so she call it.
Nowhere. She say nothing here have no name. [. . .] Adela call this
place Nowhere and with that none of the things she look at she take
note of or remember or pass on. She insist so much is nowhere she
gone blind with not seeing. Cause sheself blindness, yes. A caul draw
over her eyes. (In Another Place 1819)
While Adela had enjoyed a strong sense of connection to her home in AfricaThe
place she miss must have been full and living and take every corner in she mind, Elizete
says (20)her relationship with the Caribbean is based on estrangement and loss and
serves as the catalyst for an intimate, personal dissolution: because this place has nothing
for her to see, nothing she can recognize, she loses her sense of sight. Elizetes metaphor
of the caul, the membrane that sometimes covers a babys head at birth, suggests that
Adela is unable to be fully born into this new, unyielding place; her eyes remain closed,
her world constricted as a womb. It is unclear to what degree the blindness she experiences is figurativewhether she is blind in a purely metaphorical sense or in a physical,
visual sensebut this ambiguity serves to emphasize the idea that whether or not Adela
is medically blind is beside the point: a person in a place where there is nothing to see is
blind, whether her eyes are functioning or not. Having resigned herself to the belief that
her surroundings contain nothing of value to her, Adela exists in a state of isolation, within
which the sense of sight is of no use.
At the same time, Adelas refusal to acknowledge the presence or reality of her surroundingsa refusal declared emphatically through her insistence on calling the place
Nowhereaccompanies a wasting away beyond the loss of her eyesight: the namelessness and detachment of her surroundings cause Adela in turn to forget she true true
name and she tongue (20). Adela, the unwelcome alias given to her by the captors with
whom she shares no bond, becomes the only name that she is remembered by; her blood
descendants, Elizete, and even Brands readers have no way to refer to this woman other
than by the alien name imposed upon her against her will, her original or true name
having vanished along with her eyesight. As Elizete puts it, Everything pour out of she
eyes [. . .] until it was she true name slipping away. [. . .] All what remain now is how to
calculate breathing. Her heart just shut. It shut for rain, it shut for light, it shut for water
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and it shut for the rest of we what follow. Adela feel something harder than stone and more
evil than sense. Here (22). Reflecting on Adelas insistence upon calling this new place
Nowhere, Elizete says, I think deep about how a place name Nowhere could make sense
and I discover that Adela had to make her mind empty to conceive it (20). Because the
only surroundings, names, and perceptions that are available to Adela are unacceptable,
those aspects of herself to which sight, sound, and thought apply disappear, rendering
her an unfeeling automaton, mechanically breathing the unfamiliar air, unable in the end
even to speak her own language.
The unnamed narrator who takes over Elizetes job of storytelling, in certain sections
of the novel, tells us of people in Adelas position for whom belonging was too small, too
small for their magnificent rage. [. . .] They were not interested in belonging. It could not
suffice. Not now (4243). The situation recalls Taylors assertion, in his theorization of
identity, that if some of the things I value most are accessible to me only in relation to the
person I love, then she becomes part of my identity (103). Parts of Adelas identityher
senses, her thoughts, her language, her nameare accessible to her only in relation to the
place from which she has been taken, and, like a person who has lost a loved one, she feels
that no substitute will do. In Freuds terminology, this is melancholia: the state where the
loss of a love object casts a shadow over a persons ego. Brands description of the way
that Adelas loss becomes constitutive of her identity is a reminder that a love object need
not be another human being. People suffering from this sense of loss, of absolute disconnection from place, Brands narrator tells us, saw nothing could be done. [. . .] That is
how they lived with the dead (43).
While Adela and Brands other characters are, of course, fictional, their struggles involve
many of the same issues of identification and belonging with which Brand herself has
attempted to come to terms. In A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging (2001),
Brand weaves sources as disparate as childhood memories, theorizations of cartography,
and travel memoirs into an investigation of what the concepts of place, the past, and home
can mean for members of the African Diaspora: people whose ancestors were taken
through the door of no return onto slave ships bound for an alien land. Imagining our
ancestors stepping through these portals, she writes, one senses people stepping out
into nothing; one senses a surreal space, an inexplicable space. One imagines people so
stunned by their circumstances, so heartbroken as to refuse reality. Our inheritance in the
Diaspora is to live in this inexplicable space (Map 20).
If self is understood in relation to place, then diasporans are entwined in a complex set
of identificatory relationships with at least two placesthe homeland and the hostland
hence the double identity that Brand describes experiencing as a child in the Caribbean:
We were inhabited by British consciousness. We were also inhabited by an unknown self.
The African (1617). While a consciousness that reaches in multiple directions may itself
be nothing out of the ordinaryan example of what Vijay Mishra calls the exemplary
condition of late modernity (426)for Brand, special difficulties arise from both sides of
this split identity, this duality which was fought every day from the time one woke up
to the time one fell asleep (Map 17). The British consciousness is one to which she can
never fully belong, partly for obvious historical reasons, but also because of her physical
distance from the British center. You are living on an island, banished or uninhabited, she
says, or so it seems through the voice of the BBC (13). People in Brands position would
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have no share in ownership of the concept of Britishness, yet feel inescapably bound to it;
indeed, the language in which Brand writes is one that has been exported from Britain
not only to the Caribbean, but to her later home of Canada as well. At the same time, the
African consciousness Brand refers tothe identity, perhaps, that she should be able to take
ownership ofis a cloudy realm to which she has no real access. Very few family stories,
she says, few personal stories have survived among the millions of descendants of the
trade. Africa is therefore a place strictly of the imaginationwhat is imagined therefore
is a gauzy, elliptical, generalized, vague narrative of a place (25).
In light of these issues, the importance of namesof naming, being named, and telling
storiesis stressed in both A Map to the Door of No Return and In Another Place, Not Here.
Naming is a vocalizing of belonging, an incorporating of the named into ones life story, a
making explicit of a particular connection: whether this connection is with another person,
a nonhuman aspect of ones surroundings, or the past. The inability or unwillingness to
name, then, figures prominently in the lives of those whose connections have been severed. Relating her grandfathers inability to remember the name of the group of people
her family has descended from, Brand says, 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 (Map 5).
While Brand suggests in A Map to the Door of No Return that the condition of the African
Diaspora is irremediablethat their grief, our grief, remains unassuageable at a profound
level (26)she also describes the potential for shaping and reshaping the situation. To
live in the Black Diaspora is I think to live as a fiction, she says, a creation of empires,
and also self-creation. It is to be a being living inside and outside of herself (18). And
later, she adds, this dreary door which Ive 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 (42). The concept here of creativity, of self-creation, is complex
and contains possibilities of which Brand makes significant use in In Another Place, Not
Here. In the context of Adelas plight and the violent disconnection that informs her past,
it is somewhat remarkable to see Elizete take it upon herself to connect with the place to
which Adela could not connect: to make a somewhere out of Adelas Nowhere.
Working under slavelike conditions in the sugar cane fields and tied to an abusive
master, Elizete contemplates running away, sometimes with nowhere in mind except
not here (In Another Place 9), sometimes dreaming of Maracaibo. Maracaibo, yes, she
says. I imagine it as a place with thick and dense vine and alive like veins under my feet.
[. . .] Is like nowhere else (12). After learning about Adelas hardship, though, and after
realizing that any attempt to run away is likely to fail, Elizete changes her mind. Addressing Adela with her thoughts, she says, Where you see nowhere I must see everything.
Where you leave all that emptiness I must fill it up (24). She begins to give names to the
trees, plants, stones, and spaces around her, taking ownership of Adelas Nowhere and
changing it into a home. And by filling up the emptiness around her, she effectively fills
herself up with a sense of belonging:

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If I say these names for Adela it might bring back she memory of
herself and she true name. And perhaps I also would not feel lonely
for something I dont remember. [. . .] Nothing barren here, Adela, in
my eyes everything full of fullness, everything yielding, the milk of
yams, dasheen bursting blue flesh. Sometimes the green overwhelm
me too Adela, it rise wet and infinite on both sides of me as a vault
of bamboo and immortelle and teak. (24)
While Elizete still feels conflicted about the place she inhabitsfor the place beautiful,
she says, but at the same time you think how a place like this make so much unhappiness (25)her ability and willingness to form connections with her surroundings allow
her to enjoy a richer, more thriving sense of self. Where Adela was blind to a constricted,
empty place that could not give way to her grief, Elizete now sees everything full of fullness: yielding yams, dasheen, colours, textures, names, interactions. That she describes
the greenery around her as an infinite vault speaks both to the grandness of its scale and
the ability she now perceives in it to contain that which is important.
Elizete expresses her sense of connection with her home most appreciatively in her
thoughts about the samaan tree: a broad, sweeping tree near the house of her adoptive
guardian, whom Elizete describes as the woman I was given to (17). Under the samaan
tree is where I grow up, she says. It was wide and high and the light between what it
leave of the sky was soft and it look like a woman with hands in the air. A samaan is a
tree with majesty and I think of this samaan as my mother [. . .] she was my keeper (17).
The samaan tree is special not only for its warmth and hospitality, but for the fact that
it is never unnamed. While Adelas insistence upon the namelessness of the place had
been passed down through the family, causing Elizete to have to invent or dig up names
for the other plants that she works and plays with, the samaan tree is named from the
beginning. Like a child who has no recollection of learning about her mothers existence,
Elizete says nothing about where she may have learned the name of the samaan tree, and
it is, perhaps, this preconscious sense of identification with one part of the land around
her that inspires Elizete to fill up the emptiness that surrounds the tree. That her relationship with the samaan is nurturing enough for her to think of it as a mother-daughter
relationship allows Elizete to overcome the inability that afflicts Adelacaul drawn over
her eyesto be fully born into this place. A familial relation with her surroundings turns
Elizete into what Adela was not: a named, seeing, feeling person with a sense of relatedness and belonging.
In A Map to the Door of No Return, Brand relates the story of a German scholar who constructed a map of Abyssinia in the seventeenth century based on reports from missionaries,
without ever having visited himself; to Brand, this story proves to me something of which
Ive had a nagging inklingthat places and those who inhabit them are indeed fictions
(18). For this mapmaker, Abyssinia is an abstraction known through letters and stories;
his map is a creative work. The implication, though, of Brands suggestion that Abyssinia
and other places are fictions is that every mapevery schema for knowing a placeis a
creative work, whether it is a twenty-first-century, satellite-imaged map of Ethiopia or a
persons understanding of the best route to the grocery store. More than this, though, since
places themselves exist for us as a function of our understanding of and relationships with
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them, places are, in Taylors sense, dialogical: their identity is not defined in isolation,
but is negotiated through dialogue. As with people, relationships may be the main event.
Saying that a place is a fiction is not the same as saying that it is a lie or that it doesnt
exist; rather, it is an acknowledgment of the shaping and reshaping process in which we
are engaged when we tell ourselves storiestopographical, political, perceptual, or otherwiseabout our surroundings. Looking at eighteenth-century maps of the Caribbean
islands, which reveal distances, latitudes, bearings for ships, and cherubs blowing trade
winds, but are silent on the human cargo whose delivery they were intended to ensure,
Brand says, These cartographers, they were artists and poets. They were dreamers and
imaginers as surely as I (200). So it is, Brand writes, that in order to draw a map only
the skill of listening may be necessary. And the mystery of interpretation (18).
The premise that those who inhabit places are fictions fits alongside the premise that
places themselves are fictions, as both follow the same dialogical formula of identity as a
relational process that is always under negotiation. That we as readers are able to understand
how Adela and Elizete come to have different maps, different relations, different names
for the same place and find themselves living in strikingly different worlds as a result is a
testament to our willingness to accept that places can be fictions and, ultimately, that we
are involved in a shaping process with our surroundings. Brands assertion that all maps
make the land they represent seem understandable, as if one could sum up its vastness,
its differentiations in a glance, as if one could touch it, hold all its ideas in two hands
(89), reminds us of the power of language to form that which it describes: it reminds us
that language is not communication but reinvention (50). It also hints, though, at the
limitations from which the mapping process, like the naming process, suffers.
Brands emphasis on these matters in In Another Place, Not Here continues when she
changes the setting of the novel to the sprawling urban landscape of Canadas largest city:
a place that challenges Elizetes affinity for naming and self-creation. Finally faced with
a chance to leave the plantation and the samaan tree behind, Elizete follows Brands own
path of migration: she moves from the Caribbean to Canada, and finds herself living in
Toronto. Here, though, the growing sense of connection to place that had informed Elizetes
identity in the Caribbean is shattered. As she walks Torontos streets, feeling lost and unreal,
her own caul of sorts begins to descend over her eyes: She did not know the city, would
never know it because she wasnt looking at it. Who could see? If it was there she would
see. She knows about seeing. But it was just something across her brow, something she
made a movement to brush away like a piece of hair or a cobweb. She would never miss
it because she would never know it (In Another Place 49). The implication in the words
If it was there, that the city is not there in front of her eyes, is reminiscent of Adelas
unseeing relation to her surroundings. As the city grows more silent and comfortless for
Elizete, it comes to resemble Adelas Nowhere in its emptiness:
After months she still saw no birds to speak of or the same birds,
no river to speak of, no mountains to speak of, no grass to speak of,
no moon to speak of. Especially no moon. And no ocean or sea. No
sound that was the usual sound, no chorus of beetles, crickets, frogs
beginning with night, ending with morning. And since this was how
she knew the signs of things, she was lost. (68)

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Torontonians would point out that the city does play host to a variety of birds, grassy
spaces, waterfront properties, and views of the moon. But that none of these is present
in such quality to speak of confounds Elizetes inclination to see and name things, to
fill things up and revel in them, to articulate her involvement in the world. Somehow,
we are told, this place resisted knowing. When she tried calling it something, the words
would not come. [. . .] What could she call a place that could disappear or that did not
exist without the help of people? (6970).
Ecological theorist David Abram provides commentary on a similar situation. Describing his disappointment upon returning to North America after living with the Sherpa
people in Nepal, he says:
There the air was a thick and richly textured presence, filled with invisible but nonetheless tactile, olfactory, and audible influences. In the United States, however, the air
seemed thin and void of substance or influence. It was not, here, a sensuous medium
[. . .] but merely an absence, and indeed was constantly referred to in everyday discourse
as mere empty space. (26)
Though air and sensory inputs are certainly present in the urban landscape, their
composition or, perhaps more importantly, their perceived influences are different. Abram
suggests that the perceived emptiness of the air is merely one symptom of a larger perceptual cloud in which urban populations are immersed:
I began to wonder if my cultures assumptions regarding the lack
of awareness in other animals and in the land itself was less a product of careful and judicious reasoning than of a strange inability to
clearly perceive other animalsa real inability to clearly see, or focus
upon, anything outside the realm of human technology, or to hear as
meaningful anything other than human speech. [. . .] To be sure, our
obliviousness to nonhuman nature is today held in place by ways
of speaking that simply deny intelligence to other species and to
nature in general, as well as by the very structures of our civilized
existenceby the incessant drone of motors that shut out the voices
of birds and of the winds; by electric lights that eclipse not only the
stars but the night itself; by air conditioners that hide the seasons;
by offices, automobiles, and shopping malls that finally obviate any
need to step outside the purely human world at all. [. . .] Nature,
it would seem, has become simply a stock of resources for human
civilization, and so we can hardly be surprised that our civilized eyes
and ears are somewhat oblivious to the existence of perspectives that
are not human at all, or that a person either entering into or returning to the West from a nonindustrial culture would feel startled and
confused by the felt absence of nonhuman powers. (2728)
Brand certainly seems familiar with this sense of displacement, as she describes in detail
Elizetes sleepless nights and sense of desperation in the city. Without the usual sounds of
beetles and frogs, with which she identifies herself, Elizetes ears are lost within the citys
mechanical drone. The noise, Brand writes, the everlasting noise came from nothing
she could recognize, no particular machine, just the noise of machinery; but machinery
past the individualism of a machine, machines lost from identity (In Another Place 69).
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Brands odd comment that this place could disappearthat this place did not exist
without the help of peoplespeaks to the shaping process that any place, but perhaps
an urban place in particular, is subject to; and makes sense in the context of Abrams suggestion that the uninterrupted chorus of human-created voices in industrial culture, from
language that constructs nature as resource to the din of cars and trucks, serves to drown
out and render silent and nonexistent the nonhuman voices that ring clearly outside the
city and away from the asphalt. The obscuring of these voices in the urban center renders
Elizete silent in turn, frustrated and confused that the words would not come.
It is important to recognize, though, that Elizetes disheartening experience in the
city does not indicate an idealized or romanticized notion of rural or wild spaces, echoing as it does Adelas anguish among the dasheen and bamboo of the Caribbean. One is
reminded of Miltons famous lines: The mind is its own place, and in itself / Can make
a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven (1.25455). More than this, though, by acknowledging
wide ranges of detachment, grief, connection, and fulfillment in places that encompass
both sides of the traditional urban/rural divide, Brand emphasizes the importance and
wild variability of the spectrum of relationships that can evolve between people and their
surroundings. If the mind is a place, it is one that reflects and converses with the shapes
and sounds in which it is immersed, not one that exists in separation from or in complete
control of them; a rural or wild space does not guarantee a feeling of being in tune
with nature, and neither does the possession of a strong will. A place, we might say, is its
own mind, and in the hands of a novelist can be an important characterresponsive and
full of colour, or unyielding and silent. Like interpersonal relationships, the interactions
between person and place are complex, and are informed by contextual factors including
language, culture, and past experience; a new place of any type can frustrate the need to
connect, especially for someone who has left behind a place that has come to inform her
identity to a great degree.
Still, Brand seems to imply through her description of the city that the impersonal urban
setting is more conducive to a sense of disconnection than a nonindustrialized place, even
if this sense of disconnection has the potential to arise anywhere. In A Map to the Door of
No Return, Brand writes, a city is not a place of origins. It is a place of transmigrations
and transmogrifications. [. . .] A city is a place where the old migrants transmogrify into
citizens with disappeared origins who look at new migrants as if at strangers, forgetting
their own flights. And the new migrants remain immigrants until they too can disappear
their origins (6263). And for those whose ancestors have passed through the door of
no return, the situation is more serious. Black experience in any modern city or town in
the Americas is a haunting, Brand writes. 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 (25). All of these issues affect Elizetes experience in the city; after
spending some time in Toronto, she finds that the feeling of being lost, of being othered,
of having no sense of relatedness has left her wanting to run away from the city, just as
she had wanted to run away from the sugar cane fields before fostering a connection
there. As her words lose their ability to forge meaningful relationships, Elizete comes to
decide that no amount of stories and made up things would hide this sense for long (In
Another Place 52). This was a place she had no feeling for, we are told, except the feeling
of escape (7071). While there may be feelings, and water, and a moon in the city, they
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are not of the kind that Elizete is able to vocalize a sense of belonging to, to incorporate
into her life story.
At the same time that Elizetes sense of detachment from her surroundings is increasing, she begins to feel distant and disconnected from her lover, Verlia. Elizetes feeling in
the city that there is nowhere to go, that there [is] something malformed about herself
(52), that, ultimately, she doesnt want her own body with her now (55), reaches a critical
point when her relationship with Verlia too becomes a source of grief. The combination of
these factors results in a transformation, when, in a scene reminiscent of Adelas forgetting
of her name, Elizete decides that she is no longer compelled to respond to the alias she has
come to be called by. So, she says, I lose my hearing. One day. It was easy. The man call
to me with the name I thief, and I so studying the woman I used to be that I didnt hear
him (83). As the narrator puts it:
It was a spur of the moment thing but when she really thought about
it maybe she had decided it, contemplated it long and found it useless. If the words were not sweet, if Verlias tongue was not at the
other end of them, then what was the use of hearing? Or speech? If
she could not speak to the best thing that ever happened to her [. .
.] then what was the sense in speaking? And feeling? Touch? How
painful if she could not feel or be felt, if the skin could no longer
sense Verlia in a field or a room. [. . .] And seeing? The worst of all
if every time she opened her eyes she saw a verdant leap, saw her
own fingers clutching stones. (87)
Here Elizete feels the same sense of futility and hopeless disconnection to which Adela
was resigned, and suffers similar bodily losses, as her already impaired eyes are joined
by useless ears, skin, and tongue. By describing the consequences of Elizetes desolation
in such tangible bodily terms, Brand blurs the distinction between psychological and
physical identity and well-being, and confounds any attempt to conceive of identity, even
physiological identity, as a purely inwardly-generated quality. Because it is by accessing
the world through her senses and feelings that Elizete comes to know herself, when part
of her world is cut off a part of herself goes along with it, and, as a result, any understanding of Elizete that does not focus on her shifting relationships with the people and
places around her must be incomplete to the point of being nonsensical. She is formed,
and deformed, by her relationships.
Both Elizete and Adela share with Brand herself the plight of disconnection, of having
no name to call on, and in all three cases an identity crisis is caused by something that
we would normally call external, blurring the distinction between person and context.
It is for good reason that when Brand borrows a line from Chantal Mouffe, in A Map to
the Door of No Return, she places the word exterior in quotation marks: Every identity is
irremediably destabilized by its exterior (56). That Brand emphasizes her characters
relationships to both human and nonhuman elements, in turn, serves as a reminder that a
valid ecology or ecocritical study must take both of these realms into account, and indeed
may question the assumption of a clear distinction between the two. Elizetes oikosher
home, the world with which she interactsmay include samaan trees, birds, and greenery
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of all sorts, but can also involve asphalt, traffic, and a lovers breath; all of these contribute
to her ecosystem, and thus to the way she understands herself.

***
There are ways of constructing the worldthat is, of putting it
together each morning, what it should look like piece by piece [. .
.]. Each morning I think we wake up and open our eyes and set the
particles of forms togetherwe make solidity with our eyes and
with the matter in our brains. How a room looks, how a leg looks,
how a clock looks. How a thread, how a speck of sand. We collect
each molecule, summing them up into flesh or leaf or water or air.
Before that everything is liquid, ubiquitous and mute. We accumulate
information over our lives which bring various things into solidity,
into view. (Map 141)
Brands description here of the way that we construct our world echoes Ernst Hans
Gombrichs comment, in Art and Illusion, that if what we call identity were not anchored
in a constant relationship with environment, it would be lost in the chaos of swirling impressions that never repeat themselves (50). As the perceptions that make up Elizetes
consciousness, and the molecules that make up her bodyor the printed words that
produce her character in the mind of the readerfloat in and out of awareness and are
replaced by other molecules or words, over and over again, during the course of her life
or of a readers experience of the text, what makes her a coherent person is the thread of a
story that connects the past with the present: a story that is not woven in isolation, but is
fastened to the places and beings of her exterior. If the cognitive schema of members of
the African Diaspora can be, as Brand suggests, a set of dreams, a strand of stories which
never come into being, which never coalesce (Map 29), in Elizetes strand of stories we
find both the pain of persistent disconnection and a glimmer of hope. While Adela shows
us what it is to disappear, to lack any language to attach to ones experience and connect
one to the world, Elizetes desire to find family stories, a lover, and a moon to speak of,
and her occasional success in finding a name to call on, remind us of the transformative
power of relationships and the personal coherence and well-being afforded by a sense of
connection to place. The last line in A Map to the Door of No ReturnA map, then, is only
a life of conversations about a forgotten list of irretrievable selves (224)tells us that
maps, like names, like people, and like places, exist for us through conversation: through
a keeping of company with each other, with our surroundings, and with our pasts. These
processes are made all the more difficult through acts of severance such as the trading of
slaves or the construction of ideologies that silence the nonhuman.

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CALLALOO
Note
I would like to thank Daniel Coleman for his comments on a draft of this essay.

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Brand, Dionne. In Another Place, Not Here. 1996. New York: Grove, 1997.
. A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging. Toronto: Vintage, 2002.
Evernden, Neil. The Natural Alien: Second Edition. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1993.
Gombrich, Ernst Hans. The Limits of Likeness. Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial
Representation. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1960. 3162.
Milton, John. Paradise Lost. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2005.
Mishra, Vijay. The Diasporic Imaginary: Theorizing the Indian Diaspora. Textual Practice 10.3 (1996):
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Taylor, Charles. The Politics of Recognition. New Contexts of Canadian Criticism. Ed. Ajay Heble et al.
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