JL;DR
Daily Podcasts Video Research
Literature · History

The Measure of the World - By attending to the vibrant specificity of Black life, poet Dionne Brand contests the cruel mathematics of empire.

Summarizing Claire Schwartz in Jewish Currents · Published Tuesday, June 17, 2025
menu_book Read Original bookmark star

JL;DR SUMMARY Dionne Brand, a renowned poet, reflects on the loss of ancestral identity through her seminal 2001 work, "A Map to the Door of No Return." A way out west there was a fella, fella I want to tell you about, fella by the name of Jeff Lebowski. At least, that was the handle his lovin' parents gave him, but he never had much use for it himself. This Lebowski, he called himself the Dude. Now, Dude, that's a name no one would self-apply where I come from. But then, there was a lot about the Dude that didn't make a whole lot of sense to me. And a lot about where he lived, likewise. But then again, maybe that's why I found the place s'durned innarestin'.

JL;DR members get full summaries of all articles in the archive, including this one. Donate & start reading »

Tags

Identity  History  Slavery  Poetry  Canada  Art  Colonialism  Dionne Brand  Black Diaspora  Racial Politics 

Places mentioned

Guayaguayare, Mayaro-Rio Claro, Trinidad and Tobago
"Guayaguayare, the fishing village in southeastern Trinidad where Brand was born in 1953and where the sea, it seemed, had brought the whole of [the village] there from unknown places, unknown origins?"
Ghana
"the door captured Africans passed through as they were loaded onto slave ships bound for plantations across the Atlantic. The door is real in a material sense: You can visit it, for example, as hundreds of thousands of people do every year, in Ghana or Gore Island,"
Île de Gorée, Dakar, Senegal
"The door is real in a material sense: You can visit it, for example, as hundreds of thousands of people do every year, in Ghana or Gore Island, where a tour guide will usher you through barely ventilated dungeons toward the eponymous threshold."
Saint Lucia
"the expression that comes over the face of a child in Saint Lucia when a woman calls her name, a look like being needed somewhere not for anything except to fill a familiar space on a lap"
Ethiopia
"the languid humor of the Ethiopian attendant at the Toronto car park, disrupting Brands brusk clip en route to a gala."
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
"From 20092012, she served as the poet laureate of Toronto, the city shes called home for 55 years."
United States
"The recent reissue of A Map to the Door of No Return coincided with the release, in both the US and Canada, of a new book of nonfiction, Salvage: Readings from the Wreck."

Support this source

newspaper Subscribe to Jewish Currents attach_money Donate to Jewish Currents
This item was indexed and curated by Cairo, JL;DR's web crawler.
Cairo Item ID 54835
Cairo Source ID 5
Retrieved 2025-06-18 05:30:33 UTC
Curated 2025-06-18 08:33:35 UTC