SOURCE: Kong, Sook C. Review of A Map to the Door of No Return, by Dionne Brand. Herizons 15, no. 4 (spring 2002): 31.

In the following review, Kong praises A Map to the Door of No Return.

In A Map to the Door of No Return, Dionne Brand embarks on a long journey into the ontological night, taking her reader to the edge between life and death, history and violence, politics and grief.

In a tour de force manner, Brand maps the injustice and the callous irresponsibility of a current world, divided into the haves and have-nots, those privileged to enjoy freedoms and those haunted by “the spectre of captivity,” and premature death. For Brand, the hinge to the door of brutal history is the beginning of the prolonged oppression of people of African descent, beginning with the European trade in the buying and selling of fellow beings for mercantile profit...