SOURCE: Johnston, Ingrid. Review of A Map to the Door of No Return, by Dionne Brand. Resource Links 8, no. 1 (October 2002): 56.

In the following review, Johnston lauds A Map to the Door of No Return, praising Brand's exploration of slavery, identity, and discrimination in the book.

Dionne Brand, the award-winning poet, has created a powerful exploration of identity and belonging in a culturally diverse world. A Map to the Door of No Return is a poetic and provocative look at her own origins and identity through the imagined and historic “Middle Passage” that brought slaves from their homelands in Africa north to the New World. For Brand, her early search for identity was a “moment of rupture,” and a realization that she had no traceable beginnings. “We were not from the place where we lived and we could not remember where we were from or who we were” (p...