A Map to the Door of No Return by Dionne Brand

"I took life and I faced her and kissed her, and then went through the tunnels of the mines to see how other men live. And when I came out, my hands stained with garbage and sadness I held my hands up and showed them to the generals, and said: "I am not a part of this crime." ... I had brought joy over to my side" (Brand 99). "And to have "others" constantly remark on your presence as outside of itself. If to think is to exist, then we exist doubly. An ordinary conversation is never an ordinary conversation. One cannot say the simplest thing without doubling or being doubled for the image that emerged from the doorway" (Brand 50). "Too much has been made of origins. And so if I reject this notion of origins I have also to reject its mirror, which is the sense of origins used by the powerless to contest power in a society. The overstrong arguments about "culture," which are made both by defenders of what is "Canadian" as well as defenders of what is labelled "immigrant." These are mirror/image-image/mirror of each other and are invariably conservative. Because they must draw very definite borders both to contain their constituencies as well as, in the case of the power, to aggressively exclude the other and, in the case of the powerless, to weakly do the same while waving a white flag to the powerful for inclusion" (Brand 69).