Pope John Paul stood at this door and apologized to millions of Africans in diaspora for the role that the Catholic church played in facilitating the African slave trade. Nelson Mandela huddled in a small cell designed for the most recalcitrant slaves and emerged 20 minutes later visibly shaken. President Clinton, Hilary and Chelsea Clinton and a large delegation of the Black Caucus visited this place where the President stopped short of apologizing to African-Americans for the pain that slavery inflicted upon them. Other African-American dignitaries have journeyed to this sacred place and left scathing indictments of anger or wrenching words of profound sorrow: Mohammed Ali, Dick Gregory, Jessie Jackson, Rev Al Sharpton, and hundreds of others. “The Door Of No Return” is the door of the slave house on Goree Island located in Senegal (west Africa) where millions of African slaves looked back to get their last glimpse of “The Motherland” before being loaded onto slave ships headed to America. They were then stacked human length to human length onto European ships and sold to the Americas and Carribean Islands to work as free laborers making the western world the great civilization that it is today. Robbed of all ancestral ties, Africans in America were treated like chattel and were housed on this small island of Goree where they were subjected to deplorable conditions and sold to America, the land of the free and the home of the brave. These African slaves were sold to one of the greatest powers of the western world which was built on the backs of the slave. These contradictions of freedom built on the backs of slaves still haunt privileged American and the heirs of the slaves whose ancestors were sacrificed to make this nation great. Misdirected anger in the African-American community has led to a surge of Black on Black crime, gang warfare, drug addiction, massive imprisonment of Africa-American males, tremendous rise in the incidence of AIDS, and infectious self loathing. It is this very sense of hopelessness and helplessness that led me to seek comfort in the arms of “Mother Africa” and in doing so I have discovered a new sense of purpose and direction. My book, “The Door of No Return”, A Spiritual pilgrimage For Africans in America” is 250 pages long and it catapults the reader along with 3 African-American female physicians to Dakar, Senegal after I am involved in a drive-by shooting. It is a fictionalized non-fiction work which uses real life characters and events some of which have been altered to protect the privacy of individuals or institutions. Starting from a small crime ridden town in California, I seek refuge with my girlfriends on this small slave island of Goree where inadvertently I claim the pain of my slave ancestors. There on this small island I am reunited with my soul when we visit the slave castle as tourists. “The Door of No Return” is steeped in African history and famous African-American quotations which are interspersed throughout the text are meant to inspire those who choose to take this pilgrimage to “The Door of No Return”.

The Door of No Return

A Map to the Door of No Return is a timely book that explores the relevance and nature of identity and belonging in a culturally diverse and rapidly changing world. It is an insightful, sensitive and poetic book of discovery. Drawing on cartography, travels, narratives of childhood in the Caribbean, journeys across the Canadian landscape, African ancestry, histories, politics, philosophies and literature, Dionne Brand sketches the shifting borders of home and nation, the connection to place in Canada and the world beyond. The title, A Map to the Door of No Return, refers to both a place in imagination and a point in history—the Middle Passage. The quest for identity and place has profound meaning and resonance in an age of heterogenous identities. In this exquisitely written and thought-provoking new work, Dionne Brand creates a map of her own art.

A Map to the Door of No Return

Now in its first American edition, Dionne Brand’s groundbreaking A Map to the Door of No Return has emerged as a modern classic, a highly influential exploration of “being” in the Black Diaspora. Since its first publication in 2001, Dionne Brand’s groundbreaking exploration of being in the Black Diaspora, A Map to the Door of No Return, has emerged as a modern classic. The door, in Brand’s iconic schema, represents the point of rupture where the ancestors of the Black Diaspora departed one world for another: the place where all names were forgotten, and all beginnings recast. “This door,” writes Brand, “is not mere physicality. It is a spiritual location . . . Since leaving was never voluntary, return was, and still may be, an intention, however deeply buried. There is as it says no way in; no return.” Through shards of history, memoir, lyrical investigation, and the unwritten experience of so many descendants of those who passed through the door, Brand constructs a map of this indelible region, culminating in an enduring expression, both definitive and seeking, of what it is to live, think, and create in the wake of colonization. With a new preface by the author, and an afterword by Saidiya Hartman.

From the Newbery Medal and Coretta Scott King Award winning author Kwame Alexander, comes the first book in a searing, breathtaking trilogy that tells the story of a boy, a village, and the epic odyssey of an African family. In his village in Upper Kwanta, 11-year-old Kofi loves his family, playing oware with his grandfather and swimming in the river Offin. He’s warned though, to never go to the river at night. His brother tells him ”There are things about the water you do not know. “Like what?" Kofi asks. “The beasts.” His brother answers. One fateful night, the unthinkable happens and in a flash, Kofi’s world turns upside down. Kofi soon ends up in a fight for his life and what happens next will send him on a harrowing journey across land and sea, and away from everything he loves. This spellbinding novel by the author of The Crossover and Booked will take you on an unforgettable adventure that will open your eyes and break your heart. The Door of No Return is an excellent choice for independent reading, sharing in the classroom, book groups, and homeschooling. An instant #1 New York Times Bestseller!

Zac Baxter's grandfather has always told him he's descended from African kings and is the rightful heir to a treasure that was stolen when his ancestors were sold into slavery. Zac believes none of this until his grandfather is murdered and his apartment is ransacked.

A Finalist for the 2023 National Book Award for Translated Literature One of The Atlantic’s 10 Best Books of 2023 A Financial Times Best Book of 2023 | Named a best book of the year by Publishers Weekly and Kirkus Reviews “A hypnotic, powerful historical novel in which stories nest within one another like dolls . . . It all coheres mesmerizingly.” —Clémence Michallon, The New York Times Book Review “Stunningly realized . . . Exquisite . . . A spellbinding novel.” —Maaza Mengiste, author of The Shadow King The thrilling and deeply moving new novel by David Diop, winner of the International Booker Prize. Paris, 1806. The renowned botanist Michel Adanson lies on his deathbed, the masterwork to which he dedicated his life still incomplete. As he expires, the last word to escape his lips is a woman’s name: Maram. The key to this mysterious woman’s identity is Adanson’s unpublished memoir of the years he spent in Senegal, concealed in a secret compartment in a chest of drawers. Therein lies a story as fantastical as it is tragic: Maram, it turns out, is none other than the fabled revenant. A young woman of noble birth from the kingdom of Waalo, Maram was sold into slavery but managed to escape from the Island of Gorée—a major embarkation point of the transatlantic slave trade—to a small village hidden in the forest. While on a research expedition in West Africa as a young man, Adanson hears the story of the revenant and becomes obsessed with finding her. Accompanied by his guide, he ventures deep into the Senegalese bush on a journey that reveals not only the savagery of the French colonial occupation but also the unlikely transports of the human heart. Written with sensitivity and narrative flair, David Diop’s Beyond the Door of No Return is a love story like few others. Drawing on the richness and lyricism of Senegal’s oral traditions, Diop has constructed a historical epic of the highest order.

Beyond the Door of No Return

This book brings together a complete set of approaches to works by female authors that articulate the black Atlantic in relation to the interplay of race, class, and gender. The chapters provide the grounds to (en)gender a more complex understanding of the scattered geographies of the African diaspora in the Atlantic basin. The variety of approaches displayed bears witness to the vitality of a field that, over the years, has become a diasporic formation itself as it incorporates critical insights and theoretical frameworks from multiple disciplines in the social sciences and the humanities, thus exposing the manifold character of (black) diasporic interconnections within and beyond the Atlantic. Focusing on a wide array of contemporary literary and performance texts by women writers and performers from diverse locations including the Caribbean, Canada, Africa, the US, and the UK, chapters visit genres such as performance art, the novel, science fiction, short stories, and music. For these purposes, the volume is organized around two significant dimensions of diasporas: on the one hand, the material—corporeal and spatial—locations where those displacements associated with travel and exile occur, and, on the other, the fluid environments and networks that connect distant places, cultures, and times. This collection explores the ways in which women of African descent shape the cultures and histories in the modern, colonial, and postcolonial Atlantic worlds.

Diasporic Women's Writing of the Black Atlantic

In the mid-1990s, Shaykh Arona Rashid Faye al-Faqir arrived in South Carolina from Senegal. Settling in Moncks Corner, he brought with him the Mustafawiyya Tariqa, a Sufi movement that emphasizes remembrance and inward cultivation, which he inherited from its founder, Shaykh Muhammad Mustafa Gueye. Today, Masjid Muhajjirun wal Ansar in Moncks Corner remains the center of this North American transnational community despite the Mustafawiyya Tariqa’s spread to larger cities like Philadelphia and Atlanta. Monck’s Corner serves as a haven for Muslims to build community and, as Youssef J. Carter argues, to construct diasporic consciousness as they connect with Muslims across the Atlantic. In The Vast Oceans, Carter shows that this expansion of a West African Sufi movement in the Black Atlantic offers those traveling the Mustafawiyya path empowerment through spiritual care as they confront historical and contemporary anti-Blackness. As Carter tracks the community’s thought and practice over time and space, he examines how practices of solidarity and remembrance aid in healing. Ultimately, his richly textured depiction of lived religion expands our understanding of global Islam, particularly the dynamic Black Muslim devotional practices of study and remembrance that span from West Africa to the American South.

The Vast Oceans