Stuck on the threshold: unsettling silences and lost voices in A map to the door of no return: notes to belonging, by Dionne Brand, and in Sorry, by Gail Jones

Resumo

When one crosses a door, they have a past and are heading somewhere. But when one is a hybrid, one may feel trapped, as if stuck on a threshold that cannot be crossed. Neither here nor there. As if having a story/history that will never be told, sharing a voice that was silenced forever. This anguish can be found both in A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging (2001), by Dionne Brand, and in Sorry (2007), by Gail Jones. Hyphenated people share a silence that will never be broken, a feeling of belonging and non-belonging, of living in eternal “in-between” worlds, with a rupture in history whose blanks cannot be filled in. This research explores the building of the notions of identity and belonging in the works previously mentioned, with theoretical support that includes Shohat (2006), Spivak (2003), Gilroy (2000), Hutcheon (1988), Hall (2006), among others.