"The Sea Is History"

Anticolonial Place-Making in the Water Spaces of Eden Robinson's Monkey Beach and Dionne Brand's A Map to the Door of No Return

Abstract

This essay examines water mythologies and relationships in Haisla writer Eden Robinson’s Monkey Beach (2000) and Trinidadian Canadian writer Dionne Brand’s A Map to the Door of No Return (2001). I consider these texts together because they do comparable work in considering how the water offers anticolonial alternatives for place-making and comparably write water as a site of belonging without claiming.

When Brand and Lisamarie dip their hands in the water to pay respect to Yemayá (Brand 172) or the Kitlope River (Robinson 112), they distance the practice of place-making from the confines of a colonial claiming. I argue then that considering how water fosters place-making in these texts can generate thinking that surpasses colonial creations and capturings of space and highlights forms of belonging that have existed outside of these restrictions.