Beyond ‘the door of no return’

Beingness and (be)longing as a Black therapist

Abstract

I locate myself in space and time as a child of the Windrush generation, born in the UK in the 1960s. Erica McInnis (2018), on understanding African beingness and becoming, explains that within the diaspora I am ‘born yah’, and therefore vulnerable to issues around belonging and identity. My decision in 2020 to train as a therapist coincides with the desire to excavate my identity, long buried under the white gaze, and the double severing of enslavement and post-war migration, and to untangle my miseducation. I begin to learn how to be, rather than simply survive in white-dominated spaces.

As a student bereavement counsellor and a bereaved therapist, I examine my relationship with separation and loss, and how that might manifest in the clinical encounter. As a descendant of enslaved people, I have a specific diasporic longing to belong: to rest in a place I have never known; to go back through ‘the door of no return’ (Brand, 2011).

I conclude that belonging might not be to a geographical place, but a state of knowledge. My psychic journey is the cartography of diaspora: I have no map so must draw my own, develop a grammar, and rewrite my script from assembled fragments. With a sounder foundation, I begin to integrate African wisdom into my practice and praxis. Beingness and longing is embedded in my psyche: I embrace the state of (be)longing as a potential route to diasporic integration.