by Dionne Brand
The first thing I saw, imagined, was water, an ocean full of turquoise water. We lived in a small wooden house on the small shore of the Atlantic at Guayguayare. Standing on the beach at Guaya against the broad ocean I thought of cities, faraway places I had read of. Before I could read I only thought of the water, the fish and the fishermen I had seen come and go in it, the bits of wood, the shells, the ships which only browed the horizon, the frothy ripples which spread to my feet, the river foaming to its mouth up the beach, the new gifts of green and blue bottles and objects worn by the sea beyond recognition. The ocean there always gave me a sense of leavings and arrivals. Of momentous happenings, a fish caught, a dead body washed up, a sign from god — a too red sky, a too blue sky, frigate birds coming in, an empty boat washed in, fishermen lost or run away, muddy weedy water, blood in the sea.
The centre of the world was the beach at Guaya. From there radiated the world. Venezuela was to the southeast, Brazil to the southwest, Britain to the northeast, America to the northwest. A road map, compressed to fit the six-inch scroll of a grape leaf; these were my possible directions and my desires. This road map worked as it had for the Romans recording distance and not topography; since only the ocean lay in between, it recorded plans and not speculation. In other words, it was to be my itinerary.
I had planned to marry a fisherman and move to Venezuela. I had planned to be misled and mishandled by a bad man and run off to Brazil with him. I had planned to live in London. I had planned to live in New York City.
June 1999, London, England
In 1897 the British sacked the city of Benin, carrying off the great works of art — sculptures in brass, terra cotta, bronze, and ivory. I’ve been here several times. I know this place. How? It is not any country I’ve lived in, yet it is a country I have lived in. I do not know these particular people with whom I’m walking on the street, yet I know them. I do not know that if I walk this street in this direction I will end up at a roundabout, yet I know it. I know the narrowness of the street; I know the circus I’m walking toward. I know the pace of other pedestrians and I know how long I will have to wait at a coffee shop to be noticed and then to ask for my coffee. I know all this because it is England.
One week ago I arrived at the airport and all my apprehension on the plane about a foreign country — suspicious customs officers who flag my skin for scrutiny and my anxiousness at the prospect of finding my way to this city — all my apprehension subsided as I joined an oddly familiar queue of South Asians, Africans, Spanish, French, Arab, and Middle Eastern people struggling with papers, forgotten bags, crying children, lost purses, well-filed papers, swollen feet, and red-eyed sleeplessness. All nervousness subsided when I saw the same apprehension loosen in their faces as they saw me, too, like them part of an unnameable familiarity among us. Empire.
I know we marched into schools to the same classical music, we wore the same uniforms, we walked with writing slates hung around our necks, we sat at the same desks, we read from the same Royal Readers perhaps, we drank the same condensed milk, we ate the same butter from cows in Jersey or New Zealand, we tailored our speech in the presence of officialdom, we read the Brontës and Enid Blyton, we memorized Wordsworth and Walter Scott, we improbably dramatized Shakespeare, we stood in lines waving flags at completely indifferent royals, we sang English airs, we played London Bridge, we danced the maypole.
And here we were in a line entering England, a place we were all too familiar with and a place all too familiar with us. The customs man was affable, not suspicious as are the ones in Canada, whose passport I held. The ones back home who take me aside after my holidays and examine my folded clothing, handle my chunks of real cocoa, even after I have tried to dress in the least amount of clothing to allay suspicion of possible bags of marijuana strapped to my belly. Here, the clerk surprisingly says, “How long will you be stayin’, luv?” There’s an anxious woman in a green gold-trimmed sari behind me, then a man from Ghana, then a family from Morocco or Egypt. The British really understand about trade, travel, exploration. Close to a thousand years of foraging and conquest are preterite in this clerk’s use of the familiar. He even smiles a genuine kind of smile not the quick smirk of my compatriots. He at least tries to disarm me and not overpower me. That is the test of true power. That is why I know how to dance the maypole, and how to sing that song which begins, “Oranges and Lemons said the bells of St. Clements …,” and how I knew “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” by heart at thirteen. Charm, for god’s sake. Not fear of invasion like back home in Canada. Which, there, is fear of course of oneself.
Landing in London is landing in the familiar. The British must have built every place they settled in according to the same city plans as London. How else would I know that walking down each main street I would come to a roundabout, that streets would angle and twist into an inner square, that the width of streets would summon in me a particular stride, that Charing Cross Road would be right where it was? No matter what the landscape it seemed they imposed the same plan of narrow streets, cobbled alleys, squares, and circuses. Then they laid government buildings along in the same brown- and red-bricked way. Then they filled these buildings with quiet incompetence, occasioning long queues and fuming patience until graft and bribery suffused all transactions. In the line at Heathrow we all know each other, then. We have the same road maps in our heads. We’ve walked the same streets of colony.
Nothing to pillage here, though. If you wanted to sack this city you’d get stuck in the constant traffic gridlock. Though you stand at exhibits in museums envious. And thinking, what balls!
May 2000, Sydney, Australia
The twenty hours to Sydney, Australia, were claustrophobic, though I read two books and slept stretched across three seats. Sleep is the thing. If you can get to sleep at all on a long flight the body isn’t so rebellious when you land. I rarely sleep on planes. Economy is the new version of packin’ ’em tight. Though this time you’re paying for it. The flight to Honolulu, our midway stop, was half empty. I didn’t speak to anyone. I hate talking to perfect strangers on a long flight. I hate talking to anyone on a plane. Give someone a look beyond twenty seconds and you will hear her whole life story. If you need stories, that is all right. But who can tell what the story will be or how interesting the storyteller. So I take no chances; I immediately take a book out or a pen and paper, indicating privacy. I can’t remember anyone on that flight.
The city, Sydney, has the presumption of all New World cities — that it can erase history or reinterpret it. But it cannot help boasting about its victories. A statue of Queen Victoria, pregnant with power, dominates a square. Old buildings which once housed prisoners no doubt are rehabilitated into museums. They hold sway over the city’s architects, who cannot help but make all enclosures prison-like. Sunlight in this desert is blocked out on some streets by the heaviness of history. Someone tells me that Sydney is a very multicultural city. I can’t see it. Multiculturalism is relative to the state of white fear. So is empathy. The prime minister cannot bring himself to apologize for past wrongs of genocide and massacre. I ask someone where the Aboriginal people are. They call out a neighbourhood to me. Redfern. In the newspaper there is a story about a reconciliation march across the harbour bridge, there is a debate about which and whether government ministers will attend.
A Maori friend, Briar, introduces me to an Aboriginal friend, Cathy. Cathy is a whirlwind of hipness and charm. And connections. She gets us tickets to see the sold-out play Stolen. It is a play about Aboriginal children taken away from their parents and communities and subjected to the terrors of abuse and displacement. Just like at home in Canada. The similarities don’t end there. Before the play we three go to dinner. Uncannily, with the same sense of derision, cynicism, and hilarious absurdity, we talk about race in the countries in which we live. Briar says that ever since Once Were Warriors (a film from New Zealand), television and film producers want her to write the same characters. Representation becomes a s
tereotype. She is expected to always have a drunken fighting Maori man and a battered Maori woman in her scripts. Cathy says of the reconciliation march, reconciled to what, what have we got to reconcile? There’s been no truth, what is this about reconciliation? We laugh. Strange to anyone else but us, we are laughing through this whole conversation. We are eating seafood at a little restaurant near the theatre. We laugh in recognition, we laugh like old friends, like people who live in the same country. Later we cry through the play and more when the actors step out of the play and tell the audience their own stolen stories.
August 2000. Three months later, I hear Redfern’s been raided by police, sixteen people arrested for drugs, but everybody knows it’s to clean up the city and intimidate Aboriginal people before the Sydney Olympics. Three months later, a Darwin court dismisses the suit of two Aboriginal people who were stolen and abused. Men came on horses and took the girl, who is now sixty-two, away; of the other, they say his mother’s thumbprint was evidence that she gave him up willingly. The judge says that the sixty-yearlong practice of forcibly taking children away from their families was a product of goodwill and that the government was not liable for the devastation of a generation of people.
July 2000, Mannheim, Germany
We have just come from Landau on the train. We decide to go outside the station at Mannheim to breathe some fresh air until our train to Mainz. For Leslie the trains are portentous. Her family was taken away in them fifty-eight years ago. These trains account for the life of her family after. More doors, no returns. It is a baffling place, the parts of Germany we are able to visit. I have grown up on films about the Second World War Germany, Nazism, the Holocaust. Germany is forever attached to these images. Not to mention the more recent treatment of Turkish and African immigrants nor the forever seething neo-Nazi presence of shaved-headed young people without a shred of humanity in them. Two days ago there were neo-Nazi marches in Berlin and Hamburg. Our hosts represent the opposite of all this. We are at a conference on identity at the University of Mainz. Mainz, where Gutenberg created movable type. We visit the Gutenberg museum, where there is a replica of his press. We visit the old manuscripts. In the cocoon of our conference we feel safe; when we venture outside into city streets and trains, in Frankfurt, Landau, Mainz, the feeling of safety falls away and we are plagued by the spectres of the war which hang here like eternal clouds. One imagines that our hosts are plagued by them, too. Only the brazen can say, “I was not here, I did not do this and feel that.” One hears that all the time in Canada; about what people feel they are and are not responsible for. People use these arguments as reasons for not doing what is right or just. It never occurs to them that they live on the cumulative hurt of others. They want to start the clock of social justice only when they arrived. But one is born into history, one isn’t born into a void. And so Leslie stands at train stations in Germany cringing at the trains’ punctuality.
On Tuesday we are at Koblenz-Landau University. A young Turkish man asks a question about writing: “When you start writing because it hurts so much, do you only write about racism?” I try to tell him, you don’t write about racism, you write about life. It is life you must write about. It is life you must insist on. For him the distinction is inadequate and unhelpful. He asks again, but I cannot satisfy him.
We are running toward the train station in Landau. We are late. Just off the square there is a small street, a complicated statue, and then a house. One of our hosts says, “This is where Anne Frank’s grandparents lived. You must see it.” We are late for the train, have had lunch and drunk wine. We step into the strangest, most silent of courtyards. It is all wooden banisters and quiet. Light and silence pour into its centre.
August 1984, Toronto, Canada
A friend meets me on the street. He was born in the United States. He left there during the Vietnam War. He had refused to go to war, so he came to Canada rather than be put in jail. Agitated over American foreign policy everywhere, but mostly in Nicaragua, he says to me, “I’m cutting off diplomatic relations with them, man. I’m not even going to talk to my family. That’s it. There’s a whole bunch of Caribbean countries, too. I’m severing, you hear me, severing, diplomatic relations.” Diplomatic relations. That is what any of us in the Diaspora has with these nations we were born in, the ones we live in, and the ones we’re supposed to belong to: the most fragile diplomatic relations.
July 2000, at the corner of Primrose and Davenport
Here is a new light post. Around it are two newspaper boxes. The Toronto Star, The Toronto Sun. Also a wreath and a bouquet of flowers. Somehow, Ma Phoung died here and is missed by family.
Circa 2000, Associated Press
With as many as 2 million women worldwide forced into sexual slavery, the sex trade seems to have replaced narcotics as the favoured illegal trade activity … Best estimates show at least 50,000 are brought into the United States annually for forced labour. Feeder countries for the slave trade include Ukraine, Albania, the Philippines, Thailand, Mexico and Nigeria … A woman called Inez testified, “We work six days a week and 12 hour days.”
Circa 1492
The money that financed Columbus’s voyage to the Americas came from a tax which Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castille obtained from the church for waging a “just and holy war” against the Moorish kingdom of Granada and Islam as a whole. Granada surrendered on January 2, 1492. Columbus set sail in April 1492.
14
On the radio, the CBC, there is a report from the divided warring city of Mitrovica. The northern part of the city is Serb, the southern part Albanian. Everyone is determined, resolute in their hatred for each other. In the background, in a coffee bar in the north where a Serb is being interviewed, the voice of Ibrahim Ferrer can be heard singing
De Alto Cedro voy para Marcane
Luego a Cueto voy para Mayari
El carino que te tengo
you no lo puedo negar
se me sale la babita
yo no lo puedo evitar.
15
It is 4:45 a.m. I am doing what I do every time I drink too much wine and wake up suddenly at 4:45 a.m. I read. Eduardo Galeano falls open at this time: “I’m nostalgic for a country which doesn’t yet exist on a map.” Dear Eduardo, I am not nostalgic. Belonging does not interest me. I had once thought that it did. Until I examined the underpinnings. One is mislead when one looks at the sails and majesty of tall ships instead of their cargo. But if it were a country where you were my compatriot, then I would reconsider. And think of the things we should have to sort out.
Maps
I first heard the word Sargasso in a history class when I was a child. It described the unending water across which Europeans sailed, bringing people and goods to the Caribbean. The water was supposedly treacherous and sickening, and sailors and ships and cargo were often lost there.
I imagined the Sargasso as tangle — sea tangle — thick as grasses but fluid. I imagined dead sailors, dead ships. I only imagined later dead slaves, suicidal and murdered, strangled again in the grasses of the Sargasso. Then I imagined multitudes, throngs, wandering the bottom of the ocean, eyeless and handless, cuffed and coffled. I would wake up on the point of asphyxiation. Much later my lover had a dream of being cuffed at the ankles. I, watching her sleep, did not know her distress, only lay watching, deciding whether to wake her or let her finish her nightmare. She kicked violently, trying to free herself, cutting my ankle with her toes and waking up to my soothing her. Then I remembered my dreams of the Sargasso, its thick tangle of bones long turned to coral and sand.
Maps
A rihla is a traveller’s account of a pilgrimage. Ibn Jubayr, the foremost practitioner of the form, travelled to Mecca, then through Mesopotamia, Syria, and Sicily, arriving in Granada in 1185. His rihla, written in diary form, contained twenty-seven chapters, one for each month of his journey. It also contained praises to God.
In 1050, an earlier traveller to Mecca, Nasser-e Khosraw, also wrote
a diary of his travels, The Book of Travels. In it he tells of a figure appearing to him in his sleep, a figure who advised him to seek wisdom. When he asked where wisdom lay, the figure pointed toward Mecca.
Voyage
The poet André Gide writes in his travel diary Voyage au Congo et la Retour du Tchad: “Our travelling companions are mostly officials and traders. I think we are the only ones travelling ‘for pleasure.’
“ ‘What are you going out for?’
“ ‘I shall see when I get there.’ ”
1
I am delayed in Frankfurt for four hours. When you are travelling, time is sometimes a pain. You wish to arrive; you are impatient, especially when travelling to Africa. Europe is a nuisance. It is in the way. Yet it is the only way there from here. The waiting area is crowded. It is full of bodies in the middle of long journeys; bodies like mine, tired yet attentive and anticipating. There are bodies, walking, pacing, falling asleep in the waiting room.
My body feels always in the middle of a journey. It is always alert; it does not doze off or sleep easy. When it sleeps, it sleeps like someone expecting an emergency. Waiting is its purpose. It has two speeds, one slow, achingly, the other frenetic, hypervigilant. Under wine or whisky my body can veer toward paralysis or lyric. In Frankfurt these speeds alternate crazily at the thought of going to Africa. Bodies flap in beige and grey coats; black bags are hitched on backs and hips; the air is stale in the waiting room; hundreds are waiting. Sitting, impatient and sluggish, the room is a slow blur. I want to get rid of these people. I want to leave this room and go to Africa.