by Dionne Brand
I am on my way to Johannesburg. It is my first flight to the continent. I will fly over the Door of No Return. I will not go there, but I will feel it somehow. The plane leaves Frankfurt and I sit riveted to the TV screen, which shows a map of Europe and Africa. The symbol of a plane marks our location, as we make our way painstakingly south toward the continent. It is night by the time we take off. Outside the darkness encloses; darkness is the air through which we travel. Moving through dark air or dark water, it is the same. I cannot help thinking, I at least know where I am going. I am going willingly. This electronic map on the TV screen of the plane is not unlike those early maps (which my ancestors probably never saw themselves; they travelled without maps). Perhaps the outline is more accurate, but still only a few cities are filled in — this time for convenience. There is Frankfurt, there Johannesburg, and there Cape Town. There are no places in between, no signs for the physical geography, just an outline. It is as simple as those first maps. It is also a composite of all maps. Its itinerary is all that matters. The time, the kilometres, appear on the screen, well refined now. Why is all geography irony?
The work of watching the map, of tracking the flight to Africa is nerve wracking. We arrive at the coast, Tripoli. We cross Libya and Chad. The rims of my eyes are a burning red. By now the people beside me are asleep. My legs are cramped, my stomach is in a constricted knot. I tell myself to relax, fall asleep. But how can I, crossing Africa? I want to feel it even if I am miles above in the sky, even if I cannot see. I am all nerve and energy at the thought of the great land below. Like all maps, the one on the screen makes the land below seem understandable, as if one could sum up its vastness, its differentiations in a glance, as if one could touch it, hold all its ideas in two hands. I wish I was on the ground. I know I would soon be enveloped by it, overwhelmed as all land overwhelms me. The patience and breadth, even islands overwhelm. The Door of No Return is on my mind. I am crossing the place which holds it; the place which holds the before of history. It is a return, but aptly it is in the air and it is a glancing pass at the Door of No Return. The door is not on this map. The door is on my retina.
2
Bangui in the Central African Republic appears when I wake from an open-eyed sleep.
3
In 1486 John Afonso of Aveiro reached the kingdom of Benin. My journey is more than eighteen hours long. Down the belly of Africa. Why do I slip into the easy-enough metaphor of Africa as body, as mother? Is it because the door induces sentimentality? The idea of return presumes the certainty of love and healing, redemption and comfort. But this is not return. I am not going anywhere I’ve been, except in the collective imagination. Yes, the imagination is itself a pliant place, lithe, supple, susceptible to pathos, sympathetic to horror.
4
I cannot go back to where I came from. It no longer exists. It should not exist.
When you take a journey, you are no longer yourself. Already no one knows you any more, neither your family nor your friends. The day you decide to leave, the tablecloth seems foreign, the room where you have slept forever seems unfamiliar, as if someone has left it already.
I remember standing at the top of the street to my house when I was thirteen thinking, I will leave here and never return, I am not going to live here. Already the books in my mind were read, already I was forgetting faces and names, already all that was happening had happened. The street was a ghost. I never returned to that street. The house with the hibiscus fence and the butterflies hovering over zinnias. From then on I imagined only.
5
Another lidless sleep and we are near Kinshasa. I am looking forward to getting off the plane. It will be the first ground I touch in Africa. It is daylight when we get there, midday really. We left Frankfurt last night and I have not slept. Just before the landing, the pilot announces we will not be allowed to disembark. Political conflict. Fear. Some unrest. The plane lands far away from the terminal. Through the window all I can see is burnt grass. Mobutu Sese Seko is afraid of something or someone.
6
Andre Gide. “I have plunged into this journey like Curtius into the Gulf. I feel already as I had not so much willed it (though for many months past I have been stringing my will up to it) as had it imposed upon me by a sort of ineluctable fatality — like all the important events in my life.”
Why would Gide see this voyage as an “ineluctable fatality”? What in his life or culture made it so, made it necessary? Throughout his account I cannot find the answer. Not the answer I need. What was he hoping to find; what was he hoping to think? One travels; one takes oneself intact. With a will. One is a coherent being — needing nothing from the place one travels to but food, shelter, and most importantly that the place one visits appears and in appearance yields a confirming example of one’s sentience. Or one travels in disarray, undone, a consciousness formed around displacement, needing nothing that one can put a finger on, needing a centre. And the place is air and burnt grass through a window after eighteen hours of waiting.
7
I don’t want to suggest that my thoughts are typical of the Black Diaspora, only that they proceed from the experience. My eyes took in the burnt grass as we sat on the tarmac for another two hours and I wished I could disembark and go to a city, drive along a road with fields and forests on both sides, ramshackle houses and cattle, an oil pipeline silver and dangerous running by, then the city, calamitous and squalling. There in that city or perhaps along the road the ubiquitous Door of No Return would appear.
This opening, which I had hoped to observe, remained compelling though concealed. But why so compelling? Perhaps it is the Holy Grail of the Diaspora. It is the site of pain which will turn into the site of pleasure. Transform us into full being through its immutable knowledge. Transform us into being.
8
By the time we land in Johannesburg I have been in a waking sleep for twenty-four hours. On the drive from the airport I see red land. The land is red here. I remember little else of that journey from the airport to the hotel in Johannesburg. I go to my room. The dead weight of my body hits the small bed. It is afternoon in Johannesburg; the opening of the New Nation Writers Conference will be later that night. Nelson Mandela will be there. It will be a grand welcome and celebration. I fall into the deepest of sleeps. I, usually so insomniac, so fitful, sleep as if forever. I dream. I can’t remember what. The next morning I wake up thinking it is still the day before, then realize I have missed the whole evening.
9
Transform us into being. That one door transformed us into bodies emptied of being, bodies emptied of self-interpretation, into which new interpretations could be placed. Phantasm, chimera, vision, Ellison’s invisibility. Spook is a derogatory description, but it speaks to the psychological arrangements of the describer entering the sign. Entering and occupying the sign. I am, we are, in the Diaspora, bodies occupied, emptied and occupied. If we return to the door it is to retrieve what was left, to look at it — even if it is an old sack, threadbare with time, empty itself of meaning.
10
André Gide. “And I come near forgetting that it is nothing but a project made in youth and realized in maturity. I was barely twenty when I first made up my mind to make this journey to the Congo thirty-six years ago.”
11
Langa. Years ago I had written a poem about this place, never having seen it. It was a poem about state killings of nineteen people at an uprising during apartheid. I had heard about it on the news in Canada. About a town called Uitenhage, the black township outside it called Langa. I had imagined that place and written the poem. Now here I was and the landscape was as I had imagined. Bare, bright reddish-yellow dirt. The people; I noticed their hands, rough, bony, the skin dry and flaky. I noticed eyes like eyes waking up; eyes that were full of tragedy but also eyes that gleamed. It was the most desolate of towns. No, I cannot say that everywhere we went each township seemed as desolate as the other.
The shebeen in Langa is where I
end up. It is a simple flat-roofed structure. The beers are served in large brown bottles or large paper cartons. Langa is the kind of place where you want to drink in the middle of the day, perhaps all day long, dreary, such a hot, dry wasteland. It is the place that I imagined; it is the place where events such as have happened would happen.
I remember another shebeen — a rum shop, it’s called there — in a village in Dominica. One night some friends and I drive through country darkness, stopped where the car could go no further, and climbed a hill, bumping into tree stumps, arriving at a rum shop. It was not really a shop but a lean- to shack. A man in a ripped merino raised himself from a card game beside the lean-to, slipped behind the makeshift bar, which was a simple piece of wood, and asked us what we wanted. Beer, whisky, he let us go through our urban wishes, then said “nah” to all of them. He only had cask rum, he said. An oily, pungent, potent, uncured extract.
We sat or stood around the one rickety table outside the lean- to and drank this mixture late into the night. A man like the man who just walked into the shebeen in Langa came into the lean-to. He looked a little crazed in the eyes, his hand was bleeding from a cut he seemed to be unaware of. He came toward us, his ragged trousers held up by a bit of twine; he came toward us, a manic smile, a quick walk, his eyes flitting from each of us to the glasses of white liquid in front of us. The man in Langa smiles that same smile. He is dressed in a rough cloth shirt and brown trousers held up by a twisted brown worn belt. He hangs about, staring at us, then buys two large cartons of beer and leaves. He too has a cut on the knuckles of his hand; he too ignores it. Drinking cask rum at the lean- to we tell the bartender to give the man with the manic smile a drink on us. He reluctantly takes the white plastic jug up from the floor, warning us that this man drinks too much, and pours. At the shebeen in Langa I want to find someone for whom I can buy a drink, but generosity would not be sufficient.
This Dominican village was not Langa, but you can understand how you would need to drink in these places. Places where the physical work of collecting each devastating day cakes the body and makes it bleed.
12
I had never made up my mind to visit Africa. I had somehow felt the beckoning of the Door of No Return but was prepared to imagine it and never arrive. I have yet to see the door. Cartography is description, not journey. The door, of course, is not on the continent but in the mind; not a physical place — though it is — but a space in the imagination.
13
“A sort of ineluctable fatality.” What did Gide think would happen to him in the Congo? Perhaps he had read Conrad; he must have known of the brutalities of Leopold. What insights did he think he could draw? Was the Congo/Africa some sort of “holy” grail for European men of his time? A touchstone to their existence, an abyss whose gaze they were compelled to meet. And why Africa? In all the things I’ve read I cannot fathom it. The economics, the material power — all that I know and understand — but the perverse spiritual fascination, the “sort of ineluctable fatality” — the reasons must be situated in the self-interpretations, which I do not have access to or can only glimpse through power.
14
Willie Kgotsitsile greets me in Johannesburg as if he knows me. His face is joyful, mischievous. He says, “I have been waiting to meet you.” He is a poet and we meet as poets. “Marlene told me about you,” he says, “so we have met before.” Willie is glowing. His smile, his whole body is incandescent. I am meeting him at the end of apartheid. He greets me as someone coming out of the end of a great and long tunnel. But he is not weighed down; he is buoyant.
Maps
I run each morning, two, three, sometimes four kilometres. Part of March, all of April, all of May. I can’t run five. I am eating up kilometres on my way to where it is always twilight. I am running out of the world.
The Man from the Oldest City in the World
1
I am hurrying to the PEN benefit. I am to read there. Something from Neruda; his letter to another writer. “Miguel Otero Silva, In Caracas.” It is a letter, a poem about his choices for poetry, about finding poetry not “occupied exclusively with metaphysical subjects.”
“Life is like the sky, Miguel, when we put/loving and fighting in it, words that are bread and wine.”
I swing into the parking lot at King and John streets. The evening is glistening after a shower of rain, car lights reflect off the wet streets. A slight thin drizzle is still falling. There, near the SkyDome, near the theatres, there glitters the great building of the CBC from which the national culture emanates across the country — incessant, repetitive European classical music, deracinated jazz tucked away at night, waxy talk so careful, so nervous. Across the street is the theatre where the benefit will be held. I am going to a room, a theatre, full of writers. Writers like me and not like me. Shining escalators, velvet drapes, and soft carpeting will greet me. I seal myself in the cylinder of black pants, black jacket, green shawl. I’m thinking of Neruda and this letter to a friend. Each time I walk through these kinds of halls I must summon the writers I feed on and in whom I find comradeship. Today, today it is Neruda.
I took life
and I faced her and kissed her,
and then went through the tunnels of the mines
to see how other men live.
And when I came out, my hands stained with garbage and sadness
I held my hands up and showed them to the generals,
and said: “I am not a part of this crime.”
… I had brought joy over to my side.
It is fifty years after Neruda wrote this letter and I clasp it when I lose my way because it is as if he has written it to me; it is my faith that Neruda can write a poem fifty years ago and I can feel its company now.
2
There is a city here where I walk to see how others live. I could, I suppose, see about myself only. I could be unaffected. I could come to the easy belief that, really, what is there to speak against? I could develop that voice so full of cold address to beauty. I could with some self-defacement go about the business of making my living. I could say in that way that many do: oh, it’s not so bad, your writing need not show your skin, it need not speak of trouble, history is a burden after all. But Neruda summons me, is waiting for me at the end of every sentence. I cannot ignore my hands “stained with garbage and sadness.”
3
What holds poetry together in this city, what holds me together, is the knowledge that I cannot resist seeing; what holds me is the real look of things. If I see someone I see the ghost of them, the air around them, and where they’ve been. If I see the city I see its living ghostliness — the stray looks, the dying hands. I see its needs and its discomforts locked in apartments, its time that no one has — the growing citizenry of homelessness — the man sitting on the corner of Bathurst and College panhandling, saying, “Have a nice day, have a very nice day” to anyone and everyone; the woman who used to be a girl, when I was a girl, and she French just from Quebec City, now bloated on bad food and sleeping variously at Spadina and Bloor, at College and Spadina. I remember her as a flower child, wearing a thin Indian cotton dress, her hair on her narrow shoulders. She is still upbeat as then, bubbly but sometimes disoriented. The man who walks back and forth pacing the pavement on Shuter Street near the park as if he is waiting for someone; or the woman pacing and preaching at St. Clair and Oakwood in a language misunderstood as broken but sustaining its own logic of imprecations. These are people on the edges of the city, some would say, not emblematic. I know they might be the edges and easily ignored, but they curl into the middle. The middle of the city, where what looks like an ordinary life is composed of what is beaten into or calculated and chalked up to the world. What is accepted with a shrug but erodes the soul, burns it like so much acid. We’ll go around again, they say, we admit, we confess to not being fit for your world. The exhaustion of it.
4
I have crumpled Neruda in my hand to visit this room because I thin
k it is difficult to see here in this city; no one wants to see, or seeing is a charity they submit to. Everything far away is visible; everything close is viewed with distrust or disbelief, is viewed as imaginary.
Have you ever spent a whole day close to sea birds
watching how they fly? they seem
to be carrying the letters of the world to their destinations.
5
I park my Jeep, smiling at the attendant, asking him, “Where?” The lot seems full. I point at him, pleading, asking, “Where?” Give me a break, I’m late, find me a spot, please. He is high cheekboned, all almond-shaped eyes, all tight Ethiopian black curls, slender. I say, give me a break, bro — reaching for a language from another time which he and I now share, our common language. He gestures to a spot. I quickly fill it, then lock the Jeep and speed toward him with my keys and money. He says, “No keys, it’s fine.” He takes the money. I ask him, “What’s happening?” smiling, needing to leave quickly anyway, my question only to preserve the thin camaraderie of the Diaspora; really, only to speed him. He says calmly, “Look,” gesturing with his languid hand, “Look, I come from one of the oldest cities in the world. The oldest civilization. They build a parking lot and they think that it is a civilization.” Stunned, I burst out laughing. And he joins me. We laugh and laugh and I reply, “True, true.” “The oldest civilization,” he says again. “True,” I repeat. I don’t care if I am late now. Neruda’s letter is in my hand, and this man’s words are in my head.