by Dionne Brand
Lurie rather dramatically compares the committee’s procedures to Mao’s China with its “recantation, self-criticism, public apology.” So it seems that Disgrace rejects a communal remedy or any possibility of change. And this is where I find the novel ultimately pessimistic. Because Coetzee doesn’t offer any other choices except death. Lurie’s movement to some understanding about his place in the universe only comes through the work he begins doing in a clinic that euthanizes stray dogs and cats. It is ironic that he cannot find the same fealty for the human beings he encounters. Allegory again? And again the daily narratives make allegory obsolete.
The big question here is — up in the sky where the big questions can be pondered — is Coetzee saying that for white South Africans there is no meaningful or moral survival without apartheid? Is he saying that apartheid is as much social system as physical body; is he saying that whites are irredeemable?
I’m about to fall into one of those disturbed sleeps one falls into on airplanes. Now it is amplified by Coetzee’s dread. In the gaps of waking and sleeping, I plummet into the middle of Paradise. There, there is an exquisite chapter called “Divine.” It opens at a wedding with a sermon on love which you are drawn into like being drawn stunningly into hell, well, into clarity. “God is not interested in you,” declares the preacher. Here Morrison suggests that life in the Diaspora can’t be put right, the imagination cannot suffice — not on love, not on grace, not on exile. Not on any thing that she can imagine at this moment anyway. The bride is a girl with a torn heart.
Why do I find this chapter “exquisite” then? Is it my own sense of hopelessness and doom? Does Morrison confirm my dread? Is dread the equivalent of beauty in the Diaspora? Is Coetzee’s dread of another kind?
You have a lot of time to think, going to Australia. There is a portion of the journey where you feel that you will never see land again. Most people on the plane are sleeping through this part. I am worried about Disgrace. If Coetzee’s white professor is irredeemable, his Blacks are horribly so. Coetzee’s Blacks are acquisitive, predatory, rapine, and brutal. They have the unfortunate opacity of all Blacks in the imagination of a racially constructed whiteness — they are, in a word, scary. There is the growing or overbrooding presence of avenging Blacks. First is Petrus, a hard-working but acquisitive man. So acquisitive that Lurie’s daughter is also game. But there are more scary Blacks to come — three of them — one of them a boy who is connected to Petrus by family and perhaps all of them related to Petrus by plot. Lurie and Lucy first meet them on foot along the road. Then follows the brutal rape of Lucy and the beating and burning of Lurie. As mysteriously as they arrive, they disappear. They are ubiquitous. Rape is universal but the trope of the Black rapist is an overwhelming one. It is also predictable and overused. I was startled by its deployment in Disgrace.
Below me, out there in a vast darkness, or is it light yet, the international dateline is turning yesterday into tomorrow. Changing everything, even moments. So simply. In Paradise, without physical description of the women at the convent, Morrison leaves us to disentangle our own racial codes with the smallest of signifiers, that line: “They kill the white girl first.” Reviewers have gone in pursuit and disagree on just who that is in the text. Odd the discomfort that this brings. And here I remember Coetzee and a similar discomfort. But is it? He says in his earlier work, race doesn’t exist. She says in Paradise, race exists in the collective mind — but it doesn’t exist really, does it? We all obviously find it important — we handle it, we leave it glaringly untouched, we circumvent it … like the world, in this airplane’s clumsy flight.
In Disgrace, the Black rapists are spectres of white fear and Lurie, is like Kurtz in Heart of Darkness, “reduced” (by savagery, it is intimated) to savagery. Race exposes allegory. Allegory cannot lift race in its universal wings. Does Coetzee see it, I wonder, as I drift off again, for in the “universal” the “black rapist” trope is universal. Lucy says, “I think they are rapists first and foremost. Stealing things is just incidental. A sideline. I think they do rape.” (not my italics). The power of this trope is absolutely fascinating to me. How it eradicates, here in Coetzee’s text, a century of brutal injustice; how its possibility comes to justify, intentionally or not, “keeping the blacks down.”
Well, all this stems from having to discern whether one is being asked to dance or whether one is being ordered to conjugate a verb in another language. It is not the job of writers to lift our spirits. Books simply do what they do. They sometimes confirm the capricious drama of a childhood living room. When you think that you are in the grace of a dance you come upon something hard. In Paradise, Blacks can never live peacefully because of racism. In Disgrace, whites can never live peacefully without racism. Perhaps myth and allegory are worn out, perhaps they fail as imaginative devices. But so too reality. Sydney is ahead of me and behind me are hours of vertigo and restless sleep which I’ve left in two books.
Maps
Every shadow made by an opaque body smaller than the source of light casts derivative shadows tinged by the colour of the original shadows.
From Leonardo da Vinci’s notes
on light and shadow, circa 1492
Up Here
Calibishie. Up here you are in the world. It is ochre and blue-black and nothing you can call rock but if you can imagine before rock, molten obelisk, walls of volcanic mud jagging out into the ocean, and the ocean, voluminous, swift and chaotic. But perhaps it is we who are chaotic and the ocean orderly, we in disarray and the orange ochre rock mannered. Up here you are in the world and you want to stay, though in the evening your eyes reach over the windward mist to Marie-Galante in the horizon closing down, and in Marie-Galante you conjure the chaos you know of a city.
Perhaps over on Marie-Galante someone else, like you, looking south to Dominica, Calibishie where you are, someone else sitting on a similar veranda, someone else is conjuring chaos. Though they cannot see a city in Calibishie, so their eyes would brush past farther on to Marigot.
So you are here alone then, and you cannot hold on or control the orderliness of the real world, but you are here as all around you the light goes suddenly and quickly as light goes here and the noises of dusk rise, describable and indescribable; the noise of crickets singing loudly and all at once, beginning at the same moment as darkness envelops you. Up here in Calibishie you are in the world and wondering what is the sound you make, what is the business you do, who are you in this orderliness that does not seem to need you. Well, you sit there on a veranda at Calibishie and you feel everything, feel the soft moist breeze across your body, smell the musk of the sea, hear the creak and shush of the poinciana. As suddenly and as quietly your eyes shift from conjuring a city to save you. Suddenly and as quietly everything is passing, all you’ve lived, and you are sitting in the lap of something big, some intimacy.
The next day we drive up into the Carib territory and it is about midday and only fools like us are out on the road in the middle of the day when bare feet burn on the asphalt and the rain forest road is humid and long. You get the sense that the mountain road and the tree fern and the palmiste have been here absorbing and deflating other foolish incursions. The maxi taxi stops and we get out, going into the shop. A Carib man looks me in the eye as if he knows me and I settle into his look and I buy a hat whose strands of flex, he explains, have been buried in levels of mud, dyed there in grades of brown and red. We climb back into the van and he looks at me again as if I should be staying and where am I off to now, and I am half surprised but half convinced that, well, of course I should be staying. He sent his son, like my brother, to give me a small basket as a gift, as if to say, “Well, here then, go if you’re determined, but take this with you.” I had noticed at the back of the shop, my sister, his daughter, a whole world was in her face, 3000 years of Ciboney, then Arawak, then Carib canoeing north from South America, before it was South America, 1000 AD. In her face all the battles against the French and English for two centu
ries, the hit and hit and run and the intractable mountains that kept this island Carib until 1763; until settling to the west and east they crept into her face, too. In her face, now African, which people? Ga? Ashanti? Ibo? Washed in, wept in, with all the waters of the hundreds of rivers and rivulets. I swam some of those rivers — sluggish Cribiche, the crackling fresh Sarisari, the swelling magnificent Layou, the river Claire, the river Crapaud, Taberi, Mulaitre, Ouayaperi — I tried to swim them all, all 365, and say them all over and over — River Jack, Rivière Blanche, Canari, River Douce, Malabuka, Perdu Temps. And all this Dahomey in her face that would name the valley to the southwest the Valley of Desolation.
Well I left them in the road of the Carib territory, waving, and the van moved on, chewing up still-rugged highway over to Mahaut and Massacre. “Massacre,” Rochester says in Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea, “And who was massacred here? Slaves?” “Oh no,” Antoinette answers, foreshadowing her own erasure in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, “Not slaves. Something must have happened a long time ago. Nobody remembers now.” When Rochester arrived in Massacre it was raining, “… huge drops sounded like hail on the leaves of the tree, and the sea crept stealthily forwards and backwards.” He had feared that it might be the end of the world. When I arrived in Massacre it was gleaming, the sky a glittering blue and the road, which was sea and road at once, was full of people. The rum shop was busy and someone in the van said, “These Massacre people are always on the street, day or night. This town is always lit up.” The town had a certain feeling of careening, all bare feet and flowered dresses, all old men with sticks and young ones with soccer balls, all hips held to laugh and children playing fiercely. Rhys would have longed for it even more than she longed for it in Voyage in the Dark.
The next morning I wake up in Roseau, the sunlight pouring through the jalousie and something else, the sound of Roseau, nothing sweeter than children going to school, sun burning their lips in laughter and their own schemes, nothing sweeter in the morning than Roseau women singing in patois, “ça qa fait na?” and answering, “Moi la!” How are you? I’m there! I’m there. I’ve lain in rooms in cities listening before, but this Roseau is the sweetest sounding. You can’t tell the difference between laughing and quarrelling. So I’m there and I wait until the morning sound turns to mid-morning and then the silence of noon and then it starts all over again and then, like and unlike Calibishie, because Roseau is a city, night’s intimacy passes over the buildings and streets and commerce and over the water again.
Maps
Every light which falls on opaque bodies between equal angles produces the first degree of brightness and that will be darker which receives it by less equal angles, and the light and shade both function by pyramids.
From Leonardo da Vinci’s notes
on light and shadow, circa 1492
Armour
I am always in the armour of my car in these small northern Ontario towns. They are unremittingly the same. There is a supermarket, a liquor store, a video store where there is also milk, bubble gum, and Coca-Cola, and inevitably a pickup truck parked in a lot. There is sometimes a garage with a greasy man or two and a harassed guard dog or an old dog suffering from hip dysplasia. The small town to which I drive every morning and which I never become so familiar with as not to think of my car as my armour, my town is the same as the rest. And yes, there is also a cemetery and a church, two churches for a population that can hardly divide into two. The garage in this town has a mechanic who hates to talk. He keeps a dog tied up on a filthy mattress inside the garage. One day I see this dog who has also been cultivated for fierceness and I want to let him go, even if he will bite me. The mechanic who is also the gas attendant is a middle-aged man. He has been burned by wind and snow and gas fumes. His face is scaled red with white patches. His mouth is a tight thin wire. His jeans have grown small, but he hasn’t disowned them. Sometimes I am not sure if he will sell me gas. Sometimes I am not sure if the corner store will rent me a video. Money is not always the currency here. Nor books, which I could offer. There might be no way of exchanging even the things that strangers might exchange. Here I feel that I do not share the same consciousness. There is some other rhythm these people grew up in, speech and gait and probably sensibility.
There are ways of constructing the world — that is, of putting it together each morning, what it should look like piece by piece — and I don’t feel that I share this with the people in my small town. Each morning I think we wake up and open our eyes and set the particles of forms together — we make solidity with our eyes and with the matter in our brains. How a room looks, how a leg looks, how a clock looks. How a thread, how a speck of sand. We collect each molecule, summing them up into flesh or leaf or water or air. Before that everything is liquid, ubiquitous and mute. We accumulate information over our lives which bring various things into solidity, into view. What I am afraid of is that waking up in another room, minutes away by car, the mechanic walks up and takes my face for a target, my arm for something to bite, my car for a bear. He cannot see me when I come into the gas station; he sees something else and he might say, “No gas,” or he might simply grunt and leave me there. As if I do not exist, as if I am not at the gas station at all. Or as if something he cannot understand has arrived — as if something he despises has arrived. A thing he does not recognize. Some days when I go to the gas station, I have not put him together either. His face is a mobile mass, I cannot make out his eyes, his hair is straw, dried grass stumbling toward me. Out the window now behind him the scrub pine on the other side of the road, leaves gone, or what I call leaves, the sun white against a wash of grey sky, he is streaking toward me like a cloud. Frayed with air. The cloud of him arrives, hovers at the window. I read his face coming apart with something — a word I think. I ask for gas; I cannot know what his response is. I pass money out the window. I assume we have got the gist of each other and I drive away from the constant uncertainty of encounters. I drive through the possibility of losing solidity at any moment.
Maps
The early Romans drew maps based solely on itineraries, not attesting to science or geographic study. Simply maps of where they were going. So that a map looked like a graph of horizontal lines of roads heading to a destination.
Pinery Road and Concession 11
The water pump chortles and the car stops abruptly. I am in a great field of snow at Pinery Road and Concession 11. In the summer here the trees form a cathedral over the road. Today they are frostbitten, their summer communion broken, their branches brittle.
The car stops. I try several times to turn the engine over, but nothing. It is three kilometres back to town where there is a post office at which perhaps the librarian who is also the post mistress might allow me to use the phone. I have been living out here in the bush for two years now. This place fills me with a sense of dread but also mystery. I fear the people more than the elements, which are themselves brutal. Winters here are harsh and long. I spend mornings getting the house warm. The house is still six kilometres away from Pinery Road and Concession 11 where my car has stalled.
I have inherited this fear of people from my grandmother. She never went outside the house except on the rare occasion when some bureaucratic necessity, some official order, warranted it. She was a fearful woman, a private woman. To ask a neighbour for anything, which straightened circumstances necessitated, caused my grandmother much anxiety and shame. She would have the family wait until the last possible resistance gave way before sending a carefully worded message to a neighbour for help. I am the same way. I sit and panic and wait and wait until the last moment before calling for mercy. Then I compose my plea, then I agonize about the composition — is it too brief, is it too long, is it overweening, is it too dignified to warrant sympathy? When I am sure, deciding most times on brevity, I approach the telephone three or four times. Sometimes this last process takes a whole day, sometimes two. I wait again to see if I cannot do without what I need. Does it really m
atter? Can I not find it another way? Is asking for help really the only thing I can do?
So I sit in the car at Pinery Road and Concession 11 wondering how I can get the car to move without going for help. Help exposes you to people’s disdain was how my grandmother saw it. In this way my grandmother assumed nothing of anyone, nothing good, perhaps; she only assumed her own acts. What will the librarian say when I walk into town and ask her for the favour of using the phone? What foolish act of mine caused me to have to ask? I contemplate leaving the car there in the middle of the road and walking deliberately into the snow and the forest.
All around me is forest, except to one side there is an open field where cows graze in the summer. There are few houses along the three kilometres to my house — lone buildings on acres of forbidding forest. In the winter they are for the most part empty. Like my grandmother, for me the outside is treacherous. This is country where people mind their own business; they are as cold and forbidding as the landscape. They live out here free of the city, they guard what they call their “property,” they eschew city life, they love country music’s lonesome and outlaw tenors. They are suspicious of strangers. I can only imagine nightmarishly what they think of me. I am grateful for their sense of privacy.