A Map to the Door of No Return

by Dionne Brand

  Marlene had not been at the office, nor at home on the other side of the building. I suspected that she might have been in town and that I would find her there. The woman from Cariacou and I got to Market Square. She had planned to go to the taxi stand at the centre of the square and seek transport to Gouave but it looked impossible. The streets running to it and Market Square itself were teeming with people. They had freed Maurice from house arrest and borne him down to the square and up to the fort. My head still ached but the sun had somehow squeezed the fever out of me, or perhaps it had risen beyond my being able to understand that I was ill. I was stunned, everything was out of control, there were thousands and thousands of people milling around, throngs were heading toward the fort, up the steep incline. I saw a man on the upper balcony of a store waving a flag and chanting in exhaustion that Maurice was free and that those who had arrested him should be killed. He was stripped and hoarse from screaming. His eyes met mine for a moment. I recognized him as one of the cadres in the party. I thought that he looked nervous for that moment. The thought ran across my mind that he was an outside provocateur, not really on any side here, perhaps an American agent. I passed into the crowd below him and headed with the woman from Cariacou toward the fort. I heard his hoarse voice trailing off. The atmosphere was ripe with possibilities.

  I cannot say how I felt that day except that everything, every minute, was a surprise. I was sure of nothing, though I was hopeful throughout. The way children who know nothing are hopeful always, unable to judge what the next moment will bring. And I gave up all thoughts, all of my movements, to this hope. So I walked up to the fort. I was inside and outside of whatever was going on and so I observed the provocateur on the balcony at the same time that I took my hopes with me up to the fort like everyone else. I moved not with any deliberateness or purpose or foresight. I was less determined than the crowds of people.

  The fort hill was an area smaller than half a soccer field. There were, as I recall, two or three buildings there, an army barrack, a main building, and some other structure. I cannot say that for certain. That morning was a daze with my fever and the masses of people and the air so full, so full of danger and expectation. The buildings were a blur. But I saw everyone who would die later that day. I remember them. Jackie was in yellow, she had a cigarette in her hand, she was fiery, waving the cigarette about and talking decisively; Vincent was next to her, I think his jersey was blue, he was punching the air with his hands as he spoke; Maurice was inside the darkened doorway. Reaching the top of the fort hill, the woman from Cariacou and I found a spot on the cliffside. The cliff dropped through jagged rocks into a road. We stood there waiting for Maurice to speak. The crowd was celebratory. I recall smiling, laughing with the woman from Cariacou.

  It is possible to laugh in moments which turn out to be terrifying and tragic. You do not know that it is going to be so, you are living in the present, in each second, and so there was laughter in the crowd. Something good had happened: Maurice had been freed and the tension of the last three days had ended in celebration. We were joking and laughing, thinking that all was put to right again and perhaps we would walk down from this hill, drink a rum and Coke, and go to sleep again. You do not know that someone who is wearing yellow and smoking a cigarette and someone who is dressed perhaps in blue and is a man of laughter and someone else standing in a doorway not six feet away from you will be killed one hour from now. The three people you are looking at are three strides away from you; you can call to them. They will be murdered in an hour; their bodies will be dragged behind this same fort and never recovered. Perhaps they will be dumped in the ocean or perhaps buried in a quarry; the yellow shirt and the blue shirt will be soaked in their blood. The shadow which is Maurice in the doorway will call to Jackie who is in yellow to come with him as they are dragged away. A soldier will call her a bitch; another will put the butt of his rifle in Maurice’s face. You cannot know all this looking from your footing on the gravelled portion of the hill, then looking toward the building where they are still alive.

  Two cars came up the hill, stopped, and a few men jumped out. They opened the trunk and took out four or five AK-47s. My friend, the woman from Cariacou, tugged at my arm and said, “Let’s go!” Her face was stricken. I continued laughing. To soothe her I said to her, “Oh no, no, don’t worry, it’s over, nothing will happen. It’s only guns.” She tugged on my arm again, insistent, saying, “No, let’s go now!” I don’t know what made me listen to her. I hadn’t known her that long. I just wanted to make her happy, to accompany her. I finally said all right, still laughing as if accommodating a child. We made our way through the crowd, I reluctantly, she pushing her way through quickly. I tried to slow her again, saying it was all right, that nothing more would happen. “Why would it?” I asked. She said, “You don’t know.” I didn’t but I thought that I did. I thought that I knew more than she. The truth is I knew nothing at all that day. My head was in a fever, though my fever was forgotten by then, but even without it I did not know the thing that she knew, which she was trying to tell me. She could read the signs of her compatriots better than I. She knew where she lived. I lived like a poet lives, in a dream, in a wonderful dream which is always awakening to the hard things about life and then diving into the dream again for rescue. And that day I had a fever to compound it. But like a poet I left with her, just to console her. We walked down the hill and I said to her again, “Nothing else can happen. Look, if it does it’s suicide, right? No, no, it’s over.” She said, “You wait and see.” Market Square was still packed but more and more people were drifting toward the fort. She still could not find transport to Goauve. She decided to go to a friend’s. We walked around Archibald Street. We parted near the fire station. I said I’d see her at work the next day if things were settled. It was the last time I saw her. I never thanked her for saving my life.

  I thought about returning to the fort when I left the woman from Cariacou. As if I should go back now that I had seen her off, but then I thought that I should go to work to find Marlene and tell her what I had seen, so I went to the office. I had the keys, and the keys to Marlene’s house. I climbed the steep hill from the fire station and up the track to the house. I went to the kitchen, got a glass of cold water from the refrigerator, and walked out onto the balcony which looked out to the fort. I saw the crowd there in the place where I was standing not five minutes ago. I raised the glass of water to my lips. I saw three armoured vehicles racing toward the fort. They were heavy, swift, and determined. Their motors were loud. I saw the top of them dip out of sight for a second at the fort road and then emerge on the hill. I heard the sound of gunfire. It was staccato but guttural. The crowd where I had been standing began running in all directions. I saw people leap from the cliff and bump raggedly down its side. There was nowhere to run. People threw their bodies down the cliff trying to get away. I could not hold the glass, the water spilling was like hard stones. I did not feel as if I was in my body. They looked like rags of cloth spilling over the cliff, tumbling. Some looked as if they expected to walk on air. The air dropped from my own body, there were a thousand bright stab wounds in my skin. Just then Marlene came in, breathless; she had been in Market Square. She had seen the armoured tanks go by her on the road. I tried to tell her about the cliff, people jumping off the cliff, I was just there, but I only recall pointing and the feeling that something had just passed close to my ear, softly buzzing.

  We stood on the balcony, she and I, looking to the fort and the bodies collapsed on the cliff. I think I told her I was sorry about the glass that lay broken at our feet. More gunfire and then a flare went up in the sky. A white light which was almost imperceptible if not for the smoke trailing after it and the hard voop sound it made. It was a signal that someone was dragging Maurice and Jackie and Vincent to their deaths at that moment. What happens if you stand in a moment like this? Your own body must die, too, I suppose. Even if you do not know. Aren’t we all implicated in each other? In any m
oment like this we must die, too. I was that body draping the cliff. I left myself on the cliff and I stood on the balcony with Marlene spilling a glass of water forever.

  The curfew began. We were allowed to get food in the daytime until 6 p.m. Then we had to stay inside. The streets were quiet. Not even a dog walked by. The radio warned us about violating the curfew. When we did get out there were lines at the supermarket and more silence. Everyone looked as if they were alone, as if they did not know the person they lived with or the person who lived next door. We bought rum and sugar and rice and milk and split peas. We did everything in a stiff hurry, as if the day threatened to pass quicker than it usually did. As if the night was bearing down on us. At night the waiting for daylight again was interminable. The baby next door was quiet, as if he knew it was important to be still.

  The thought that I should have died on the cliff covered me like a cloak. In my dreams I lay on the cliff, cut up, my limbs in disarray, the rocks breaking through, pebbles in my mouth. In my dreams I had stayed at the fort for five more minutes. I had convinced the woman from Cariacou to wait with me. We had been killed. When I awoke from these dreams I was not certain which was the dream and which was the real day.

  It was a small place. Everyone knew everyone else. So everyone knew someone who had been killed. People listened to the radio with a personal pain, with thoughts of retaliation, with stony hearts or with a wound. The radio’s attempts to sound distant and authoritative only rankled. The announcements themselves slipped into childish whinings of justifications for the killings. Once, I saw a fight between two brothers, grown men with the ability to kill each other. The fight was so physical, so fleshy, so reductive, as if abandoning any intellect, tearing their own skins off. These days reminded me of this. Finally it was personal.

  The curfew lasted for three days and then there were battleships out in the ocean. Someone outside can never tell you how stupid war is, how insensible or how heartless. It is always much more so for you. You know full well because you are hopeless. Your body cracks to each sound of gunfire. You genuflect to each bombing attack of F15s. By the time it’s over you are brittle, your teeth feel like crushed stones, you are skeletal, you have a single wire of electricity running up your back over which you have no control. That is only the corporeal. You had come here for some purpose. Small, certainly; foolish, certainly. It’s still hard to say what it was now without someone sneering at it as if it is childish and impossible. I wanted to be free. I wanted to feel as if history was not destiny. I wanted some relief from the enclosure of the Door of No Return. That’s all. But no, it had hit me in the chest and all the wind was gone out of me. It was all I could do to hold on to my mind, that is, to know the orderly passing of minutes and the idea that the sun comes up and it’s daylight, it goes down and night comes. But of course nothing is the same. You climb into a car taking you to a U.S. army base on the island. You look at your hands and you look at your feet and you don’t recognize them and you wait for what more is to be done to you. You find yourself at another base in another coming night waiting for an airplane to lift you out. But there is no you.

  The fever I had on the first morning of the crisis seemed to last for years. As in a fever, you do not always know where you are. And then again, you know precisely and dreadfully where you are. A fever makes you acutely sensitive — to light, to shadow, to the unsubstantial, to chimera. You feel everything. Things happening miles away, things yet to happen at distances. Your ears hurt with sound.

  Marlene and I are sitting now in a café on the Danforth. It is fifteen years later. She had since gone back and had been arrested by the Americans. Then she had gone to Africa to work again. This is a woman from whom I learned all I know. There is a question I need to ask her. It is hard to ask her. Perhaps she’ll be disappointed in my lack of faith. But I have finally figured out this question and I am finally not ashamed or embarrassed to ask her. I haven’t seen her in a long time. She is ill, her left shoulder is slightly immobile. We are drinking cappuccinos and I ask her, “Marlene, did we, did you go crazy after? Did you have trouble with life?” “Yes,” she says.

  Maps

  Îles cicatrices des eaux

  Îles evidence de blessures

  Îles miettes

  Îles informes

  Îles mauvais papier déchire sur les eaux

  Aimé Césaire, from Cahier d’un Retour au Pays Natal

  Soufrière, St. Lucia

  A friend of mine told me a story. He is on a bus in Colombo. The kind of bus you never find in the city where we live or in any city in North America. The Colombo bus is packed, literally, and speeding to its destination. My friend and another man are hanging on to the pole at the open door. The bus in fact does not have a door. The bus is so crowded they are barely in the bus. My friend looks up the pole to where it is held tenuously to the bus’s ceiling. He sees a single screw there holding the pole. He says to the man who he is sharing the pole with as the bus flies through the city, “You realize that our lives depend on that one little screw?” As if my friend has intruded on him, the man says to him in exasperation, “So what!?” My friend cannot fathom this response. He is angry with the man for pointing out the inevitability of death in our fragile existence. The man refuses his companionship and his grim camaraderie. So what.

  One morning, walking the road by the jetty in Soufrière, leaving the market behind, its stalls scant on a weekday, the Pitons on the right, brown as dry season, the ocean white like the afternoon sun, I stop and say a chorus of Yemaya’s song. I’ve walked here to do that, to bow down to the vast ocean and contemplate my smallness and its majesty and to simply acknowledge it by repeating a chorus I heard in a song by Celia Cruz. The ocean and the planet it weeps around, these are the only powers I truly respect. Over my shoulder is the steep hill to Anse Chastenet — women and men walk up the hill or catch a ride to their jobs in the opulent hotel cradled in its bay. I am at the jetty facing the small hill before Jalousie. This small hill is a severe contrast to the richness of Anse Chastenet. The shacks of the poor are crushed up against each other on this side. The town has levels of poverty. Poverty is not uncommon or remarkable anywhere on these islands. It is ordinary and there is an ebb and flow to it. There is an occasional easement from good luck or paydays or steady work or family in the country who send ground provisions or fish or wild meat. My own childhood was spent in one such town on another island in much the same way. Everyone around was relatively poor, poor being a kind of standard. But every now and then in such a town, such a country, there is a road like this one going to Jalousie — sometimes it is on a hillside facing a new highway, sometimes it is on the edge of a city — where the houses are crushed shacks of spare galvanized iron and reused wood and where the regular common privation is exaggerated and where, as if to be wicked, just in front of its face there is a casual opulence.

  This morning, the sun not quite risen, I have awakened to go to the jetty to reason with Yemaya, the goddess of the ocean, to entreat her to help me with a certain problem — to make my life better, to send some worry away. I walk down to the jetty only three minutes away from the place I have rented. There is a hulk of an old ship there. There are boats tied up. I make my ablutions, dipping my hands into the water and signing to Yemaya. I am not religious, but this I do each time I am at the ocean. It is impossible for me not to be overwhelmed by it, not to pay respect. I never turn my back on it. I wet my forehead, throw handfuls of water into the air and back into the sea. Then I back away over the concrete breaker onto the asphalted roadway, praising Yemaya and asking for my favour. I complete my singing and I begin to walk toward Jalousie. The Pitons are to my right, those two wonderful mountains. Gros Piton and Petit Piton emerge from the ocean as if fresh every day. The mountains of which Walcott wrote, “Under the Pitons, the green/bay, dark as oil./Breasts of a woman, serenely rising.”

  There is a small hill past the market, past the jetty and the post office and the tourist board,
and there to the left, the crushed shacks. The road edges into a cliff, a woman emerges from one of the shacks with a po covered by a piece of cardboard. She crosses the road toward the cliff, the ocean calm below. She flings the contents of the po over the side of the cliff, making sure that the po is empty, then crosses again to where she lives. Among these shacks, there is no running water, no electricity — no amenities. The woman is wearing a slip, her head is tied in white. She vanishes without noticing me. I continue up the hill and as I arrive at the place where she has emptied the po, there is the tremendous stench of human feces. The entire hillside cliff leading down to the ocean is covered in feces. The smell is overpowering and follows me as I try to escape it up the hill. My throat gags, my stomach heaves as I begin to run up the hill to get past the stench, trying to make my way to Jalousie. It is a long walk reaching Jalousie along the steep curve of the hill past villas and down into the bay. I come to the sea again and Yemaya. I do the same ablutions. I thank whoever her sister and brother gods are that it is not me on that hill in a slip and a head tie, but I cannot be so pitiless. I ask Yemaya why, what is it that we must live like that? She answers like a man hanging onto a pole in a bus in Colombo: “So what.”