by Dionne Brand
The second book I recall, as one only recalls significance — and recollection is happenstance; things leave sufficient impression to break the surface of thousands of thoughts and experiences — the second book I recall is D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover. This book began as a rumour at twelve or thirteen, a rumour in a girls’ high school about a forbidden book. Forbidden because there were “good” parts about explicit sex. When we got hold of the book it was all we could do to keep it secret from the teachers. So amazing and unvarnished were its descriptions that our own language became secretive, even unspoken. I have not read it since. The truth is, I do not remember the book at all. I remember only a gardener (gamekeeper, gatekeeper?), a lady, a kind of anxiety, a kind of exquisite agony I looked forward to having some day. The book had a red cover. It was poured over and crushed. The pages with the good stuff were creased. I remember reading quickly. I remember, too, a feeling of being older, of having read it. Worldly. As if I had been let into another skin, a woman’s, a man’s. And also, another country’s. But I also felt burdened, as if I knew some thing that I should not. Some thing that had changed me into the girl who had read Lady Chatterley’s Lover, different from the girl who had not read it a moment ago. And I don’t think that I read it all. So ravishing were the book’s contents that I think each of us only had the chance to read certain paragraphs, hastily. Perhaps different paragraphs, perhaps different stresses for the words of particular sentences. We read quickly, looking up after every line to see if we were in danger of being found out. Our eyes probably landed on completely different places on the page when we looked back. We could not betray each other, or we would lose the possibility of ever knowing the good parts. We only had the one copy. We covered it in brown paper, I think, as my grandmother had covered the avocados, to ripen. We rationed it, keeping only so many paragraphs apiece, so many lines. I read holding my breath, the narrative interpolated into the humid air of a going-home-after-school afternoon. A not-watching-where-you-are-going stumbling, perhaps falling afternoon.
I like to think of us now, eight or so women then girls, each in a different part of the world, each in possession of a different paragraph of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, a different line now perhaps interrupted, intercut by how we chose to live our lives, how we chose to interpret Lawrence.
I do not know among us who identified with the lady and who with the gamekeeper. The book’s gendering could not have been seamless. No book’s gendering can be, ultimately, since a book asks us to embody, which at once takes us across borders of all kinds. Or does it dispel borders altogether? Anyway, some of us were him and some of us were her. She seemed light, limnal; he seemed dark, brooding consciousness. This paradigm of the canon was a conflict for us. We were she and he — female, and darkly brooding, becoming the consciousness of the book. Both the possibilities and the constraints of enactment existed within the borderless territory of the book. We were beckoned by some familiarity with her in us, we were willing, eager, to be her. Yet at the same moment of reading her we saw in ourselves the “not-her.” She was an ideal of a society which stood in powerful relation to ours. The conversation going on in the book was one about culture, class, technology, and sexuality. It was the same conversation going on in our lives and it was the same conversation going on between the place where the book lived and the place where we lived. This conflict was not fully charged in us yet, or at least it operated as a doubleness. So we wanted to be her, we wanted to be them, we wanted to be there. Yet we recognized the cleavage, the primitive in his cottage at the bottom of the garden, modernity attracted and repelled by him. We were him. We, on an island at the bottom of the New World, we too were representations of the primitive.
The book had begun outside of the book in the rumour. We had begun outside of the book also, the colonial consciousness, the female consciousness. And the curious. When we entered the book, entering for the purposes of identifying and enacting, we were flung apart. We disintegrated, we abstracted. We emerged having reconstructed the novel into a more complex, more fluid sense of desire.
These two books gave me a refractory hunger. Their register and compass led me to all other books.
My uncle let me keep The Black Napoleon. It became my book. I do not recall sharing it with my sisters or my cousins or my friends. That time I tried to run away from home at fourteen I tied a belt around it along with the rest of my books, going I don’t know where. No clothes, no shoes, just books and three dollars. I could not take Lady Chatterley’s Lover; I did not have it all. I only had a few lines shared with a few girls.
Books leave gestures in the body; a certain way of moving, of turning, a certain closing of the eyes, a way of leaving, hesitations. Books leave certain sounds, a certain pacing; mostly they leave the elusive, which is all the story. They leave much more than the words. Words can be thrown together. It is their order and when they catch you — their time. These first two books shaped me. And I suspect that I have been writing these two books ever since, recalling and reimagining them. I had been seduced by them. The fact is, I remember them only in my body. I cannot quote a single line from them, and I have not ever felt the need to return to them physically, though I know that I always return to them as I write. The emotions they spoke of were perhaps contradictory to what one might simplistically call desire. But desire is disclosed as a complex. There is a range of experience within the space which is called desire. Toussaint and Dessalines embodied faith and ferocity, different constructs which amplified my sense of desire. The lady and the gamekeeper embodied dissonances of the physical body, the racial body and the gendered body. The canonical locations of light and dark, male, female, master, slave were broken or interrupted in both books. Desire’s province widened to the flying pieces, their occasional collection into a movement or a colour or a sigh, ever shifting, ever reimagined.
Writing is an act of desire, as is reading. Why does someone enclose a set of apprehensions within a book? Why does someone else open that book if not because of the act of wanting to be wanted, to be understood, to be seen, to be loved?
And desire is also an act of reading, of translation. The poet Joy Harjo writes, “Nearly everyone had left that bar in the middle of winter except the/ hardcore. It was the coldest night of the year, every place shut down, but/ not us. Of course we noticed when she came in. We were Indian ruins. She/ was the end of beauty.”
Desire, too, is the discovery of beauty as miraculous. Desire in the face of ruin. How in these lines there is such wreckage and that too is beauty, how in those lines there is such clear-eyed dread, such deeply mocking knowledge, and that too is desire. How those lines read beauty and desire into any given night, in any place, trailer park wasteland, rural rum shop, shebeen, sports bar, speakeasy, piss-and-beer-reeking dive, beauty walks in. On any given night, even with history against you in any hardscrabble place, beauty walks in. The ruin of history visited on a people does not wipe out the steadfastness of beauty. Not a naive beauty but a hard one. Beauty, it seems, is constantly made. It is both fortunate and unfortunate. Surprising.
For some, to find beauty is to search through ruins. For some of us beauty must be made over and over again out of the sometimes fragile, the sometimes dangerous. To write is to be involved in this act of translation, of succumbing or leaning into another body’s idiom. Some years ago a young man surely on his own way to ruin stepped into the street on a square in Amsterdam. The night just approaching, I watched him from a distance well into the night. His figure was in anguish and discomfort; it jangled; it wanted to be and not to be in the square. He was in a kind of despair I have never experienced and experienced then only through his drifting into the street. My despair is private, but his was public and private all at once. His drifting into the street, his slight hesitation — this was beauty. I saw that young man drop into the square like a drop of water into an ocean. That is, I saw his body, his back half-turned toward me, his right leg hovering before stepping off the curb.
My eyes followed his yellow-clad body — or it seemed to be yellow in that dark street. The square had a way of darkening with secrets, so the light was yellow, his figure was yellow. That was beauty, his anguish was beauty — his leg stopping, his face whipping round in search of someone, yet his disinterest somehow in people, the glaze to his eyes, yet their sharpness in seeking out the thing, the someone he was after — all was beauty. He was someone in his own gesture, the thing that writers envy. It is clever and cold, edgy, and it belonged to him. To desire then, to read and translate, may also be to envy, to want to become. What is it that I wanted to pour myself into — his grief, his cold sweat, his life uncertain of its next step? And I wanted to do it only for the moment it took to put it on a page, to feel its texture, and then to run back quickly to my uncomplicated hotel room and my as-yet-uncomplicated page. To desire may also be to complicate.
I want to say something else about desire. I really do not know what it is. I experience something which, sometimes, if I pull it apart, I cannot make reason of. The word seems to me to fall apart under the pull and drag of its commodified shapes, under the weight of our artifice and our conceit. It is sometimes impossible to tell what is real from what is manufactured. We live in a world filled with commodified images of desire. Desire clings to widgets, chairs, fridges, cars, perfumes, shoes, jackets, golf clubs, basketballs, telephones, water, soap powder, houses, neighbourhoods. Even god. It clings to an endless list of objects. It clings to the face of television sets and movie screens. It is glaciered in assigned objects, it is petrified in repetitive clichéd gestures. Their repetition is tedious, the look and sound of them tedious. We become the repetition despite our best efforts. We become numb. And though against the impressive strength of this I can’t hope to say all that desire might be, I wanted to talk about it not as it is sold to us but as one collects it, piece by piece, proceeding through a life. I wanted to say that life, if we are lucky, is a collection of aesthetic experiences as it is a collection of practical experiences, which may be one and the same sometimes, and which if we are lucky we make a sense of. Making sense may be what desire is. Or, putting the senses back together.
Maps
In 14th century Songhay books were sold for more money than other goods. At Jenne, gold, ivory, skins, pepper and rubber were exchanged for cloth, salt, glass beads, iron, copper and manuscripts.
Ezio Bassani, in Circa 1492
Museums
This novel begins in a museum. A small white museum which once housed eighteenth-century British colonial military. It is a small building with two floors, wooden and creaky. It has the smell of all colonial buildings, a yellow handwritten papery mustiness which reminds one of khaki breeches, white sea-island cotton shirts, endless reams of paper, carbon duplicates, and ink wells. It reminds one of interminable waiting. You arrive at the small white museum by climbing or driving up the steepest hill in the town. Up this hill was once a fort. Fort King George. Laid down around 1783, this fort was named for George III of England. You come past the once regiment buildings, and the once domed iron jailhouse which rests in one side of the hill. You imagine eighteenth- and nineteenth-century prisoners baking in this iron prison atop this highest of peaks in the town.
On the other side of the narrow road up the hill are flamboyant trees, ranging, graceful, and red. As you crest the hill, there is the ocean, the Atlantic, and there a fresh wide breeze relieving the deep flush of heat. From atop this hill you can see over the whole town. Huge black cannons overlook the ocean, the harbour, and the town’s perimeter. If you look right, if your eyes could round the point, you would see the Atlantic and the Caribbean in a wet blue embrace. If you come here at night you will surprise lovers, naked or clothing askew, groping hurriedly or dangerously languorous, draped against the black gleaming cannons of George III. At night it is cool and breezy here, and dark; in the daytime it is stark and chalk white and hot, except for the ever blue sky and the flame trees — at their torrid best in the dry season. This book begins in the small white stone museum to the left of the cannons. As you enter there is the sound of a ceiling fan, whirring somewhere in an office upstairs. A clerk asks you apologetically for five TT dollars and ushers you in. On the first floor are bones, shells, stones, small carvings, arrowheads, broken amulets of the first peoples who inhabited this island. It strikes me that on the first floor of all our consciousness, all our imaginations in the Americas, there are these particular bones, shells carvings, arrowheads, broken amulets of the first peoples who inhabited this New World. The legends on the glass cabinet seem unsure of dates, names; there is not enough money to investigate details, the curator says. To enhance the exhibit the curator has installed a carved boat from Guyana or Surinam, the kind these peoples must have used two or three thousand years ago to make the trip by water to this island from the South American continent. Already this novel is about forgetting. Several millennia have been consumed in the airless small room of this exhibit. This small wreckage of broken stones, bones, and carvings strewn in a glass case without classification or dating is what is left of millions of journeys, millions of songs, millions of daily acts, millions of memories that no one remembers.
On this hill with its wide sumptuous view of black glittering water at night, its blue forever in the daytime, this museum’s vain attempt at recollection is visited by few. Guilt makes me want to stop longer at the glass cabinet even though it is possible to see all there is here in a matter of minutes. Fear of disrespect to something quite old makes me linger but then sheepishly move on. Out of the corner of my eye I see a wicker sack where bitter cassava was drained of its poison; I see an arrow whose head might have been tarred with woorara. I make a note without even knowing why and I walk away.
Glancing away from the glass cabinet’s debris is looking away from history as well as being filled, uneasily, with history. Moving away is escaping it and this novel is escaping as well as succumbing. Edouard Glissant, the Martiniquan critic, says, “History is destined to be pleasure or distress … is capable of quarrying deep within us, as a consciousness or the emergence of a consciousness, as a neurosis and a contraction of the self.” This novel begins as I move to the staircase to the second floor. The staircase creaks before my weight has time to rest on it, it creaks from the thought of another body weighing it down, inquiring. The feeling that I carry from the glass cabinet to the stairs is already in the novel — discomfort. This novel will not breath on those bones; if it does it will be brief like the brief rain the Caribs disappear into on this work’s second page, it will be brief and therefore mythic. Those bones warn me that everything after I have made up, I have invented in absence.
Moving up the staircase to the next rooms of the museum where this novel begins, I am distressed, in Glissant’s sense, and also curious, which is pleasure. The rooms above contain maps, the works of eighteenth-century cartographers growing more and more skilled at forgetting as time passed, maps, ascertaining courses and distances, astronomic observations made on the land, latitudes taken at sea, soundings of banks and harbours and bays, bearings for ships. These cartographers, they were artists and poets. They were dreamers and imaginers as surely as I. On a Chart of The Antilles, or Charibbee, or, Caribs Islands with the Virgin Isles by Louis De La Rochette, drawn and published in 1784, there are angels, or cherubs, mouths pursed, blowing the trade winds west on the Atlantic. You must remember this is one point of the middle passage. People are to be lost here, drowned here; people are to be sold, backs and hearts broken; those cherubs, their sweet lips pursed, blow a rough trade. Only an artist could render an angel here. Wonderful wind roses adorn these maps, ships under full sail; cartouches of sovereigns, great explorers, and welcoming nubile natives.
Thomas Jefferys, geographer to the king, George III, writes, in a strangely elegant prose, his observations of this island with the small museum and the cabinet of bones:
The currents near Tobago are very strong and uncertain efpecially between this island and Tr
inidad. At the full and change of the moon the sea will rise four feet perpendicular. The North east trades blow all year round. The numerical figures denote e/y depth of water in fathoms where e/y anchors are exprefsed it is good anchorage Man-o-War Bay, Courland, Sandy Point and King’s Bay are for vessels of the largest size. Tyrrel’s Bay, Bloody Bay, Parlatuviers Bay at Englishman’s Bay, Castara Bay and La Guira’s Bay have safe anchorage for vefsels of 150 tuns or under. Halifax Bay is very safe and snug for ships under 250 Tuns but there is a shoal in e/y middle of e/y entrance that makes a Pilot necessary. If you make Tobago toward evening and are afraid of running in with it you must not by any means lay to but fstand to e/y southward under an easy sail otherwise e/y current which always sets to e/y North west or north east will probably occasion your lofsing sight of the island and if it set north west would perhaps carry you so far to e/y leeward that you should not be able to fetch it again. Vefsels sailing from e/y eastward for e/y south side of e/y island, must keep well to e/y southward, otherwise the current round Little Tobago which run always to e/y North west will sweep them away to e/y northwest. To the South west there is nothing to fear, till you come to Courland Bay but what shows itself, except Chesterfield rocks …
This novel begins most assuredly here in this sublime narrative. I am stunned as I read it with its lisping s’s, I am fascinated by its unintended irony, I am in love with its cadence; what movement in, “[Do] not by any means lay to but stand to under an easy sail.” I am envious the way it speaks so gently to its readers, so surely. Its authority in apprehending what others cannot apprehend, its command of the geography of the oceans — How wilting! How majestic! This gorgeous prose dissembles, it obstructs our view of its real directions, it alludes, it masks. But it points, it says, there, that is where you land the ships bringing slaves to this island. It says that it is possible to do this and still maintain gifts of erudition, or intelligence, even playfulness. Language is so wonderful, so deceitful. Which is why 230 years later I wrench it from his pen, I tear it from the wall of this museum, I cut it into pieces — one piece for the title of this novel, At the Full and Change of the Moon, and the rest I give to my Kamena, who escapes the slave plantation at Mon Chagrin in this novel and who in this novel is searching for Terre Bouillante, a maroonage; who is searching in this novel for a place he will never find. He must instead take Bola, the child of a woman named Marie Ursule, a woman who at the beginning of this novel is about to commit suicide; he must take this child Bola and care for her until she can make generations who will inhabit our century. He never finds what he is looking and longing for, it eludes him, it dissembles, all of his directions lead him nowhere. His observations are unearthly …