by Dionne Brand
Kamena’s unending and, as history will confirm, inevitably futile search for a homeland is the mirror of the book’s later generations — their dispersal, their scatterings to the extreme and remote corners of the world: Amsterdam, New York, Toronto. Their distraction and flights resound in him and back to him. It is their condition of being. This is what they give all cities; they inhabit temporariness, elsewhere — thinking of something they cannot remember but thinking furiously. The journey is the destination.
I use Jefferys’ observations not as he had, to show the way to slavery, but to sail my characters into the late twentieth century. The unholy paradox of it does not escape me, I cannot undo Jefferys’ words, which might look like simple directions to some; I cannot unhappen history and neither can my characters. When asked, as in Derek Walcott’s poem, “Where are your monuments, your battles, martyrs?/ Where your tribal memory?” my characters answer as in that poem, “Sirs,/ in that grey vault. The sea. The sea/ has locked them up.” My characters can only tear into pieces, both history and Jefferys’ observations, they can only deliberately misplace directions and misread observations. They can take north for south, west for east. Anywhere they live is remote. They can in the end impugn the whole theory of directions. They inhabit everywhere, mostly the metropoles of North America and Europe. Their lives take any direction at any moment.
In this museum are records, books, lists, names of the enslaved and their age, sex, and physical condition. This novel begins in the jumble of names I’ve read. I look down each list, I try to imagine someone writing these lists. Would they have written them down at the beginning of the crop, at the end of the crop, or would they have kept a running record? Would they have had a cup of tea before going to the job or would they have stopped in the middle, gone home to have an afternoon nap, and returned thinking what a nuisance paperwork was? Or would this someone have written these names quite happily, with flourish in the wrist, congratulating himself or herself on the good condition and quantity of their livestock. I cannot help wondering at the personal while reading these lists. What did May, girl, ten, sickly, look like? Or Alfred, man, twenty (?), good health? There are no ruins of slave houses on this island. Their lodgings were so poorly made, so transient, nothing is left of that. Perhaps that is all to the good. Forgetting is a crucial condition of living with any peace. But the records of what and how are in the living, in our habits, our tastes, our styles — a sweet tooth, a love of starchy foods, a sudden hatred of fields, a desire for big cities, an insistent need for loud colours, beautiful shoes, excesses of all kinds whether we can afford them or not.
I scour this museum to understand what is already written in this novel, what is already written in this novel writing itself. I scour many museums. In these museums are signs of exits from the Door of No Return. In another museum, on another island, I find an eighteenth-century prison dress once worn by a woman who was a slave. It is hanging on an iron mannequin in a dank room in the belly of another eighteenth-century fort. It is stiff, mildewed, and for one moment I wonder why, why have they kept this since there seems to be no reason in the assortment of items here, sugar boiling coppers of various sizes, saddles, ladles … Why this dress? A dour dress, as any prison dress might be in any century, doubtless, but a dress as if waiting for this novel to inhabit it, to give it life. Writers, I know, are egotistical sad beings but this dress was waiting for me, it was waiting for the fiction of my Marie Ursule to inhabit it. Looking at this dress I felt a chill, a determination which I could never have myself; I could not be that single-minded or have that much conviction or perhaps that much love to last several centuries to inhabit a novel. The memory of this dress arrives one night along with a memory of V.S. Naipaul’s The Loss of Eldorado: A History. In it he tells of a woman, Thisbe, who was a slave and the main suspect in a mass death by poisoning on a plantation. After being on trial for several months and tortured throughout, she was sentenced to death. Thisbe was “hanged, her body mutilated and burnt and her head spiked on a pole. At her hanging she was reported to have said, ‘This is but a drink of water to what I have already suffered.’ ” My character, named Marie Ursule, wakes up on the first morning of the novel heading for that dour mildewed prison dress and those words which Naipaul snatched from history and which I receive from him, gratefully. And the novel begins, “Marie Ursule woke up the morning, knowing what morning it was and that it might be her last.”
This novel begins in a memoir of Père Labat, a French priest who went to Martinique and the French colonies in the seventeenth century. There, in cheery recollections of his adventures and life among the colonists, I find two Ursuline nuns, Mère Marguerite de St-Joseph and Soeur de Clemy. They have a convent, two novices, a plantation, and nineteen slaves. They are very good businesswomen because, according to Père Labat, when they die without consecrating their novices into nuns, the Jesuit priests claim their estate. Père Labat’s sanguine account of all this, his own travels and business dealings, the ways of planters, the workings of capital machines, his fascination with and disdain for the rituals of the indigenous peoples, his enthusiasm for the whole matter of colonizing, makes you understand just how plain and ordinary this all was, how commonplace and regular — and not in the least bit extraordinary — brutality and exploitation are. And how god is tied up in it up to his neck. The nuns sparkle in Père Labat’s narrative even though he only deals with them briefly. I imagine them moving calmly and ghostly among the teeming crowds at the docks in Marseille in 1680 or so, their habits dragging on the ground, their barrels or bundles carried by the novices, making passage on the ship called Tranquille. They are going to the colonies to convert savages. When I meet them in Père Labat’s narrative I write them into ever. In the novel they are hundreds of years old. They hover over the work.
This novel flees from that century. It does all it can do to make distance between itself and those catastrophes — Marie Ursule, the nuns, the cartographers. It makes haste through the hurricane of 1875, when a boy is swept away from all his might-have-beens. Another boy goes off to the First World War only to find himself digging latrines. One woman has a sudden and great lust for the glint of gold things and fine cloth. The descendants of those early narratives cross to the mainland of South America, step back onto the archipelago time and again, unknown and known to each other, aware and unaware of their history. Some make their way by water and guile all the way to North America and Europe. That eighteenth-century cartographer’s theory of directions is unravelling in this novel. By the end of the twentieth century what the lines on Jefferys’ map have conspired to hold in has burst out. What he had not counted on was Marie Ursule, but Marie Ursule had counted on nothing, just whim, a decision to let her child Bola escape with Kamena. Counting on her own theory, the theory of nothing, she had opened up the world. In every city in the Old World are Marie Ursule’s New World wanderers real and chimeric.
Museums; museums are not only enclosures of and for the dead. They are also wide vistas and dark alleyways, car rides across the backs of cities and bodies wrapped in cold coats. This novel begins with the living in Dam Square, Amsterdam, 1992.
Truthfully, this novel begins because I have lost my luggage on my way to Amsterdam. In Glasgow I search and search for my suitcase until the plane to Amsterdam is about to leave. I board my flight to Schiphol feeling somewhat bereft. I have the clothes on my back. I am in Europe with only the clothes on my back but I have my passport and my money and thank goodness the volume of poetry I am to read from the following night. My most horrible nightmare will not come true. The nightmare where I am at a poetry reading and I discover that I have forgotten my book at home and I cannot remember a single line of my poetry. My luggage … to be without luggage. I wonder if this is how they felt in that other century, no familiar thing which would suggest that you decided to travel, you have a destination, a place where you will land and open your suitcase and put your things away and then go outside and see what is there. You
will be a traveller, you will look at your surroundings as a place to discover, you will decide what to eat, who to speak with, where to sleep. You will expect recognition and interest, even fellowship.
I land at Schiphol, Amsterdam, without my luggage. Unlike Jefferys. I have no compass. Nor do I have a dispensation from a king to map a shoreline or, in my case, a city. Anyway, it is 1992, and travel is now different though sometimes the same. I am a traveller but I do not travel to the New World (as travellers do today) to encounter a shaman who will take me to my inner soul, a shaman whom I will consume with the greed of a Coca-Cola drinker, a shaman who will disappoint me eventually and inevitably since in the grand narrative the outcome of such encounters must confirm the fallibility of the shaman’s magic and the infallibility of my Coca-Cola. I travel to the Old World to be … well … to be an exotic. I am not a traveller then; I am an exotic in the best of circumstances, an out-of-place nuisance in the worst. The mythology is already known, already in place, my travelogues will not be sent home to make maps for science and commerce. I cannot reflect, question, demonize, or assimilate the monuments of Europe. I have no centre which domesticates the periphery. I do not even have my own luggage. I do not know Amsterdam; I do not have a map. The ex-policeman concierge who told me that he had been to Canada to a police convention gestures in the direction of a flea market where I might find some second-hand clothes to wear. I should not be coy here, there is no prison dress waiting for me, only haunting me. It will take a day or two to get my luggage. It has apparently gone to New York. Following the ex-policeman’s directions I wander over to the flea market, buy a shirt, then wander about other streets looking for clothing stores.
I walk along the canal, getting lost, losing my bearings, until something else takes my eyes, a window. A woman is in the window, she is standing next to a table, she looks at ease. I say to myself, “Oh, of course there are Black people here, Curacao, Surinam, the Dutch West Indies.” I stare at her; she stares back until I feel that I am intruding. I miss my step like a gazing child. When I look up there is another window with another woman, then another, then another. It dawns on me slowly as history, “Oh!” How artless of me. Oh yes, it’s Amsterdam. I am struck by the fact that all the scenes in the windows are domestic. My character Maya stares at me impatiently, waiting for me to recognize her, then as if having no time with my innocence she goes about her business. This window and this woman, the one sitting so casually, find their way into the novel.
Eduardo Galeano writes in Walking Words, “I’m alone in a foreign city, and I don’t know anyone, nor do I understand the language. But suddenly someone shines in the middle of the crowd, shining suddenly like a word lost on the page or any patch of grass on the skin of the earth.” In Dam Square I spot my character Adrian. It is night; he is walking busily back and forth in a jerky walk. He is wiping sweat from his face with a distracted hand. His body is light and wind-bent though there is no wind. He gathers his coat up around his ears though it is summer. But he is cold from something missing in his veins. He is trembling. With my usual preciousness at first I do not catch the play for some minutes. Then he shines. That is Kamena’s boy, the boy lost to directions. Then I am sad on Dam Square. All the way here, all the way here to look so dry faced on Dam Square. I feel like sitting there, right there beneath the statue covered in pigeon waste, I feel like sitting there and crying, I feel bereft. I feel abandoned by Marie Ursule to city squares and windows and public places where I am on display and must make a display, like exotica. I feel marooned like Kamena. Marooned now in outposts and suburbs and street corners anywhere in the world. I am adrift, spilled out, with Adrian and Maya at the end of this century in any city all over the world with nothing as certain as Marie Ursule coming. We are all abandoned, all scattered in Marie Ursule’s hopelessness and her skill.
This novel doesn’t begin because of any of this. It begins because I am a writer. I like the way a word can bloom a whole other set of words, and I like the gesture of an arm on a street corner or in a church. I like the faint whiff of perfume, a hip-shotted walk, a trail of cloth, dappling light off a tree through a curtain at a window, strong coffee artichoke hearts and dry white wine. The novel begins because I am sitting in a two-storey pine house in the middle of winter in Burnt River drinking coffee, and a spider is figuring out how to catch the flies buzzing on the windowpane and by this time I have no other skill so I begin to write.
Maps
An oral ruttier is a long poem containing navigational instructions which sailors learned by heart and recited from memory. The poem contained the routes and tides, the stars and maybe the taste and flavour of the waters, the coolness, the saltiness; all for finding one’s way at sea. Perhaps, too, the reflection and texture of the sea bed, also the sight of birds, the direction of their flight. This and an instrument called a Kamal which measured the altitude of stars from the horizon.
Ruttier for the Marooned in the Diaspora
Marooned, tenantless, deserted. Desolation castaway, abandoned in the world. They was, is, wandered, wanders as spirits who dead cut, banished, seclude, refuse, shut the door, derelict, relinquished, apart. More words she has left them. Cast behind. From time to time they sit on someone’s bed or speak to someone in the ear and that is why someone steps out of rhythm; that is why someone drinks liquor or trips or shuts or opens a door out of nowhere. All unavailable to themselves, open to the world, cut in air. They disinherit answers. They owe, own nothing. They whisper every so often and hear their own music in churches, restaurants, hallways, all paths, between fingers and lips, between cars and precipices, and the weight of themselves in doorways, on the legs of true hipsters, guitars and bones for soup, veins.
And it doesn’t matter where in the world, this spirit is no citizen, no national, no one who is christened, no sex, this spirit is washed of all this lading, bag and baggage, jhaji bundle, georgie bindle, lock stock, knapsack, and barrel, and only holds its own weight which is nothing, which is memoryless and tough with remembrances, heavy with lightness, aching with grins. They wander as if they have no century, as if they can bound time, as if they can sit in a café in Brugge just as soon as smoke grass in Tucson, Arizona, and chew coca in the high Andes for coldness.
Pays for everything this one, hitchhikes, dies in car accidents, dresses in Hugo Boss and sings ballads in Catholic churches, underwater rum shops. This is a high-wire spirit laden with anchors coming in to land, devoluting heirlooms, parcels, movable of nips, cuts, open secrets of foundlings, babes, ignitions, strips of water, cupfuls of land, real estates of ocean floors and steaming asphalt streets, meat of trees and lemons, bites of Communion bread and chunks of sky, subdivisions of stories.
These spirits are tenants of nothing jointly, temporary inheritors of pages 276 and 277 of an old paleology. They sometimes hold a life like a meeting in a detention camp, like a settlement without a stone or stick, like dirty shelves, like a gag in the mouth. Their dry goods are all eaten up already and their hunger is tenacious. This spirit doubling and quadrupling, resuming, skipping stairs and breathing elevators is possessed with uncommunicated undone plots; consignments of compasses whose directions tilt, skid off known maps, details skitter off like crabs. This spirit abandoned by all mothers, fathers, all known progenitors, rents rooms that disappear in its slate stone wise faces. These people un-people, de-people until they jump overboard, hijack buildings and planes. They disinhabit unvisited walls. They unfriend friends in rye and beer and homemade wine and forties.
She undwells solitudes, liquors’ wildernesses. This drunk says anything, cast away in his foot ship, retired from the world. This whisperer, sprawler, mincer, deaconess, soldier is marooning, is hungering, is unknowing. This one in the suit is a litigant in another hearing gone in the world. This spirit inhaling cigarettes is a chain along a thousand glistening moss harbours and spends nights brooding and days brooding and afternoons watching the sea even at places with no harbours and no sea. This one is gone, cast
off and wandering wilfully. This is intention as well as throwaway. This is deliberate and left. Slipstream and sailing. Deluge. These wander anywhere, clipping shirt-tails and hems and buying shoes and vomiting. These shake with dispossession and bargain, then change their minds. They get trapped in houses one minute, just as anybody can, and the next they break doorways and sit in company mixing up the talk with crude honesty and lies. Whatever is offered or ceded is not the thing, not enough, cannot grant their easement, passports to unknowing everything.
This spirit’s only conveyance is each morning, breath, departures of any kind, tapers, sheets of anything, paper, cloth, rain, ice, spittle, glass. It likes blue and fireflies. Its face is limpid. It has the shakes, which is how it rests and rests cutting oval shells of borders with jagged smooth turns. It is an oyster leaving pearl. These spirits have lived in any given year following the disaster, in any given place. They have visited shutters and doors and thermal glass windows looking for themselves. They are a prism of endless shimmering colour. If you sit with them they burn and blister. They are bony with hope, muscular with grief possession.