What We All Long For

by Dionne Brand

  The World Cup is this year, and today it is raining. Korea is playing Italy in Japan. Up on St. Clair Avenue, in the Italian neighbourhood, they’re biting their nails over espressos and San Romano beer. Any minute now they hope to launch out into the street waving the tricolour and screaming Francesco Totti’s name. They’re prepared to wear black and go so far as to cut their wrists if the blues don’t win. In Korea Town on Bloor Street, the same, except their hopes are more modest, given that Korea’s team has gone farther than any in history and the Italians are formidable. When Ahn Jung-Hwan scored the golden goal, from St. Clair to the old Little Italy on College Street the Italians declared days of mourning. In Korea Town, where Binh has his store uncomfortably wedged between a grocery store and restaurant, red flags, red T-shirts, red headbands, “red devils” screams, have burst out of the bars and restaurants, honking cars full of people have suddenly jammed streets. Exquisite screams of exaltation can be heard. The Koreans have erupted in a street party too sweet to mean anything less than world domination. The rain is incessant, yet it doesn’t stop some; the sidewalks are crammed and tears are flowing so much it’s impossible to make out what’s falling from the skies and what’s falling from faces.

  Tuyen loved World Cup. She loved being in the middle of whirling people, people spinning on emotion. She’d been with her camera to every street party this June. To Little Italy, to the English pub, where the reactions are exuberant as a soccer riot in Manchester but contained within four walls; she stood outside of the German pub and was shy to take pictures; at the Brazilian cevejaria on College Street she danced the samba in between shots. Today she heard the honking horns heading up to Bloor Street, and she collected her gear and raced up Bathurst to Korea Town. As she left the apartment, she heard a television announcer say, “I didn’t know we had a Korea Town in the city.” Asshole, she thought, you wouldn’t. You fuckers live as if we don’t live here. She wasn’t Korean, of course, but World Cup made her feel that way. No Vietnamese team had made it, so today she was Korean.

  The fool on the television made her fly all the faster up the street. Tuyen began snapping photographs as soon as she hit the intersection. There was one of six or seven teenaged boys streaming a twenty-foot red flag; there was the rain beating down on a girl, her body outstretched through a car window. Tuyen found a vantage point on top of a parked car. The owners were so happy themselves, they didn’t mind. The traffic was backed up for blocks. Korean flags drenched with rain slapped about. Car horns made a rhythm, and the whole of Korea Town was lit up despite the downpour.

  Tuyen felt elated, infected by the mood on the street. It reminded her of a year ago, when she and Oku went to Quebec to demonstrate against globalization. Oku had joined the black anarchists. They were both always trying to find something tingling on the skin, something where their blood rushed to their heads and they felt alive. She had taken her camera and Oku his balaclava and thick gloves for throwing back tear-gas canisters. The night before, they had watched videos of Japanese demonstrators, impressed by the riot gear protesters in Tokyo had. “There,” Oku said, “they didn’t have this bullshit talk about peaceful demonstrations, they came out knowing there would be trouble.” Carla was nowhere around for this. She watched the protest on TV, disconnected and passionless. Tuyen had tried to persuade her to go with them, wanting to get her out of that stark apartment—a futon, a crate for a table, two stools, some bricks and board for her few books, her stereo, four plates, four cups, four spoons, four forks, four knives, a skillet and a pot, her clothes, a clock that ticked loudly, an old black-and-white television. She was going through an extra-antiseptic phase at the time. “Bullshit,” she said, when Tuyen asked her. But Oku got his foot sprained when an undercover dragged him into a van. He was one of the first ones to climb the fence. He made up the opening lines of poems, calling them out to the group he was with. He was enjoying himself, screaming poetry about the downfall of everything. He even enjoyed the arrest. Until his father almost blew an artery when he came home.

  He had borrowed his father’s broken-down car again. This time without telling him how long he would be or how far he was going. “He’s just going to have to understand that it’s service to the people, man, service to the people.” Tuyen was clicking away with her camera throughout the whole thing. She was going to use the photographs for an installation called Riot. She photographed the legs of the policemen on horseback as the horses skittered toward the crowd, planning to title it “Dance.” She may have lost Oku when she stopped to photograph the arc of a tear-gas canister, broken glass, and police shoes—she would call this photograph “Overkill.” Oku yelled to her for help, but she didn’t hear him; she saw him as she saw everything, as she imagined.

  Her eyes took in every human experience as an installation, her lids affecting the shuttering mechanism of a camera. It must have been a milky evening: the water was grey milk, the sky was stone grey, the boat was disappearing in a noisy rush, and Tuyen’s mother and father must have seen Quy like this—slowly, slowly moving away. Floating, floated away, in the China Sea without a trace. Her mother’s insomnia was caused by this sight. When she closed her eyes at night, she herself saw Quy floating away. So Tuyen kept clicking. She kept looking at what wasn’t being seen, as her brother must have been unseen, and her mother noticing too late, harried with irrational fear. Tuyen saw, heard first Oku’s voice unlike his voice, then saw, turning with her camera to click and click the declensions of Oku’s body being dragged to the van. The arm of the cop entwined with Oku’s flailing arms. She photographed this aggressive embrace, Oku falling to his knees, then pushed, pulled away by two friends, then the cops beating the friends back and shoving Oku into a white cube van with lines down the side. She called this “Tree Falling Against Van.”

  Months later, announcing Riot, an installation in her apartment, Tuyen mounted these photographs on the staircase coming up. Oku was very proud of them and brought people he’d met at the riot to see them. The photographs made Carla queasy. She told Tuyen and Oku that they were sick. She rushed up the staircase and into her apartment quickly each time she came in. The photographs, something about the motion in them, their sequence, reminded her faintly of the dream of her mother climbing onto a chair. As a concession Tuyen removed the photographs from the stairwell and hung them inside her apartment. She saw Carla’s flinching ascent on the flight of stairs, her left ear bent to her shoulder as if against the sound of the pictures, as she would have as a child. It was all Tuyen could do to restrain herself from taking a photograph—a way of caressing Carla.

  She loved June anyway. The fresh womanly sound of the word, and the way the month never disappointed in any year. The opening of summer. Today, music blared from cars and from the open doorways of dress shops, restaurants, cybercafés, and tea places. Tuyen was ecstatic. She spun around, her camera clicking off shots. She didn’t yet know how she would use them. Through the lens she saw a familiar face and stroked the button to open the aperture; she clicked twice, trying to remember who it was. Binh! She hadn’t expected to see him here, so the face of her own brother was familiar and unfamiliar to her. She was shocked and ashamed at the same time at not recognizing the sibling with whom she had so many recorded and unrecorded fights. Perhaps there was something in her misrecognition that told of those battles, how a brother was both a stranger and a loved one, more than a loved one, the same as you; and seeing his face outside of yourself, of the family, was to see him anew.

  Binh was grim-faced, talking to another man whose back was to Tuyen. It dawned on Tuyen that she was standing diagonally opposite Binh’s store, XS. He was using his hands to talk, pointing at the man as if telling him what to do. The man was tall and slight, his head angled as a boy being berated, dangling on the slim stem of his neck. Oddly, the man’s body itself was rigid, a hand reaching out to touch Binh, to hold his pointing finger. Tuyen’s lens caught this hand and the other reaching onto Binh’s right shoulder. The embrace was both sini
ster and affectionate. Binh broke into a smile, then spun the man around, his left arm taking the man’s right shoulder. Tuyen snapped this series of shots, her own shock translated into mechanical clicking of the shutter. Her camera almost slipped from her hand when she saw the man’s face.

  It was the face of a boy, a baby, innocent and expectant. There was something wrong about it. It didn’t go with the rest of his body—something she’d suspected when photographing his back. Binh clapped. Then they turned to watch the celebration in the street and Tuyen kept clicking her camera at them until the roll ended.

  Something stopped her from raising her hand to signal Binh—it was the ridiculous face of the man beside him, the feeling that she had just spied something intimate or secret. The revellers in the street kept moving along in throngs—she had almost forgotten them. A pool of light set itself on that little familiar-unfamiliar knot of her brother and a stranger, a friend, an associate, a partner. The rain continued falling; all of Korea Town was awash in joy.

  Tuyen climbed off the car and struggled along the sidewalk, heading home. She wanted to go home quickly to develop the photographs. She wanted to look again at her brother and the man. There was something there that she had to suss out, some intimate fact that she seemed to know but could not put her finger on. She cradled the camera from the rain.

  She gradually became aware of someone calling her.

  “Tuyen!”

  She heard her name above the traffic and car horns. An electric current ran down her neck. God, no, not her brother. She was so sure he hadn’t seen her. “Tuyen, hold up!” The voice was loud and excited. She walked faster, trying to think of where to hide the camera.

  “Tuyen!” The voice was closer and breathless. She swung around defensively.

  “Tuyen, isn’t this great? Shit, I’ve never seen anything like it. It’s fantastic.” It was Oku, his face streaming wet.

  Tuyen was so relieved she grabbed him hard, hugging him. Why, a minute ago she’d been so frightened. And frightened of what? Her brother? That was nonsense, she told herself now, but she looked furtively over Oku’s shoulder to the intersection.

  “Where the hell are you going?” She tried sounding nonchalant but heard her voice choked on the rain.

  “I’m meeting Carla for coffee. Come with me. We were gonna watch the party and then go to the bar—she’s on the corner. Come on. This is so fucking beautiful out here!”

  Tuyen was caught up again in the enthusiasm of the day. She hadn’t thought to check for Carla when she rushed out of her apartment—she’d assumed Carla was at work. She suddenly realized that she had been holding on so tightly to the camera that her fingers hurt. What had she been afraid of? She slipped the camera into the bag on her shoulder. Why hadn’t she done that before? Instead, she had carried it like some, some … yes, it came to her—Remedios Varo’s painting Solar Music, in which a figure is pulling a bow across rays of light; in the air small glass prisms break open, revealing scarlet birds. She had been carrying the camera like a delicate glass prism in which she had captured a stunning red bird.

  “Come on, come on, come on. Let’s go.”

  “All right, I’m coming, I’m coming.” She plunged after Oku back into the throng at Bathurst and Bloor. They found the usually subdued Carla waving a Korean flag and singing, “Oh, Pil-seung Korea.”

  When they made their way to Cyber’s, a bar on Bloor Street, a half an hour later, Tuyen had put the disturbing thoughts of her brother aside.

  “God, I love this place. The joint is fucked up today.”

  “Yes, and I’m wet like a mother.”

  “Here, use my scarf.” Tuyen pulled a bandanna from her bag and wrapped it around Carla. The camera tumbled around inside. They ordered a jug of draft, three shots of tequila, and French fries, each hopeful that one of them had money to pay. Carla usually paid. She was the one with the steadiest job.

  “Word,” Oku started. It was a game they played whenever they went to a bar. Someone would say “word,” and each of them would have to riff on some subject.

  “Let me get my drink down first.” Carla threw back the shot and chased it with the draft.

  “Stall. You go, Tuyen.”

  “No, you go, I’m cold still.”

  “Lame. I’ll start.” They both did this to Oku each time. He loved this. He was bursting with it today. “Okay, this city better be ready, this shit is coming down, check it. Days like this are a warning. A promise. I heard one Korean guy say just now this was the happiest day he’d ever had in this city. Now why is that? See this place, some world shit is coming down and some of us are ready and some not. Now why would he say that today? See, some might see that as pitiful. And it is. But, man, I think it’s visionary. That guy just saw possibility. This shit is going to get more fucked up after this June. I like it when shit is all messed up like this. So here it is—millennium, man, the millennium is come and gone. And if not, if not for this sweet gasoline of time and our great beauty, they’d be drowning in this quick rain; if not. If not for my hand in Jackie’s, my throat singing this hymn to the boy visionary in the street in the red rain, this city would burn us all.”

  “Word! Word!” Tuyen and Carla acknowledged him, laughing.

  “Your turn,” Carla said pointing at Tuyen.

  “Okay, okay. I’m not good as him, but here goes. Madonna, Madonna, repeating, repeating that brutalized beaten-up Marilyn Monroe. White folks’ culture is just repetition of some old hackneyed images. Jesus, I’m sick of Madonna. I can’t understand how she can stand walking around in that body. It’s the dried-out pupa sack of Marilyn Monroe. Every generation of Americans gets to fuck over Marilyn Monroe all over again. They get to batter her, jerk off over her, and kill her. The main scary thing about that image is it all depends on bleach, the hair is bleached, the skin is bleached, the body is bleached. They get to corrode her in public. The eyes do damage to her body. I’m tired of them killing Marilyn Monroe over and over again and saying it’s sexy.”

  “Word! Word!” Carla and Oku said together.

  “And Eminem is only Elvis Presley, another repetition. Like I have to say more?” Tuyen warmed.

  “Hey, no, Tuyen, Eminem’s my boy, he’s for real.”

  “Sure, kill women, kill the homos. That’s for real. What’s that make him? A homeboy?”

  “Word!” Carla chimed.

  “See, Elvis was for real once too,” Oku explained “Poor boy, like Eminem, but the system only knows how to co-opt so they even co-opted his poor ass in the white supremacist shit.”

  “Well, what do you think’s happened to Eminem? And don’t think for a minute that you’re trumping me with that. It’s still kill women, kill the homos, whatever. I’m dead either way.”

  “She got you there,” Carla threw back another shot of tequila.

  “Word. Hey, your turn,” Oku conceded, reluctantly turning to Carla.

  “Okay, Angie was a border crosser, a wetback, a worker in the immigrant sweatshop they call this city. On days like this I understand her like a woman instead of a child. Everybody thought she was a whore. She wasn’t. She tried to step across the border of who she was and who she might be. They wouldn’t let her. She didn’t believe it herself so she stepped across into a whole other country.”

  The table fell silent.

  “Word,” Tuyen said finally, softly grabbing Carla’s hand around her beer bottle. “Hey, Carla …”

  “I’m good, I’m good. It’s just I get it, you know.”

  The game was over. They sat drinking and feeling, looking at the rain still falling outside and listening to the blare of horns and the clatter of forks and dishes around them. As disturbing as all they were living was, they felt alive. More alive, they thought, than most people around them. They believed in it, this living. Its raw openness. They saw the street outside, its chaos, as their only hope. They felt the city’s violence and its ardour in one emotion. It was dark now; the rainy summer light had descended. The wat
er glistened on everything—cars, neon signs, newspaper boxes, people. The blind singer across the street in front of the movie theatre packed up his tuneless voice, going home; teenaged boys hobbled along in too-big jeans; girls holding cigarettes between French-tipped nails walked briskly by. Next door the Lebanese shawarma place, which had been a doughnut shop, and had once been an ice cream store, and would in another incarnation be a sushi bar, now exhaled odours of roasted lamb. A stream of identities flowed past the bar’s window: Sikhs in FUBU, Portuguese girls in DKNY, veiled Somali girls in Puma sneakers, Colombian teenagers in tattoos. Carla had said it all, not just about her mother but about all of them. Trying to step across the borders of who they were. But they were not merely trying. They were, in fact, borderless.

  “Anyways …” They all started laughing at the same time as Tuyen broke the moment. “Let’s stop this cerebral shit.”

  “Where’s Jackie today?”

  “At the store!” Carla and Tuyen said together. “Where else, Oku?”

  “Look, man, get over yourself, okay?”

  “I know. I’m just asking.”

  “Christ. You’re gonna lose out, man.”

  “You better think of something, Mr. Poet.”

  “Have you done anything? Have you called her, talked to her? What is the big deal?” Tuyen was always impatient with Oku in regards to Jackie.

  “She’s got a white boy, man. I saw them in the market the other day. It looked really intense.”

  “Intense? Jackie intense? Which girl are you talking about?”

  “Yeah, Jackie holding hands and shit. The shit looked critical.”

  “So, you got nothing to lose, right? Man, you are so slow.”

  “I’ve got to do some research, all right?”