The Blue Clerk

by Dionne Brand

  What does this have to do with Borges? Nothing at all. I walked into the library and it was raining rain and my grandfather’s logs were there, and the wooden window was open. As soon as I opened the door, down the white steps came the deluge. If I could not read I would have drowned.

  Now you are sounding like me, the clerk says. I am you, the author says.

  VERSO 2

  I can’t say I was conscious of the left-hand page as early as this but there it was if I had looked. There it was, if you had looked, says the clerk. Essentially years and years actually trying to write in the centre of your life, working with all the intelligence of your being. The feeling of repelling some invasion in order, one day, to be yourself. Rhizophora mangle propagules fell into the mangrove lagoon near the Iguana River, where the sea carried them to us.

  VERSO 2.01

  The sea brought, too, blue-red kilometres of Physalia physalis.

  VERSO 2.1

  Then I had six shields in the ground, I thought I’d grow a little corn or take care of a rabbit—both for food. Then I saw a column of orange air, is what I saw. Then I saw a river. I remembered the river. I remember the garbage. I saw a column of night. I remember a whale. What is a pillow tree? I saw pebbles in the dry riverbed. I saw yellow. What kind of yellow? Mars yellow. Iron yellow. I saw polished pebbles. I heard quarrel, quarrel, quarrel underfoot, when you walked. Then I ran back to the road. I didn’t think much of the meaning of life, I only thought of my way through it. Then I saw a green window held open with a stick. What green? Oxide of chromium, terre verte, malachite.

  VERSO 2.2

  There’s a woman leaving by boat to go to the house where she would have an abortion, and then a story of a woman returning by plane to the hobble of family, and then another about a woman who was taken up by the goddess of winds, storms, and waterfalls, and another about a woman who knelt in the middle of a city street praying, and another about a woman who sat at a small table with a lamp looking at the insects it attracted, then fell asleep and was awakened by a screaming bird. Then there was the story about a woman on a gritting train to Montreal and a wraith, a racist screed veering toward her on the escalator at the Gare Centrale and a woman who sat at a bar in Kensington Market and saw the ghost of Cristóbal Colón. (All these women were embattled except perhaps for the woman in a story who had lovely breasts, adored by many schoolgirls.)

  VERSO 2.2.1

  On the train, is that when I should say the clerk emerged? She was before me, she was always with me. She was a stevedore stowing cargo for one of my grandmothers, Luisa Andrade from Venezuela. I met her on Luisa’s piano with the photographs. But that was in another language. Luisa threw a man into a pit and covered him with sand; when he got up she had mothered his six children, stitched racial discord among them, subjected them to photographs for the piano and left for her grave. She came from La Guaira on a steamer on the 18th of a certain month. You are making that up. Well Cumaná then. Guaira. She became legend. I did not know her name until a few years ago. You never asked. She was legend.

  VERSO 2.3

  There was a second woman and she was a woman of the book, a woman of diaries, and a woman of such compact violence that in an instant, brief as it was, she fell in love with the woman of forbidding language. No one has asked me about her.

  VERSO 2.3.1

  And then there was one, another woman who did not want to be in the world, or the world she was dragged into, who noticed right away the fatal harm but who gave birth to a woman who wanted to be in the world true and absolutely whole and therefore lived with ghosts since that world could not happen yet. And both of them, all they could do was give birth to fragments of their possible selves and then more fragments of themselves would sit in a window on Bethlehemsteeg in Amsterdam or burst with lust in San Fernando or write long letters of excuses in Toronto, until the last of them returned to the ghosts of the second. These two women even when they gave birth to men the men were women. That is. They were undone by something or other and lay on apartment floors gurgling up some exhaustion with masculinity or killed that exhaustion in some violent Greyhound flight from Miami to New York. And the men who read them said they wanted something much more heroic, as if they weren’t yet fed up with a heroism that distorted them, as if they weren’t yet gagging on a heroism that left them right where they were. As if they were not maimed with heroism, as if their eyes were not closed and bruised. Or else they wanted themselves written as Caliban over and over and over again, they loved him perpetually, the way he stayed helper and prodigal brother to Prospero, the way his sores remained open, the way Prospero stabbed him.

  VERSO 2.4

  All your women, I notice now, leave on boats to get abortions, or leave by poisoning from their own hands, or sit gazing at insects, or leave in flights over cliffs, or leave by their imagination but leave trying to attend to their own intelligence, “but” for the love of god, they’d be human.

  VERSO 2.5

  I had a great-grandmother, Angelina, who fled in a pirogue across the four Bocas del Dragón. From the ragged coast of one island to the ragged coast of another. She fled with her lover and her three children. Her husband swore to kill her and her new man. The waters in the Bocas are perilous. Between Huevos, Monos, Chacachacare. I can see her standing in the prow as in a painting, her lover—a shadow of herself; because it is she taking the risk of murder; he only loves her and will be the father of several more children but she will leave him too. A watercolour. The sea is verdigris, her head scarf is ochre, her dress is lead white, her three children arrayed around her skirt tail—the two boys in khaki, the little girl, my grandmother, Amelia, in red flowers.

  VERSO 3

  I came to the city and it wasn’t the city yet. It wasn’t any place and I began there. It wasn’t any place and I was no one and it began there and I began there. At the edge of the city, at Keele and Bloor, there was nothing but a subway and a police car. And to tell by my poetry there’s always a policeman and a hyphen and there are many languages and many signs, which is why there is a policeman to manage the hyphen and to manage the languages and to manage the signs. The city has no contours yet and no buildings, that is why there’s a bicycle in some poems, and a syntax bunched like a new wall, and then a syntax drifting out to the northern fractured sea and to the southern enclosed sea. There is a trio of women on a corner waiting for time to start them and a man who falls down a staircase when the policeman shoots him. There’s the author, the clerk, the poet, that flâneur, collecting streets, and there are uncollectible streets and places and temporary streets and places; the bell of markets and the rake of money making temporary streets and places uncollectible. There’s the eager lyric vowing it all has never happened before, hoping it all has never happened before, and straightaway writing the book, the city disappearing in it.

  VERSO 3.01

  Yesterday, I heard, at the Nosso Talho Butcher Shop, a transaction—$52.50 for forty pounds of chicken legs—and it was in two dialects of Spanish and two dialects of English and someone was listening in Urdu. Or was it Punjabi? Chali pon kuku dyain lata, bauth maengi hai(n). And in a series of languages this is good news. Molto economiche (Italian). Muito baratos (Brazilian Portuguese). Ponde arte al lado, e baratisimo. Baratisimo, baratisimo. Putting art aside, that’s really cheap, very cheap.

  VERSO 3.1

  At first there’s no lake in the city, at first there are only elevators, at first there are only constricting office desks; there are small apartments and hamburger joints and unpaid telephone bills. Then a few nightclubs appear and eventually the lake disinters. At times there’s a highway and a car and friends in a snowstorm heading nowhere but back to the city and Sarah Vaughan is singing in the cabin of the car. The three of us are frightened of everything. Our lives in this town, which is not a town, and on this snow road, which is no road, who will protect us. In the city there is no simple love or simple fidelity, the poem long after concludes. There’s a slippery heart tha
t abandons. Fists are full of women’s bodies. The Group of Seven is painting just outside the city now. The graffiti crew is here inside blowing up the expressway and the city is like a Romare Bearden or a Basquiat. More Basquiat. The cynical clerk notes, in her cynical English, all the author has elided, the diagonal animosities and tiers of citizenship. The author wants a cosmopolitan city. Nothing wrong with that. But the clerk who orbits her skull has to deal with all the animus.

  The author’s not naive, far from it, but however complicated she is, the clerk is more so. The clerk notices there are air raids, a lingua of sirens and gunshots in the barracking suburbs, the incendiary boys are rounded up by incendiary boys and babies are falling from fifteen-storey buildings into the shrubbery; each condo fights for the view of the exhumed lake, until the sky is cloudy with their shadow. The atmosphere is dull with petulant cars. The author avoids all this; you see my point?

  VERSO 3.2

  The girl on the bicycle says (there is always a girl on a bicycle because the author cannot ride a bicycle, so one time the girl on the bicycle she rode all across the city and the streets were like the ribs of an eel). “Some eel have saltwater beginnings. Spending their mature lives in lakes. Some eel are electric.” The girl, in the book to come, wonders why we never collect beauty; as she sits, collecting beauty at a window on the lake. She answers, “La belleza no hace daño. / Sac dep khong hai nguoi. / Mei mao boo hai ren. / Ang kagan / dahan ay nindi nasisira.” It doesn’t leave its broken claw in your neck bone.

  VERSO 3.3

  The author scrapes and scrapes. A palimpsest. The old city resurfaces. Its old self, barely concealed, lifts its figure off the page, heaves deep sighs of bigotry. This beast will never die, the clerk breathes.

  The taxi drivers know this. “Miss,” one of them says, “don’t talk about this city, I know this city. You come here thinking, you’ll do this for a year, maybe two, before you know it, it’s ten years. And what did I used to do, and what did I hope, I can’t tell you. I can’t talk about it. It’s no use.”

  In the back of the cab a poet tries to sympathize. “I know, I know.”

  “You don’t know, Miss.”

  And I don’t. I do know that we are both only trying to make a way through life. We are not trying to make sense of it any longer. And I am lucky to be the poet in the cab. I do not know his life. With me this will find its way to a silver-struck enjambment of regret. He will make his way to regret itself.

  The woman who lives with him; and the children who live with him? I wonder how this melancholy has scored them.

  Nights later another driver tells you, “Miss, no, no, no, women are not equal to men. No, no, you don’t understand. You have to understand; every holy book. Miss, Bible or Koran, not possible. It’s okay, you’re a nice lady, very intelligent but no. You have to learn this, Miss.”

  He looks back at me with a pity, as if, if I don’t learn this my life will be hard and I will be punished. He’s telling me for my own good.

  VERSO 3.3.1

  That cab ride sends the clerk into a polemical frenzy. She opens my notebook and writes the following rant: Modernity can spread a bed of weaponry to what it calls the far reaches of the globe but it cannot spread women’s equality. It cannot stem the liquidity of capital, it cannot even feed its own populations but female bodies are still trophy to tradition and culture. The clerk marks this down. I cannot use it. The actual true elevation above sea level, the clerk says. What is that to me, I ask. This is the ranging rod, she says, shod with iron.

  The clerk fills a small, thick red moleskin that swallows five hours of time. The empires, she fumes, the empires called culture and religion only have one province left—women. Her notebook is sleepless.

  VERSO 3.3.2

  But no, thinks the optimistic author, not just; another cab ride—we talked about Gabriel García Márquez and another we spoke of Camara Laye, then waiting at a stoplight we assessed the IMF and then, in the same breath, the way the autumn arrived between Thursday and Sunday last week. So? The clerk is quiet with condolences for a moment.

  One cab ride can catapult you into melancholy, another can sprout wires from your brain. The author must erase this notebook with snow and snows and snows and trains, and febrile women.

  VERSO 3.4

  In this city, you fall in love at Chester subway, it’s not a beautiful subway so your love makes it so. But its ugliness may doom your love, and you know it but you love anyway.

  VERSO 3.5

  The subway skeletons its way east, west. North like anxious electrocardiogram, there are invisible stations. At least that is what the author says. Like the eel, bone black, calcined.

  VERSO 3.6

  In the book to come two new men are trying to arrive in another time, subatomic particles rapid as light along the DVP, a woman is on a train leaving again for Montreal, trying to enter yet another syntax. The clerk expects a sloop of war from across the water. Always.

  VERSO 3.7

  The city in the book to come is full of people who think there’s a trick to everything. And they’re right of course, the clerk reproaching, after all, twenty mobile phone companies own the electromagnetic spectrum and can sell you a signed two-year contract for the infrared direction and speed at which light travels; some can sell you lightning itself. The author measures the tectonic plates of condos, leaving one apartment for another, one city block for another. The author and the poet always have to leave somewhere, someone, themselves. Only the energies of cities might cool them, metamorphose them.

  VERSO 3.8

  The clerk senses an urgency in the author, the author is always rushing somewhere.

  There are five ways of saying let us go home, the clerk tells the author.

  inakeen aan guriga aadnee hadeer (standard, the clerk says) udgoonoow = sweet-smelling one

  aqalkii aan u kacno hadatan (middle dialect, the clerk says) indhoquruxoow = beautiful eyes

  ar soo bax aan xaafadii hadeerbo tagnee (banaadiri)

  qalbiwanaagoow = good-hearted one.

  On the other hand, “home” as roots or a place where one feels at home would be:

  inakeen aan dhulkii hooyo aadnee hadeer (standard, the clerk says)

  nakeen aan maandeeq soo haybanee hada (northern, the clerk says).

  You understand, says the clerk, which will you use? You keep them, says the author. The clerk climbs into the packet boat.

  VERSO 4

  To verse, to turn, to bend, to plough, a furrow, a row, to turn around, toward, to traverse

  When I was nine coming home one day from school, I stood at the top of my street and looked down its gentle incline, toward my house obscured by a small bend, taking in the dipping line of the two-bedroom scheme of houses, called Mon Repos, my rest. But there I’ve strayed too far from the immediate intention. When I was nine coming home from school one day, I stood at the top of my street and knew, and felt, and sensed looking down the gentle incline with the small houses and their hibiscus fences, their rosebush fences, their ixora fences, their yellow and pink and blue paint washes; the shoemaker on the left upper street, the dressmaker on the lower left, and way to the bottom the park and the deep culvert where a boy on a bike pushed me and one of my aunts took a stick to his mother’s door. Again, when I was nine coming home one day in my brown overall uniform with the white blouse, I stood on the top of my street knowing, coming to know in that instant when the sun was in its four o’clock phase and looking down I could see open windows and doors and front door curtains flying out. I was nine and I stood at the top of the street for no reason except to make the descent of the gentle incline toward my house where I lived with everyone and everything in the world, my sisters and my cousins were with me, we had our bookbags and our four o’clock hunger with us and our grandmother and everything we loved in the world were waiting in the yellow washed house, there was a hibiscus hedge and a buttercup bush and zinnias waiting and for several moments all this seemed to drift toward the past
; again when I was nine and stood at the head of my street and looked down the gentle incline toward my house in the four o’clock coming-home sunlight, it came over me that I was not going to live here all my life, that I was going away and never returning some day. A small wind brushed everything or perhaps it did not but afterward I added a small wind because of that convention in movies, but something like a wave of air, or a wave of time passed over the small street or my eyes, and my heart could not believe my observation, a small wind passed over my heart drying it and I didn’t descend the gentle incline and go home to my house and my grandmother and tell her what had happened, I didn’t enter the house that was washed with yellow distemper that we had painted on the previous Christmas, I didn’t enter the house and tell her how frightened I was by the thought I had at the top of our street, the thought of never living there, which seemed as if it meant never having existed, or never having known her, I never told her the melancholy I felt or the intrusion the thought represented. I never descended that gentle incline of the street toward my house, the I who I was before that day went another way, she disappeared and became the I who continued on to become who I am. I do not know what became of her, where she went, the former I who separated once we came to the top of the street and looked down and something like a breeze that would be added later after watching many movies passed over us. What became of her, the one who gave in so easily or was she so surprised to find that thought that would overwhelm her so, and what made her keep quiet. When I was nine and coming home one day, my street changed just as I stood at the top of it and I knew I would never live there again or all my life. The thought altered the afternoon and my life and after that I was in a hurry to leave. There was another consciousness waiting for a little girl to grow up and think future thoughts, waiting for some years to pass and some obligatory life to be lived until I would arrive here. When I was nine I left myself and entered myself. It was at the top of the street, the street was called MacGillvary Street, the number was twenty-one, there were zinnias in the front yard and a buttercup bush with milky sticky pistils we used to stick on our faces. After that all the real voices around me became subdued and I was impatient and dissatisfied with everything, I was hurrying to my life and I stood outside of my life. I never arrived at my life, my life became always standing outside of my life and looking down its incline and seeing the houses as if in a daze. It was a breeze, not a wind, a kind of slowing of the air, not a breeze, a suspension of the air when I was nine standing at the top of MacGillvary Street about to say something I don’t know what and turning about to run down. No, my grandmother said never to run pell-mell down the street toward the house as ill-behaved people would, so I was about to say something, to collect my cousins and sisters into an orderly file and to walk down to our hibiscus-fenced house with the yellow outer walls and my whole life inside. A small bit of air took me away.