Daria

  He did not seem moved. He did not understand. His poetic vein had been suddenly frozen by the venom that the world had injected into him, once again. And this time the snake had really won.

  I CANNOT. She has been wasted. I want to love her. I know she is beautiful and clean, but I cannot touch her. I see in her Ana being raped by Arsénio and his aids. I see her beautiful young body being taken by another man, and in that vision I cannot find forgiveness, I cannot regain pure love, pure yearning. I see my baby being soiled by the sperm of another man who has always been a friend to me. I see my idea being destroyed. Daria. I cannot believe he would do this to me, to her, to us. He is my friend, a man who has also suffered the shackles of colonization. I cannot forgive Ana or Arsénio or the guards or myself. Daria. I had to let Ana go, for I could no longer touch her. Every time I lay down on the same bed with her and tried to put my hands on her belly, they became frozen. She stayed for a while, immobile under my frozen fingers, thinking my wounds would be cured with time, that they would be cleansed by the beautiful metaphors that I invented to cover the ugly in The Idea Against Tarrafal—through an alchemy of love and the ultimate visionary alphabet. She hoped that words could in fact do that, but wounds are wounds, and sometimes they are so great that they cannot be washed away, will never be washed away. No catharsis is possible. She waited in vain: her belly never became warm to my desire. Since then, I have been covering them up, the wounds, behind this mask that I always wear. I have acted like a man in full control of himself, a rational, pragmatic being who does not allow himself to be shaken by emotion. But the truth is that I am not made of iron. Daria. My mask is a mere lie; underneath it are the ugly events that have shaped my life. And there are many of those ugly events, too many to recount fully in a lifetime, and they are too difficult to recount using this language that we humans use. We think we know what we are saying and that we can say what we feel, how we feel, but we don’t. I cannot touch her. She has been wasted. She was my salvation, and now I am at point zero again. I became a sex addict after my release from Tarrafal, going from woman to woman, always virgins. I was trying to rescue Ana, to repossess her before she was wasted. I thought if I could do this, I would perhaps find a way to save her from that doomed future and that I would forever have her. I thought I could return to the time before those ugly days at the prison, that I could stare at her frank and clean smile, her hope and mine together working toward the beautiful. And now this. Daria, beautiful Daria. She was my salvation, and she has also been spoiled. I am at square one, and I am afraid that I will never be able to become a normal human being who sees women as women, not as bodies to be taken and used and possessed and dispossessed. I am lost, a man without redemption, without future. Where is my escape? I have abandoned her, leaving her alone in her pain, soiled by the dirt of another man and without my understanding. I am broken; I am gone. I no longer know whom to believe. Vasco da Gama claims she is lying. He says she is a liar who cannot even work legally at the centre because she came to Canada as a nanny and was restricted to that profession for at least two years. He says she is a woman who uses her physical beauty to trap men of power and then makes a public scandal out of her debauchery. She is shameless. Just a peasant—like her parents. She has admitted to me that she did come to Canada as a nanny and that she did not disclose her immigration status to Vasco, but that he also did not ask for any papers, any proof until after the incident. She said that, in fact, she should have had her open work permit by the time she started working at the centre but that she has not received it due to the backlog at Immigration; she says she is a victim of bureaucracy. I believe her. I want to believe her. She is a woman full of depth and poetry in her body and her soul. But Vasco is my friend, and he is a man of standing in the community. I am a man of standing in the community. I cannot look at her in the eye and tell her all this, but this is all that I feel. I must find a way to let her know our romance cannot go on now. How can I find a dignified way to tell her that? I really thought she and I were it. I really thought she was the one who would cure my illness, this vicious need to possess women who have never been possessed. I really thought she was my Daria.

  My therapist tells me that I suffer from PTSD and that all I really need to do is face the pain that I endured in the past and let my mask go. All I need to do is open my soul and my heart to the wounds that Salazar and his counterparts, and all his ancestors since Vasco da Gama, have inflicted on me. All I need to do is deal with this trauma, which he calls colonial trauma. He tells me that he himself suffers from slavery trauma, which he has been trying to overcome by taking many different steps. It started slowly, but today he feels like he is a real man, someone who believes in himself. Now, when a white man looks him in the eye, he does not look down or move; he stares right back. But in South Africa, he continues, Black men still have difficulty staring at white men in the face. In South Africa, even after all that Mandela endured, and despite his beautiful speeches that pierce the soul and really make you believe, despite the end of institutional apartheid, people still live side by side but not together. The rainbow nation is just an illusion—a beautiful Daria, a flying dream running in the savannahs of Africa waiting to find a bed. We keep waiting to see this idea be made manifest, and we are becoming tired, tired and disillusioned with the distance that still remains between the verbs to be and to become. He tells me all this as if he were my own double; he tells me that I must face the dark side of my self, like he has done, that place where the pain throbs fully, waiting to be heard, felt, caressed. He tells me that is the only way for me to stop hurting others and myself. He tells me that a real man shows his emotions and lets the mask down; a real man allows the tears to roll and the lips to tremble uncertain and convulsed. But I do not think that I am ready yet. I do not think that I can let it go, that I can let this crutch go. This crutch gives me power and allows me to relive my love affair with Ana. Ana. The beautiful and fierce Ana, who begged me to father her more children after we left Tarrafal because I had stopped touching her belly and rolled to the other side of the bed every time she came to me to feel my veins. My therapist is a man of knowledge who tells me that I must read Fanon’s Peau noire, masques blancs to understand the depth of my bondage. He tells me I have been reading too many books by European and Western thinkers, including Karl Marx. He says those books have corrupted my soul and they are preventing me from seeing who I really am. He tells me I must travel deep down there, to the place of the ancestors, in order to regain my true self and that this symbolical voyage has been taken by many in my condition and has given them great solace, great self-assurance, making them feel at home. He tells me to read Derek Walcott, the Saint Lucian poet who proclaims he has no nation but his imagination.

  My therapist is a man of knowledge, and suffering too. He came from St. Lucia and has felt to the bone the damage that slavery can cause. He has felt the damage that has been inflicted upon him and his long line of ancestors, bodies and bodies crossing the sea to come to another world that was not theirs. They are the same people whom I tried to liberate in the dream that I had, that dream where I was a knight mounted on the most beautiful stallion, saving my people and bringing them from the bottom of the sea to a secure shore, where warmth and open arms were there to receive them. My therapist is a man of knowledge and I respect him, but I think his ideas are a little too utopian. I think he wants to regain his pre-colonial Africa, pristine and perfect, but that Africa has never really existed. I have seen how my brothers killed and sold one another. I am an assimilado, I know that, but I am a man who has lived on the soil of Africa and on the white soil too. I have lived in exile in and out of Africa. I think I can master both systems, and I am not completely convinced that constantly chasing after virgins and white women is an attempt to regain the power that the white men took away from me, like my therapist says, like Fanon says when he writes that the dream of the colonized is to sleep with the white woman and eat at the colonizer’s table. To be
honest, I like all kinds of women: Black, Chinese, Indian, white … I like to travel through their colours and sense with my fingers the different complexions, the different patterns of their noses, mouths, eyes, and hips. It’s a “Mambo No. 5” song: a little bit of Sandra, a little bit Jessica…

  It feels like the world is in my hands when I am with a woman. It feels like I am boundless, that I can travel the wide earth and taste its fruits, here and there, here and there, like an explorer. I like possessing women, and, let’s face it, Africa is ridden with patriarchy, from left to right, from bottom to top. I understood, from very early on, that women were there for men’s pleasure. I learned this from my mother, my father, my sisters, my brothers. My sisters and my mother ate the leftover food, after all the men had eaten. My father had seven wives and divided his sperm between all of them, one day here and another there. I have many brothers and sisters that I do not even know. We do not quite see eye-to-eye here, my therapist and I. And when he says that the main reason African-Canadian women suffer from depression is that they are not following Afrocentric values, I get a little confused. I ask him to define Afrocentric values, telling him that his position makes it seem as if African men and African culture are not against women, are not patriarchal. He says that is precisely what he thinks and that he has done extensive research on the subject. He says he knows that pre-colonial Africa was truly communal, a place where women were respected and had equal access to power. I note that one can find all kinds of evidence to prove an idea that one wants to prove, and I argue that his position is extreme and biased—that he is being purely reactionary, that perhaps he ought to read Wole Soyinka and Buchi Emecheta and Paulina Chiziane to find out some other truths, more balanced stories. I tell him that perhaps he has been reading too many purists, the likes of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o and Léopold Sédar Senghor who, though profound and righteous and beautiful, are not always as objective as they ought to be and can sometimes come across as racist or ethnocentric in a manner similar to the European colonial masters, not to mention misogynistic. “Perhaps,” I add, thinking of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s passionate Africanism, particularly his novel The River Between, “what men need is to decolonize their minds, decolonize it from patriarchy, that is.” I also say that he ought to read Fanon more carefully, for one of Fanon’s central points is that those who are oppressed often go on to oppress others, whom they perceive as having less power, in order to regain some power—something that Fanon in fact mourns deeply, wishing, praying that we could find another way, a better way, a more beautiful way. Perhaps that is why Black women are the ones who suffer the most, for they are dealing with what Kimberlé Crenshaw has called intersectionality. They are the victims of multiple guns trying to destroy their wholeness, their fundamental right to be. Black men are oppressed by white men, and then they oppress Black women even more as a way to regain some power. If only we could find a way to regain true power and step out of this disgraceful dynamic. If only we could find a beautiful way, the beautiful way. This is also the fatalistic dynamic guiding Arsénio de Oliveira, as I try to show in The Idea Against Tarrafal: he is an abused and deeply traumatized man, who feels poor and undervalued inside and out, and then goes on to abuse others in unthinkable ways.

  But my therapist maintains his positions firmly, unshaken by my doubts, my attempts to contradict, complicate, and debunk them. He further adds that I am grossly misreading Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s intentions in The River Between, for his main objective in that novel is not to necessarily defend female genital mutilation—he insists on calling it “cutting”— but rather to decolonize the minds of Kenyans (and Africans in general) by making them question the Christian and European ideologies they have slavishly and uncritically internalized. The novel, he argues, is to be understood as an allegory, a type of sublimation in reverse, if you will, which could be interpreted as the author’s direct attempt to dismiss some of Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytical theories, an erotic manifestation of rejection of colonial cultural baggage, a phenomenology of love, as superbly argued by the Cameroonian-American scholar Elias Bongmba in his article “On Love: Literary Images of a Phenomenology of Love in Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s The River Between.” He, my therapist, recently became a chief in Ghana, and despite the fact that he lives in Canada and works as a therapist full time, while also doing his PhD in Anthropological African Studies, he manages to travel there frequently to perform his duties. This honour and title were given to him because he has done a lot of good work with different communities in that country. The other day, when he was interviewed on the national radio, the interviewer asked him how a chief must act. He replied that there are very specific protocols to follow. For example, one cannot go out on the street alone without one’s aids, one cannot walk barefoot, and one must not get drunk or abuse others. As I heard his answers, I smiled, for I know that in certain parts of Africa the community chief also has the right to sleep with a young virgin woman if he so chooses. In speaking about the community that he represented, I noted how he avoided mentioning anything that would imply that the men had more power than women. He also kept talking about the Queen Mothers and their paramount role. He did not mention that even they are still mostly under men’s power and that the areas that they control are considered to be less important. He did not address female circumcision. He did not address polygamy and how it often creates jealousy between the women. He did not address the many initiation rites that women undergo, rites that teach them that their main role is to please their men sexually, that their happiness is secondary to the men’s, that suffering is their lot in life. He spoke like a good politician, a man who has a specific agenda. There was also an article in a Canadian newspaper, The Canadian Times, that described him as follows: This man possesses the high distinction and wisdom of a true African chief. From the way he walks to the way he talks. He exudes nothing but rectitude, nothing but knowledge, and so being given the title of chief is only fitting. Upon reading this article, I chuckled because my father too was a traditional chief in Mozambique, and he benefitted from all the perks that being a powerful and respected colonial overseer warranted him. He was all that, and yet he did all that he did to his people and to me. He had a great demeanour too, and he spoke with distinction. He had seven wives and never doubted that he had the right to have them, that they had been made to bow before him and lie under this weight whenever he needed the warmth of their thighs. When I tried to discuss the interview and the article with the newly appointed Ghanaian chief, he became very professional and said we were there to discuss my neurosis, my PTSD, not his diverse career. I did not say anything because I needed him to help me. I am a sick man trying to find a way out of my painful and confusing darkness, but I am not fully convinced of his methods, his views relating to my condition and his own condition, for I think the matter is really much more complicated than meets the eye.

  The trial between Daria and Vasco is set to happen very soon. I still do not know how I should act, what I should say. His lawyer has summoned me to provide a character witness about Daria. I am Vasco’s friend, but I used to be in love with the beautiful Daria. I have not seen her in several weeks. I have avoided her, and, sensing that, she did not beg. Sometimes I dream about her, how stunning she was that first time we made love, how her breasts were roses inside roses, Russian dolls inside Russian dolls. I dream about her gentle and poetic manner, and that way she has of seeing deeply into things. I dream about her like this, over and over again, trying to regain, restore that moment, that moment before the fall. If I were a perfect man, if I had really learned from the evil that was inflicted on me, I would still love Daria as much as I loved her then. But I am a mere mortal, I am an African and a European, I am a universal man, and I possess all the faults of those men. If I had become illuminated, if I had truly escaped my ego, if I had become acquainted with the big self in those magnificent voyages that I undertook inside the chamber and on other occasions—when the soul becomes bigger
than the body, than the man, as I describe in The Idea Against Tarrafal—I would not do to women what I have been doing to them. I would not do to Daria what I have been doing to her, what I am about to do to her. I would not, because I would have truly entered her being, felt her pain. Do as you would be done by: that is the golden law.

  THE DIVERSITY DIRECTOR. Daria, you used to know a very sui generis director of diversity while working at the Hospital of the Soul. He was hired when the idea of diversity in the workplace was really starting to take hold in Canadian society, or at least in Toronto. His name was Abassi Izuora Mbembe, but he was also known as Michael von der Post, the last name alluding to his dark history, that atrocious passage through the Atlantic that left so many marks, visible and invisible. It could not be otherwise, for the human soul and body can only allow so much disgrace to penetrate their clean, breathing core before sickness takes hold. Some still called him Michael, but he would quickly correct them, saying in a calm timbered voice—where, if we paid attention, we could detect a slight accent, but one that was impossible to locate, to attach to any existing tribe in Africa, America, or Europe—“My name is Abassi, Abassi Izuora Mbembe.” He, Abassi, was massively tall and always walked as though he was very sure of himself, erect like a beautiful monument that no one could ever bring down. In his position of diversity director, he had ordered a book for newcomers to Canada to be translated into a particular African language, Akhunnia, and then printed in high numbers. To everyone’s surprise, the book was never requested by any newcomers and the copies just sat there in the closet collecting dust and mould, waiting for the mysterious people from Africa to arrive. He got into a little trouble with the executive team for ordering a booklet that benefited no one. They pointed to the fact that, in this age of economic depression, we all had to be careful about how the money was spent. When they asked him why he had ordered the booklet to be published in Akhunnia, a language that no one was able to locate in any part of Africa—a fact that was confirmed by the independent consultant hired for the purpose—he became irritated and simply said, “I am the diversity director, and as the holder of this title, I know the languages spoken throughout the world. I know the languages of my motherland.” Shortly after that incident, news came that Abassi was voluntarily leaving the Hospital of the Soul to pursue his other interests, which included finishing his PhD in Anthropological African Studies. He studied a new branch of Anthropology, which followed an Afrocentric epistemological approach, and his research topic was the collectivity systems in pre-colonial Africa. Later on, Daria found out through a private source that the CEO of the hospital had received a call from a very angry Caribbean woman who accused Abassi of defending and perpetuating patriarchy in his therapy sessions by insisting that Black women follow Afrocentric family values. This woman was doubly upset because she did not even consider herself African. Apparently, she threatened to sue the hospital if they did not get rid of Abassi.