by Dionne Brand
“Nasir?” Selah replied, having forgotten who Nasir was. Selah can’t take care of anything but herself. Her body requires far too much time on its own invention and maintenance.
In Spain, we visited the Grand Mosque, the Mezquita at Córdoba, and my eyes glistened with its magnificence, its light; my own body shone with the whole of its history. My legs weakened entering its grandeur. I held out my glowing hand to Selah. Seeing me so incandescent, Selah drew back as if I had stung her. I turned to her, opening my arms, and she said to me, “That is what I want. That look. Why don’t you bring home some of that.” I had no idea what she meant. She wandered off, refusing to speak, pretending that she was intent on the arches and doorways, examining the floors and eavesdropping on various guided groups. I resolved not to allow Selah to destroy the Mezquita at Córdoba for me. I ignored her rudeness and followed her, explaining this and that to her and receiving no response. Ultimately I gave that up and wandered off by myself. Of course, then it came to me what Selah meant; I was not entirely dense. Selah thought herself as beautiful as the Mezquita, if not more so. I understand her assessment. She was. But the knowledge that Selah would deprive me of this experience in a fit of jealousy surprised and hurt me. I floated through the Mezquita with a mix of awe and rage. Finally, I stood at la Puerta del Perdón, pausing significantly, as Selah strolled around, knowing full well I was standing there at this door of pardon, waiting.
The terrain. The body. I can’t say why Selah rarely made love to me. I can’t say if I permitted this or if she desired it. It all falls into the gloam of those hours of sensuality. I certainly enjoyed her hands on my back, my thighs, her kisses, her palm on my belly, her strength. It was the way it was. She was the beauty. She permitted the uses of that beauty, but clearly, judging by her remark, she resented giving that permission. Is permission therefore implied in “beauty”? If so, “beauty” is subjected to licence, always supine to desire. What did Selah desire? This is the question that haunts me. I believe Selah experienced her body the way I did, as beauty, as sensuality, as the carnal object. And she cultivated this object—that is, she maintained its look, its emanations, its presence. To Selah, it seems, her body was an object she possessed, and so she observed its uses. Why did Selah possess this object? Why didn’t she refuse it, say? I don’t know. It’s pure speculation on my part, all these whys and wherefores. But this is what an academic does. So here I am. This I know without speculating: Beauty lives in the past and in the future, never in the present. You say, like Selah, In the past I was beautiful and In the future I will be beautiful. Beauty in this sense is always under construction. “I am never aware of how I actually look,” Selah said. And by her jealousy I knew that to be true. Beauty is never fully aware, it rises to awareness and then awareness disappears with the promise of beauty’s arrival again.
Once, I unexpectedly saw Selah walking down the street ahead of me. She was unaware of me. This was when I noticed her habit of reaching her right hand out in a subsiding motion. As if all that she was kept rising in her and she was attempting to calm it down. This was how I learned more about Selah—by catching her in anonymous moments. Or so I told myself. Even though I believe that beauty is always aware of itself, always scrutinizing itself, so it cannot be entirely anonymous. Nevertheless, I observed her once in a photograph; this was after she had left me, some years later. She was as beautiful as ever and also, I observed, lonely. There was in her a loneliness that I had never been capable of assuaging, no matter how much I attempted to do so. It was that loneliness which had made me sad for her and which I had always been certain I could help her with. All she needed was me, I had thought—me, there, with her—and it would pass. I wished I could walk into the photograph and reassure her. I felt a call, an urgency to hurry to Selah and make it well. My appearance would put her immediately at ease, after her initial reticence, I thought. She would be relieved on seeing me. We would remain there in the photograph together or perhaps leave the scene in triumph happily ever after as Selah had always wanted. But, as I’ve said from the beginning, my own preoccupations, my studies, as I call them, didn’t make me completely available to this task in the past. If only I had located this loneliness each time the mask of beauty had covered it, perhaps. And yet, and also, Selah’s loneliness was also an apartness, a—forgive the word—coldness, a profound unhappiness. I can’t help but think it was her own dissertation on beauty that caused her this unhappiness. She was never enough for herself. Well, who of us is? I don’t want to suggest that Selah was always brooding. Perhaps it was I who was always brooding. Selah told me as much. I was the critical bastard. I criticized everything and everyone. This, after she returned home one day with yet another useless blouse, or useless undergarment, that I mildly critiqued. What part of Selah did I love if there were so many parts of her I didn’t love? I loved Selah, I insist. Perhaps it was my own sense of perfection that I loved. I’m aware that I’m mixing terms up here; perhaps it’s my sense of perfection or, say, beauty, that kept erasing Selah’s sense of perfection, kept correcting her attempts at correcting her own sense of perfection. I loved Selah, I insist nevertheless, even her perpetual shopping for items she discarded upon removing them from the shopping bag. I gloatingly watched this ephemera find its way to the bundles of clothes to be thrown away—gloatingly, and eventually resentfully, since I saw my research grant dwindling with each return home, each evening. Selah had a job, but after going through her own paycheque she nonchalantly went through mine. With a generosity I would regret, and an inflated sense of my future worth, I at first invited her to use my account if she was short. I hadn’t expected her to take me up on it. Yet, I smiled indulgently and shook my head when Selah appeared with a new shopping bag after dropping off her bundles to the Goodwill Society.
Selah loved walking through the city. Through her I used to receive news of what was taking place in the minds of people on the streets. She was a clever observer of life where I only thought that I was a clever observer of life. I spent most of my days shuttling between university, library and Selah. And when I walked home I was always too much in a hurry to get to Selah, or the possibility of Selah. By contrast, Selah went walking after work. And Selah was in tune with the zeitgeist. When I realized this, I would press her each day to recount the experiences of her walks. I became even more fascinated with Selah. I lost the anxiety I felt arriving home to the empty flat and waited with anticipation. This is how I found out about the real motives of a certain shooting in broad daylight at the shopping mall. The police thought the shooting was drug related, but through Selah I knew that it was about a lover. The two people involved were lovers and one was going to leave the other. Selah had it on the best authority—someone knew someone who knew someone. It was also Selah who told me that there were so many big, empty condos going up on the waterfront because racketeers were involved, Mexican cartel money and Hong Kong money, she said, and bribery and corruption with permits. The developers, the land surveyors, the escrow scandal—all this Selah knew about. She told me of a condo corruption case where someone flew to Seoul with the escrow money—Selah knew a lawyer who knew the lawyer who was charged. She said that the developer had sold a ditch in the suburbs to two hundred people, claiming it was going to be a high-end community.
I loved Selah because she filled in these gaps in my knowledge—gaps in what I know about ordinary life. Selah could speak to anyone, unlike me. My face is too serious, my eyes too probing. Selah has eyes that are conspiratorial and forgiving. She has eyes that offer silence. She would hardly say a word. She smiled, and people told her things about their lives. She would eventually ask them the most intimate questions and they would answer. Apparently, people like to go to intimacy first, not last, as I had unsuccessfully tried. The immediacy of the intimate opens people, Selah said, not some distant prevaricating question or some circling thesis. These only brought suspicion. Selah found fault with the way I spoke. She criticized my diction. She said I was too formal.
She said I never asked intimate questions. But I am convinced that people told Selah intimacies because she was beautiful. My knowledge lacked the beautiful in it.
Selah worked exact confessions out of all kinds of people. When I try to analyze the place this skill has in the world—the daily supply of confessions that accumulate and layer a certain city, or for that matter certain years—I can’t help but think there is some other force at work, a force that curates these confessions into some virtual museum, while the lives that produce them go on. Or is there another purpose that acquires power through the museum of confessions? If this were part of my thesis, I’d say that these confessions, piling up, one on top of the other, operate to keep people silent. It is counterintuitive but what I mean is this: we are all blurting out confessions with their coterminous guilt while…I can’t finish that thought, but you see where it is leading.
And so the pleasures Selah brought of the outside world were astounding to me. Selah’s smile seemed an invitation for confidences, a well where confidences could be absorbed and refreshed. This strange smile of Selah’s was a complicated one; it broke over her face like a sweet water. I had a sense of well-being and of sumptuous richness when she smiled at me. She distributed this smile throughout the city. It was always new, this smile. I never grew tired of it. When I think of it now, I realize it had its apex in profound understanding. That is how beautiful Selah was. Everyone who was caught in her smile thought that they were understood. This included awful people too. Once an awful woman at a party told Selah that she had knifed a man. Selah was taken aback and disturbed by this confession. She wondered why the woman had picked her, of all the people at the party, to confess to. I think it was because of Selah’s beauty. The woman thought Selah’s beauty would absorb the ugliness of the knifing and redeem her hand. After hearing this confession, Selah didn’t sleep for two weeks. I know that beauty is not an ointment or a salve, though I do still wonder how the woman made out after the confession. When I told Selah my theory, she sucked her teeth. “More likely she wanted to destroy me,” Selah said. Perhaps. Perhaps seeing Selah made the woman sad and angry at her own destruction and, like many, she could not bear the presence of beauty. But I really think it’s the redemptive possibilities of Selah’s smile that the awful woman yearned for. Selah is both aware and unaware of its power. Even this story of the awful woman is a pleasure to me; how fantastic and outlandish the city is—and I would never have known of the awful woman if not for Selah’s beauty.
Again this made me wonder what Selah saw in me. What awful story had I told her? But clearly that was the wrong question. She did not like awful stories. She loved implausible stories, like the ones in love songs. Was I, then, an implausible story? Selah captured me and put me into a box; it was an implausible story she willed me to execute, but I could not. Or did I capture Selah and put her into a box, starting a story she could not execute?
I often wondered what my friends saw in me too—so this was not Selah’s problem but mine. I was trapped in my cul-de-sac of perceptions.
I was reading Galeano’s Mirrors. I was at the beginning. I read the words, “On the back of a blue ox rode Lao Tse. He was traveling the paths of contradiction, which led to the secret place where water and fire fuse,” while I was waiting for Selah in the lounge of the airport in Madrid. Selah descended the escalator just as Galeano quoted Lao Tse: “Only thistles and thorns grow where armies encamp.” The phrase is perhaps an exaggeration of my life with Selah, but one always remembers the difficult aspects of time. Ninety percent of our time together was superb. One never notices space or air, only the chair or table. But thistles and thorns, yes, thistles and thorns.
Let me confide this: Selah hated my friends because my friends loved me. I spent hours chatting on the phone with them when I arrived home some evenings. It was my way of reliving the day and letting off steam at some incompetent asshole or another whom I encountered in the university or at the student magazine where I was trying to insinuate a little politics. I met with resistance at every quarter as I tried to inject intelligence into that rag. Selah would bang pots around me while I was on the phone, then she would raise the volume on the television, then she would march off to the bedroom and close the door. She simply hated my friends. Yes, early on, I had friends. Until Selah’s needs, Selah’s moods consumed me. There was Terry Lezama. I always called her Lezama. I liked the sound of it. She loved George Lamming. And there was Jonesy. He loved Lezama and he was doing a diss on the chronotopic events in Wide Sargasso Sea. They were in the English PhD program. We lost touch eventually. Lezama went to England, to the London School of Economics. I think she’s a banker now. And Jonesy must have gone mad with Bakhtin, because the last I heard he was teaching at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. Selah never appreciated the solace I received from my long discursive conversations with Lezama and Jonesy. Since I could not believe that anyone would hate my friends, I did not catch on to this animosity of hers for quite some time. And perhaps the falling away of my friendships had something to do with Selah’s insinuating. This is typical of me, I have to say. I arrive at matters late. I’m an academic in life as well as in practice. I can only study a thing once it has passed. At the time what I noticed was the rise in the decibel levels of domestic life and Selah’s constant moodiness. So I would say to Selah, “Sweetie, are you okay? How was your day today?” Then I would find that the bedroom door was locked. Still, I did not think this mattered since Selah and I were not traditionally tied to the bedroom as a location where something of a sexual and therefore bonding nature happens. I would leave Selah to her brooding. I would make her a cup of ginger and spice tea and leave it at the door. Then I would go back to my phone conversations while lying on the living room floor. Selah was not good at long and deep conversations. That was clear from the beginning, and I thought it was understood between us that I would not depend on her for such things. She did love it when I read poetry to her. She loved Yevgeny Yevtushenko, especially when he said, “Say thanks to your tears. / Don’t hurry to wipe them. / Better to weep and to be.” And better still when he said, “Bite into joy like you bite / a radish.” And I can tell you of her laughter when he got to the part where he said, “don’t shake off the large wonder / of your entrance upon the scene.” Selah would fall asleep to me reading, and when I stopped and turned the light off, she would say in her sleep, “Read some more.” In this way I read to Selah works by Enrique Lihn and Adrienne Rich, Derek Walcott and Muriel Rukeyser. Rita Dove. “I learned the spoons from / my grandfather, who was blind.” And Christopher Logue. “Silence and light / The earth / And its attendant moon / Neither of great importance / But beautiful and dignified.” I read her everyone I could put my hands on. I read them to her as she slept. This might make me sound wonderful until I tell you I had to stop. I petered out, even though I knew Selah loved my reading to her and it was the surest way to maintain her love for me. But what can I say? I grew forgetful. I postponed one night until the next, one afternoon for another, et cetera, et cetera. I became preoccupied with my own life: the way the editor of the university magazine was cutting up my articles, the way the bastard downsized my job in the editorial room and formed a clique against me. And my academic work was like a ceaseless noise in my frontal lobe. So no, I could not put my voice to poetry. I couldn’t read Mahmoud Darwish’s “Psalm 2,” saying, “I want to draw your shape, / you, scattered in files and surprises. / I want to draw your shape, / You, flying on shrapnel and birds’ wings.” If I felt like reading a poem, it would be Langston Hughes’ “Suicide Note.” Even this Selah would have appreciated—but even this I could not do at the time. Now I’m a bigger person. We are all small people in relationships. Despite my vaunted superiority, I was a small person. I elevated my smallness in my own eyes. Or come to think on it, it was in Selah’s eyes that I thought that I was big.
In my defence, let me say that there is a difference between reading poetry to someone and needing poetry for yourself
. And in those dreadful times at my job, and with my premonition of failure at my academic work, I needed poetry for myself, not poetry to entertain Selah. Selah should have seen this. But here I’m taking my admissions back; and I don’t want to do that, I won’t be accused of doing that. The poetry should have continued. It would’ve made me a better person.
Back to the airport at Madrid. Thistles and thorns. Selah was descending the escalator, coming toward me in a field of thistles and thorns. Late. She had taken her time scrutinizing every duty-free shop in every corner of that airport. We were on our way home to do more of the same at her shopping malls. I was furious. We were supposed to be boarding, and by boarding I mean there was still a bus to be taken from the gate to the plane. I was destined to look after the small details of that inconvenient time in our life. Selah came toward me, oblivious of time. She smiled her smile at me and presented me with a white scarf with a gold border. Then she added, “Shouldn’t we be leaving?” and proceeded to the gate. We missed our plane, and to this day Selah would tell you it was my fault because I had been reading Galeano and forgot about the time. Time was my domain, it appeared; Selah was timeless. Selah always caught me off-guard. I would be on one trajectory of reality and she would be on another. As I said in the beginning, I had assumed Selah would go about her business of being beautiful and I would go about my business, whatever it was. But this wasn’t how it worked out. Being beautiful, it became apparent to me, needed not only the attention of the beautiful but of everyone else surrounding the beauty—and in this case, that was me. I found myself at cross-purposes.
How did I meet Selah? Selah swore that it was at a brunch of the Berkshire Conference. She had come with someone she called a “friend,” someone she has never confirmed as a lover up to this day. I was giving a small talk on Jaqueline Jones’ Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow. Apparently I turned to make a point on my slide and Selah fell in love with my ass. So she said later. And far from listening to my talk, she paid attention only when I turned my back to the audience. Charming, I told her when she approached me later that day with this information. Then Selah informed me that there was a way in which I smoothed my trousers upon standing that was also apparently a turn-on—as was the way my hands moved when I read from my talk. I dismissed this reading of my body at once. But not really. Because I too cultivated my body with a hopeless vanity. I tuned it to an athleticism that I and only I (I thought) would appreciate. I, and only I, was aware of its muscularity, its flexibility and its speed. There was not an ounce of fat on it. My fingers were like limber twigs, like the twigs of tamarind trees. Dry aqueducts ran up the sides of my thighs. Long legged—yes, I was long legged, and Selah’s observation was indeed correct about my ass. It was high and noticeable and, most of all, firm. I prided myself on these physical attributes and I could be found running around the park near the parliamentary buildings at lunchtime in a sweat to make sure they stayed intact. My vanity was solely for my own enjoyment. I’ve never had what they call “body issues.” I’ve always loved my body. I am vain. But it is an esoteric and discreet vanity. I’m the only person who knows about it, I don’t project it. I revel in this physical happiness. You would not know this to look at me, I thought. But Selah had observed it, and while I outwardly expressed dismay, a deep satisfaction ran through me when she did. It must have shown. Initially I dismissed Selah’s come-on…but here we are. My vanity overtook me and I let Selah into my life. I was in the early days of the dissertation. I’d finished my master’s and had already published in several journals. I was the most promising scholar of my year. I was offered major scholarships to every reputable graduate program in the humanities. I had decided on the University of —— with a five-year guarantee of research money and teaching. It was in the glow of this reputation that Selah noticed my ass at the Berkshires. I was twenty-eight.