by Dionne Brand
When I say Selah was, and is, unaware of the power of her beauty, and its extension in her smile, I mean that her smile has a force of its own regardless of the consciousness that Selah, in the contemporary, is. There are elements to the Selah whom Selah cultivates that have effects that Selah may not know about or may not be able to marshal. The trope with all its attendant affects, and these are many and multi-valanced and convoluted, is one that Selah plays in, and it is so wide a trope that one cannot conceive of the entire territory it covers at all times, even if one represents that territory. A trope is a trope but a human being is a human being. So though at times that slippage, that difference between them, was not apparent, Selah was an intellectual in the studies of this trope but not the trope itself. And so she was taken aback by the effects of that trope and did not really know what to do with reactions to it—except to absorb them for a short, a very short, while and then go on to the dissatisfaction of more and more grooming and culling. When confronted with people’s reactions to her (and, in effect, the trope), she was astonished on as many occasions as she was pleased.
When I was born, my older brother, Wendell, said he felt free—free of attention and obligation. When I was old enough to understand and when he was old enough to tell me, he wished me good luck in satisfying the hopes of my family. He had been assigned to become the doctor, the lawyer, the CEO of whatever dreams our father and mother had. With my birth he would now be free, he thought, to discover what he would become. I was instinctively resistant to this task, and now my brother has gone on to become the doctor, the lawyer, the CEO of whatever, trapped as he was and clever as he is. I mention this to show how the trope of “son” cornered him. A trope is a trope, and my brother, Wendell, was caught sexting an assistant manager in the company he worked at now and the assistant had to be bought off. This behaviour confirmed my brother’s embrace of the trope of masculinity. I am far away from Wendell now, though I feel sorry for him. I only heard through my grandparents in Fort Lauderdale about his troubles. For me, leaving the world of my father and mother was to leave yet another trope. This may seem like overreacting but my parents’ drive, drive, drive to be the same, to have the most, to get the best, not even knowing what “the best” was—this drive gave me a rash. My family was like an organic person, my brother and mother and I being the legs and arms and a heart and a stomach, my father being the head. It moved, it ate itself and it birthed itself. An organism. That being said, it’s wise to have grandparents, as I did. They would visit every once in a while from Fort Lauderdale, complain of the cold and leave abruptly. The complaints of coldness would coincide with some quarrel with my father. Wendell and I were packed off to these grandparents in the summer. If not for them, I wouldn’t have been able to take a year off between my bachelor’s and master’s degrees. Yes, I would have entered the PhD much earlier, but back then I wanted a separation between me and academia; I wanted to live in the world, as I put it to my father. He screwed up his mouth into a knot and told me, “Fine, come work at the dealership.” This was my father’s idea of living in the world. There and then I thought to myself: this man and I have nothing in common and moreover he’s a danger to my ambitions. My father saw my life as belonging to him, and if I had been pliant he would’ve strangled mine for his. I had thought I loved my father, but when he said these words I began to doubt that. I began to lose family the way one loses the epidermis each day.
A year after our Spanish near-disaster in Córdoba, Selah and I went to Ghana. There, I left Selah to herself in the seaside suburb of Teshie-Nungua. We blew through my scholarship money with these trips. I realize now that with Selah I was pretending to be someone I wasn’t—someone with endless resources. It’s not that Selah asked me to pay. It was I who insisted on paying. I was overcompensating for my father’s stingy ways. I wanted to give Selah what she desired even if her desires were unreasonable and even if I didn’t have what she desired. Furthermore, I think, sensing her waning interest, I was trying to amuse Selah and to keep her attention. In Teshie-Nungua she said she felt at home with the ocean outside our door and the vendors along the street. I’m sure that she was really thinking that Teshie-Nungua, unlike Córdoba, did not require my highfalutin ways with my little guidebooks and my enforced visits to museums, and my little facts and pseudo-facts about populations and gross national product, et cetera, et cetera. So I heard the wind on the Bight of Benin scatter away my droning words, “For god’s sake, Selah, the per capita income here is what you spend on shoes…” To paraphrase Joy Harjo, here in Ghana we were the ruins. But I was superfluous here on this outer skirt of Accra. Teshie-Nungua did not need a language only I, between us, was fluent in. Selah could be free of me. I confess, she was much more fluent in the everyday niceties, the spiritual and human exchanges people needed and appreciated. I was ill at ease on this level. I don’t know what people want. They catch me off-guard all the time. I sit and think, and before you know it events have slipped away. Selah, in contrast, was in her element here. Three tailors came to visit us at the hotel and went away with measurements for an assortment of dresses. Selah moved up and down the streets of Teshie-Nungua speaking to bead sellers, fish sellers, kelewele sellers, gourd sellers, cloth sellers, bicycle riders, elementary school children, security guards, cassava fryers, church ladies, bartenders, taxi drivers and street sweepers. She moved with a swiftness and fluidity, doubling back and advancing, and within the first two days of our visit she was well known among the locals and privy to details of their lives that would surprise their mothers. Again, I can speculate, but I don’t truly understand quite how she is able to wring these details, these intimacies, out of people. She was calling the cake seller “Joan” on the first day. A few days later I heard her asking how Joan’s mother, Martha, was doing, how was her diabetes. To truly take in this feat of Selah’s, this quick-step flânerie, the magnitude of it, go to YouTube and find a video of the Teshie-Nungua Labadi Road; in this way you will embrace the enormity of her seductions. In Teshie-Nungua, Selah found me non-essential. She seemed to forget that we were living together and had been for several years. It seemed as if I was a mere inconvenience to the life she had always planned to live in Teshie-Nungua with her friends and her potential lovers. This is the type of forgetfulness that beauty has. It begins every day anew. It is rigorous in its viciousness. Selah would rise in the mornings, leaving me in a still tight-eyed sleep. She would shower, oil her body, perfume behind her ears, and pack her Coach tote bag to set off on her day. I would roll over and catch her sandalled feet disappearing through the closing door. On occasion she returned with a forgiving cup of coffee for me from the breakfast room. But most days she simply left for her new life in Teshie-Nungua.
One day, from my lounge chair where I was reading Colm Tóibín’s The Master, I saw Selah strike up a conversation with one of the musicians on the beach, a boy who made drums—at least he seemed a boy to me. This boy, she told me later, was making her a drum. The next day Selah disappeared with him, saying he was taking her to see what she called the real community. She presented this as if her time with me had been stuck in touristic preoccupations. The boy was handsome, the kind of sun-bodied boy one finds on so many beaches. I assume a certain cliché played itself out, although this acceptance of events sounds more sophisticated than I was at the time. I felt something. Loss. And insult. And shock. There I was, walking back and forth from the beach to the hotel gate waiting and looking for Selah. She breezed in late that evening without further explanation. There was a feeling between us like fine sand, a curtain of fine sand, a distance that made me sad and lethargic. I could do nothing about it except pretend it was not there. I asked Selah how her day had been. She said “Great,” without elaboration or embarrassment. She was far away from me. Selah is incapable of remorse. Or perhaps it is I who suggests remorse belongs here, as if it would be suitable. I could never assume I knew what Selah was thinking. I read in her diary once—yes, I read in her diary, “I have to say s
orry more often to ——.” My name was in that space. Selah found it hard to say sorry. She felt it was a weakness. It broke her spirit to apologize. I find it easy to apologize. Selah thought my apologies were insincere. She said that I apologized too easily and therefore it meant nothing. Strange. Strange. She couldn’t conceive of the sincere. It’s nothing for me to apologize to another human being; I hate to offend. I feel as if I have struck the person. And that, for me, is the most disastrous thing one can do.
Selah loved the ocean, the beach, the sun. And I loved Selah loving all this. I had anticipated us together walking the beach, looking out on the Bight of Benin, reading our books, turning to the ocean and turning again. I always accused Selah of being a romantic, but it is I who was the romantic. The Bight of Benin is the deep belly of a goddess. Amazingly more than human. Terraqueous, it owns you. It has no relation to you.
I cannot remember what else I did in Teshie-Nungua after Selah’s return that day. Next we were at Kotoka airport, then in Frankfurt, and then back home. Several times for several weeks after, an international number called our home. I dialled the number that had been left idly on display. Once, I heard the trade winds over the Bight, I heard the waves lift and fall, and I asked the receiver, “Who is this?” Time passed but the sand-screen remained between Selah and me. Though I am one to forget.
Yes, travelling with Selah ate up most of my research money. I can’t blame her, though. I wanted to be in the world. I cannot see how one can stay in one’s little place and have anything to say about the world. I wanted to investigate the struggles of the masses everywhere. Though now I see I was only investigating Selah, or probing my own self-awareness, my own vanity. And Selah did pay her own way to an extent. After all, she worked as administrative secretary in the Faculty of History at—University. I was the one who magnanimously offered to pay for or procure accommodations. And as the bills from Spain and Ghana mounted, I grew frantic at the thought of having to grovel before my father or brother.
Selah and I loved to dance at a local club, El Convento Rico. They play Latin music there and I love Latin music. We loved to dance anywhere, as I fancy myself a dancer. Selah thought herself a better dancer, and kept up with the trends and the moves. Selah, did I say—it bears saying again and again—was beautiful. Selah was so beautiful she never existed; no one that beautiful can exist. She is a fiction of mine. We were at a party once and someone asked, “If you could be with anyone in the world, who would it be?” And I said, “I am with her now.” Selah claims she never heard me say this, but it doesn’t matter. It was said. My love was too subtle for Selah. I love plainly. My love is on the floor. It may not be visible as love. It may look like nothing. That is, it may look like air. We walked around in my love; Selah breathed it in. It is not spectacular. But one notices when it goes missing.
Despite everything, I breezed through my course work and my comprehensives in no time. In fact, the course work for me was minimal. The topic of my doctoral dissertation, though, has changed so many times that my committee was threatening to abandon me. First there was “Gender’s Genealogies: The Site of the Subaltern, a Foucauldian Reading.” Then I thought of “Exhibitions or Memorials: The Site of the Subaltern, a Spivak Reading,” then “Gender and Heidegger’s Dasein: Informal Imperialism and 5,000 Years of the Gender Regime.” I finally decided on a much pared down topic and reworked my thesis statement. I wrote several hundred pages during these changes, each recording the turns of my mind, but could not get the committee to read them until I had my statement pinned down. This statement had to be put through the system and approved before I could proceed, they said. There’s no getting around this bureaucracy. Once that tedium was over, I was still left up in the air by the committee. This has ended up being my fault, and increasingly I realize that no one on the committee truly wants to work with me. I fear they only want to steal my ideas. Added to which—and I don’t say this boastfully but as a statement of fact—my brain is faster than the academy allows. I settled on “Political Thought as Outgrowth of Gender Identities,” and then I thought “The Mask of Gender: A Fanonian Critique.”
Selah had no idea about the bowels of academia. When I arrived home to unburden myself, to rail against the academic tyranny, she sucked her teeth and said, “Well, if you are so much more intelligent, why can’t you figure them out? Why aren’t you done?” I accused her of a coarse logic, but of course she was right. I haven’t been able to get around myself to complete my life’s work. At the root of the problem are the quotations and references. One is not allowed an original thought. I asked the committee: Does Derrida keep quoting everyone before him to make sure he is right? Does Spivak have to array around her all the dead philosophers and theorists to prove her credentials for speaking? And finally, there’s no reference for what I want to do. Why can’t I simply speak without having to have that speech legitimated by god knows who? Selah had to give me these last points.
When Selah was on your side, she would fight for you. Fiercely. There is a side to beauty that is fierce, as I’ve said before. You don’t want to get in its way. It will crush you. One night we were out dancing with friends at El Convento Rico. One of Selah’s friends became drunk and propositioned someone. The someone’s girlfriend jumped on Selah’s friend, and Selah immediately went on the defence. Selah’s friend was clearly in the wrong—but she was Selah’s friend and that, to Selah, made her right. I tried dragging Selah off the girlfriend. “You don’t allow people to step to you like that, no matter what,” Selah said. Selah’s friend had a lot of mouth, as they say, but no skills. There was shoving and grabbing, and Selah put her hand in the girlfriend’s face. We left the club, walking along College Street, me pulling Selah and Selah walking backward and ready to resume the fight. We had been followed, since Selah’s friend continued cursing and challenging the attacker for a block after we left. My major concern was not the scandal, the possibility of the police arriving, the unwanted social territory that this kind of behaviour would instantiate; my concern was Selah’s face. What if that woman had gone for Selah’s face? I would’ve had to step in beyond how I did, which was to entreat all parties to end the fight. Selah didn’t fully appreciate my position. She gave me a look as if I were a coward, berating me for not wanting to get my hands dirty. No, I don’t want to get my hands dirty, definitely not, I told her. I’m always for using reason and argument. I can never understand violence. I find it alarming. Selah said, “Violence is too big a word for this kind of hand-to-hand combat.” While Selah kept a lookout for the counterattack of the enraged girlfriend, and the person who had started it all kept up a blizzard of curse words, I searched desperately for an empty taxi. One finally drew up and I shoved Selah and her friend into it. They cheered each other as the taxi moved off, boasting about what they had done and what they should’ve done. Here I want to reference Gabriel García Márquez’ Chronicle of a Death Foretold. Selah and her friend reminded me of Pedro and Pablo—determined and set, precipitant. They saw no reason to resist a destiny. Meanwhile, I felt as if I were the whole town in the novel, unable to stop what could come because of my inattention or my disbelief. Or perhaps, if it’s not too much of an exaggeration…well, it is; I was not Bayardo San Román. My main effort was to make sure Selah’s beauty did not experience some disfigurement. Selah didn’t appear concerned. She had been prepared to put her face on the line, though she did not see it this way. She didn’t anticipate losing the fight. “That girl couldn’t touch me!” she said disdainfully when I brought up my anxiety. Selah thinks beauty is a piece of armour, that it will see her through all battles. But I think of the beautiful Achilles. There is a heel somewhere on Selah and I hope it’s never exposed.
The question remains: If we were so diametrically opposed, why was I with Selah? Simple. Vanity, I believe. I loved walking beside Selah down any street. I could see all eyes on Selah. No one noticed me until several seconds after noticing Selah, and then dismissively. They thought that I simply happened t
o be walking by at the same time as they were looking at Selah, that I had no possible relation to her life. This gave me pleasure. Perhaps Selah loved walking with me for the same reasons. I set off the vision that she was in a stark manner. I was always incredulous that Selah had chosen me—even now that I understand her choice as the random and arbitrary power of the beautiful. I’m not trying to say that Selah had no imperfections. I could outline them, and will, but all her imperfections were enveloped in that sinecure of beauty that she possessed. Perhaps my affair with Selah can be rolled into my dissertation; perhaps that is what I am doing subconsciously as I ponder the interpretative, the hermeneutics of our situation.