Theory

by Dionne Brand

  When Selah told me that she was leaving me, I had a spell of catatonia. I lay on the bed for two days…or was it three? My eyes descended to the bottom of my life, it seemed, and my brain felt underwater. I saw my bookshelves lean in toward me and the ceiling was kilometres away. I thought that I was dying. This is an expression, of course. People use it all the time, people who are not dying. So to be precise, I thought that I was losing a part of the way I had come to exist. I only recovered when Selah lay beside me and held my hands. I could feel both her sincerity and her insincerity at once, and I hung on to her sincerity and pulled myself out of the well of catatonia. I promised myself never to plunge into that well again. During my three catatonic days the weather was still and blank; events had no future. I will never visit that place again.

  By that point I had lost all sense of Selah’s inner life—at least to the extent that I thought I knew it. Can we say that we know anything of another person’s interior? The whole idea of an interior and an exterior suggests a certain deception, as if the interior is hidden deliberately from us. So let us say I no longer thought I knew what I had thought before about what she wanted. I would like to be indulged in this convolution, since there’s no clearer way of saying it. And now this became my preoccupation, whereas, at the beginning of our relationship, I had thought that Selah was her own preoccupation and I would therefore be required to contribute very little to that absorption except in the ways that I could. I myself had made it perfectly clear, both in my self-presentation and in my verbal representations, who I was and what I expected. I had no hidden agendas. This is the difference between Selah and me. Selah worked by innuendo, expectation, pregnant suggestion, expected interpretation. And when all this was misinterpreted on my part, the result was her complete rejection. When I rose from my catatonia, I decided to exit the trope I’d been inhabiting. To be truthful, I was expelled from the trope. And in the end gladly, though the end was long in coming and long in execution. Why do I lie and say “gladly”? It was horrific.

  It’s difficult to inhabit a trope; not at all as easy as one is led to believe. If the trope of beauty is arduous to manifest, as I think in Selah’s case it was—for it took constant recalibrating despite the basics being in place—then to attend to this trope, as I did, was also laborious. For Selah, I think, the benefits or pleasures that you would expect to accrue from manifesting the woman she was didn’t bear out. She was never sure, I observe, as to whether this or that benefit was right enough or deep enough. Perhaps the actual pleasure of the objects—the things she received, the people she attracted—never quite matched the promised pleasure of them. That is, faced with the results, she didn’t feel the charge that they were supposed to give, and so she kept pursuing that charge as an addict pursues a high. This is all interpretation on my part. What else is there but interpretation? If I thought that I was the other figure in the trope, then I was mistaken. I was a complete failure at this manifestation. I certainly learned through being with Selah that a trope is always provisional, always held by failure, always “being.” I don’t want to unravel those clauses; to put it simply, I was heartbroken.

  After the catatonia, a refreshment bathed me. I thanked Selah for her touch and proceeded with plans to divide our modest belongings. This renewed efficiency on my part surprised Selah, I believe. Though I hesitate to interpret, since it is interpretation that got me into trouble in the first place. I made a list of things. I gave Selah everything except my books, my notes and my extensive iterations of my dissertations. I gave her the date of my departure. I wished her well. I made no more entreaties. I suffered. I tried to remember that moment of surfacing from the well, how clear and clean it was. The world had goodness in it. I could exist, not with plans or possibilities but with nothing. When I was in my twenties, I had such moments—brilliant moments, where my life was illuminated in its singularity. Selah was behind me as an experience and, in the few weeks we spent navigating each other’s absences, Selah’s presence was like the presence of a ghost. And I, the “me” at the bottom of the well, was like a ghost too. Such enlightenment can’t last long, we can’t live in sustained enlightenment, since the world around us is full of the past, and so I had to move quickly into the future. I travelled virtually to another city with my folders and suitcases and my yoga mat, and left Selah to her city. I don’t know how all of this affected Selah. I abandoned all questions, all interpretation. I took the salvation of her hand raising me from the well and I fled. It returned me to freedom. Was it Sartre who said we are “doomed to freedom”? Well, I was incandescently doomed. I drove down the highway screaming my own name. I conclude that I can’t handle life the way other people, I assume, handle it. I’m not successful at the ordinary, as much as I try. I’m not successful at much; my dissertation is still waiting to be done. My gigs at the magazine where I had written two long pieces about my travels with Selah and the odd article have dwindled away. That dreadful editor sidelined me politically, and it will take some grovelling to get a couple of teaching assistantships.

  Selah hated paper. This knowledge should have given me a clear sense of my situation—but no, not me. I took it, perversely, to mean that Selah would grow out of this hatred under my influence. Some would say I had an inflated sense of myself, but I call this courage on my part. A more generous reading would be to say that I have faith in people. What is wrong with that?

  I know I have not described the place where I lived with Selah. The truth is I cannot recall the scenes through the window, the view through the door. I can’t remember them. Were there neighbours of significance? I don’t know. Selah filled my gaze. Have I forgotten these scenes or did they not exist with Selah? There may have been a birch tree, there may have been blue jays; there may have been water outside, though I doubt it. It may have been a river far away. At any rate, there was traffic. I turn these possibilities over in my memory, trying to see the window, the doorway, and I fail. I see nothing except Selah. Even when I dance late at night by myself, I am dancing with Selah.

  My only hope now is in an academic appointment, and for that I must complete the diss. Selah was a complete distraction, not what I had anticipated at all. Where were my small affections, my kindly encouragements, where was my solace? All these I had expected to ameliorate the harsh world, as I saw it. Those pages I managed to write, the few pages I salvaged from the disaster, of Selah, I don’t even know what they say. I keep them in a small suitcase. But I don’t want to return to my petty complaints. I want to live in the glow of my enlightenment. After leaving Selah, I wanted to speed down a highway singing “Crazy” with CeeLo Green, then break out into Whitney Houston’s “It’s Not Right but It’s Okay.” And it was these two songs that launched me on my new way. I’m not one for songs. Songs were Selah’s purview, but she can’t have these two. This period of enlightenment was a gigantic floodlight into my mind. This floodlight washed my former life with Selah—not clean, but discernible, as if I were circling all the events that had passed with Selah but in a different orbit.

  I don’t want to waste another moment more on Selah. I circle the ideas I circled around Selah, not Selah herself. Already I have forgotten Selah, because I never knew Selah. I understood that behind her beauty was the nervous panic, the tension of that beauty, the uncertainty of it.

  When I woke up the next morning, the morning after the well, I told Selah, “I want to wake up tomorrow in a new place, without anxiety, without panic.” It was wrong of me to have said this to Selah; after all, Selah may not have seen things this way. I apologize to Selah, I apologize to her beauty, this long after. But still, hold my words even if they are not a reference to Selah the finite. I wanted to wake up the next day, and every day, without anxiety. I want the floodlight of enlightenment to shine its beam on me always. For this I had to take leave of Selah. I sped down the highway like Lewis Hamilton. No, forget that reference. It’s not a question of winning and it’s not possible to draw a reference here because all destination
s on our tiny planet are known. Once I saw through a telescope the constellation Cassiopeia, quiet, distant, indescribably sparkled. I sped toward Cassiopeia singing “Maybe I’m crazy” along with CeeLo Green. Possibly, eleven thousand light years away from Selah.

  I mustn’t be sentimental about Yara, but whenever I think about her, even though she had nothing to do with my childhood, I remember my earliest years with its candies and split-pea soups. Why is that? Yara’s apartment over the railway bridge on Annette Street took me, strangely, back to the scents of my happiest years. The years when all I did was follow one desire to another. Small desires, like a cup of milk or a handful of sugar or the sourest cherry candy exploding in my mouth. Those years can’t be duplicated for happiness. They were brief but they were potent. My father had not become an ogre; my mother had not become a doormat. Back then, my father was still kindly. It was not yet clear to me that he saw my brother and me as possessions. Perhaps a child lives as a possession; perhaps the act of resting against a father’s knee or hanging off a mother’s shoulder are the conditions of being and living as a possession. My father loved us until we could say no. Possessions don’t speak. They are not allowed to say “un-own me.” Then, in my childhood, I didn’t think of the future—or not in the ways I think about the future now. And I didn’t think of the past for longer than a few seconds, the few seconds it took to feel the pain of a fall on my knees or to summarize the look of a bruise on my elbow. All these I recovered from quickly, since my only ambition was the next desire. Desire is like this, always dramatic and always ahead. To have desires satisfied is to defeat the purpose of desiring. Desires are never satisfied and that is why they are called desires and not satisfactions. If I thought of the future back then it was only in terms of my desires, not in terms of “a life,” let us say. The present was full of desire and therefore full of ups and downs.

  That’s how Yara was—full of ups and downs. If a pleasure couldn’t be immediate and mind-blowing, Yara didn’t understand it. I pride myself on my powers of observation. However misguided I am as to my potency in this regard, I can assure you that I take myself seriously on this. My observations are always wrong, but I’m amusing to myself when all is done. The one thing I can count on is that I am always wrong when it comes to judging character, especially the characters of the people closest to me. I met Yara at one of the meetings of academic researchers in my field. What was my field?, you might well ask. I had flitted between Philosophy and Literary Studies, between Literary Studies and Political Thought, between Political Thought and Cultural Studies. I landed somewhere among these disciplines in Interdisciplinary Studies. Yara wasn’t a researcher; she was writing a play where one of the characters was an academic. I don’t even know why my colleagues and I let Yara into our meeting. I don’t recall, now, how Yara came to find us in the third-floor Philosophy Lounge we had commandeered for our biweekly discussions. We, the academic researchers at the meeting, were flattered to a degree when we heard of Yara’s plans, but preoccupied as we were with the urgency of our research we found Yara naive—yet mystifying, as researchers find artists. Artists seem to produce, by magic, moments of illumination. We academics, on the other hand, slog away at an idea, often only reproducing the ideas of others in our turgid and lethargic dissertations. So Yara’s interest in us was amusing for some and alarming for others.

  I was still considered a glowing presence in my department despite my foreboding that I would never finish my dissertation. It was now five years since I’d begun writing the work in earnest. I’d given many talks at MLA conferences, I had published five articles in refereed journals—one per year, which is a feat. Still I couldn’t help but feel that my life’s work was ebbing away in these grim halls we call academia. I had anticipated being done by now, but what with one thing and another, not the least of which were my personal entanglements, here I was at thirty-four with my dissertation incomplete. ABD. All but dissertation. In the academy, you get caught up in the cut and thrust of theoretical argument and theoretical doubt and before you know it a year has passed, and then another. I had been attacked by some colleagues who were jealous at my production. Naturally, these attacks were not open—but I had several theoretical knives in my back administered by the same people I was sitting with now. They sneered at the speed with which I produced papers, implying that my work was slipshod. I had failed to mention Guattari here, I had not cited Lacan there. One has no friends in academia. One has colleagues. One has assassins. I preferred my own company anyway. Or, to be candid, I was finding it difficult to cultivate friendships. Lezama and Jonesy had left the city and I realized that although I had thought that it was I who had been the glue of us, it was really Lezama—for various reasons, not the least being her bubbliness and Jonesy’s desire. She had been the vivacious centre of our friendship. I think that desire is contagious.

  There were five of us in the so-called study group: Josie Ligna, the deconstructionist; Abby Guarino, the Lacanian-feminist theorist; Ahmad Khan, the Marxist theorist; Kofi Alexander, the Foucauldian theorist; and me. My work was interdisciplinary and uncategorizable.

  Yara was a fresh gust of air that afternoon. I felt her breath rustle the dead paper dust that had settled on the rest of us in the room. Each of us, the academics, rose to the occasion. We tried to impress Yara with our gravitas. We were aware of her as one is aware of a lake of shining water along a path or a bright light from the sun through a window into a dull room. More the latter, Yara burnished the third-floor lounge. We overwhelmed Yara with multi-syllabic words and esoteric concepts, each of us thinking that we weren’t really trying to impress Yara, we were merely speaking in the way that we, and people like us, spoke. Whether this worked on Yara, I don’t know, as we were soon caught up, as usual, in the sounds of ourselves. Academics become anxious with their own self-doubt, and instead of this silencing us, the self-doubt only causes more logics of self-proving. So after a while, to us, Yara wasn’t in the room at all. We insulted each other over who knew the literature of our subjects better. We pulled out little-known French theorists and quoted from them in French. One of us dredged up a Romanian who had written a single but seminal book, which the rest of us were unaware of. That stopped us for a millisecond before we collected ourselves, pointing out the flaw in the Romanian’s unknown theories. We were amazing that afternoon as we whipped around like so many gleaming switchblades.

  When I was a child, my grandfather had a way of feigning impatience with my questions while really being amused and fascinated with my argument. I had caught him smiling many times after dismissing me. This is how I now dealt with my colleagues—as vague annoyances, though on this occasion I felt like slapping them all. Yara’s delight and innocence—or what we then thought of as innocence—eventually brought us back to ourselves, or back to her world, or rather, the world outside of our research. This is what I loved about Yara—her pure delight and her sharp, if unscholarly, insights. Her shrewd observations surprised me. Given the methods of my own scholarship, it would have taken five or so years to arrive at these insights myself and commit them to paper, and so her insights shook me and made me consider if there was not another, clearer way to look at the world. Perhaps knowledge could be arrived at from a more visceral and intuitive knowing of the world instead of the way in which I had so far been conducting my inquiries.

  Needless to say, in my usual way I had misinterpreted Yara—or let us say, underestimated and badly assessed her fount of knowledge. But that is for later. When I first met her, I was very taken by the genuine delight she shone on all things. She giggled from time to time as we bore on with our academic minutiae. Her giggling at first goaded us on to more and more arcane hermeneutics until we finally subsided uncomfortably, each thinking we had made a complete ass of ourselves and perhaps created enemies amongst ourselves with the ferocity of our critiques. At the pregnant lull ending our discussions, Yara put us all at peace by declaring us fabulous and thanking us for including her in our meet
ing. She took each of our phone numbers, joking about how sexy she found us. Naturally we all fell for this and temporarily forgot all the theoretical wounds we had inflicted on each other in the course of the three-hour session. Yara complimented us, saying we were like wild and exotic animals she’d never encountered before. She said our brains were as sharp as needles. We’d never thought of ourselves as exotic and I for one was so taken by the metaphor I fell in love with Yara. I was willing to have Yara define the way I hoped to look at the world from then on. Yes, I was in fact exotic and sharp as needles. I’d never met a woman like Yara, a woman so forthright and brassy. Yara said what was on her mind all the time. She did not dissemble. She said she didn’t know how to lie and that statements simply burst out of her no matter how uncomfortable. She said that when they came out she understood herself more. Why keep things inside, she said.

  That afternoon, while we academics tried to collect and curate ourselves around Yara’s descriptions of us, Yara shocked us all with a question. “So who do you people fuck?” she asked. No sooner had we thought her charming than we thought her disrespectful. We became defensive. One of us said, “Well, that is not a theoretical question.” And another someone covered her mouth in dismay, and someone else gave out a huff of disagreement. I smiled enigmatically, and my closest academic rival, Josie Ligna, gathered some words about theory and praxis, mocking the academic who had denied the theoretical implications of “fucking.” In the end, our failure as theorists was apparent, since if we were theorists of the kind we’d hoped to be, Yara’s question wouldn’t have floored us or caused so much obfuscation. Yara made a joke again, saying, “You’re probably none of you getting any, eh?” We all laughed and left the subject there, as if we were joking too.