Theory

by Dionne Brand

  Yara had no filter. There was no public and private divide, no secrets either. Much later, Yara said to me that she’d had enough of secrets in her past. I was afraid to find out too much about that past, yet I also wanted to help Yara sort out the past so that she could go forward with double her abandonment. Again, my do-gooder personality got in the way of actual reality. However, you can’t blame me for compassion.

  After the meeting, where I became intrigued by Yara, I waited for her phone call, as did all the other academics who had been in the room that afternoon. Yara had flattered and embarrassed us, and as academics we couldn’t wait for the opportunity at rebuttal. My vanity led me to believe that I’d be the one receiving Yara’s phone call and that I would be the subject of her new play. I didn’t live in the world of art and had no idea about Yara’s work. Frankly, I didn’t consider art to be work but something given by the gods. Despite my flirtation with literary criticism, and my reading of poetry to myself and others as solace, art qua art did not engage me deeply. I was aware of the commercialized versions of art—popular movies, television, and radio. Suffice it to say those were uninteresting to me. The world of artists, true artists like Yara, wasn’t so much uninteresting to me as remote. I shared, of course, with my colleagues the disdain for and exaltation of such artists. I found them airy-fairy, to use a vulgarism—that is, they seem uninvolved in the material world. I much preferred past literary figures such as Naipaul or Walcott or Dickens or Shakespeare. I preferred my artists to be mythic—understood in hindsight, which is the way contemporary society embraces art, as a sort of relic. In this respect I’m not unusual. Art exists not in the present but in the past, like beauty, or like a holy icon whose significance is essential and infinite. Art and artists are a subject I’m familiar with only in a global and abstruse sense. Is this a dreadful admission in one who considered Literary Studies as an academic route? Not really.

  Yara called as I predicted, a few days later. Truthfully, she had disappeared from my mind except as an occasional whiff of good feeling that I had carried with me since our meeting. Her giggle had stayed with me. Once or twice I remembered looking up from my own intense contribution that afternoon, and seeing her resist a laugh, her hand to her mouth and a sheepish look in her eyes. We had seemed to share a private joke and this made me certain she would call me. When she called, she said “Professor ——” in a false Italian accent. I’d insisted on a point on Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks when my colleague Josie Ligna had cited her unknown Romanian. I knew it was Yara on the phone, naturally, and I laughed. Then she said, “Would you like to come and see my work?” in the same Italian accent. I jumped at the chance and we arranged that she would leave me a ticket at the door.

  I’m not a professor, not yet. I’m simply trying to finish this dissertation. At that point, when I met Yara, most of my research money had been pissed away, though I can’t beat myself up for that. I tell myself, I enjoyed it. I ate it, I drank it, I spent it on women. Fine. Some distraction always intervenes—if not intimate relationships then money or jealous professors who want to steal my ideas. I am determined to finish this year. Though I know I say that each year. There are other reasons for my failure to complete my work that I prefer not to go into here. My distractions seem more compelling than the dissertation. Why is it that the mind can be caught up so heavily in feeling? We have been taught that the mind is more systematic than the emotions, that the mind can be marshalled and feeling can be sublimated, but this, I swear, is false. Feeling is more compelling and insistent than what we call “ideas.” Understandably, this is my own theory. No citation. Just self-diagnosis.

  When I arrived at Yara’s event, who should I meet there but three of the other academics, including Josie Ligna. Obviously, Yara was not discriminating. I had been at pains to say to my colleagues how disruptive Yara’s presence had been to our discussions—and now there I was. Mind you, we’d all agreed, all except for Josie Ligna. My embarrassment was momentary. I was sure that I could explain my presence away through some academic ruse. Yara was a local informant, I would say. I sat at the back of the small theatre, which had a bar. I sat as close as I could to the door in case I felt like leaving, and also to get a better view of my colleagues. Josie Ligna, I observed, had found her way to the front, close to the stage. Ahmad Khan, the Marxist, tried waving me over to the other end of the bar, but I ignored him. Abby Guarino, the Lacanian feminist, was at a small table making notes in a tiny notebook. The place was poorly lit, so clearly she was faking it. I couldn’t see the Foucauldian, Kofi Alexander, anywhere.

  Yara’s “work” included a monologue from Toni Cade Bambara’s Gorilla, My Love, which was very affecting. Then Yara produced an acoustic guitar and began to sing. It was then that I truly fell in love with Yara. There was something about the way the single light of the improvised stage fell across her, something intimate and vulnerable that appeared in her face. Intimate and vulnerable, not weak. Worldly. She sang a song she had composed about a girl laughing or about wanting a girl to laugh or wondering if that girl was still laughing. It was about a girl Yara had known and lost touch with, and whom she had shared happy times with, but a girl who was a little crazy and lived a precarious life. Yara sat there, singing this song, but she had left the audience watching and had travelled toward the friend she was singing about. The way she sang the word “laughing” made me know that it was not about laughing at all. It was about the recovery of laughter. I saw a loneliness and a great capacity for empathy in Yara. When she finished the song the room was quiet. She sat still, then untangled her fingers from the guitar, took a deep breath and returned to us. She told a joke; I don’t remember it. It was to cover the vulnerable space that had opened up in her. Then she introduced a bass player and a flautist, and they played for a while and then the show was over. I wanted to go to Yara, put my arm around her or give her a glass of water. I wanted to say to her, “Let us go home.” But I didn’t. I slipped out of the club and walked to my apartment. It was raining—an odd tropical deluge for a northern city by a lake. What had I seen? Why hadn’t I stayed? I saw Yara and the girl in the song fighting the world so that they could laugh, and I saw Yara lonely for that friend. I saw them both abandoned to the world. I made all this up as I walked home, and I determined that whatever it took, I would be in the world for Yara.

  I didn’t have Yara’s phone number to call and tell her all this. A minor but telling obstacle. Now I fretted that Josie Ligna had probably stayed on and insinuated herself, with gushing congratulations, to Yara. Josie had a way with women. At any rate, I was happy (grateful) to hear Yara’s chirpy voice on the phone the next morning, saying, “So, Professor, you didn’t like my performance?”

  “No, no, no,” I gushed. “It was wonderful but I had to leave for another appointment.” “Appointment?” Yara insinuated. “Well, I’d like such an appointment with you.” I laughed. “About my play, I mean,” Yara said. “I’d like to interview you.”

  “Sure,” I said. I thought I could hear an interest in Yara’s voice, an interest beyond a mere interview. I said I could not imagine what kind of play I would feature in. Yara was a multidisciplinary artist, she told me. She didn’t see herself as limited to one genre. She’d been trained in opera but had made the transition to what she called “less militaristic art.” She said that she did miss some arias, like “Dido’s Lament” and “Casta Diva,” but she didn’t miss the brutal competitiveness and the power plays of the opera world. I couldn’t imagine Yara as an opera singer—not that I know opera singers. I saw Kathleen Battle in action once—at the Roy Thomson Hall, a solo recital—imperious and splendid. She ordered her pianist to get her a glass of water with only a glance in his direction. Yara, while potent, was not cruel—except when she was being cruelly honest.

  I’d never lived in a world of honesty. So perhaps I took honesty for cruelty. My upbringing was to be quiet if there was nothing good to say. My upbringing was to have nothing to say in public, since this
would either expose one’s ignorance or give far too much away as to one’s intentions. Yara went around saying everything in public—the mark of an artist, I suppose. She had no “private,” as I’ve said before. At the lunchtime interview that followed our phone call, she launched an intrusive inquiry. Where was I born, how did I justify being an academic, who did I sleep with, did I ever question my left-wing politics, my gender assignment, my comfortable life while good people were starving, my obvious class allegiances, et cetera, et cetera. And did I intend to make a living off studying people as if they were bacteria? Wasn’t I perpetuating a system of hierarchy? I engaged Yara lightly on the surface, seeming amused at her questions. Underneath I was steaming to be challenged in this way. In the end I felt as if all my ideas were indefensible. I knew full well my ideas were defensible, but put under the searching blowtorch of Yara’s questions, I was at a loss. I was put out by the mere fact of being questioned. And so the legitimacy of these questions, questions I would have readily asked myself, annoyed me. I had until then observed the protocol of not asking or entertaining questions of a personal or political nature. Yara’s every question was an indictment of my positions. My positions were public and correct, but to be asked about them was an affront. Yara laughed at the end of every question and her face had a smile all the way through her interview. This made me uneasy. I couldn’t wait to get to the end of the encounter in order to never have to see Yara again. She even found fault with the way I spoke, calling it cute. I asked her what was cute about being able to enunciate words or possess a vocabulary? She said, “Oh no, nothing, it’s just weird the way you talk.” I was incensed. Only good manners and a distrust of my own uneasiness allowed me to bear the rest of our lunch.

  When Yara called again I let the answering machine take the call. I listened to her message at least five times before calling back. She was sorry “if” she’d overstepped. She’d sensed my embarrassment but there was nothing to be embarrassed about, she simply wanted to get to know me deeply. Perhaps some of the questions had been intrusive, but she really admired me and what I’d accomplished despite the society we lived in. Did I detect a note of amusement? Still, I was pacified, though I didn’t know what Yara was referring to when she mentioned what I had accomplished. Nothing, it seemed to me. I was working at a small community newspaper now, editing ads and trying to sell a few. I couldn’t bear the manager, who had big capitalist dreams for the crappy little rag. I was barely hanging on and hoping my dissertation would bail me out. Sometimes I worked as a teaching assistant for some incompetent professor whose job I was better at. I was finished with all of my course work and my comps, and really should have been much further along. My father had warned me that Sociology, Political Science, anything in the humanities—these were nowhere degrees and that I should have done an MBA. But that is all water under the proverbial bridge. I find business and my father insufferable. He owns three used-and-new car dealerships around the city and suburbs. He buys wrecks, fixes them up, changes the speedometer and resells them to unsuspecting people. I know this doesn’t make him the worst kind of capitalist, but it’s what he’s made of my brother, Wendell, that I detest. He’s made Wendell into a toady. I’d done my undergraduate work in literature, and so had my brother. Wendell was two years ahead of me and had encouraged me. But constant hammering from our father about how were we going to put food on the table with English degrees persuaded my brother to do a master’s in business. I saw him fold up his soul and put it in the bottom of his shoe. I felt pity for him until the day he told me the same thing as my father—looking me in the face as if we had never looked each other in the face before with any sincerity. And so I left literature to analyze the social and familial systems that drove people toward self-betrayal and blind conformity. I miss my brother. On the occasions that we talk, I sometimes hear a small sound of what he used to be come from the back of his throat.

  But I must get back to Yara. I was fascinated with Yara’s frankness. I decided to subject myself to this unabashed honesty. I thought that there was something in it I had to learn. There must have been a layer of dishonesty in me that I wanted to cleanse. Yara took me to clubs I’d never been to in my life—clubs with painters, musicians, singers, actors, pool tables, smoke, installations, private sex rooms and sex viewing rooms. In some of these clubs we danced, and one night Yara spun me around on the dance floor until I fell down with dizziness. I loved Yara for this dizziness. The whole time I was with Yara I was dizzy. I stayed out all night with her and her artist friends, coming home at four in the morning sometimes. I abandoned the study group. I had been accustomed to long cups of coffee with my colleagues after our sessions as we carried on the same esoteric arguments. No more. Truthfully I didn’t know what Yara would do to the study group with her questions; I was afraid. So for the first months I abandoned my colleagues and my dissertation. Ours was what is commonly called a whirlwind romance. I lost weight answering Yara’s probing questions about my life, my thoughts, and trying to be as honest and open in my own questioning of her life and thoughts. I experienced the world differently. I experienced the world at the level of the skin. Yara made me see that I’d spent enough time avoiding my true feeling. I felt flayed. Yet, energized. Yara would ask the most intimate questions of the most unlikely people. The bank manager she asked about her sex life—Was she getting any? Yara would ask. Taken aback, the bank manager scoffed and turned her back, but the next time we visited the bank together, I noticed Yara and the manager engaged in a giggly private conversation. Yara’s questions were, in the main, of a sexual nature and under other circumstances I would’ve said that she was fixated in adolescence, but given that I myself never asked these questions, I was persuaded that a repressed side of me was being challenged. Yara told me I was repressed. She said that the first time she saw me at that academic jerk-off she had felt sad for me (she is the one who called it an academic jerk-off); she had wanted to protect me, and she felt that she would do this for me. How odd that in a setting where I was at the height of my powers, Yara saw my vulnerability. That is, she saw me as vulnerable. I didn’t know what to do with this admission at the time. It made me feel comforted, though I hadn’t imagined it would. On the other hand, it disturbed me because it revealed what I lacked and what Yara, in far worse circumstances than I, possessed. I felt it was incongruous that Yara would say that, seeing me, she wanted to take care of me. But that is all in hindsight. Truthfully, at the time, through Yara’s eyes I saw myself as possible and open. Yara seemed to experience life in the immediate, in the present. I lagged back, observing the experience of life. This, I assume now, is what Yara pitied me for. Was there a life I wasn’t living, I asked her at first, a life only noticed in scars and pains? I hoped that I would have an impact on Yara with questions of this kind. She, it seemed, had grown up in a world of hurts and pains, so I asked her if it was only hurt and pain that defined a life. How do you recover from a wound? I asked her. To recover isn’t to betray or forget, I said. It’s to resist the definition of the wound as the whole incident. What about the defence mounted in the face of the wound? I asked. If we gave each other anything it was this argument. She laid out scars. I…

  Let me rephrase. Yara would bring strays to her apartment over the railway tracks—by which I mean not cats, not dogs, not half-dying birds, but half-dying people. You see already my failure to be human in the description of people as “stray,” but let me explain. There were always at least two other people in her apartment; one drinking water in the kitchen with the thirstiest appearance, another with bags in a corner, trying to sort things out, arranging and rearranging the bags. These were bag ladies and women just discharged from the mental hospital, and women running across the country as far away as possible from Saskatoon or Port Alberni or St. John’s, running as far away as they could get from all traumatic events. I was afraid of these women. Some of them were glazed-eyed and some so cleared-eyed their gaze hurt you. They either looked past you or deep into y
our soul. Some had a violence to them, a violence Yara rarely saw. Why did I see their violence while Yara saw their vulnerability? When I objected to them, Yara became distressed. Or she accused me of being comfortable and middle-class and therefore having blinders as to who these women really were. I think that was true, in the main. My blinders. I couldn’t see, beneath the film of appearance, who these women were or had been, let alone who they would be. That is key, I suppose—to be able to see who someone might be. But if I was blind in one direction, Yara was blind in the other. She couldn’t always see danger. She didn’t see the violence, or the other universe these women had already departed into because of the violence they had suffered. She didn’t see that their rescue was impossible. They were walking in another territory and not even her hand across the divide would lead them back to anything resembling where she stood. But I loved Yara’s compassion, her scary compassion. Yara’s compassion was sacrificial. Most of us stop at the perimeter of self-preservation, but not Yara. There was nothing between her and harm. She felt everything and she let everything in. To be with Yara was to hang on to an open nerve. There were constant emergencies. All of Yara’s stray women lived emergencies—emergencies that Yara was willing to be dragged into as if their life were her life, as if their jangling cerebral cortex were hers. I couldn’t always bear this presentness of hers. She would eye me accusingly, asking why I didn’t feel the same. Her face then was all rawness, so open to the world it was astonishing. She was forever wanting me to do something about the world. I thought that I was doing something about the world by writing my dissertation. Language and thought—the world—would change after my dissertation, the whole field of gender would be revolutionized. But Yara couldn’t see this, or didn’t agree. I asked her: Didn’t her own art work to save the world? her acting, her performances? Perhaps, she said, but it wasn’t enough. She wrote me a letter about this once. She wrote me many letters, but this one said: