Theory

by Dionne Brand

  Mostly I disagree with you on this self-fulfillment of your dissertation. People die all over the world, live hungry, freezing, thirsty, war-torn, and I want to be out on the streets and you want to be thinking. You want financial security. You give up life to universities, to this thesis to be read by whom, bought by whom? You still don’t even know the meaning of the word oppression. You are satisfied with that, and I am disappointed in myself. I should be out more in the streets. Right here people die of crack, people are raped, and we do nothing. I am missing something by being with you, though now I can’t live well if you are not in my life.

  I am missing something by being with you. It hurts me to read this even now, years later. Yara was always on fire, burning, burning, burning. Her letters ripped my heart open. I never knew where to put them, they were so raw and truthful. I have them even now, and they still burn my heart.

  Yara and I spent a furious six months falling in love. This falling in love consisted of intense arguments and sex. My colleagues didn’t see me for these six months, and when I finally emerged again, after phone calls from my supervisor, no one seemed to recognize me. I’d lost a great deal of weight and I now smoked. This was all due to the intensity of my encounter with Yara. I had only answered the supervisor’s call because Yara had gone away to a gig in San Francisco with a troupe of actors doing a Lynn Nottage play. I have never missed anyone so much in my life. We both felt, I think, as if something terrible was happening. The trip was only to be two weeks, but I felt such loss being without her it was as if an irreparable damage had been done. I had to get a hold of myself, so I went to the university. I recognized something like horror in my supervisor’s eyes—well, perhaps consternation. He asked me about my health. Health? I asked. What do you mean, I feel wonderful. Auer, my supervisor, and I were not personally close so I found this question intrusive. Yara had sent me a postcard. It said, “Having a coffee (decaf) in a renaissance café in San Fran. How lucky to have you in my life. Take good care, love, Yara. To justice and equality.” I had grown thin with my love for Yara. Loving Yara was making me thin. Every moment took on such a potency, a metabolic potency. My whole body seemed made, exclusively, of straining muscle. A colleague, the Lacanian whom I was not close to, passed me in the hallway and said, “Look at yourself.” I did not look at myself. I had not looked at myself for six months of love. I’d only looked at Yara. And I didn’t look at myself that day or else I would’ve seen the rope and beam of love I had become, the spare and lit banister of love I had become. I was brusque with my supervisor, promised him another chapter in a week or so, and went home to miss Yara more.

  Now that I think of it, I suppose I thought Yara an antidote to academia.

  It’s August now and I am watching a blue moon. Yara would love this. It would be misleading not to speak of Yara’s complete zest for living. Were it not for me, all our days would have been spent on the streets protesting and all our nights would have been spent singing and playing games. Yara loved games, especially poker. On any given night, her apartment would be full of actors and musicians and mad women playing poker. Yara was always moving among us, probing. She was the centre of attention, she cooked, she asked questions, she made jokes. One of her favourite puns was on the word “celibate.” If someone said they were celibate, Yara would ask them who they were selling a bit to, or for how much. Yara knew the sex life of everyone and made this news public. She loved being the centre of attention in this way, and she could size up a person quickly. Her acting career benefited and suffered for this ability, since having sized up the person she couldn’t help but declare her assessment. I, on the other hand, have poor judgment. I never know who people really are. I look over their faces and I’m at a loss. I look at some broad outline that I alone see and on that spurious basis I make a determination, usually wrong. It took me a long time to admit that I’m a poor judge of character. I didn’t misjudge Josie Ligna, however. She had kept in touch with Yara, going to her demonstrations while I sat in the library working on my dissertation—over-confident, eight months into the relationship, of my limited (in hindsight) prowess. I blame my grandfather for this overreaching on my part—this sense that the mental overwhelms the physical, and that I could, because of my stronger arguments, my philosophy, occupy an unassailable position with a lover. In fact, this is an arena where I’m completely incompetent. My grandfather staked much on the intellect, and he also succeeded in having many women besides my grandmother. He demonstrated, to me at least, how the intellect frees one from the immediate. Moreover, my grandmother seemed content to me; she turned a blind eye to my grandfather’s infidelities. Infidel. Breaker of faith. Heretic. These observations I make of my grandparents are, I realize, equally spurious. They are based on knowledge gleaned from the times my brother and I were sent to stay with them every summer, and overhearing my father and mother talk about them. My mother complained about my grandfather, her father, often. My own father chuckled through these complaints. But the times my brother and I spent with our grandparents were indulgent and idyllic. Our grandparents seemed more expansive than our parents. Both my brother and I couldn’t wait to be loaded on a plane each summer and banished to Fort Lauderdale, where our grandparents lived.

  I was pious with Yara. If pious is absolute faithfulness, I was a defender of the faith. I was pious to the point of poor judgment. Isn’t all faith poor judgment, though? I defended Yara’s outbursts, her insults, her intemperateness—and she had many inappropriate moments with perfect strangers. She was always pulling someone down a peg or two, or going too far with someone, and when they criticized her she was offended and hurt. Then I would have to put on my armour and go out and break someone apart. I always said that she was right when she was wrong. Then, when I tried privately to tell her that she was in fact wrong, she would either assail me for my bourgeois analysis or she would look so crushed that I had to withdraw the criticism and assure her that I was the one who was wrong entirely. If I couldn’t convince her, I would wake up to her absence, and a letter that began:

  Dear——, what I can say is I’m sorry and should life have been different, should I have been able to change the time, to clean myself, to will myself to be more I would have. Some things are like cancerous sores that don’t heal, and only time can say what will pass. That is me wishing never to have been in a nightmare, needy. I take what I need. It is not a choice. I brave aloneness, hatred…

  Then I would have to find Yara and hold her, while she forgave me and I forgave her. Invariably it was I who retreated. These events never caused Yara to pause the next time before flying off at the mouth. They did, however, effectively close the door on my critique.

  Yara and I lived together only briefly. I moved into her railway apartment for several months. I didn’t give up my own small place, however. There I would repair to my thesis, my books, my private life where I sat still or lay on the floor. I’m a solitary person in the main, and when I’m alone I think about how solitary and alone I am, and I think of how I love to be alone and solitary—but then I think how sometimes this aloneness and solitude needs to be performed among a multitude, because I wouldn’t, for example, go out into the countryside and find a cabin and root around there loving its solitude. But I do love the quiet of my small apartment, and I love there the noise of my books, the din of all my thinking. I even loved the detestable neighbours. There is a big lumbering drunk man to one side, and to the other, a man who plays R. Kelley’s “Nothing wrong with a little bump and grind” to wake up each morning. I can see the lumbering drunk right now: he is at the House of Lancaster with his face on the bar. The bump-and-grind guy I never see, I only smell his strong perfume as he passes by my doorway. Between these two neighbours, I am an angel.

  I couldn’t live in the same apartment with Yara for long; her busyness disquieted me. There were people coming and going all the time, plays being rehearsed, concerts being planned. At first I loved this, and gradually I was hauled into the arrangements
for this or that event. Suddenly I was acting in Lonne Elder’s Ceremonies in Dark Old Men and Adrienne Kennedy’s Sleep Deprivation Chamber. Suddenly I was Yara’s background singer at a concert. I could neither act nor sing, but in the thrall of Yara this fact didn’t seem to matter. I felt the slightest twinge of discomfort within myself. I’m not delusional, but I was convinced by Yara’s argument that expertise was a bourgeois plot to keep people away from pleasure and yoked to grunting labour. This made sense to me following Paul Lafargue’s proposition that appeals to the moral nature of work are the hypocritical and corrupt ideas of the bourgeoisie in their attempt to chain the hell out of the working class. Writing in 1883, in his essay “The Right to Be Lazy,” he said, “Our epoch has been called the century of work. It is in fact the century of pain, misery and corruption.” Lafargue ended his essay in this beautiful way: “O Laziness, mother of the arts and noble virtues, be the balm of human anguish.” Yara felt that everyone could act, sing, make music, make art and more than that everyone should do so to save themselves from the compulsive machine of capital. This I fully agreed with, then and now. Nevertheless, I told Yara that my way of defying and denouncing the bourgeoisie was to write my dissertation, which would expose their corruption and hypocrisy as much as Paul Lafargue’s “The Right to Be Lazy” did. Lafargue, of course, was Marx’s Cuban son-in-law, and as we all know Marx did not like him or his essay—but in this one matter I think that Karl was wrong, entirely. Yara loved me and she understood, if not my thesis or how it mattered, then my longing to complete it. I am reminded that Lafargue and Laura Marx, Karl’s daughter, committed suicide together. He wrote, “I die with the supreme joy of knowing that at some future time, the cause to which I have been devoted will triumph. Long Live Communism.”

  After six or seven months with Yara, I stayed in my own apartment more often instead of going to her railway apartment. I didn’t like the comings and goings at her place. I wanted us to be alone. Yara didn’t like this much. She was suspicious of the private and she said that living, just she and I, would be living in a world discrete from others. She said this was capitulating to the normative, the “heteronormative” to be exact. I had no comeback for that. Yara’s analyses were always surprising. And they were often spot-on. I had to admit that even though I didn’t see us in some heteronormative performance, I couldn’t define or describe what we were in, and neither could I offer an alternative reading.

  I didn’t want to be strictly alone with Yara, as in some doleful romance, but I also didn’t want to spend my every waking hour among what my grandfather used to call those “crazows.” I admit that this was a crude and backward analysis on my part. Guattari at La Borde Clinic would have been appalled. And so was I. After all Yara was practicing a group therapy for the dispossessed. But, Chaosmosis aside I felt more and more the pull to do my own work, and looked forward to the pleasure of leaving Yara’s bustling house to simply lie down on the floor of my apartment among my paper. I mention my grandfather quite often, skipping over my father, because my grandfather was my great defender and confidant. He inspired me to be an intellectual and brushed aside my father’s commercial concerns, saying that pecuniary ambitions spoke of a picayune mind. He loved this antique way of speaking. Why, when there was all the world to think about, should we only think of money? he said. Money was easy, he said, it only required cunning. And so my grandfather underwrote the antagonism between my father and me. These are sometimes the tensions that cultivate revolt in a family. I doubt that I will have children to follow up on that tradition, but perhaps my brother will and I will carry on this function with my nieces and nephews so that there will be more of me and my grandfather in the world and less of my father.

  I don’t know why Yara said that I was after security; perhaps she saw some vestige of my father in me. Yet I want to suggest that Yara saw peril as security. Perhaps we identify whatever situation we are born into as security regardless of its objective conditions. Yara’s childhood wasn’t the easiest. She was bounced around from aunt to cousin to mother, and back to aunt again. Her father was a flugelhorn player. He travelled the small dives across the country in a boozy mess for his entire life. Her mother was a pianist and self-destructive. Yara told me she couldn’t wait to grow up and get the hell out of family. Engels would approve—this we can extrapolate from chapter two, part two, of The Origin of the Family. There was our similarity: I, too, couldn’t wait to escape—in my case, the consumerist ambitions of my family. I can’t blame Yara for trying to love newly. I too wanted to love in a new world. And for the time we lasted, we tried every day to love this way—sharply—making sure we weren’t re-enacting the heteronormative dramas of the ruling ideology. This is, was, a difficult thing to do. There are no forms to follow, only errors to make. The love was exhilarating but Yara’s many projects were exhausting. I hope it isn’t the case that I was exhausted by loving. I hope not. I hope not. I loved Yara, I swear. I didn’t want her to go. But if I’m a solitary soul, Yara is a gregarious soul. She met many people and migrated into their lives. She used to arrive at my apartment calling out someone’s first name as if I would know them. She spoke of these people so familiarly, as if she’d known them all their life. Toni, for example, where did Toni come from? Toni had once been married to an eastern European physicist who now worked as a mechanic and who was looking for Toni in order to kill her. Toni needed Yara’s protection and a group of activists to confront the mechanic. Mechanics are by nature a violent and disruptive force, as became apparent to me later. But Yara attracted emergencies. She was like the fire department. I wanted peace. The philosophical question for me became how to reconcile the clear and dangerous everyday and dreadful emergencies of the social world, and one’s obligation to rid the world of them, with the desire for peace, for calm in this social moment. You can see how it wouldn’t turn out well for me. Again let me restate the philosophical question: how to avoid burning up in the incinerator of Yara’s urgencies, that were my urgencies also, and still survive the cynicism of inaction. With Yara it felt as if each moment was crucial, and each moment stretched between these precise coordinates.

  During this period my thesis did not go to complete shreds. Yara’s energies led me to the following insight in my sixth chapter:

  Certainly, Genet’s The Blacks concerns the confrontation between colonized and colonizer and speaks eloquently to the racial situation in the United States. But it is not primarily concerned with the experience of black people. Rather it uses their experience both as metaphor of more general aspects of the human predicament and as mask for Genet’s personal experience and philosophy. In so doing it engages the traditional use of the stage figure of the black. Where the cultural ground is white, the black figure on stage is “figure” on a white ground simply because the ultimately stage reality is that of a white audience. Genet insisted that there be a white presence in the audience always, as the acts on stage never take place outside of the context of white dominance. Is it ever possible, in a white cultural context, to portray black characters on stage as other than metaphorical expressions of aspects of whiteness? One possible reply is that this figure will cease to exist when the political ground ceases to exist; when the black is de-metaphorized and the white made metaphorical. Genet himself said, “This play…is intended for a white audience but if it is ever performed for a black audience then a white person should be invited every evening. But what if no white person accepted? Then let white masks be distributed to the black spectators as they enter the theatre. And if the blacks refuse the masks them let a dummy be used.”*

  Yara’s flat near the railway tracks was a study in précarité. It was above a store in a strip mall. The strip mall seemed abandoned, the railway triangulating it, stranding it in desolation. Where I saw précarité some, Yara included, saw a crossroads, an opening, a choice. Robert Johnson, they say, made a deal with the devil at such a crossroads, which was why his music was so full of the divine, his gifts everlasting. There w
as a Chinese restaurant downstairs and a palm reader, Mrs. Carvalho’s. Mrs. Carvalho gave discount readings to Yara’s visitors, telling them what they already knew—that life was a bitch and beware the Plain of Mars. Here’s the finger of Saturn, Yara would joke.

  As intense as we were in our intellectual and sensual encounters, Yara was a jokester. Of course one aspect does not preclude the other; I’m talking as if sensuality cannot be humorous, or the intellectual fun. We found such pleasure in knowing each other’s minds, each other’s thoughts; took such pleasure from a surprising coincidence of having heard the same song at precisely the same age, or having been to the same club ten years before on the same night; or realizing that when Roberta Flack did a concert in Hamilton at the Coliseum we each quite separately, and in other lives at fourteen years old, took off from our homes and saw Roberta Flack together, without knowing each other at all. It was as if we knew each other before we met, and we simply had to slough off the unintelligibility of our former lives to arrive at Yara’s flat over the tracks and meet again.