by Dionne Brand
I’ll tell you how I met Odalys. I was walking along a street where I had heard there was a bicycle shop that sold good bikes for little money. I was given to understand that these were high-end stolen bikes—Nishiki, Schwinn, Colnago, Kalkhoff. I had decided that I should get a bike instead of using public transport. I can’t ride a bike, but I thought buying one would give me the inspiration to learn and to save the planet at the same time, and also to save myself some money so that I could re-enrol in my PhD program in order to get a date set for my defence. I had deregistered to save money. I’m digressing as usual when it comes to Odalys. At any rate, I was in search of this store where Josie Ligna had bought herself a Schwinn when I met Odalys. She seemed to be retreating out of a nearby store when I wandered into her. My hands reached out to protect myself and she spun around and grabbed them. She said, “You’re very cold. How come?” Her words were intimate, as if she knew me already. “I don’t know,” I said. “Let me warm them,” she said and proceeded to rub my hands in her palms. It was July. She kept walking backwards, warming my hands. After several yards I tried pulling my hands away, thanking her. Her back was still in the direction we were heading. She said, “You’re wasting all your light.” I stopped. And she did too, looking into my eyes with the most knowing expression. “True,” I heard myself confirming. I can’t fully describe the comfort I felt in her words, in the realization that someone finally understood me. I felt as if I’d been waiting for someone to say this to me. You are wasting all your light. I hadn’t had the words and here this perfect stranger had said them. It is true, I was wasting all my light on this insufferable institution that was the university—academia—and my cretinous colleagues, and the trolls of the ruling class who were my professors. It had become increasingly impossible to express a single original idea without these Neanderthals wanting you to weight it down like a sycophant with all the drivel that had come before. And here was this vision of my future, Odalys, although I didn’t yet know her name, telling me, “You’re wasting all your light.”
Anyone could see how I would be drawn to her. Odalys held my hands and kept walking backwards, pulling me along. It was some time before I realized that she was walking backwards. We arrived at a traffic light, not noticing. Caught up in our fantastic absorption, I only became aware of people shouting as we almost stepped off the curb of the road in front of an angry white car. I pulled Odalys to the sidewalk, but she kept going in this backwards fashion and the noises subsided. I asked her why she was walking like that. She said, “Going home.” I said, “I mean backwards.” Odalys said, “I am trying to change life around. I want to see what was behind me before, I want to see what I leave behind when I move forward.” Can anyone, any social theorist, deny the investigative power of this? the profoundness this involved? Wouldn’t Habermas find this compelling? I would go even further. I would say that Césaire in Discourse on Colonialism would firmly fall in with Odalys’ line of inquiry. And most recently, Gikandi and his Slavery and the Culture of Taste Odalys foreshadows here. Ordinary people have an acute grasp of what we are living—far more acute than we academics give them credit for. There I am, ending in a preposition. I hate doing that but it can’t be helped. I decided to walk with Odalys and tell her about my life. I would face forward unaware of what I was leaving behind, and she would face backward, fully conscious of another realm of understanding and reason. Odalys and I therefore connected on this level, which I hesitate to call spiritual, since I don’t believe in that kind of thing and I clearly overestimated how deeply Odalys was submerged in its efficacy.
Now in hindsight, I mistook Odalys’ occult interest in me for affection. I’m always mistaking people. Her interest in me was like the interest of a doctor in a disease. She diagnosed my hands, my face, the look in my eyes, for symptoms from her spirit world. Some being, according to Odalys, was registering communications through me. That’s what I gathered later from Odalys. My cough was a sign from somewhere about something. If I dropped a cup, some spirit wanted the water in it; if I spilled wine, I had failed to libate the ancestors; if an object couldn’t be found, or appeared somewhere other than the place where I put it, it wasn’t simply forgetfulness but the metaphysical manipulations of the people who had lived and died in my apartment before. I went along, blissfully ignoring the life Odalys was living, ignoring where she had located me in it, brushing away her baths in green leaves for money, her evaporated milk and anise baths for purity, her blue baths of food colouring and lavender and scrubbing shells with watermelon incense for peace, her red baths with beets and John the Conqueror herbs for courage; her purple baths, which she persuaded me to take with her, for power—and with these baths, the five-finger grass she made me put on my eyelids. All this I did for Odalys. I humoured her. Well, there’s my paternalism again. I’ve spent my whole life suffering from this trait. People are always living a life I fail to apprehend. It’s right in front of me but I go about with my own assumptions, drawing faulty conclusions that end up being fatal for me.
Odalys’ place above the garage was full of the paraphernalia of her practices. That’s why I couldn’t live there even after we were married. Central to the main room was an altar. The wax of many candles crusted the floor; the masks of many ancestor gods peopled the walls. Always there was the scent of some uncertain burning and the sound of running water. There was a peace at Odalys’ place; to be sure she was centred in her being. That last sounds like something she would say, centred in her being. Anyway it was true. I can say that Odalys had no anxieties—or at least, none I recognized. I was someone who lived in anxiety. I felt anxiety was a necessary part of being conscious in the world; it was a prerequisite of a moral and ethical life. I don’t mean the anxieties of Capital, I mean the anxieties of an unfinished world, the unfinished project of the imagination, as Wilson Harris would put it. But perhaps here again I fail to recognize: Odalys’ anxiety must have been to satisfy the anxieties of all her ancestor gods. They took all day long to appease—or at least, what Odalys did looked to me like an appeasement. No sooner was one satisfied than Odalys would move to another. My presence seemed to alarm them, and that is another reason why even after Odalys married me, we didn’t live together. I visited Odalys above the garage each week; once every six or seven days seemed sufficient for both of us to be in each other’s presence, so intense were our meetings, so cluttered by my thoughts and by Odalys’ thoughts, which were unfathomable to me.
Of all people, Odalys understood my dissertation least and most. In many ways we were navigating the same territory. For what was it really but the explanation of how it is to live, and to analyze the forces arrayed against that living? How can I blame Odalys for trying to find a way through, albeit with magic? How can I now blame her when obviously my methods hadn’t yielded any success? I suppose you can say that we were exploring different paths. I didn’t anticipate any result from this, like peace or harmony or any of the claptrap Odalys anticipated. Nor did I consciously expect the disintegration of oppressive structures after my own dissertation was complete, though deep in my heart I did; but at the level of the intellectual, the cynical, I did expect to silence my colleagues and to move from sessional teaching to something more permanent. Your expectations get very small after watching the world awhile. Believe me. I also expected to find a publisher for my treatise, and then to shock people into finally listening to me. Now you might say that Odalys’ ambitions were greater than mine, theoretically far greater, since she at least was trying to elaborate a theory of being while I was merely anticipating work and a publisher. But these thoughts are useless, since I can’t seem to find a way back to my dissertation. I’ve taken to being maudlin. Yes, my work was important, and of course it will be groundbreaking. To compare it to some senseless metaphysical maunder isn’t worthy of me.
By the time I met Odalys I can’t say that I was still in the best of moods about my dissertation. I was thirty-seven. To tell the truth, my own apartment was not dissimilar from
hers except in one respect. There were no longer any gods at mine. If I had gods, they lay dead in heaps of primary reference texts. There was no altar except the altar of my depression. I would arrive home from Odalys’ and find the bitter piles of paper and books that littered the floors and tables. They seemed to address me with a kind of spite. It was not for want of writing that the dissertation hadn’t come together. I had discarded many versions of the original thesis. My filing system had begun well enough, nine or ten years ago. I’d started with the greatest enthusiasm, done my comprehensives, done my course work, gathered my committee. I had been in the spring of my intellect then, when I was twenty-eight. Mathematicians have an early expiry date, they have a short shelf life, but philosophers only grow better. Clarity, with us, increases. Memory isn’t the optimum quality, neither are pretty, young, green synapses. I console myself saying this now, but back then I felt I was on the brink of a great philosophical discovery. I had constructed my thesis committee in the hope that they would leave me be. After all, what could these antiquated senators of the dying regime possibly give to me? Their lives had been lived in privilege and elitism. They had fooled themselves into thinking that merely because they had privilege, they had earned it. They’d never taken into account the violence their existence had perpetrated on the world, on the very people who lived around them. They’d oiled their way into schools and clubs and journals and conferences. They actually believed that this made them worthy—they confused their privilege with intellect. These professors weren’t conservatives, by any means. Oh no, they would never consider themselves in that category. They were left-wing scholars, social theorists. But I knew, and they knew, that academia was a place for perpetuating class and class privilege. It was a place for training up the ruling classes so they could continue ruling. My aim at the time was to write the bomb of a thesis that would blow up the buildings. Little did I fully recognize that the old farts on my committee would bog me down with their criticism about the structure of the thesis, the citations and proofs that were necessary, the “theoretical framework” and on and on with each iteration of the thesis I would give to them. No one can accuse me of self-indulgence. Self-criticism has been my practice since I was four or five years old—as far back as kindergarten when I borrowed a pencil from a rich boy only to lose it on the playground and have the teacher scold me for doing so. As young as I was, that teacher’s tone told me just where I stood. When I came home and told my father, my bougie father, he shook me and scolded me never to find myself in that position. I never played with that boy again and I kept my distance from that teacher forever.
But to return to my thesis: it lay on the floor and tables and open desk drawers of my apartment, its theories scattered and shredded. The Chair had died after six years on my committee, and the second reader had left for another university. Josie Ligna laughed and said I’d taken so long that my Chair, like my ideas, had expired. I won’t forgive her this zeugma at my expense. Despite finishing her thesis before me, she hadn’t published half of what I’d published in refereed journals in our field. My apartment was desultory with unfinished chapters. I’d torn up at least three versions of the thesis, and these lay in the bottom of my kitchen drawer with the spoons and scotch tape. I’d torn them up but changed my mind and resolved to stick them back together when I had the time. Each evening I would look at these three versions and a paragraph would leap out at me: I am especially interested in how unknown and/or unacknowledged histories nonetheless continue to produce symptoms; in how we reproduce the unknown trauma or desire that complicates and structures our lives; in how these unrepresentable or represented social structures or relations erupt in concrete ways in other times and other places….What bodies, languages and ideologies are more or less readily included in constructions of communities? What memories are performed and reformed in the border spaces of these texts? What do memories entail, what do they permit and what do they exclude and prohibit? *1
I would return to these words time and time again. I’d written them in the earliest iteration of the thesis and they still sounded utterly masterful to me. Yet my deceased supervisor had pretended not to understand this paragraph. I always called him Professor Auer, despite his insistence that I refer to him by his first name, Bertolt. I liked Bertolt Brecht too much to call this doorstopper by Brecht’s first name. Let me be truthful, Auer never knew that I hated him. He never knew, until the last, that I dissembled at our every meeting. The levels of dissembling that I’d been taught in my arriviste family and among the people I was born to were completely outside of anything Auer could imagine. Leaving his office, I would run to the elevator or down the emergency staircase to prevent myself from exploding. Or to prevent him from witnessing my explosions.
My father had taught me well. “Don’t let these people know that you’re upset or see you upset. You’re better than that,” he would warn. “You’re better than them.” It was the only advice he gave me that I would take. And so I would never let anyone on my committee see me distressed. I would never ask for anything I didn’t deserve by right. I reserved my true feeling for my theoretical work. Auer tried often to engage me, but I surmised this was only to give himself the occasion to belittle me. Often, when I was in his presence as he held forth on hermeneutics and Habermas, I thought to myself, “You have no idea, Bertolt Auer, how much my people have been through, and how it has prepared me for sitting here and listening to your bullshit without a word in response. You do not know.” Each chapter I would give to Auer, he would turn over on his desk without looking and continue where he had left off the time before. After a month or so of waiting for his response to the chapter, I would hear that he still thought there were problems with the theoretical framework and he would suggest revisions that necessitated quoting his own work on the “public sphere” and “communicative action.” Auer’s theory was predicated on a “homogenous” that social structuring patently denied. He posited a simplistic analysis and failed to analyze the deeper underpinnings, economic and racial, of a far more complicated set of relations and locations. The histories, the violences he ignored were mind-boggling. I found his work essentially tiny and solipsistic; his ego, however, was massive. On several occasions I attempted to replace him as my supervisor, and this caused major eruptions of bad-mindedness on his part—and as if I were not having enough trouble writing the thesis itself, it delayed my work even further. No one wanted to cross him in the department.
Auer’s death did not move me. Here I failed as a human being. When I heard of his passing I remembered Diane Wakoski’s poem “Dancing on the Grave of a Son of a Bitch.” That poem, at least, had previous affections it mourned. Not so, my relationship with Auer. My failure here, I freely admit. Death should move us. Auer deserved contempt perhaps, but not death. Yet I can’t help but think that his rancid, life-sucking ideas contributed to his demise. Here again I’m not being kind. I must confess, without embarrassment, that I felt somewhat renewed by his death. I would find another supervisor, I would finish the thesis and launch myself among the real scholars who would truly be my interlocutors and colleagues. This is what I’d hoped.
Bertolt Auer’s death gave me a freedom. I felt my rooms open up. For a shining few months, my thesis seemed alive and possible again. And in the beginning that was true. I wrote copiously. A new idea came to me: I would write the whole thesis before I struck my new committee. I would overwhelm them before they had a chance to give any advice. The result of all this—the detritus of it—is gathered on the floor of my apartment. I never invite anyone over.
Odalys refused to visit me after a while, since when she did visit, she would try to clean the place and we would end up in awful fights. Her rearrangements would leave me with days of reassembling to do and set me back on my thinking. Once she tried to turn the oven on and almost cost me notes to several chapters. I know where every bit of paper, every idea, is located, I told Odalys, and I don’t need anyone coming in here and disrupting things
. Both texts revise mono-narratives of the flesh by relocating memory outside the body rather than insistently stigmatizing the body through the reproduction of particular historical moments. Both texts suggest that it has become necessary to locate social memory outside the body.*2 I love my apartment. It contains all the beautiful pages I’ve written, and all of my generative anxieties. I will admit that sometimes when I open the door I’m overwhelmed by my work. And I will admit that it prevented me from leaving, from going out to visit Odalys. These two ideas can exist together, I’ve now come to understand. When I went to Odalys’, it was often with relief. I was happy to be away from my apartment, away from the unfinished business of my thesis. My life’s work, I call it, and I suppose it’s come to be just that, the work that will take me a lifetime to complete. Odalys’ place couldn’t have been further away ideologically from my rooms full of imprecisions, proofs, theories. Though I suppose belief such as Odalys’ is theory of a kind. Odalys dealt in the natural arts, I in the arts of…of what? My art is nothing, since everything is built on, or rather stopped, as a post stops a wall—built and stopped on someone else’s suppositions.
“Teoria…” that is what Odalys called me. “Teoria, you are too much in your head. Before you can do something you think it out of existence. You think it out of being something to do.” This was her reason for calling me Teoria, Theory. I can’t fault her argument. But as lovingly as she said this, I sensed an insult and snapped at her, “Belief is a theory, isn’t it?” God exists: thesis; Odalys is central to this existence: exegesis. But I could be entirely wrong about what Odalys thinks, since all her beliefs are shrouded in mystery. I asked her why her gods were so domestic, so small as to be concerned even remotely with her; she sucked her teeth at me. She told me, “You lack an anchor; you lack a thing that you love.” I said, “But Odalys, I love you.” She said, “Yes, you love me more or less, but I am talking about a love without limits, without reservations, without a face or a body.” I was brought up short by Odalys, as I am sometimes by the most common charlatan selling god on a corner. Their faith is to me so dreadful and overblown, there are no answers to them.