Theory

by Dionne Brand

  My intention, which sometimes belies my indolence, is to finish the work this year. Since I’m now free of all encumbrances, since I mean to resolve all the emotional aspects of my life that either get in the way or weigh me down, since there is no lover in the way, I should be able to complete my thesis. I’ve made a full press on reorganizing the twenty or so disparate chapters that I’ve written. I’ll sort out the various topics that I played with since the death of Bertolt Auer. I’ll whittle them down to manageable ideas and then I’ll attempt to—no, I will bring them into a coherent whole of about six hundred pages. I must also reconstitute my committee. At the moment I’ve got no standing in the academy, as I was forced to deenrol due to financial issues. I do hate that word “issues.” It is so overused. To be plain, I’ve run out of money, and in any event it was wasteful to pay a yearly tuition when I was no longer taking courses. My production, vis-à-vis refereed journals, has slowed to one sole-authored essay and one co-authored essay over the last several years. The refereed journals are a racket, notwithstanding.

  My apartment is now desolate with the leaves of my thesis. Well truly, my lovers added a certain frisson to the enterprise, a certain urgency, despite the fact that their presences prevented the completion of my work. They would not agree, naturally. Perhaps I used them as a defence against the thesis. I often thought that they helped me to stay in the real world. I thought that I needed them or else I would be swallowed up in the theoretical. But they themselves had their own theories and in the end it’s me who was swallowed up each time in each one, without any clarity whatever. Theories ostensibly clarify; theirs did not. Again, you can always look back with jaundice. While I was with Selah and Yara and Odalys, I had no inkling or intention of looking back with rancidity. I hate suggesting that. I swore to myself each time that matters would not end in rancour. It’s difficult to keep to this promise, as all I have, or all I can discern that I have, is an apartment cluttered with unfinished thoughts, half-written chapters and a feeling of having wasted a tremendous amount of time in personal dramas. A paragraph of my thesis begins, We can only see differently if we frame it differently.*1 I should try to take my own advice. Another paragraph begins, “Often, unknown, unspoken trauma or desire that complicates our lives, increases and reduplicates with every denial and with every repetition.”*2 These two beginnings seem to contradict each other, or at least to be in a contrary conversation with each other. Yes, a certain frisson. When I was with them, my lovers, I felt as if my work was important. I was always breaking away from them to do it. They were always interrupting a thought; they always stood in the way of a wider argument, a deeper engagement. I felt then that the important thought lay just a turn of the head away, just a silence that had to be stolen back from attending to my lovers’ needs. The notes I’d quietly made I would reassess in the mornings, and each striking revelation was brilliant in the mirror of their adoration of me.

  I never finished reading so many texts because of my lovers. The second volume of Capital, for instance. Hegel’s Phenomenology of Mind, though his dismissal of all of Africa was sufficient for me to dismiss him—nevertheless, Odalys was implicated in this failure. Selah alone stood in the way of all of Lukács—literally, all of Lukács. The half-read texts now lie around my rooms. I can travel to each of the room’s hemispheres and find lost theories. I remember which year. I remember which month. These theories nevertheless represent a time in my life, even though I never read them or only half read them, or only paid attention to half of their reasoning. I can’t get rid of them. I don’t want to get rid of them. I encounter Roland Barthes and I recall Yara composing a theatrical piece on sex tourism. “Gide was reading Bossuet while going down the Congo,”*3 Barthes wrote. Gide, you know, was into sex tourism. This is a lateral thought because Barthes’ piece “The Writer on Holiday” was not about sex tourism but about the “proletarianization of the writer”—a soporific to the proletariat. Or so I read. But I also read sex here, the “sexiness” of the Congo, Gide’s libido, the whole of European libidinous enterprise on the African continent. So Barthes invokes Yara and then all I can think of is Yara’s artistic inventions in my time with Yara…Yara and I are friends, of a sort. We sometimes have tea, but it’s not the same as when we were together. All of our being together is contained in references to Barthes. So I can’t get rid of Barthes. Someone visiting me would say that my rooms need cleaning. They would see the paper scattered all over the floor, flattened or bunched up, and they would say, Throw this out, for god’s sake. I would point to this pile and say, No, I wrote this when Odalys’ Nkisi made itself known to me; I wrote this when Selah left. I must keep it all. This way my memories stay intact.

  And the books on the stressed shelves? Every one of them contains a memory of mine. I’ve only to look at Heleith Saffioti’s Women in Class Society to be invigorated over my mission to finish this work. Her analysis that the “dynamics of the capitalist system in all its phases—mercantile, industrial, financial—led the countries in the most advanced stages of the system to establish an economic structure in the new world that would not hamper the further development of capitalism in the old.”*4 This broke apart for me the idea that slave economies in the New World were somehow a relic of earlier economic organization, and it skewered the economic theorists who held that social formations necessarily pass through the vectors of slavery, feudalism and capitalism. To paraphrase. By now anyone who proposes this last theory should have disappeared, but I know that these ideas still lurk cynically. My thesis is to rip them out from their cultural repositories. My first chapter is dedicated—well, in a tangential way, it is dedicated to this ripping out. And so this leads me to Fanon by way of Sylvia Wynter. Wynter says, and I quote, “a mainstream scholar necessarily takes his point of departure from a pre-Fanonian, and thereby purely ontogenetic perspective (with the identity of the human ‘us’ being seen as a supracultural one defined only by its own); the question that he poses with respect to the possibility of, and a methodology for, an ‘objective phenomenology’ is the question that in the case of the human, Fanon confronts in his Black Skin/White Masks at the same time as he opens up the possibility of its eventual resolution.”*5 Hence Fanon’s sociogeny. “Beside philogeny and ontogeny stands sociogeny.”*6 As an aside, Wynter is the very meaning of discursive. And why not? Such discursivity I’ve often been accused of myself. Meaning isn’t to be approached with any preconditions, and most assuredly when we’re dealing with these matters of being, it is imperative to provide ample caveat and delinquency so that we may arrive at the semblance of a thing. So, no, I don’t find Wynter as impenetrable as Josie Ligna has fully confessed she finds her. I wonder how she lives with herself after saying this? What scholarly understanding could she possibly have after such an admission? But when it comes to social awareness, Josie is much clearer than I. She manages not to get bogged down in meaning as much as I do. There are people for whom theory isn’t the source of life or death; it is a commercial object as well as a weapon of hegemony. Josie Ligna has probably already parlayed her skill at this into many jobs. I haven’t seen her for a year or so. For me, meaning is a source of life and death. As a result, my TA work has dried up. I insisted that students own their locations in the world. Josie Ligna and others treat students like tabulae rasae, as if civilization has just begun with them, as if they are not culpable. I insist on an ethical relation to the present rooted in an authentic one to the past. Well, fine. I have forfeited teaching gigs for my pedagogy. I retreat to my paper rooms, my paper floors, my paper walls. I won’t fight for what I deserve, for what by right and by any measure of intelligence I should have as a matter of course, as a matter of the obvious. This is when they, whoever they are, reduce you.

  My father used to say, calling up from the bottom of the stairs to my brother, Wendell, and me, “You may plot and plan but you cannot bring down the government of this house.” He was a tyrant, and so the way I figure it, I’ve already met the worst. They must
have cratered him in Sheffield, where he took a degree in mechanical engineering. But Academia will not make me cower. My father would command my brother and me to sit in silence for the hours of Sunday afternoon between one and three. We couldn’t fall asleep or even read a book. He said this was a lesson in discipline. Sunday, between the hours of one and three, are precisely the hours when one wants to fall asleep. If he found us eyeing each other and smiling, he would make us face the wall and prohibit us from turning our heads. “Say your times tables in your head,” my father would advise. “Think of all the starving children in the world.” Also, he would counsel, “Prepare your thoughts for the coming week—obedience and brightness are your goals.” We would stand there facing the wall, my brother incubating an anger he would take out on me when he could, slapping me behind the head as my father would slap him; and me plotting my father’s overthrow through small, wicked acts. For the most part, to be truthful, I went under the radar of my father. My brother, Wendell, bore the brunt, as he was a boy. Once, in defence of Wendell, I placed a small tack in one of my father’s brown Derby shoes. When he cried out in pain, it was with the strangest sound. A plaint, so surprised. This wasn’t the sound I wanted, I realized. It was a childish sound. His pain, I realized, wasn’t the key to his overthrow—not his physical pain, at any rate. He sounded helpless. People in power should not sound helpless, I thought; they have no right to sound helpless. This route, then, would not overthrow my father. It would have to be something else, something less personal. It would have to be about something he wanted, since getting was my father’s first principle. Wanting and getting. That is when I decided to remove myself as soon as possible from his governance. My father needed subjects, instruments that he could move around, order around, send for and send away.

  You’ll notice that I have not mentioned my mother in this account. At least, I don’t think that I have so far. My mother was a ghost who lived in the house. She did as my father ordered. She did this out of utter fidelity to him; she loved him. She loved him to her extinction. Your father says and your father wants and your father knows, and your father will and your father won’t. These were the salutations at the beginning of each of her sentences. Her affinities for my brother and me were predicated on my father’s approval. We were each schooled by her in ways of being. My brother can speak for himself. But I think that there are people like my mother trapped in imaginaries. I do not mean her own imagination because I don’t think that she made the whole thing up herself. When I was a child, I used to watch my mother apply makeup to her face and neck. She mistook my fascination for pleasure and camaraderie. All the time, as she applied, she instructed me in the right amount of eyeliner, the right amount of eyeshadow, the scintilla of rouge, the basalt of foundation cream, which held all this up; the realgar mineral of lipstick at the death. I saw her appear—another person, whom she represented as herself. Her eyes encouraged me to imitate her practices. But even when I was a child, these appearances of my mother disturbed me. I was not the only one. I observed my father’s response at this transformation. He became obsequious. The more foreign she became the more obsequious he. I say became but I am not sure about that verb. It was more like an emergence of what my mother thought was her true self. This made me think later that there was a Plato’s cave of gender that my mother and father inhabited, and I was their clear-eyed philosopher. My mother tried to usher me into this cave with her enactments of femininity; I was unable to see anything but weakness in that invitation. I felt as if she were asking me not to be the person I knew myself to be. When she had control of me, she forced me into the display; then, I was her possession to be dressed up in uncomfortable shoes and garish fuchsia outfits. She would lead me down streets and into churches and stores and social gatherings as if I were a pet on display, like her. At ten she recommended band-aids for my nipples. I had not noticed them as a problem. At twelve she laid out her jewellery on the bed offering me a bangle if I behaved like a girl. I found her syntax interesting in the use of the subjunctive—as if she were not describing known objective facts, but a concept, a person she observed, rightly, unconnected to present and past time.

  One might say I am being harsh about my mother and father. I’m not being harsh; I am being analytic. I’m being frank. Frankness about the people who bring you into the world is never appreciated. I believe that I am describing them as they are, not as sentiment or social script would have me do. Again someone might remark on the stereotypic patriarchal portrait I’ve painted of them both. They are as I have described. If they are not differentiated in my portrait, it’s because each of them had drunk from the same draught of patriarchy and found it intoxicating—to this day most likely. They’re compelled by this force; they acquiesce to this force and they acquire power through it. No one wants to give up this lurid power. One might argue that in this complex my mother wasn’t powerful, but I would argue that she, however delusional, saw herself as powerful. The aesthetic of brutality, which produces women’s bodies as desire and romance, captured her. She lived in a false consciousness, and still inhabits it now. I can’t say that this mask of hers, or what I’ll call a mask, ever slipped. She was fully taken up in it.

  My brother tells me I’m too harsh with her. Again this word, “harsh.” I can’t take him seriously anymore. How can he see what I see, when he too has adopted his position as patriarch, duplicating what oppressed him in our childhood? It could be that given his sex, he made an easy immersion into his gender role; given mine, transition out of the gender role ascribed was my only chance at sovereignty. I suppose he and I despised different things in my father. I despised my father’s authoritarianism, his dominance. My brother despised our father’s indifference toward him, his disdain. As I’ve said, meaning is a source of life and death to me.

  My father loved Pimm’s and oranges—leftover from his Sheffield days. He had a drink of this each Sunday morning. Sunday mornings would begin with this harmony—my father and my mother in the kitchen drinking a Pimm’s cup with oranges. Despite the way Sundays would end for my brother and me, they always began in peace. Every Sunday morning, I’d forget my father’s routine of spoiling Sundays with his disgruntled persona. This routine made our winters even duller than they would have been. But I recall how each spring morning, I’d lie in my bed looking up at the April-May light searing the air with its soft laser. I would lower my eyelashes to a curtain and play with opening and closing the aperture of my eyelids. I would hear my mother singing in the kitchen and I would hear the laughter of my father mixed with the smell of eggs, bacon and fresh bread. And I would hear the quiet of Sunday buttressing this. My father was always in a good mood at the beginning of this day. He would squeeze oranges into a huge glass jug with ice, mixing his own and my mother’s with Pimm’s, and mine and Wendell’s with slices of cucumber. Then, with the lilac tablecloth on the table, the teacups and saucers and Sunday plates sitting prettily, the bread steaming with butter, the world was peaceful. Even my father seemed peaceful. If only Sundays did not proceed. If only they lingered on their early hours. I never knew when the turn would come. It was like the aura before a migraine, triggered by a certain heaviness, an odour of cleaning product from my mother’s kitchen, too acute. Then the living room became a torture chamber. This was after my mother and father returned home from church with my brother and me in tow, ordering us to clean shoes, lay out clothing for Monday and bring finished homework to the living room for inspection. Then Sunday was lost. Or that part of the day I called Sunday. So I don’t do Sundays well. I don’t know what to do with myself on a Sunday. I’ve tried all my adult life to recuperate Sunday, and I’ve been unsuccessful. I’ve made a promise to myself to finish my work on a Saturday so that the following day I’d be completely free from the history and memory of those unfortunate Sunday afternoons.

  Despite my state of no money to speak of, I’m determined to press on. There are few itinerant jobs out there that will hire a forty-year-old—perhaps thos
e hundreds of little boutique coffee shops rising up that hire people called baristas. God knows where all this coffee is coming from. My inability, it would seem, to get along with people has put me at a disadvantage with regard to work. The only position I’ve been able to get, on and off, is at the university’s writing centre, where I help first-years cobble together a decent paper on children’s literature or human geography, or on energy and society, or on Being Human: Classic Thought on Self and Society. I won’t disparage the students who come to the writing centre. If I do, I’ll find myself out of work again. Whenever I launch a critique against anything, anything, I feel obliged to take a political and principled position—and then, of course, though my ethics remain intact, my livelihood becomes precarious. This time I’ll have to keep my mouth shut until the thesis is written. Don’t think that I don’t hear the desultory notes I’m registering here. This time of reassessment is by necessity a doldrums. It is as if I am swimming in the Sargasso Sea, and seaweed has washed up in my apartment. I’m making my way through the sea creatures and I am trying to find the flowers of the sargassum. The problem with not having a lover is that there is no distraction from the person I am. There is no one who needs my counsel and advice. There’s no one to fix, in other words, except me. I’ll say this last before anyone says it for me.