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What We All Long For
By Dionne Brand St. Martin's Press
Copyright © 2005 Dionne Brand
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4299-8603-8
CHAPTER 1
THIS CITY HOVERS above the forty-third parallel; that's illusory of course. Winters on the other hand, there's nothing vague about them. Winters here are inevitable, sometimes unforgiving. Two years ago, they had to bring the army in to dig the city out from under the snow. The streets were glacial, the electrical wires were brittle, the telephones were useless. The whole city stood still; the trees more than usual. The cars and driveways were obliterated. Politicians were falling over each other to explain what had happened and who was to blame — who had privatized the snow plows and why the city wasn't prepared. The truth is you can't prepare for something like that. It's fate. Nature will do that sort of thing — dump thousands of tons of snow on the city just to say, Don't make too many plans or assumptions, don't get ahead of yourself. Spring this year couldn't come too soon — and it didn't. It took its time — melting at its own pace, over running ice-blocked sewer drains, swelling the Humber River and the Don River stretching to the lake. The sound of the city was of trickling water.
Have you ever smelled this city at the beginning of spring? Dead winter circling still, it smells of eagerness and embarrassment and, most of all, longing. Garbage, buried under snowbanks for months, gradually reappears like old habits — plastic bags, pop cans — the alleyways are cluttered in a mess of bottles and old shoes and thrown-away beds. People look as if they're unravelling. They're on their last nerves. They're suddenly eager for human touch. People will walk up to perfect strangers and tell them anything. After the grey days and the heavy skies of what's passed, an unfamiliar face will smile and make a remark as if there had been a conversation going on all along. The fate of everyone is open again. New lives can be started, or at least spring is the occasion to make it seem possible. No matter how dreary yesterday was, all the complications and problems that bore down then, now seem carried away by the melting streets. At least the clearing skies and the new breath of air from the lake, both, seduce people into thinking that.
It's 8 A.M. on a Wednesday of this early spring, and the subway train rumbles across the bridge over the Humber River. People are packed in tightly, and they all look dazed, as if recovering from a blow. There's the smell of perfume and sweat, and wet hair and mint, coffee and burned toast. There is a tension, holding in all the sounds that bodies make in the morning. Mostly people are quiet, unless they're young, like the three who just got on — no annoying boss to be endured all day. They grab hold of the upper hand-bars and as the train moves off they crash into one another, giggling. Their laughter rattles around in the car, then they grow mockingly self-conscious and quiet, noticing the uptightness on the train, but they can't stay serious and explode again into laughter.
One of them has a camera, she's Asian, she's wearing an old oilskin coat, and you want to look at her, she's beautiful in a strange way. Not the pouting corporate beauty on the ad for shampoo above her head, she has the beauty a falcon has: watchful, feathered, clawed, and probing. Another one's a young black man; he's carrying a drum in a duffel bag. He's trying to find space for it on the floor, and he's getting annoyed looks all around. There's an enviable loose physical allure to him. He has a few days' growth on his face, and when he smiles his eyebrows, his eyes — his whole face can't help its seduction. The third is another woman, she might be Italian, southern. She's bony like a mantis in her yellow slick plastic coat, except her mouth has a voluptuousness to it, and her eyes, the long eyelashes weigh them down. The Asian woman points the camera at her, coaxes her for a smile, and the flash goes off and she looks startled. It's obvious they've been out all night. They're talking now about some friend of theirs whom the young man loves. But all three are finally subdued by the taut silence around them, as if succumbing to some law they'd broken. Who wants to hear about love so early in the morning?
Mornings are like that on the subway trains — everyone having left their sovereign houses and apartments and rooms to enter the crossroads of the city, they first try at not letting the city touch them, holding on to the meagre privacy of a city with three million people. But eventually they're disrupted like this. Anonymity is the big lie of a city. You aren't anonymous at all. You're common, really, common like so many pebbles, so many specks of dirt, so many atoms of materiality.
Now that conversation has entered everyone's heads, and will follow them to work; they'll be trying to figure out the rest of the story all day. Now they'll be wondering where those three were last night, and someone will think, Why isn't my life like that? Free like a young person's. Someone will go off into a flight of imagination as to where they'd been — probably the railroad tracks, probably High Park, probably smoking dope at a party, drinking beer and dancing. Definitely dancing. And some other jealous rider will think, That bunch of free loaders! Never worked a day in their lives! Life will get them hard some time, don't you worry.
And jammed in a seat down the car there's a man who hardly understands English at all, but he hears the tinkle of laughter, and it surprises him out of his own declensions on fate — how he ended up here and what's to be his next move, and how the small panic that he feels disgusts him. He rouses himself from going over the details of his life, repeating them in his head as if to the woman reading a newspaper next to him. The laughter pierces him, and he thinks that he's never heard laughter sound so pure, and it is his first week in this city. Only when he was very, very little — a boy — then he heard it, he remembers.
What floats in the air on a subway train like this is chance. People stand or sit with the thin magnetic film of their life wrapped around them. They think they're safe, but they know they're not. Any minute you can crash into someone else's life, and if you're lucky, it's good, it's like walking on light.
There are Italian neighbourhoods and Vietnamese neighbourhoods in this city; there are Chinese ones and Ukrainian ones and Pakistani ones and Korean ones and African ones. Name a region on the planet and there's someone from there, here. All of them sit on Ojibway land, but hardly any of them know it or care because that genealogy is wilfully untraceable except in the name of the city itself. They'd only have to look, though, but it could be that what they know hurts them already, and what if they found out something even more damaging? These are people who are used to the earth beneath them shifting, and they all want it to stop — and if that means they must pretend to know nothing, well, that's the sacrifice they make.
But as at any crossroad there are permutations of existence. People turn into other people imperceptibly, unconsciously, right here in the grumbling train. And on the sidewalks, after they've emerged from the stations, after being sandpapered by the jostling and scraping that a city like this does, all the lives they've hoarded, all the ghosts they've carried, all the inversions they've made for protection, all the scars and marks and records for recognition — the whole heterogeneous baggage falls out with each step on the pavement. There's so much spillage.
In this city there are Bulgarian mechanics, there are Eritrean accountants, Colombian café owners, Latvian book publishers, Welsh roofers, Afghani dancers, Iranian mathematicians, Tamil cooks in Thai restaurants, Calabrese boys with Jamaican accents, Fushen deejays, Filipina-Saudi beauticians; Russian doctors changing tires, there are Romanian bill collectors, Cape Croker fishmongers, Japanese grocery clerks, French gas meter readers, German bakers, Haitian and Bengali taxi drivers with Irish dispatchers.
Lives in the city are doubled, tripled, conjugated — women and men all trying to handle their own chain of events, trying to keep the story straight in their own heads. At times they catch themselves in sensational lies, embellishing or avoiding a nasty secret here and there, juggling the lines of causality, and before you know it, it's impossible to tell one thread from another. In this city, like everywhere, people work, they eat, they drink, they have sex, but it's hard not to wake up here without the certainty of misapprehension.
Quy
Quy. It means, well, it means "precious," and people underestimate me all the time because of my name. How do I start to tell who I am? Talking is always a miscalculation, my father, Loc Tuc, used to say.
I was a boy at that time. It was night. Because it is at night that these things happen. I was with my parents and my sisters. We had left the place where we lived and travelled along a road. We were picked up by a lorry on this road. I held a lime in my hand that my mother had given me to squeeze and to smell when I felt nauseous. We travelled in the lorry for half a day, and we arrived at a place by the water, a bay, where we waited for a boat. This boat didn't come. We waited two weeks in the back room of a house. There were many other people waiting in that house. My father paid extra money to get me milk, which I liked. My parents loved me. My sisters loved me. I was loved. One day my father told us we would travel in two more nights. My parents prepared. My sisters were terrified, but I was only a small boy; nothing terrified me. I would have been frightened if my mother and my father weren't there. I only ever had nightmares about not seeing my family.
No one would suspect I had diamonds in the belt around my waist. That was almost all of my parents' savings. It was a cloth belt, and my mother had sewed the diamonds into the seams.
At the boat site there were many people. Some of them had been waiting for weeks. Only two boats arrived. There wasn't enough room. Some of the goods and some of the people would have to be left behind. My sisters walked in a small knot, holding each other, my mother held me, my father held me, they passed me between them time and again. One of them put me down. I won't say who. The water was cold and lapping. People were pushing. There was that quiet fighting-pushing people do when it's dangerous to make noise. I was swept along, my feet were getting wet. It was dark. It was night, of course. The sea was humid. The air was humid. I jumped up and down looking for my parents. I made out my father's legs. I followed him. Someone lifted me into a boat. I sat next to my father's legs. I said nothing. I put my lime to my nose. The boat sailed, and I fell asleep. It was cold. It rained sometimes.
We were in the middle of what I later knew to be the South China Sea when I understood that I was alone. I was a small boy, so I cried. The sea was endless, it was like travelling to the sun. I drank water from the ocean and my belly hurt and my lips cracked. The lime in my hand hardened. It was eight days before the boat arrived at Pulau Bidong, but I didn't belong to anyone on board. I followed the legs I had mistaken for my father's.
It was fortunate, I learned later, that I wasn't thrown overboard by the others. Though I was mistreated, beaten back when I reached for the good water or when I cried for food. Well, it would surprise some, I suppose, that people running to democracy are capable of such things. Why? You would think I would've turned out better myself. I didn't.
This is how I lost the diamonds. On the fourth day of that ugly sea we were boarded by Thai pirates. Six of them. They had three guns and many knives. They were disgusting men. They separated the men from the women, and a few of them raped the women while the others searched the rest of us. They found my belt and wrenched it from my waist. My poor father and mother didn't know this was a well-known hiding place. The pirates pulled me around like a rag. One of them said he would take me with them to make me a whore. I didn't know then what a whore was. They decided to take some women too, and the girls. What did I know about these things? I only know that I saved myself by biting one of them and getting knocked unconscious for it. When I woke up I was still on my way to the place I didn't know yet was Pulau Bidong.
After they left, the boat was a sick place. All the food was gone and people were more depressed, so I was an even worse liability. Human kindness is supposed to set in now, and it did, though it wasn't human, just chance. We reached the place called Pulau Bidong. From there on I was treated with a mix of goodness — some would call it disinterest but at the time I thought of it as goodness — and brutality. I never knew who would bring me which.
When you look at photographs of people at Pulau Bidong you see a blankness. Or perhaps our faces are, like they say in places, unreadable. I know how you come by such a face. I was paralysed when we unfolded what was left of ourselves onto the shore of Bidong. I felt like you do with sunstroke. I felt dried out, though, of course, a child doesn't have these words, but don't give me any sympathy for being a child. I grew up. I lived. I've seen the pictures. We look as one face — no particular personal aspect, no individual ambition. All one. We might be relatives of the same family. Was it us or was it the photographer who couldn't make distinctions among people he didn't know? Unable to make us human. Unable to help his audience see us, in other words, in individual little houses on suburban streets like those where he came from. Had he done it, would it have shortened my time at Bidong?
In one photograph you can see me stooped at the dress tail of a woman who could be my mother. She had two sons, and in the photograph I look like a third. Staring together into the camera's lens, perhaps by then we knew we were transformed into beggars for all time. I for sure had none of what you would call a character. Pulau Bidong was a refugee camp. A place where identity was watery, up for grabs. Political refugees, economic refugees — what difference? I was too young then for beliefs and convictions, thank heavens. Only at first I looked for love, for goodness, for favour. But after, I lived by one rule: Eat. Eat as much as you can. Nowadays I try not to make too many rules. You probably think if I hadn't lost my mother and father, if they hadn't lost me, I would've been a better person. Don't be sentimental. Don't ascribe good intentions. Who are you to judge?
I spent seven years at Pulau Bidong as an orphan, and I wished the Thai pirates had taken me with them. I would have had a destination and another fate. As it was, I ran to be photographed each time some news reporter or refugee official arrived. Perhaps I hoped my father or mother or my frightened sisters would find me. How did the pictures turn out? Do you recognize me? I'm the one who is smiling brilliantly less and less and then giving up on that more and more. I don't suppose it showed up in the pictures. Bidong became my home.
Once in Bidong I met another boy like me. There were many of us. He asked if he could play with a metal toy I'd made, the last sign of my innocence. I told him no, bluntly. He asked if I knew of his mother and father. I said, "Why would I?" He asked if he could be my friend. I said, "Suit yourself." I don't know what became of him.
What happened next? What happened next happened. That's the one thing Pulau Bidong taught me — shut your mouth.
CHAPTER 2
RAIN HAD FALLEN the night before, but today the sun lit the studio, and the clutter of wood, canvasses, paper, and the general debris that Tuyen considered to be the materials of her art. Tuyen looked out of her window facing the alleyway. Overflowing garbage cans and a broken chair rested against the wall of the building opposite hers. The graffiti crew who lived on the upper floors there had painted a large red grinning pig on the wall. She hadn't noticed the chair there before and examined it from above, thinking of what she could make with it.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from What We All Long For by Dionne Brand. Copyright © 2005 Dionne Brand. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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