by Ian Williams
I also cannot ask these questions because she is gone.
* * *
—
In screenshots of the event, she is pale against a black background. I am dark against a white wall. She looks like a still from a film. I look like I’m trapped in a passport photo.
* * *
—
Afterward, charged with adrenalin, I march around the unfurnished condo, humming “Hungarian Rhapsody.” My parents bought me a cassette of Liszt as a child and I played it in the background as I read my mother’s anthologies. My condo is too small for my marching, so I take to the streets and walk through cold rain. When I’ve tired myself out, I return home, towel-dry my puffy coat, and tuck it under my hip as makeshift mattress padding. In my dream, someone keeps singing “where nothing is real,” a line from “Strawberry Fields Forever.” I think it’s Atwood, but I can’t find her. I encounter two mirrors in a bathroom. In one of them, I look great. I’m in focus, my hair’s shiny, each curl is defined, there’s a bubble of light in each eye, and, interestingly, I appear lighter, or not exactly, just more orange. In the second mirror, I looked like a Black guy shot on film with poor lighting and no flash. In the dream, I am surprised to discover that people recognize me as the man in the first mirror when I recognize myself as the man in the second.
People want Atwood to blurb their books, to retweet them, to say they’re geniuses, to bless them and their children. They want years of one-way familiarity and intimacy reciprocated. But that would make me anxious. I don’t want long late night conversations about the state of literature or spontaneous phone calls where I ask her whether I should buy the green pants or the brown pants. I don’t substitute her for my own mother, who, when I told her about the Atwood event, was stoic. Make sure you do something with your hair, she said.
What do I want from Atwood? The impossible. I want her alive forever. But I cannot preserve her in my head, let alone in the world. In the green room, I asked how she was managing during the lockdown. She told me she’s got a backyard with various heating contraptions. She said I should get a pair of thermal-reflective gloves. She said when things get better, in six months she predicted, I should come over.
Oh dear, I said. I’ll have to bring a pound cake.
Something like that, she said.
2. MOVED
The puppet appears
On my forty-first birthday, before all this nonsense with the move, I received a large box from my friend Myronn, an American poet. Inside the box was a card, Read this first, sitting on mounds of bubble wrap. The card actually gave away what was in the box: I remember our conversation about the one you saw in Prague but didn’t acquire.
What I wanted so badly in Prague was a puppet of Icarus, hanging mid-flight from the ceiling of a puppeteer’s shop. I considered buying the puppet for a long time. It was the size of an infant, dressed in a red shirt and blue shorts. I thought about it while sightseeing. I went back to the shop the next day. In the end, I was financially prudent and persuaded myself that the puppet was out of my price range and that shipping would be too costly. In place of the puppet, I took a photo. I used it as my Skype avatar for years. Skype was how Myronn and I communicated because he was always away. Or I was.
Sure enough, inside the box was a puppet of a Black man with bushy moustache and eyebrows. He’s wearing a leather shirt that is frayed at the bottom over a mustard skirt. He’s holding something in his hands, an axe maybe.
It took me a few days to realize that I’d misconstrued that. On closer inspection, he’s holding a flute.
He’s an artist.
I named the puppet Anonymous.
The puppet immigrates
The puppet, Anonymous, was born in a village in Tunisia. It journeyed from Tunisia to Morocco to New York to Maine to Vancouver and eventually—WHEN WILL MY FURNITURE ARRIVE?—to Toronto, where it will finally rest on top of a bookcase, next to a plant and a prize. The puppet’s travels shadow Myronn’s and my own.
The journey that this puppet took is familiar to academics. Myronn taught in Morocco for about ten years. Jobs in one’s area of specialization are scarce. Competition is fierce. One goes where there’s work. The puppet has endured various puppet-sized difficulties at each dislocation. It was hard to find a box big enough for it and the right kind of protective padding. Familiar problems. What really makes it special to a Black academic, though, is the journey across the ocean.
Anonymous Ancestors
I took a photo of Anonymous sitting on my shoulder and sent it to my partner. She said it looked like me. I sent it to a friend in Korea. He said the same thing.
I looked closely at the puppet’s face. We’re often the last to see resemblances between ourselves and others. I denied looking like my mother until time drew two marionette lines down my cheek. And same with my father, until I bought a pair of velvet pants and recalled—with horror—his velvet pants in a photo album from the seventies. The puppet has an elongated face and neck, large eyes, and a moustache. I’ve been rocking one too for the last few months.
Okay, so I recognize my face, yes, the skin, the Africanness touched by Europeanness. Then I note something more—the only word I have for it is familiarity. Anonymous could have been a simple doll, but instead it was made into a puppet. There’s a place for strings to attach to its head, but—I looked—the places where the other strings go are hidden.
People have interpreted the slender, narrow sadness of my face as Ethiopian. It’s the kind of guess they make when they intend to compliment me by whitewashing my Blackness. To trace my face backward, I flirted briefly with Ancestry.com, but it just chops me up into percentages. When people do these tests on the commercials, they get excited by the famous relative or the surprise ancestor of another race. The second narrative makes people cover their mouth: you’re not the person you thought you were.
I’d like to know more. I’d like to know what my percentages were thinking and eating and wearing in 1720. I’d settle for a drawing of their faces. Hell, I’d settle for a name.
* * *
—
I make the mistake of trying to investigate my background once more. And again, I shut my laptop with the crossword feeling of having gotten some clues but no completion.
It would help to know who I’m looking for. I suppose I’m looking on my mother’s side for the man who left her his skin, to see if I can find the woman he loved, raped, desired, what’s the word, reproduced with, so that I could, I could what, so I could have a name and a face. Finding the woman is impossible. She has been erased. Finding the man is hard because there are many men like him. He is overrepresented in the records.
Imagine yourself in a version of this erased Black woman’s life. Imagine yourself as an ancestor to your descendants. Everything you currently struggle with and fret over has vanished, and when your descendants look back, if they’re lucky, they maybe find your name. It’s a glimmer, no? But don’t you wish that a great-great-greatn grandchild could see your face and say, I look more like her than my mom. What funny clothes she’s wearing! She was a financial adviser? She wore a lot of red? She got divorced? She lost a child to an overdose? She died thousands of miles from the farm where she was born? And after assembling these pixels into an image of a human, wouldn’t you want that descendant to know what man did you wrong and got away with it?
Here’s the truth about looking for a white ancestor. I want to find him so I can track down his descendants and see how wealthy they are, how mobile, how many passports they hold, how ignorant they are of me, how slavery has been used for them like a disposable straw, useful at the time, utterly forgettable now that they’re nourished.
* * *
—
A friend who shall remain anonymous messaged me about his unstable ancestry. Ancestry databases update their results periodically—surprise! you’re not the person you thought you were!—
and the effect of your reconstituted racial composition can be disorienting after you’ve made peace with your prior identity.
Anonymous: BTW, these DNA tests keep changing slightly. Now I’m more Cameroon than Nigerian.
Me: Yeah? I don’t know what to make of these tests. I started at 20% Nigerian and now I’m 50% but I’m also getting whiter.
You been to Nigeria?
Anonymous: No. I want to go now because of the DNA result. I was 30% Nigerian. Now I’m 20%.
Are you from Mali as well?
Me: I think I have some Mali. I have to look again.
Anonymous: I’m 10% from Mali.
Me: Great?
Anonymous: I’m really happy about this. Remember the guy a few blocks over I thought was a musician? I run past his house in the mornings.
Me: What about him?
Anonymous: I think he’s moving. His apartment seemed emptier, but the keyboard is still front and centre and the big framed watercolour is still on the wall.
Me: Are you gonna knock on this white guy’s door one day or what?
Anonymous: Haha. It’s so not that deep. But I still really want to see his place and I do wonder if he’s actually a musician. He wasn’t sitting at the keyboard today. No one was there. But the lights were on.
Me: I’d love it if he were a DJ.
Anonymous: And it would be great if we randomly became friends.
Me: You sound like you’re in kindergarten.
Anonymous: BTW, where in Europe?
Me: All over. Scotland, Ireland, France, Italy, or Spain. Don’t remember now.
Anonymous: I’m 15% Scottish. I’m not Italian.
Me: The rape happened. Not just historical allegations.
Anonymous: Well…clearly. I’m 20% Norwegian. The hell?
Me: I expected Portuguese stuff.
Anonymous: That too.
Me: Do you feel any connection?
Anonymous: Nuts. Europe is all rape.
I feel nothing.
Me: The white folks got around though they like to make us seem like animals.
Nigeria and Norway. Your next trip.
Anonymous: When they raped us…
I’d like to see Nigeria.
There was French in my first DNA result but none now. It was replaced with Russian.
Me: Russian?!
It’s weird how quickly we adjust our history based on the new results. Like our attitude toward the new country softens.
Anonymous: Mine doesn’t. To me that tragic…history of slavery and subjugation is even more real now.
It’s literally in the blood, in the genes.
Me: What is whiteness doing inside of us—that feeling.
Nobody invited it in.
Anonymous: All those different ethnicities of Africans. All over the continent.
All those women being raped.
It’s really disgusting.
Me: And no way to connect with the original Blackness.
Nigerians won’t claim us.
Anonymous: There are worse things than death.
Me: Orphaned by Africa. Raped by Europe.
Anonymous: I’ve been to Ghana, but I can’t go…and say, love me.
Me: Ethnic tourism.
Anonymous: Or Mali, Cameroon, Senegal, Benin…
Me: Right. All we have is this continent. And they’re shooting us up.
What a predicament!
OK. I’m gonna go for a run myself. Burn off some of this feeling.
Anonymous: It’s really awful.
And the musician doesn’t know I exist.
Me: One day you will knock on this white man’s door
Anonymous: and say you don’t know me
Me: but I know you.
Moved
The puppet Anonymous was the only enduring gift I received in the Year of the Pandemic. I remain moved by the sentiment and the expense.
When I was preparing to move back to Toronto, I packed it in a box of its own with yellow pillows on either side. It spent weeks in a loading facility, then in a truck with the other cargo, and then in a warehouse, before finally reuniting with me. It survived the journey unbroken and now it crowns my bookcase. Okay, the last part was premature. Anonymous is still in a warehouse somewhere. There is a chance that it might arrive broken or, worse, be lost forever.
3. THE MOTIONS
Sorry I am late
I call the moving company. I learn the location of the warehouse where my furniture sits, awaiting delivery. Brampton. It’s where I grew up. I consider a heist.
Toronto enters another lockdown. The days shorten. It snows.
For some reason, I take to watching DJs play electronic dance music on YouTube. The videos are from our former world. There’s no way anyone would tolerate the moist skin of strangers making contact with their own these days.
Now, while making dinner in my one pot, I watch DJs play to crowds. I adjust the knobs of my cooktop like the dials of a mixing board. I dance when the beat drops. I eat, watching the bodies more than my food, and sometimes I pass out in my sleeping bag (an upgrade) while they continue to shuffle with the infinite energy of youth. These videos can be hours long.
Solomun is the DJ that started this phase for me. He too seems to come from a former world. He’s a heavy-set man, born under Eastern bloc Communism, the kind of presence one associates with bearded loggers and the proletariat. When I saw the clip of him remixing “Sorry I Am Late” by Kollektiv Turmstrasse, I sent it to every friend who texted me that day. In the video, Solomun charts a funky brass line by fluttering and chopping his hand through the air. He sips from a glass of wine. He’s not the kind of man you expect to dance, but he does, with small, delicate gestures. He pinches his thumb to his finger. He waves his expressive pinky. The crowd adores him. The best parts of his videos are the moments when he dissolves from DJ into audience. Even among the crowd, he’s so enraptured by the music that the audience appears incidental. He’d make music even if he was alone. I imagine him as a boy, spending many evenings in his parents’ living room, conducting imaginary symphonies. Am I drawn to house music lately because I’ve been stuck at home, in this holding pattern, for so long? It captures both the monotony and the thrill of days in the house. One song blurs into another. It’s hard to know where my workday ends and my personal life begins. I toggle between Outlook in one tab and WhatsApp in another.
House music isn’t an outgrowth of shimmering European salon music. It emerged in the 1980s from Chicago’s Black underground club scene. The term house is probably an abbreviation of Warehouse, the genre’s birthplace and home to queer clubbers. From Chicago, house spread across North America to Europe. In a way, the spread of house music is no different from the mainstreaming of Black production: take the gold, take the style, take the slang; discard the people.
Surreal
Before this current phase, I assumed that DJs played in back-alley clubs where lasers strobed over sweaty bodies. But on YouTube, they spin in sublime locations. Imma claim that I’ve been there. I mean, is this virtual travel much different from the shallow ways we’ve been travelling this millennium—from snapping a selfie in front of the Mona Lisa? I have danced with these DJs atop a tower in Amsterdam while the sun sets, aboard a pirate ship in Ibiza, before the horseshoe stairway of Château de Fontainebleau, on the peak of Sugarloaf Mountain in Rio, so high up the clouds wrapped us, on the terrace of the Revelin Fortress among the red roofs of Dubrovnik. Alls I need is my HD TV to turn the red roofs of Croatia into the magic carpets of an acid trip.
The DJs who take me to these scenic places are themselves sights to be seen. There’s Solomun, the imposing conductor with the delicate gestures. Hot Since 82, the DJ I saw in Ibiza and Croatia, is a stunningly handsome man with a sleeve of tattoos, who wears his shirt unbu
ttoned into a deep V. Idris Elba, who played me a solo show in Amsterdam, needs no description. Boris Brejcha is a skinny man who wears a horned carnival mask. The mask has an impish smile and a steep nose. The first time I saw Boris (we tight now), I thought he was snorting coke through a secret tube in the mask. He was such a different person when he wore it. And he was wearing a shirt that said Cocaine Cowboys. The truth shamed me, though. When he was a boy, he was badly burned during a military air show disaster in Germany. His face is scarred. You never know where people are coming from.
Perhaps, at some point, the functional masks of the pandemic will morph into carnival masks and we’ll all walk around not just masked but gloved, costumed, not an inch of skin showing. Would people interact differently if they didn’t know the race of the person under the mask?
I have a dream
My mother says that I should come and stay with her in Brampton. Why are you suffering? You have a bed over here.
I tell her that my furniture will arrive any day now. I have faith.
What’s in the background? she asks.
Music.
Turn it down.
* * *
—
Honey Dijon is a Black woman who deejays with fierce concentration and Shiva-limbed busyness. Every once in a while she backs away from the equipment and throws her hand up as if she has done everything possible to contain the music before letting it burst upon us.
More than other DJs, she seems to be interested in something apart from our pleasure. She doesn’t empty words of semantic meaning. Instead of dance, dance, dance, she’ll mix in focus, focus, focus. Her set in Melbourne, from 2018, begins with Stevie Wonder singing “I wish” a cappella. There’s nothing to wish for, I think, compared to the disease, unrest, and wildfires of this summer. I had furniture in 2018. After a few moments the beat comes in, the tempo speeds up, a cross rhythm drops in, and the music unfolds in the fluid yet numbing way of house music. Metaphor of our days. Halfway through the set, though, the music recedes and Martin Luther’s voice rises. He has a dream. His voice reverberates like it’s haunting itself. The crowd erupts at the climax, then music floods in and he’s forgotten. At the end of Honey Dijon’s set, words seize our attention again. The last sounds are a woman’s voice: “Just stopping by to let you know I won’t be needing your lil’ dick services any longer.”
