Year of Plagues

by Fred D’Aguiar

  The song of my cure resides in my sense that chant, movement, deep breathing, some drum and a little bass go a long way toward making me strong. With strength I can react in less negative ways with the drugs. I say drugs after I start to take a pill to block the production of testosterone considered a food by my cancer. The tablet, bicalutamide, is bitter and much smaller than the Flomax. I am warned that it may result in hot flashes, to which my wife responds, “Welcome to my world.” I ask if it means that I might grow breasts. My wife guffaws, shocked at the suggestion, and the doctor nods and admits that some breast enhancement may result from the medication.

  Bicalutamide, 50 mg once daily, is the latest recruit into my army, the one that I have to raise to combat the cancer. Its action of stopping testosterone means that my body will soon be depleted of that male stock. As a carpet-bombing military strategy, that is the equivalent of collateral damage to me as the drugs attack the cancer. There is always this trade-off with medicine. To get better there has to be a transaction with a personal cost attached to it. Die of cancer or live as a testosterone-empty male.

  I teach that gender is fluid and we must in our state of gender binary revise our outlook to take on board the flotation of gender, its fluidity as a condition of our modernity. My students are at ease with the use of plural pronouns for singular fluid bodies. I have to adjust. Now if I feel tender in my breasts or come over all hot and bothered I have a visceral reminder of a cultural state of affairs for many. A by-product of the drug treatment for my illness, unintended and beneficial, is that I begin to belong to the consciousness of this new societal norm.

  Rastafarians want us not to under-stand a thing, rather to over-stand it; that is, to truly comprehend a thing by overcoming our ignorance about it. To understand it would be to capitulate to its overpowering colonization of our consciousness, literally, to accept our subjection to its strictures. To over-stand is to rise above the subject and see its true dimensions and so free the mental process of the chains of the thing. The mind wishes to get to know, or over-stand, in order to be free of those straitjacketing mechanisms. The Rasta vibe in me with the help of chant and drum and bass (though no puffing on the smokestack of a spliff’s herbal transportation) fancies itself attuned to liberation.

  The tune of liberation from my disease, on this personal and metaphysical plane, is a combination of these rhythms from my cultural and philosophical life. Goffman’s Asylums and Foucault’s Madness and Civilization helped me frame some of what I am going through in terms of my life as a reader. The act of reading illuminated what I thought, provided form for thoughts that were otherwise scattered and rhapsodic. I read Goffman while I trained as a psychiatric nurse and Foucault at university. I glean from the former the way the place takes over everyone, doctors, nurses, administrations, porters, and patients alike. The institution becomes an organism. People pool their nervous system into its workings in nefarious ways. Our modernity amounts to a madness in light of this institutional transformation of individuals. So that I feel bad and mad: bad that I question my medical experience, and mad for thinking that I may be wrong to be critical at a time of dire need.

  Liberation is too strong, though I feel indebted to my consciousness for housing Goffman’s world. I am both the subject of a disease and its incipient host, the person talked about and the person generating that talk, so that the drama of being taken in by something and becoming that thing is now two things folded into the one body and mind captured by the disease. Put another way, I am institutionalized by my disease, which forces me to behave with it as if hostile to my plight and impelled to conquer it.

  This is hard for me to reconcile with the politics of illness as the shape taken by our contemporary moment, that the times are mad for taking this shape and in so doing electing to be ill as part of being modern. Foucault obliquely addresses my cancer by situating me in the entrails of a modernity designed to procure cancers of various sorts. That I have cancer signals that I am in modern times, and how I react pulls me into the rules that govern a body afflicted by disease in these times.

  In order to modify the term liberation as an operating system in my life of disease, let me say that what I am going through and how I decide to cope with it is my way of assisting the work of the drugs: to help the chemistry with a body and soul philosophical practice. Together, pharmacy and philosophy might be able to defeat the spread of the disease and even banish it from its stronghold in my prostate. In the absence of any conventional religion, I see that I need a spiritual frame that is usually the remit of religion. My secular spiritualism insists on having access to the same depth charge of meaning as that supplied by the best of religion; let’s say, the Psalms.

  Though my body is overrun with disease, my spiritual cup runneth over with the help of music, politics, culture, education, arts. Poetry with its many colors may well be encoded with various registers of this overcoming of the disease. The poetry in me of chanting, music, boom box, and meter of my walk and move and groove, when taken together conspire to lift me from depression instilled by disease. A poetry of the senses insists on all five senses, and a sixth sense, come into play in over-standing my disease and making moves against it embedded in my prostate.

  What are the sights, touches, sounds, tastes, and smells of my liberation? Where around me might I lay eyes on this useful approach to add to my cure? Is it in the sight of the arrival of morning? Could it be in the pleasure of trees? My daughter walking up to the car to meet me after her school day? My sons at their desks looking up from gaming to talk to me about something? My wife at my side grilling the doctor about the specifics of a drug regimen? A painting or sculpture or elegant building? I think I may (as a condition of being awake and even while asleep) extract from all these visual stimuli emblems of my over-standing.

  The same can be said for the other senses. They too help me to garner aspects of truth to add to the curative approach to my disease. Not to mention that sixth sense. Some see it as aligned with superstition. As somehow the hunch or feeling that you get that makes you change your conscious course. Or a practice to counter obvious totems of ill will—the poor black cat that gets a bad rap, the dropping of utensils that to my Guyanese elders signals the arrival of a stranger (a fork for a woman, a knife for a man, and spoons I do not remember, perhaps for a child), the seeing of a likely outcome based on an instantaneous eureka moment of insight supplied by this intuited knowledge. All of them define this sixth sense, ethereal, that shadows the chemical and physical other five.

  With that in mind I turn up to the hospital for an injection (Lupron Depot) that delivers a three-month dose of testosterone blocker into my buttocks. I am told it is like a couple of flu shots to the arm—not one but two. I read up on it and the witnesses say that it can lead to all kinds of ill affects. The site gets very sore a day or two afterward. The mind becomes a little skittish. There may be a dull headache following you all day that you cannot do anything about except devise ways not to think about it. And of course the ever-present feminization of the body, with augmented breast tissue and hot flashes.

  I arrive for the morning appointment, having moved around a few work meetings, equipped with all this knowledge and still afraid. The nurse is chatty and takes her time to point out the bullet marks of possible and probable side effects that run to four pages. I ask her how much pain I should expect from having syrup pumped into my butt muscle. She says it is more of a liquid than a syrup. I ask her if the one-month dose is less of an amount than the three-month dose. She says it is not; the mix is the same volume though the dosage is different. I watch her mix a powder and liquid in a syringe fed by tubes with two compartments to it. The white powder turns slightly gray once it comes into contact with the liquid that is meant to reconstitute the medicine.

  Which side, she asks me. I pick my right buttock, on the assumption that I am left handed and favor my left step when I walk and may well favor the left buttock when I sit (though I have to think about this for
a moment since I assume that I sit square on both and I do not cross my legs when I sit). I open my trousers and lower the right side and she asks me to lean on the gurney and contract that right buttock. She sanitizes the area with vigorous rubs of a cool menthol wipe. I take her slight aggression as a declaration of her business approach. While in the vicinity of an erogenous zone the last thing a nurse wants to convey to a patient is the slightest intimation of intimacy. Those vigorous rubs declare a sort of nonchalance, a degree of utility, like drying a plate before putting it away.

  She asks me to relax my right buttock and take a deep breath and prepare for a little pinch. I shift my weight to my left leg and let that right buttock fall. I inhale and sure enough the pinch follows, more a stab and puncture of a bicycle tire by a nail, dear nursey-o, than a little pinch. She applies a plaster, which she says is to protect my clothes in case of a spot of blood at the site of the injection. I tuck my shirt into my pants and zip up. She wishes me well and we part with smiles.

  I want my pushback at my cancer to bring multiplicity of form to that splurge of content that is my cancer as it threatens to break out of its confines to my prostate and invade the rest of my body. My cancer has a form of its own that it deploys against my body. That it spreads with its deformed outgrowths by invading healthy cells and subjecting them to its deformity. I know that it feeds on the very nutrients meant to keep me healthy and functioning and that it hides from the troops in my body that look for sick expressions to surround and drown.

  I do not know what to do with what I know. I do not know how I am going to write a poem or chant and direct those forces with any certainty against such a methodical spread of disease in me. Even with meds on my side and with the promise of a surgery to help me, and further radiation therapy, I wonder if my self-help of chanting and the arts can even make a ding against such a virulent thing. The doubt is not despair. My outlook consists mostly of uplift, more positive than negative, more realist than pessimist, and therefore hardwired to see a lit path where none might appear to the darkened outlook.

  Poetry as a force whose composition promotes an under-, no, make that over-standing of my illness, and contributes to my cure, still seems like a stretch. I have my doubts about an art that resides in, yes, doubt, in order to generate inquiry. I have to sort out the lucrative and foundational doubt of my art from my doubting of art’s ability to have a curative effect on me. The two forms of doubt—one agitated, doubting Thomas, the other celebrating doubt, Descartes—look much the same. They differ in how fertile each proves to be for me. All my writing years, from my early twenties, I relished doubt as an impetus for artistic inquiry. I began with questions spurred on by doubt that resulted not so much in answers as in modes of inquiry.

  The second kind of doubt feels like an invitation to despair. To doubt the efficacy of my art’s metaphysical properties, wholly trusted up to now, as poetry-, drama-, and fiction-generating procedures, seems to me a sign of my weakness faced with the implications of cancer. Literary forms might be the very things that I need if I am to face down, embrace even, my doubt. My capacity to prevail against the disease rests in techniques borrowed from art: slowness, meditation, repetition, controlled breathing, physical awareness, focused thought, rhythm, sound, silence, movement, the weight of the line, sentence, paragraph, the clarity of the image, memory, and imagination.

  I want doubt in my life as an aid, not as an insurmountable hurdle. It is natural to have days of doom and gloom without surrender to the medical model as the only sure way to battle the disease. Perhaps, there is a way forward in which I do not view everything nonmedical as fluff, as too subjective and as not open to test and confirmation, measurement and its coterminous deployment. My intuition tells me that I have to trust the very sense of being unable to verify what good positive thinking might do for me and just keep doing it, just keep on visualizing the shrinking to naught of that prostate, the trap and retreat of those cancer cells, the chanting down of the walls of my disease and the improvement of my lot.

  Never mind the fine tremor in my hands, the feeling of cool in my body and my need to wear a tee under my shirt and jacket on bright, warm days, the back burner of a mild headache, the attention to my bladder, the odd relocation of my attention to my body just to that area below my pubic hair, the thoughts about the two meds that I have to take and how they are working on my behalf with that lethal (I hope to the cancer) injection, a surfeit of lethargy when it comes to exercise, and not a little fear, which surges involuntarily every couple of hours. That my calendar may be truncated and each mundane hour that I waste contributes to a countdown to zero time left for me, and my view of it as somehow routine, amounts to a criminal waste of a limited resource.

  I cannot live each hour as if it were my last. I do not have the energy or the necessary indulgent spirit. I need to string together those moments of a complete lack of self-awareness, of being on automatic pilot, not hearing my heart or breath, and not even present in my body. The only constant is my inability to hold on to animosity. There is no room left in me for it. In my condition I could have tea with Mussolini. (Except that I am afraid that it would be my last cuppa.) I feel so vulnerable in this frame of mind. Close to inexplicable tears that I put down to the total annihilation of testosterone in me. In the suit of my black skin that peels under the gaze of racist eyes. That cannot stomach intimate touch. That shuns attention of all kind. That I love. I refuse to feed my doubt of it. I cannot leave it behind me, as I forge ahead in search of a cure.

  My skin, my flesh and bones, my nerve suit of consciousness, we are all going down together on the Titanic of my being. Let the music play on. Giant gong hit with sledgehammer. Going down as one. Dolphin pod swan-diving through sea currents. Down as my art in life. A life without art is not worth living, not without the worth of art in a life. So chant. Dance. Breathe. Conjure the bear, Baloo, in The Jungle Book (Disney’s version), who sings his evanescent song, “The Bare Necessities,” to school Mowgli into the bear’s ways of survival in the jungle. Focus on living that thang, that Rastafarian livity that makes life a multifaceted approach of enrichment. I lean heavily on Rasta speak, from Marley to Tapper Zukie, to the terminology derived from my teens in London listening to reggae at dancehalls in South London and buying records pressed in London or imported from Jamaica, of artists singing politics and culture guided by Rasta ideology. The music provided a compass to navigate and make sense of the city jungle. Calvino’s Invisible Cities would cast a different light later on as a reality that I passed through in my youth, a map of the heart and mind whose coordinates were otherwise an abiding threat and palpably lonely.

  To be fair, other types of music figured just as heavily. My English teacher befriended a few of my peers and me, and we listened to Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, and other sixties and seventies luminaries like Santana, Joplin, and Hendrix. My mother, to her credit, played LPs of Motown soul that we listened to as we did our chores parceled out by her. She danced and sang along to Marvin Gaye, Al Green, Gladys Knight, Diana Ross, and many more, as she vacuumed. The week I began my paper route with my older brother we started buying James Brown, Herbie Hancock, the Crusaders, and other funk acolytes. In addition I encountered Fela Kuti. I picked up on blues, step forward Robert Johnson, Lady Day, Ma Rainey, Muddy Waters, and more. I heard Coltrane and Miles and felt my nerves and mind scrambled.

  I coupled my love of music with an ear tuned to the music of poetry. I scribbled in my spare time and memorized poems as well, in part thanks to Geoff Hardy, that English teacher extraordinaire who read aloud chunks of the romantic poets, “Fern Hill” by Thomas, “Ode to the West Wind” by Shelley, Keats’s Odes, Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan,” Blake’s Songs. I mimicked the style of those poets as a way to find a style and content of my own. There remains for me now as it did at the time a thrill in the recall of a poem in its entirety; a mental walk-through renews showers of diction, syntax, rhythm, and feeling, given by poems that lend themselves to recall, co
mposed as many are as mnemonics, as shelves for the library of nerves of memory.

  I admit that I danced too. Caught up in the social sexual drug of the disco era of clubbing though never as a wallflower, never there just to lean against a wall and peruse the dance floor, but a wild occupant of it, gyrating, spinning, bumping, and getting all the way down until covered in sweat and drinking pints of water to keep on grooving until the lights came up in the house. My older brother, as a result, took up dance for a living. I found out the limits of my dancing ability next to him on the dance floor. I felt I was fighting the music and always playing catch up to it, whereas Greg, he controlled the groove and moved with economy and urgency.

  I go back there to help me move through and with this current emergency. Back to those energetic days summoned by the mere whiff of cut grass, an olfactory trigger for a panoply of memories. And deep too, a dive into inner resources submerged and intuited as there and waiting for me to call on them to spring up to my assistance. And so there is a rhythm to my resistance to disease, a groove that my recovery may draw from by mimicking, by going through its paces for measures of my cure. Vials of the stuff that I see as buried in my senses and my artistic practice that I summon want to help me now in my hour of need. Not just the numinous—though credited as such—more than that, the luminous as well, and a word I do not like, ludic. That which shines and emits a pulse, those invitations sent out to the self to incline toward solace.

  3.

  Is This What Dying Looks Like?

  I have no defense against the experience of seeing my thirteen-year-old daughter burst into tears. As she cries so I am made immobile, catatonic with confusion that my condition drives her to such distress. She and I are in the car going to her school on one of the last days before the city stopped all social gatherings. We are a bit late and she has to make a stop at the pharmacy. She cannot settle on the brand of tampons and pads that she needs. I have my eye on the clock. I hurry her along. I am agitated even before this detour. I wake in the night, run to the bathroom or lie awake and wait for sleep to wander back to me. I eat, dress, and interact with Debbie and the pets on a reserve tank of civics, with most of my mind in the realm of the disease newly revealed in me.