Year of Plagues

by Fred D’Aguiar

  With a hop, skip, and jump into the gap I launch a bridging imagined thought, the thing most likely to follow from where I stand and take me to where I wish to be (that could be an image, phrase, short poem, paragraph, story, essay, run of dialogue, or combination of these, variations). The thing that surprises more than anything, that may not be practical. There is no automatic beauty to it, though there may be much elegance to how it looks and sounds and chimes on the heart, nerves, and lungs. There might be puzzlement at the end of reading, hearing, seeing, or feeling that bridging thought. So what? There is contradiction, of course; how can there not be contradiction after Whitman gave it style.

  His sprawl. His grandiose, multitudinous, amoeba-like claims for his imagination. His arms-wide embrace of everything in the world because all those things reside in him. Whitman’s thirst for life as an imperative for living. His multiple perspective, generated by his splintered sense of self. How he is receptive to difference on the basis that somewhere in him there is a compartment ready and willing to receive the thing that he does not know and wishes to become acquainted with. The many-roomed mansion of the curious heart with its endless capacity to accommodate new and strange things. That heart expands as it meets new stimuli and proves to be endlessly accommodating of the world.

  And next to Whitman’s sprawl, I keep Phillis Wheatley’s compression of her history of her capture and sale (sail too) into a life of enslavement. “On Being Brought from Africa to America” (1773) enacts in eight lines what has taken two and a half centuries to comprehend.

  On Being Brought from Africa to America

  ’Twas mercy brought me from my Pagan land,

  Taught my benighted soul to understand

  That there’s a God, that there’s a Saviour too:

  Once I redemption neither sought nor knew.

  Some view our sable race with scornful eye,

  “Their colour is a diabolic die.”

  Remember, Christians, Negros, black as Cain,

  May be refin’d, and join th’ angelic train.

  Her words travel from her cancerous time to my cancer. I join my carriage to Wheatley’s propulsive engine for the help with history that she offers me. She invites me to employ her poetry’s resources for my ends. To see Wheatley caparisoned in the cancer of her age, the system of enslaving Black bodies, and watch her mount a counteroffensive of compressed creative practice, sent ahead to my time, for me to continue to battle on her behalf, emboldens me in my calamity.

  I want her artistic cunning in my life as I face my diagnosis and embrace treatment of it. Cancer wins if I die from it. If I die from something else, cancer loses. Cancer wins if I keep waking up early with worry about its progress. If I sleep through the night, cancer loses. There is a room reserved in me for the cancer and I wish to keep it there under lock and key. I do not want it to have the freedom of the house, to roam and vandalize things. I might even wish to spring-clean that room and evict cancer from it, throw cancer—since cancer floats—out the window and into the moat below. I take a baton offered to me through time by Wheatley. Where her poem ends, I imagine beginnings: the likely trajectory of her life before her capture, to celebrate her strengths and define the sustenance that I draw from her work.

  The accordion of her words compresses a dictionary of feeling and supposition in just eight lines. My conjecture expands that instrument to the point of its fullest extension for help with my cure.

  6.

  To Fall, Falling, and Never Land

  Today I catch the spread of light across the east paving the way for a ripe sun to climb this ladder of clear blue. Though it is out there and far, far away (the second far doubles the distance and stretches the heart’s elastic inclusiveness to the max), I manage to draw it into my body through my eyes, ears, mouth, nose, and the pores of my skin until that sun rises in me. The day starts in me and it is a good day. I incline my ear to the body for the slightest ping of any symptoms to do with the cancer, and I hear nothing, feel nothing, and think only of this sunrise extension of me, this shining thing. How to hold that feeling for the rest of my days? Yes, in part, to Pope’s eternal sunshine of the spotless mind as a condition for conscious life from now to when I am laid low by time (not, I hope, by cancer). Not as forgetting to start over fresh, as if anyone can wipe the slate of memory clean, more as a pivot between the two as a way forward, inviting selective forgetting for the hopeful sun to germinate that space and repair whatever damage lingers in that spot. With cancer as my focal point, as the damage in me that needs to be repaired. With repair as an endless process, of flux, each new stimulus drawn from my sense of history and from autobiography.

  My disease depends on fixity. Cancer wants me to sit and be still and let it run rampant in me. Imagine me reclined. See the cancer pick up speed in exact proportion to my passivity. The more static I become, the more momentum cancer gains. This is not stillness as contemplation. This is inert and passive surrender that operates on physical and mental planes. In a conversation between Derek Walcott and Seamus Heaney at a writers’ conference in 2012, Derek made the case for the writer who needs solitude, stillness, and quiet to help bring about a readiness in the poet for poems to arrive or emerge. He called for a stillness and quietude of the mind as much as the body and its surroundings. As Derek made his case I saw Seamus lean forward a little. The moment Derek ended his convincing argument for this ideal environment that brings about poetry, that constructs an ideal place and opens up a coveted space for the reception of poetry, Heaney lifted a hand with a pointed index finger and blurted out, “Ah, but we dwell in clamor.”

  Of course, both conditions obtain for poetry. The clamor of the world, that is outside and inside, needs to be quelled sometimes for poetry to breathe and be and cannot be evaded so much as brought on board by poetry. We need both, and. The and part of the equation is that which cannot be described adequately, which the mind and heart sense intuitively as present alongside clamor and contemplative stillness. And suggests something unending, that is always being made and remade, something that can be grasped partially, and so the poet must try for it. Such a stance is not conclusive. It invites perpetual rehearsal (Wilson Harris’s term). The unfinished business of poetry. Poetry’s endless flux. The tilt of the poet as a permanent reach and gesture, slightly off balance always, and always that necessary feel of being about to fall in order to recover only to feel that tilt once more.

  To fall, falling and never land. Fly with no end to that flight. No windmill of arms, no flare of legs. A crawl, as if to take on board the velocity of flight. Hip dip, shoulder duck, head bob and weave, foot stomp, as hands carve the air. Move yourself. Hear this dub beat out of 1970-something. Dark room, ganja smoke–filled vibes stacked with bass boxes from floor to ceiling. Mr. Operator, please do not stop the rhythm. Not unless you want a riot from the crowd strapped to that sound and linked to the ground. The 45 with a doughnut hole on the turntable. Spin it. Inhale. How long did it take to get to this place? Our generation wanted more, always more, which amounted to wanting nothing to do with a system that wanted nothing from them, except their Black sweat and blood. Rock on. Against racism. Against sexism. Against homophobia. Against poverty, police brutality, the prison system, nuclear weapons, and any other schism that happened to rear its mean, little, institutionalized head.

  Echo chamber of the sound system mimics the pump of blood around the walls of the heart where blood picks up speed for its current around the body. Blood beat. Linton Kwesi Johnson (LKJ), step forward. Dub, bass, and rhythm guitar twang, measure this salt-and-pepper tongue-lashing of the system. Skin drawn over the drum of a skeleton that moves to the beat. Is there cure in this? How can there not be some salve for the soul in this monument of skin peppered with a history of the transatlantic slave trade, so that the bow in the sea and sway of the ship gel with the rhythm of the pulse? Atlantic in my blood even if I did not bathe in salt water. King Tubby, Tapper Zukie, and LKJ’s scatta-matta.

  H
elp me with this mantra for my cure of my cancer. That may or may not be the best cure for my disease. If what I have may find a path through me to end both of us. Turn left and you bump into my writing hand. Turn right and you meet my echo above my head and underfoot. Hum breath. Fill those pockets under my arms. Lift me off my feet. I hum in breath and tongue to drive back the thing in me that is a part of me only insofar as I let it become me. No amount of wise words will suffice for this journey. What is the technique behind the niche that I must take to another level?

  It is the beat. Drum. Bass. Reverberations. Delay. Stir a bit of rhythm in the pot. Pepper it. Echo. Move with the Operator, that mixology for a palette strung by ear and heart. Birth of the B-side generation. Version excursion. Show me my cure. I am ready, or not, as the case may be for me. Studio bells toll. Not for me. For my disease. Herald its end in me. Not my ending thanks to it. What is my thumbprint if I hold this raw ragamuffin pulse to my ear? I was there back then in the mid- to late seventies and into the militant eighties in London, and I carry the snow water of all of it in the breadbasket of my brain stem. I hop on the bus heading for a destination not on any map. How time flies without my clocking it. What is that Marx Brothers maxim—time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana? Before I know where I am, or who, for that matter, I catch sight of gray hair on my head as I brush past a hallway mirror, gray that sprouted seemingly overnight.

  Digital dub takes the baton from reels of tape. Composed in my youth by that sound, in my twilight years I decompose to it. How did Derek Walcott phrase it in his calypso riff “Spoiler’s Return”? “Tell desperados when you reach the hill / I decompose but I composing still.” Or so I thought until the arrival on my radar of this disease. Sit me between walls of speakers and allow the bass to drive disease from me. See how my clothes tremble. That is the work of air displaced by the speakers that shimmers the flesh beneath my cotton socks. Bass, shake my fillings, still the tremor in my hands and the twitch of my feet.

  My world, inundated by a vast wash of morning light, stirs, so that a steady wave begins in the east from an opened sky, last night’s aperture birthing a sun. Stand up in this vaulted sky and mind you do not bump your head on the ceiling. That recedes, recedes to hands that pull, draw in, and gather the wide span and haul of a net cast by a strong arm to catch us all in it. We are a silver catch that net releases onto a beach where we jump and flick light off our scales. We are afloat as dust in a sunbeam that falls slant across the room. (By we, I mean my disease and my engagement with it.) In that lime-green flock of parakeets swerving over the skinny palms of Mid-City LA. They pull a veritable market of noise in their wake.

  I convert the currency of my recognition of my cancer from negative to positive, from a thing that worries me to something noteworthy and in need of a solution. I address the disease and it addresses me. I call and it responds, or I respond to its call on and in me. If the disease is my enemy, it is my friend too; if it wishes to destroy me, it seeks to help me to live a better life. My cancer reminds me of that stained-glass panel in Durham Cathedral that says troubled but not distressed. While troubled by my cancer, provoked by its machinations in my body, I refuse to be distressed by it, become its victim.

  The cathedral is my body. I invited cancer into it. The disease worships as it sees fit. I conduct a ceremony to quell and steer that behavior toward terms that preserve rather than destroy the cathedral. It scares me that we share the same space. As sun and moon share sky, so my cancer shares my body with me. It is not a question of proportion. There is no balance to be struck with cancer, no bargaining with this devil. Any amount of cancer is too much for my body. My conversation with my cancer is to persuade it to desert the space that it occupies, since it has compromised the entire organism. There is no switch of roles in which each may take a turn to lead and follow.

  * * *

  The novel coronavirus shutters the city. Civic and work life grind to a standstill. Traffic becomes sparse and the shelves of the supermarkets empty like a shebeen raided by police. Birdsong replaces the usual traffic hum of the city. Light falls unimpeded by what the city sends up into the atmosphere so that the air itself feels lighter, though I may be giddy from the exigencies of the emergency. This adds a new clause to the things that I have to worry about. My doctor’s office is not handling calls and my emails to him remain unanswered. I see this halt in the affairs of state as a reflection of the disease being granted carte blanche. While the disease earns a green light for its progress in me, I receive a red one in my quest for a cure. Cancer gallops around my body while I sit on my hands and wait for help to deal with it. I am among the compromised bodies in a stricken city that cannot afford to host another malady.

  The last straw may be my despair, my propensity to ruminate on my last days as full of pain and an early end to my life. It saps my energy. I move about the house like a sloth. I don’t want to wash and shave. Despair that proves to be an art form for some people vandalizes my imagination. I cannot write, cannot think outside cancer and its bad outcomes. Despair takes over my life. I prefer a pinch of the bleak for this house of my body, rather than painting my house black, from pillar to post, and closing the blackout curtains.

  I want to spin bleakness out of its concentric vortex and into the widening ripples of light, of hope and purpose for consciousness. Spin it into the light of my childhood in Airy Hall, a village about forty miles outside Guyana’s capital, Georgetown. Back then and in that place we skipped stones to see who could make the most skips before the stone sank out of sight. We loaded the smoothest, flattest stone we could sort that lay near the lake, and gripped it near the edge of our palm close to thumb, index, and middle fingers and tensed our shoulder and leaned low and fired that stone at the flat face of water. Those skips happened fast and you had to focus to get the correct count. We whooped and flicked our index fingers against our pressed middle finger and thumb. We slapped our thighs or high-fived with the champion stone flicker, searched for more flat stones and tried another round to beat that high score.

  As the stone skipped, ripples sprang up and widened and grew less and less on the surface of the lake until they sank back into the water. The lake absorbed our energies. Those stones stopped skipping on the surface and dived out of sight to the bottom of the lake and added to the lake bed whatever life was taken from the lakeshore. If we thought back then that the stones would just as well pile up on the bottom of the lake as languish on the shore, that our skipping of them meant nothing but an interruption of such kept and adhered-to positions, we might have missed out on a laugh and the exhilaration of a shared phenomenon: the best stone sorted from the pile, the close study as that stone’s life blazed a trail across the lake, and the moment when it vanished from us after opening this unbridgeable gap of skips between it and us. The warmth in our activated shoulders radiated to our animated spirits. Our eyes met in confirmation of this life and as we tried once more to outdo our last best effort.

  * * *

  Things start to go wrong when around mid-March I can’t seem to put a foot right. I become jittery, infused with the tremors of the drugs’ side effects. Not fear. Just feeling off, thanks to my biorhythms, or horoscope, or some juju of pins stuck in my effigy by my enemy, make that plural, enemies, on three continents if my paranoia serves me justly, and if I fall in with this run of things going wrong, or slightly off kilter in a tilt of the field of sorts for me, so that my aim and gestures miss their target by a centimeter, and so I may as well have not taken aim in the first place, which leads to mounting bad feeling in me and short temper in my dealings with others in the house, who seem to move in slow motion and do not hear me when I speak, and if they hear they misunderstand, and that just adds to my frustration with them, and my feeling that I am disconnected from everyone all the time, and in need of more than language to help me correct my course, which has veered too far off the path for me to even think that I can resume the journey, or take it up where I left off, as if
my life is a lost and found of aspects of my fortune waiting for me to collect them, parked as they are in some legitimate space, or place, for just an eventuality as this one, of me waking on the wrong side of the bed or getting out of it and leaving the best of me asleep and so my day starts without me in it, and I move out of sync with everything around me and all that grows in me is this frustration that I cannot defuse or reduce or escape.

  This is where a cuss or two might be cathartic for me and reset my day and recalibrate my discord. I think this surge of bad feeling feeds my cancer, adds to its delight in me. The more I act out of anger or frustration, the more of that ill persona I assume. Whoever I might be is sidelined. I can feel the bunched muscles in my shoulders at the base of my neck, both sides aching now and knotted, pulling my shoulders up around my ears, and hunching my back. I lean into my misconception of everything and increase the likelihood of more mishaps coming my way by my obvious show that I am primed to receive such negative messages. I want to take on Caliban’s aspect of using language for one thing alone, though with a gift for more than cursing, as his dream speech proves.

  With Caliban’s crude tongue, given its vituperative might, I too can cast spells, the way he spits insults in a stream of frogspawn akin to a witches’ brew. I reserve his poetry for another occasion. For now I launch his tongue to drive back the bile of the air, the furniture and people as they all conspire to add to my knotted shoulders and hunched back. All such poisons internalized by me and made so private that they aren’t even dependent on the external factors of air, people, and furniture clipping my knees as I sweep past. To set them off in me, they just need me.