Un-Anansi my cancer. Let me match the dexterity of my foe with this West African myth and legend and telltale tall tale, made taller still by evenings lit by a gas lamp on a sheltered porch. Though tripped by that cancer, that I may fall and land in a many-limbed and limber roll of recovery. And resume my stride, my rock and roll, twist and turn and shout, whistle and chant, through the best that is the rest of my days.
Anansi ducks to avoid the top half and walks through the bottom half of two half doors at the back of the house. He walks into his kitchen to find his four children and his partner, their mother, waiting at the breakfast table for him. They look at him and smile and keep that smile as they move their collective gaze to the bundle that he cradles in his left hand. Can they smell fruit as they remember that smell to be or as a result of the roomed-in and still air? Their mouths water. Anansi smiles and sits at the one chair empty for him, the one nearest the back door.
At that moment Anansi computes the error that he failed to see during his quest for a meal for his family. Even as he shifts the hand of bananas and he parts company with it, his shoulders drop and all his limbs lower to his side. He slumps in his seat. His youngest boy takes one from the bunch and passes it to the youngest daughter second. She takes one and passes the remainder to the next in line in terms of age, the second daughter, older than the first by exactly the wink of an eye that it takes a child to break free of its gestation in an egg. She takes her share of one banana and she hands the last two to the eldest, who passes the last banana to his mother.
At each juncture each child follows the action of the last and the next in line and counts down the hand from five to four to three to two and to one and none left for their father. None left for the person who made it all possible and who should have known better than to return with this dilemma. He is Anansi. The greatest trickster of all. The father purported to persuade a dog to offer up a last juicy bone, a squirrel to sacrifice its last saved nut, a mosquito to withhold its primed proboscis from the warmth of a limb. Anansi the spider.
Seated at the head of the table with an empty plate and his family, plates full, ready to eat, Anansi looks forlorn. His wife says, Take half of mine, dear. Anansi holds up one limb as if to halt his partner. She stops and looks at him with knitted brows in her attempt to work out just what new trick her husband may be up to now. Into that gap jumps the youngest. He looks at his father and takes a knife and cuts off a third of his banana and places it on his father’s empty plate. The other children do not pause. (Anansi suppresses a glint in his eye. He pushes it to the corner of his eye and narrows his eyes a little to hide that glint.) They cut a third as well and pile it on Anansi’s plate. His partner does the same. Anansi’s limbs shift from their folded and resigned pose to something of a spider about to pounce on a prey. His mouth turned down for that look of disappointment involuntarily springs up into a broad smile. His eyes water and his partner and children take it as his gratitude at their sacrifice on his behalf welling up inside of him.
Anansi adds up his one-third shares. For each member of his family’s two-thirds portion, he has one whole banana and an extra third. He dives into his meal. His wife and eldest son exchange a glance, shake their heads, and start to eat. Anansi’s wife looks at him, long and hard. She wants him to give back each of those pieces to his children, if not all of it then at least take that extra third and cut it into four and distribute it among the children. Anansi wants nothing to do with parity or the extraction of a life lesson for his children from a teaching moment. He raises his eyebrows, shrugs his shoulders, and eats.
Anansi, as a collective, amounts to the sum of his partner and their four offspring. His trick never ends. He plays it on himself and on his world. I extract from his story those nutrients my mind stands to benefit from the most. The family sups at a table laid on my body for me to look at in all the ways available to Anansi, his multiple limbs, his sixth sense, and his trickster mentality. I gain from that body, memory, and imagined affinity with a folktale and with my father and my mother (two spiders in my heredity). My body morphs into a communal body, never alone and always assisted by many helping hands. I travel through time and across continents for these benefits. I descend (after a tiptoe skip of a flat stone on the skin of water) like that stone, to the bottom of a lake, river, or sea for a similar lesson from history, from the land, sea, and air.
7.
Help Me, Anansi
My surgeon calls me three days after his last call. This time I do not hear the phone. I play back his message three times: once for me, once for my wife, and a third time for my hard ears. He says he has a date of April 1 for him to operate on me but the novel coronavirus has halted everything. He says the equipment, a bed, ventilator, the staff, are all on reserve for the expected surge in demand for hospital rooms by those with COVID-19. My cancer is aggressive, he says, and he hopes to convince the hospital to grant me that date for my operation.
Things are bound to change in the three weeks before that operation, he says. COVID-19, which has locked down the city and freshened the air with the absence of cars, and turned up the volume of birds in exact ratio to the decline in traffic, dictates everyone’s calendar. The doctor’s message ends by saying that we should talk again in a week or so. I grip the phone and stand quite still for a long time. I conjure the peace and calm of light falling more freely in air less polluted, light that shines more brightly in that freshened air, so that leaves catch a breeze, and the skirt of a tree stitched out of those leaves is thrown up to reveal the white underside of leaves, or a run of that same light over water that becomes pleated with it. The image of washed air is from this moment, now; the idea of the skirt of trees is from back then, as a child. I roll the feelings linked to the two images into one entity with double the power, to help me now.
I stop seeing the operation as an emergency. I practice views of the operation as a thing I might postpone and schedule at my convenience. Rather than walk into a sick environment and subject my body to a debilitating operation and make myself vulnerable to catching a wildfire disease, I should place everything on hold. Forget the operation for the time being and spare myself the gamble of walking into a hospital where everyone is cheek by jowl with the incurable virus. Stay home as ordered by Los Angeles’s mayor, and by the state governor, enjoy my confinement to my house, and persevere with the work of understanding my cancer and seeking out homeopathic ways to tackle it. The Caliban in me is quiet, no curses. I listen for what Anansi has to say.
Anansi includes his partner and their children. Mrs. Anansi showed reserve in her gaze directed at Anansi, and in her quiet. She could have challenged him and spoiled the meal with friction and the correction and diminution of the family’s breadwinner that morning. She reminds me of Debbie. Debbie watched me over twenty-five years. She could have said a lot to me and taken us down a path of conflict and arguably my cowardly flight away from her truth telling. To keep me engaged with her and to bring me around to seeing the error of my ways she said a little and stared at me a lot. In her look I heard her protest. I took my time but I came around to a self-scrutiny that highlighted my faults and showed a path for repair and renewal. Debbie sat at the same table as me. She knew there would be other meals to sit through and more opportunities for me to act in a more selfless manner.
I cut the cord of our eldest son. I buried it under a tree at our house in Miami. Debbie labored for a day and a half, and we walked up and down stairs to accelerate the labor and bring about the birth of our son. We walked the child early in the morning to avoid the steaming sun of South Florida. We searched for a rhythm of life that honored the growth of our child. If there were a meal to divide I would eat last, after the baby and after Debbie, if called upon to do it. There was never such a demand made by our situation or one that Debbie would allow to come about. In that sense she prepared the environment for the meal long before my arrival at the table. She set that table for all of us. She called the children to take their se
ats, and she left a place for me as though she heard my arrival long before I announced myself.
As I ducked through those half doors—I mean by walking under the top half through the open bottom half door—I could see that I was not just Anansi, his understudy, but that all our children and Debbie combined operated as me, with me as their emissary and all of us combined as a way into this world, a way forward in it. Debbie’s look sent volumes across so many tables to me for me to mull over and dream my way around. She waited for me to find my way back to her and our children. She made the table ready with our children and reserved my place on it. She must have seen me coming before she heard me bluster into the room.
Anansi condensed to a partner and four offspring is, in fact, a multitude. Imagine lifting a stone in a yard and a huge spider jumps out at you and on the ground one hundred baby spiders scatter from the light aimed at them as if that light poured from a garden hose. Two big spiders, Anansi and his partner. One hundred offspring. It’s for them that Anansi goes foraging to the nearest plantation. Anansi is an adult, over six feet tall. He is a man in a spider body. The miracle is that he succeeds in escaping those Dobermans and the electric fence and barbed wire. Each limb carries an entire branch full of bananas. He throws them over the fence and leaps just in time to dodge the jaws of those Dobermans. You should see Anansi run with his body laden with bananas enough to feed one hundred baby spiders and his partner. It is to that table that Anansi returns and so his mathematics of recall of a part of his meal from each of his offspring and partner results in a feast for Anansi.
We splinter into our children. They grow into their own abilities independent of us. I know nothing of the hand that lifts the stone that we huddled under. One moment we sheltered under that stone, the next, light flooded our hiding place and we scattered to find another safe space. Since Anansi must leave to go about his trickery, it is to this community that Anansi returns laden with the fruit of his labor, fruit Anansi has to share in confirmation of his stature as master trickster and to affirm his unity with his progeny and partner, all splinters in this light refracted through a glass prism.
Anansi tricks his way across time, from my grandmother’s time to mine. Her story about him takes on new shape in my life. He eats at his table in her story. But at my table set for him on my terms he sacrifices his bigger share that he won by a trick on his family for the fast that feeds him at a deeper level of satisfaction of seeing them eat after each gives up a portion of food to him, which he gallantly refuses to accept. He turns against his own trickster nature in his story as told by me in my time, and so proves his shape-shifting is not confined to his era or even to his body; instead, it is a function of telling his story then and now and again without end.
His eldest notices what has happened and puts it down to his father’s mastery of the spider’s sixth sense and trickster nature. His partner smiles at his change of heart, knowing all along that the gift of transformation was not confined to the physical plane but had a spiritual dimension to it as demonstrated by her husband in front of his children. She says she is full halfway through her meal and she covers her plate with a napkin and sets the remainder of her plate to one side of the kitchen counter. The children eat up and leave the room and she follows them. Anansi listens to make sure no one is near and that all the children and their mother are occupied and he sidles over to the covered plate and devours the banana, peel and all. Peel as well in the belief that all the goodness in the banana lies just on the inside of the skin. On that reasoning he eats the cast-off skins of all the children and his partner. He is full.
I am Anansi, both spider and man, able to change my shape and alter my mind. The cancer is a test of my wit as a trickster. Can I overcome the cancer or will it beat me? I see my quest as a hunt for a meal for my family. The banana plantation guarded by Dobermans and with a barbed wire and electric fence waits for me. My grandmother watches over me to see if I stick to the details of her story. My father parades as Anansi in the story that she tells. The entire scene unfolds in my body. Not just my grandmother’s story but my update of it as well. Both Anansi stories, past and present, unfold simultaneously in me. I am a student hearing and seeing the two stories. I play all the parts in the two stories as they play out at the same time. I usurp the parts of my father and my mother. I extract valuable lessons from both. This is my challenge: I carry a disease, and in the shared space of my body I must make room to deploy a cure that preserves my life. Help me, Anansi. I carried you for five decades not knowing why I kept you in me. Now I ask that you carry me. Together we tell the story of Anansi, one for that past time and another for this time that I find myself in with the fight of my life. Trickster that I have become, two spiders in one, past and present incarnations in me, I feel ready to take on cancer.
Lewis Hyde sees this trickster as a universal figure and as a progenitor of worlds. He privileges story with more than knowing the world and gives it primacy as the world we know.* Hyde’s Anansi is that conscious mind in the world. All things that we know about the world originate in the play of the story of the trickster figure, his twists and turns, his current nonbinary incarnations, his bend of gender and slice of it into a multiplicity. The presence of the trickster globally makes the local and the global aspects of the same thing seen in multiple ways. My grandmother’s Anansi story that urges us to share and be grateful for what we are given is told on many platforms across the globe to the same global end, that the story organizes certain principles about growing up in the world in a way that makes those principles memorable and easy to transfer from storyteller to listener. And for the listener to become the teller of the tale to another group of listeners in a chain that runs through time and across cultures to cover the globe.
* * *
One side effect not seen as yet, though I keep a sharp eye out for any traces of its beginnings, is that I may grow breasts. My wife and daughter find this enormously funny, in an alarming kind of way. I do too. I find it irksome and outright unsightly, at least on my body. It is not the idea of breasts that appalls me, I quite like the appendages in women—they are erogenous to me. What irks me is that the drugs aimed at a specific intervention can be just as proficient in bringing about an undesired action in my body. I do not want breasts, thank you very much, I want a cure for this cancer of mine that threatens my life and curtails my days and nights, and crowds my thinking. The breast side effect, or threat of it at the moment, adds to the number of things that I have to worry about on top of the cancer that rages in me.
Will I need a bra if this breast thing happens to me, or will I let them hang loose and ignore the fact that I have added weight on my chest? I wonder. I wish I did not wonder. I want nothing more than to pole-vault over the cancer to a time when I am free of it and have time on my hands to write what I want instead of having to bring all my writing to bear on demands of the cancer. I need a pen that lacerates. A sword for a pen, or a scalpel, something, anything to wield, that I can turn on the cancer and uproot it, extirpate it from my heart and mind and body and spirit. Rather than this buzz of sentences meant to bombard the cancer with what it cannot withstand: scrutiny. Though it may be one of those illnesses with an ego that feeds on the attentions lavished on it even if those actions are meant to root it out.
I see myself in a 36C. I pulled that number and letter out of my dim knowledge of my wife and my daughter talking about such things as we ambled along corridors of shopping centers. I think that if I can cup my breast in my hand and if my hand feels full of flesh then it must be in the vicinity of a 36C. At the risk of revealing a fantasy, that I like to cup breasts and estimate their measurement, let me say that I have not entertained these thoughts in this way before, not ever. That I would voluntarily take a drug that might make me grow breasts or stop the production of testosterone or shrink my prostate and my testes along with it, all are anathema to me. I do not want anything to do with any of those drugs and I take them for the larger goal of beating back t
he cancer.
If I was told that the cancer was present and I carry it around with me like a sixth finger with no threat to my well-being, I would live with cancer and do nothing about it. I will go one step further. If you told me it would grow in me at a slow pace over a quarter century before it killed me, as prostate cancer often does, I would take that over these drugs and the looming surgery and after that, perhaps chemotherapy. I can live with a venomous version of Anansi, brought into being by my cancer to outfox a friendly version of the same creative. I would find ways to encourage the friendly trickster, the playful one. For its sense of fun is not deadly to me. It’s a creature that comes from a tradition of playing tricks in order to gain respect and a meal, a kind of court jester in the kingdom of my body. I would deploy this good Anansi against cancer’s wicked version of it.
Since they are locked in a drama, I would write a play for the two Anansis. Not a play for a proscenium arch or in the round but one of those roving dramas in which the audience runs around a huge construction with a dispersed set of players, all versions of Anansi and all locked in forms of combative trickery that relate to one story or other as told by my grandmother, by the cancer, and by me, not to mention the perspectives of my wife and each of my children. This would place my Anansi play on several stages that move around with scenes that intersect and with an audience who must have the ability to look in many directions while keeping up with the different dramas that are the same drama, though splintered and multiple and layered.
I need my lateral and quantum thinking to help me with this multidimensional drama of the various Anansi characters. But I have an addendum to my breast-growing-saga worry. I said, falsely, that I would entertain the idea of breasts and even speculated about a bra. A size that fits my cupped hand or a number that sounded good. The truth is, I would not be one of those characters who discard a bra to be liberated. I refer my students to that sixties form of protest in our search for early examples of women who resisted male designs of clothing for women aimed at controlling female bodies along lines dreamed up by men for men. Instead, I would strap my chest to conceal those breasts. I can think of at least one musician who did this, Billy Tipton, and several women who volunteered in various wars and fought as men. My bandaged chest suppresses an opportunity, I know, to be unconstrained by norms. Along with the idea of letting such chemical augmentations flourish in view of all eyes and not give a damn, I worry that my energy will be absorbed by yet another infraction into my bank of energy, every ounce of which I need for my fight, dance, or whatever with the disease.
Year of Plagues Page 10
