Year of Plagues

by Fred D’Aguiar

  In your system and take you down, but this time it all happens

  Before your wide eyes and there is nothing you can do to stop me.

  * * *

  I forget, so the adage goes, in order to remember at a deeper level. Forgetting is survival from trauma. Forget or perish under the pressure of the memory. Remember selectively and become strong and able to combat trauma. I forget that I had cancer. I do not have cancer. One addresses the past and my operation, the other my present and my consternation that it might be present in me. Can I really package the operation that removed the bulk of my cancer and place it in my memory vaults out of reach of my conscious mind? Or am I performing a trick of memory and a pretense at a coping mechanism?

  During the moments of forgotten cancer I regroup my energy to combat the possibility that I may still be poisoned by it. Why do I find it hard to have a song for my troops to sing in my encampment?

  I draw squares in the dirt with a stick for a game of hopscotch. Three stacked squares branch out to two drawn side by side, and continue with another one, stacked like the first three, two more side by side, and finally one stacked on top. The diagram of squares has a start and finish in the same place at the head of those first three squares. The rest of the diagram is a circuit. The player has to hop on one leg throughout and kick an object from one square to the next all the way to the top of the squares and back to finish at that starting place. All the while the player must maintain that hop and keep the object inside those squares without missing any of them. The player must nudge the object with the foot that hops: one nudge for each hop, no resting on the other foot, the leg of which must be kept bent at the knee to avoid touching the ground, all the way up and down those squares.

  During that game, the only thing in the world is the object that I have to kick and the borders of those squares that I must stay inside to progress from square to square. As a left-hander I hop on my left leg. I call it my leading leg, not my strongest leg but my most accurate leg. For this game it must play the role of strongest and most accurate. Hop to burning point and beyond burning to outright evisceration at a cellular level and remain accurate with those jabs of what turns out to be a dry mango seed.

  * * *

  “Saturday night at the movies . . .” The Drifters’ song pops into my head to remind me of what no longer happens in Tinseltown, of all places. Nobody in the neighborhood is getting dressed to be there, alas. We have drifted away from all things social for all things isolated. That song was nostalgic, even in my youth. As for most things that endure, it carries an emotional register for me. It is akin to what Walcott said, “Sometimes there’s more pain in a pop song than in all of Cambodia.”

  That sounds corrupt until you concede that most people conduct their emotional lives far from the politics of injustice and shut out the news of another massacre somewhere on the planet and tune in to images of a neglected dog and cry inconsolably. History is my tearjerker. That song appeals to me as a sound that strikes a certain tone. I do not think of movie theaters at all. The tone takes me back to my childhood in Guyana’s countryside, where the only movie that we saw was shown to the entire village in the open with a white sheet for a screen and two large spools of film that had to be changed halfway through the screening.

  I don’t remember the movies. They did not serve popcorn. It was a huge treat to meet up at night to see a moving image, larger than life. Could it have been The Sound of Music? There were no hills near us. The night air was alive with the sound of insects and peeper frogs, and mosquito coils burned all around us to keep critters at bay. The youngest among us fell asleep and had to be carried home from the village square after the show. Was there even a village square or was it just some field beside the church house? Most likely, the latter.

  I was six or seven or eight or nine. I walked unaided in the dark with the others. I carried my sleeping cancer.

  14.

  I Wake with His Name on My Tongue

  George Floyd, I add your name to a long and growing list of those killed by the police, though no less of a shock to see nearly nine minutes of an officer with his knee on your neck and you in handcuffs with two of the other three pinning your body and legs and the third standing guard. How long those minutes string out on my nerves and stretch to breakpoint my ability to bear that time and not succumb to damage of my ability to see with clarity. Who am I kidding? Cancer and COVID-19 together amount to less than what you had to bear in those nearly nine minutes of your murder.

  George Floyd tied to a history of slavery. History that is as warm as Floyd’s body. A history before the noose of that officer’s knee consigned George Floyd to history. His body, robbed of natural breath, refills with the breath of history. A history that insists it must be for his flesh now, his flesh that looks like flesh back then.

  It is this suit of history in the shape of George Floyd’s skin that I wish to unzip and have him step out of it and walk away. Without this suit of history the police see a big man in good shape whom they must bargain with to find out what part if any he plays in their reason for being there. Without this suit, this black skin, with the naked appearance of whiteness, the police see a perfect specimen of themselves. They talk to him and shake his hand and wish him a good day. He walks away and lives to see his children and grandchild.

  With this suit on George Floyd that cannot be unzipped, the body’s biggest organ, the other option if George’s black skin is nonnegotiable is to pluck out the eyes of the police, or have them wear lenses that see black skin without the negative connotations of history, skin as somehow neutral, as somehow freed from a history of enslavement.

  If the police are blind when they meet George Floyd, they encounter another person, a stranger; if they can see, they meet George Floyd but do not see the individual, and register only the history attached to his skin that robs him of his humanity. By seeing, in effect, they are blind to him.

  * * *

  The city of Los Angeles is under curfew. For the first time in my nearly thirty years in the States I am living in a city under martial law. Debbie and I stop at the red lights to cross Venice Boulevard into the strip mall with our local supermarket. There along the cordoned-off three-lane street for each direction of traffic on Venice we see yellow police tape and two recycling trucks parked across the lanes to block all entry. We gawk at the desert fatigues of the National Guard and their sand-camouflaged armored vehicles. I utter an expletive out of shock and horror.

  There’s urgency in the crowd inside the supermarket. It feels as if something terrible is about to happen along Venice Boulevard that might include this supermarket. Everyone fills their trolleys quickly and heads for the checkouts. In the line a woman says her husband is armed and waiting in their car, guarding it. We shake our heads and look at each other a little disbelieving of what we just witnessed on Venice and what we hear now in the checkout line.

  We cross Venice slowly and look long and hard at the soldiers and their armored vehicles. Venice Boulevard corrupted, tainted, infected. The air full of those spores able to permeate our masks.

  COVID-19 takes second place to this emergency curfew response that brings the National Guard into our streets.

  * * *

  As the city burns so my heart bleeds for the minutes George Floyd lay handcuffed on the ground restrained by four officers with one of them pressing his knee to his neck.

  As city streets fill with protests for George Floyd, who pleaded to his last breath to be allowed to breathe, I draw on this bitter air for him and all who died at the hands of genocidal anti-Black violence.

  We walk our dog in a neighborhood that hurts all over. We talk uncompromisingly: this is the time to prosecute all police who have records of the use of excessive force; and fire prosecutors and coroners who have upheld brutal murders by police by not prosecuting them for first-degree murder and for declaring dead Black men who died at the hands of police as dead from a preexisting condition.

  As th
e world reels from COVID-19 and this latest police murder, I want to see the police force reformed to protect and serve the community, not terrorize and brutalize black and brown and poor members of that community.

  Today’s society-cancer is the police—a force sanctioned by the state to control its citizens by violent means. My cancer is the police—a rampant disease in me that does violence to me. George Floyd’s murder must result in a reinvention of the police force—defund them and put those funds into social and economic programs, such as mental and physical health care, education at all age levels, anti-incarceration initiatives, and youth employment training.

  George Floyd’s murderers must be brought to trial—no peace, no justice, even if it means unpredictable violence. Thank goodness for the energy and outrage of the young, who take to the streets no matter the personal cost. They march and chant, “No justice, no peace, prosecute the police.” They hold silent vigils for eight minutes and forty-six seconds, the length of time the officers pinned George Floyd to the ground with a knee pressed to his neck.

  This has turned into a manifesto for radical change of our police force. The body count goes back to slavery in America. That a uniform protects a murderer is cause for shouting in the street. That George Floyd and so many others died because the police protect officers who practice racism to the point where they commit murder methodically or spontaneously, knowing they can get away with it, deserves community and wider public outrage.

  As my city burns, my heart breaks for George Floyd. I mean my nerves feel this unbearable strain of another death of a Black person at the hands of the police. It feels too much on top of society’s COVID-19 restrictions and my battle with cancer. It takes me back to ’92 and Rodney King’s beating and the acquittal of the police involved, longer still to ’55 to Emmett Till’s murder by Whites for his alleged whistle at a White woman, who retracted her story much later, saying that the whistling incident never happened.

  * * *

  Hurt strafes the air of Mid-City. Someone or something bruised this morning light. The light runs a gantlet, beaten with sticks. Or else squeezes like wet clothes through a clothespress. Trees, grass, wire fences, brick walls, buildings cower from that particular shine, which dents your eyes, makes them bloodshot. You walk the streets as though every paving stone were broken bottles with you barefoot. You wait to cross at the lights no longer sure cars will obey the red light and white-lit pedestrian walk sign. You do not trust the quiet kept by houses. Their curtained windows harbor surveillance and threat.

  The city mourns for George Floyd and a long list of other names. We look somber, we move slowly. We breathe for George Floyd and many others who met a similar fate. We say some of their names, Breonna Taylor, Eric Garner, Ahmaud Arbery, Tamir Rice, Sandra Bland, Antwon Rose, Trayvon Martin. We recite as we inhale deeply, “This is for you, George Floyd.” He stands for all those murders. We lend him our strength so that he frees himself of his three police assailants with their knees on his legs, his torso, and his neck, the fourth standing guard to cover them. They fall away from him, blinded by the collective power of his light, he shines above the road, unhurt, full of his restored Black being, and departs that scene.

  Reggae

  DJ Cancer

  Cancer comes to spoil your party

  Cancer here to keep you company

  Cancer play the part of DJ

  Cancer plan to run things his way

  Cancer going to put disease in you

  Cancer going to turn your party blue

  Cancer is the elephant in your headroom

  Cancer is the merchant of your early doom

  Everybody wants to avoid cancer

  Everybody carries pieces of cancer

  Watch how cancer walks human

  Watch how cancer talks human

  Don’t stick your head in cancer’s lion mouth

  In the middle of your faith, entertain doubt

  Back in Airy Hall, way back when, a posse of about six of us decided on a whim to steal out of the house before dawn and head for the village bakery for some free baked goods—the broken buns and cookies that no one wanted to buy that the bakers sometimes gave away to children on a first-come, first-serve basis.

  The night was pitch. A thick darkness that the moon, half-full or half-empty, slipped from behind cloud to bathe the place in an eerie luminescence. We tiptoed through it in pairs, sticking close to each other. We whispered as if the dark were made up of thousands of ears, a few of them belonging to grown-up relatives who would catch us out so early and punish us for it.

  We saw the bakery lights like beacons. As we drew near, the smell of the bakery, all sugar and flour sizzling the air, hooked us, watered our mouths, and reeled us over the tall fence and chained gate and into the yard. We trotted to the open top half of the half doors. We stuck our heads inside, those of us at the front, to catch the attention of an adult. Those of us at the back held on to someone nearby and craned our necks to see past the heads and shoulders of those at the front.

  At last an adult appeared with bits of biscuits and pieces of the sweet buns caramelized on top with brown sugar. He wore his white baker’s hat lopsided as if at a nightclub. He dished out something to every empty hand. He warned us to hurry out of the place because the watchdogs were still out somewhere on the grounds.

  We did not have to be told twice. The dogs had a reputation for biting and they were kept in cages during the day away from contact with people. They rarely barked, which we considered the worst of all character traits, because it meant that the dogs preferred not to warn but rather to bite. Someone heard a growl rapidly drawing near and took off in a sprint for the front gate. We must have been about twenty yards from it. The panic spread among us in an instant and without looking back for confirmation and without hearing anything the smallest two (I was one of the two) of the group followed the bigger ones, already a couple of strides ahead and opening more ground with each step, leaving me and my cousin neck and neck doing our best to keep up.

  I could hear the growl closing in and getting louder. It sounded like more than one growl, perhaps two, even three. My bigger cousins jumped up at the fence and cartwheeled over it and disappeared. I reached the fence at just about the same instant as the cousin my size. We launched ourselves at it, gripped, and as we clambered up I heard something tear and felt something that made me scream, and my scream spooked my little cousin beside me and made him scream too. I forgot about my bakery treats. I may have stuffed my bread and biscuit samples into my mouth or dropped them to free my hands for the climb. My short khaki pants were so old the pockets were ripped out. They were a hand-me-down. They did not even have buttons at the crotch opening (zips were a luxury). I pulled and climbed away from the yard and the dog whose teeth gripped my short-pants, ripped them, and sank into my bottom. I screamed so loud as I tumbled over the fence and fell to the ground on the other side that my cousins rushed to me. They helped me to my feet and brushed my clothes and straightened them. The lights from the bakery flooded the yard as the workers came out to see what the commotion was about. The dogs barked and jumped at the other side of the gate, rattling it, until they were called away with repeated whistles and names I couldn’t decipher. My cousins all gave me a piece of their bread or bun or biscuit and I quieted. They looked at my rear in the dark and said it was only a scrape. We tiptoed over the rice-paper-thin moonlight and back into the still-sleeping house. An older cousin found a rag, wet it, and wiped away blood, and dabbed the offended area with cotton wool dipped in iodine and stuck on a plaster. The whole operation stung. I nibbled the extra treats that lasted long after everyone else’s were gone.

  * * *

  Cancer plays hide-and-seek with me—hide in plain sight as COVID-19, hide behind the ramifications of the murder by police of George Floyd. The many always outweigh the few and so I bow in obedience to everything communal, and accept my lot, my fight with cancer, as a private matter. Cancer dares me to claim my disease as
more important than the mass waves of COVID-19 and the uprisings over George Floyd.

  I’m silenced by my situation. George Floyd died because of anti-Black racism. I am threatened with death by cancer. The assault on him, though unlike my slow burn with cancer, scalds my body. I hurt as a result of his murder. I wear a mask, and my cancer takes second place to my protection from COVID-19. If cancer wins as a result, then it deserves that victory, since there is nothing for me to do but honor the dead while I have the luck of my life.

  Cancer cuts me loose in its maze. I wander around in search of an exit. Cancer keeps me busy as I bump into its closed spaces and must double back on myself and try a new avenue with the same dead-end result. Cancer laughs at my efforts to evade it. I keep trying, as I feel I must do if I do not wish to surrender. Flux on my part is everything.

  I wake with his name on my tongue. I breathe on his behalf. I see him pinned to the road by three officers, the fourth standing guard, and I wish them gone and wish him to his feet. George Floyd splinters from his body into ours. We chant his name not simply out of a quest on his behalf, or in search of him, though both mean something—we say his name to count his presence in us.

  George Floyd rounds street corners in long lines of marchers; his name echoes around the canyons of towers in financial and residential districts; he fills city squares worldwide; he blocks countless intersections, stops traffic on motorways, and bolsters our spirit with this multitude made of each of us alive in his name. We switch back and forth from grief to joy, grief and joy, from mourning his loss and that of so many, to affirming our intent (the crowd drawn from all quarters of society) to stop further losses.

  * * *

  The tax of cancer attaches to my skin. I see fishhooks all over my body donated by history and society. A history of transatlantic slavery; a society built on racism. I do not bother to remove those hooks, more trouble to try, best to leave them in place rather than cause a flare-up at the sight of each one that I remove. I have cut so many lines attached to those hooks. Worked against their tug until each broke and set me free with its gift of a barb in my skin.