Year of Plagues

by Fred D’Aguiar

  The bait that I swallowed to catch that hook came out of nowhere and headed directly for my body without my trying to consume anything offered to me as temptation, or a trade-off, or quid pro quo. The hooks sunk into me, aimed at my skin. I had no option but to wriggle free of them, or flow with their pull as they reeled me in. I opted to break free. Hence the hooks, enough to fill a large basket, that decorate my body.

  I say this knowing that I belong to a group all of whom wear this evidence of someone or something trying to capture them or exacting a toll on their body by virtue of the suit of Black skin. There is a drag on the psyche of carrying so many hooks all aimed at Black skin. People see the barbs so often and so many of them there covering the person that they stop registering the presence of hooks on a human being. They replace the hooks with an attitude or they put on dark glasses to obliterate the sight and they see a Black body in history, as history, not human, more a string of happenings that led to this relationship of White people with fishing lines and Black people in the water.

  * * *

  Ghetto flyover of parrots—a banner made of color and sound for this morning overcast with the threat of rain that burns off before it amasses enough oomph to make it to land. I take the threat as a mood, somewhat bleak, for George Floyd, whose death lingers in the city that for all its mighty bluster cannot shake off the plight of the man. We won’t let that happen, of course, for we are that city that refuses to forget and will not rest until we correct this gross wrong. As if a life once taken can be made good. It cannot. This is work for the living, who argue that George would not want another soul to go through what he did and so he would be the first to keep things stirring and keeping hold of a thing that burns to hold for long and staring at a place that threatens to blind us.

  Writing this keeps me a stranger to myself. I do not have to look at what I do not wish to see that is in me. I gaze elsewhere and place the urgent far from me. This may be cowardice or a fair strategy, given the vagaries of my personality. Which is what? Not liking to be liked, not wanting the limelight and yet craving recognition. Not much in love with people, most of whom annoy me and most of whom appear to flip-flop on every conceivable front.

  I feel rage and hurt rise in me out of dissatisfaction with my lot. Not happy to dodge cancer (assuming the op is a success) the way I did—last-minute rush to action and only after surgery and drugs steered me through its maze—I balk at the prospect that it may return after all that trouble and I will be left with my sour mood of too late and too little and always more to be gained and so much more to do and what little I have done I think could have been so much better.

  No woulda, coulda, I tell myself. No point. That ship has sailed that proverbial sea. (Or some such inconsolable crap.) Hurt and rage make an odd cocktail. I resent it. I wish to dash it across the room. I need to drink it up and fast. Even this feels like a circle that I have to make for fear of crashing into something that I cannot handle, something dark and uncontrollable that will leave me stranded in despair. I think despair leads to madness, my last port of call, if there is a call to be made at that port.

  I say all that and end up wanting to sit out in the makeshift gazebo in my Mid-City backyard and pick up the morning’s industry of traffic and birds, with the dog and cat steering clear of each other in the yard. My ears zero in on each birdsong and I look for that bird. Small piece of life; small brown flick of momentum; eyelid flutter; pulse under skin. I gauge the light as if my eyes were scales capable of weighing the morning for its specific gravity. Specific gravity is a quality of the spirit, a charge emitted by light picked up by my eyes to add velocity to my day. Spin, as in the opposite of stasis. Spin, as in verve for this beat and breath, warmth and manifold hunger.

  * * *

  I am up against a deadline to submit a video recording of Kamau Brathwaite’s “Poem for Walter Rodney.” It is three a.m. I listened to classical and jazz for inspiration. The town sleeps, the house and all its people and pets. I do not want to be heard, so I set up shop in the movie room that is a space off from the kitchen. For white background I pull down the large screen and position a small armchair in front of it, and on a coffee table in front of the chair I prop my phone sideways.

  The request arrived in my email about two weeks ago from an inspired collective curating forty nights of forty poems written by Kamau for his ninetieth birthday, and read by people with a connection to the Caribbean. They asked me to send mine in time for the June 13 anniversary of Walter Rodney’s assassination by the then-government of Guyana, in 1980. I found Kamau’s poem online. My copy of his Middle Passages is boxed up and locked away in my office at the university, where the building is being renovated after the flood. The online poem appeared in Index on Censorship in August 1981. It is in three parts.

  I print it and arrange its four pages clipped to a folder. I keep a fifth introductory page to be sure I say the correct date—though I know it by heart. Rodney’s death shocked everyone in London. We could not believe that the government had placed a bomb in a walkie-talkie given to Rodney and detonated it and murdered the country’s most promising political acolyte. We expressed horror at a regime that was willing to hurt its future politics as represented by a young Walter Rodney, for the sake of present power. I wrote a poem that I could do nothing with but had to write out of my grief and outrage.

  Kamau’s “Poem for Walter Rodney” is a sprawling exploration of a Black history that covers three continents. The spirit of the poem matches the life that it eulogizes. Composed in three parts, it recalls the majesty of Auden’s “In Memory of W. B. Yeats” and the litany of Eliot’s “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” Kamau’s poem is visceral, “to be blown into pieces” and elliptical, “for the sake of his nam,” declamatory, “POOR CYAAN TEK NO MOORE,” and imagist austere, “in my arms.”

  There are politics and economics in the poem, in keeping with Rodney’s seminal study, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, from his doctoral thesis at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, and his political treatise The Groundings with My Brothers from his time in Jamaica before the government expelled him because of his radicalism. I say all this about the poem since it made me remember my view of Kamau at the time of Rodney’s death, that he upheld the political voice of the oppressed at the cost of the personal (something I valued in a poem back in 1980 during the formation of my poetics in London). I was mired in the poem as first and foremost an act of autobiography that sought communion with other forces social, political, and philosophical. Always primarily focused on a single speaker who may or may not be the poet, the poem proceeded on the grounds that we believe the speaker to be in the process of thinking something through with the reader/listener as privileged bystander.

  I loved Kamau’s energy and invention and the way he brought Africa to the Caribbean and to Europe and North America. His historical awareness made me conscious of the poem as political intervention. Kamau made me think about the many ways that ethics shape aesthetics. His performances electrified me. All of which made me think of myself about to record his oral and lexicographer’s rendering of his elegy as ideally unsuited to the undertaking. That is why I postponed making the recording until three a.m. of the morning that it had to be delivered.

  Of course I was wrong back then about Kamau. He was far more complex than my understanding of him in terms of my art. Throughout the eighties I embraced Kamau’s music and storytelling in his poetry, and shunned his overt orality, his voiceprint (Stewart Brown’s term) that called for much phrasal repetition and lexicon inventions to highlight the sonic and visual multiple registers of words.

  His “Poem for Walter Rodney” was the culmination of all these qualities (though the typographic experiments with vocal and emotional representations are reined in). If ever there was cause for righteous anger in art, this elegy for Rodney by Kamau was it. You feel the artistic rage and hear the raised voice of outrage. The poem verges on disbelief at the murder and stops just shy o
f despair. It predates by a couple of years his poem “Stone,” for the startlingly original dramatic poet Michael Smith, who was stoned to death at twenty-eight by a mob in Jamaica in August 1983. “Stone” amplifies all the representations of voice and thought on the page that we see in “Poem for Walter Rodney.” This stone is nothing like the optimism of his earlier Caribbean creation myth that can be sung, “the stone had skidded, arced and bloomed into islands, Cuba, San Domingo, Haiti, Puerto Rico.”

  There is a side to me that wishes I possessed Michael Smith’s skills to render a poem in all its glorious multiplicity as a dramatic device. To tell the story of a poem as a loudly declaimed thing takes practice. To keep the listener locked into the emotion of a poem, and the sense of its sound and its argument, takes talent.

  I sat down and pressed Record and faltered time and again at those broken-up words, broken to draw out their implied meanings as a simultaneous experience with what those words primarily denote. I felt lock-jawed. My neck muscles tensed. I looked and stared hard at the lines to stay with their drive and sense as sound and argument and lament and legacy. It took me two hours of trying (and this is after many days of rehearsal) before I found success in one take. My reading lasted over ten minutes.

  I received an email thanking me for sending the file and a second email saying that the file arrived okay in the file transfer system that I had to download. But then I received a third email that rankled me. The curators wrote this time asking me to shorten Kamau’s poem to a usable extract and record and send the shortened version as soon as possible. I ignored the email. I fumed. I thought, A man was blown to pieces. The best of two poets from the region (Walcott is the other one) wrote an elegy about it, and this poet is being commemorated on his ninetieth birthday (had he lived) by my reading of his poem for that assassinated activist (my countryman) in time to mark the fortieth anniversary of the assassination: two big events in one. How dare they ask me to make it shorter!

  Postscript. They posted my long reading of the unexpurgated version of the poem, made with my early-morning voice.

  For those two hours I was free of cancer. Cancer vacated my mind and body for those one hundred and twenty minutes. Cancer left me alone and happy.

  * * *

  George Floyd Laid to Rest

  I keep such a tight grip

  On my emotions that my knuckles

  Whiten and I lose all feeling

  In my hands, not even a tingling.

  If I let go I would not know

  The difference unless I stare

  At how I feel with nothing

  To hold me back or rein me in.

  What happens next has always

  Happened behind my back or else

  Has never taken place in my life:

  A salve of breath the likes of which

  I have not felt, a surge of blood.

  15.

  As Long As I Draw Breath

  That 2:45 a.m. sleep Mid-City, to the lullaby of a lone siren. To traffic lights regulating nothing but darkness bathed in business signs. As if these artificial colors called out to us in our sleep for us to wake and find them. Colored lights able to soak through eyelids and dictate dreams.

  Cancer tucked in with my flesh and blood on its third or fourth dream with me keeping vigil. Now I know what it means to be burdened. Cancer stored in me and I know it and all I can do is walk on tiptoe so as not to wake it. For cancer is best left asleep. As cancer walks in its sleep that progress is slow. Almost movement with arms out in front measured by feeling. Small steps to avoid hitting the knees on the edge of furniture as my bones and nerves must appear—furnishings in cancer’s home.

  I shush my mind and heart for fear of waking cancer; index finger over pressed lips, eyebrows raised. I think in a whisper, which is thoughts lined up and made to pass through a turnstile in single file. I breathe evenly to keep the drum of my heart steady and low key. Even my eyes must behave in this purlieu of calm. My eyes take their time to alight on an object, assess it, and move on, none of their usual daytime zipping from one thing to the next with no mind for what they pick up and all those things piled up for later inspection as dreams.

  If my noise—as rapid thought or sudden movement—stirs cancer and cancer opens its eyes, and sets out in all directions in me to explore which new site it might settle, that means I contribute to its spread in me. For now cancer behaves like the city and dozes almost at peace with itself and me. I almost fetch a blanket and cover cancer to keep it comfortably asleep, prolong its apparent lack of action in me.

  * * *

  As long as I draw breath I tell the story of my life and my death. Add my heart and my brain for that beat and thought. My automatic summons of air that I throw away when I exhale. That soul beats in my chest, neck, wrist, and groin. Those fleets upon fleets of my thinking dispersed. That my dreams gather, filter, and fling to the breeze. I share all three with cancer.

  See that dandelion. I stoop, pick it, stand straight, and hold it to my lips and exhale. There goes my thinking, shorn from that dandelion stem in my grip. Each thought adrift on a raft of light, airship. Each thought strung with feelings that float behind it, attached as strings with electricity in them of a cluster of stings of a jellyfish.

  I exhale onto a mirror, not to polish it, more to see the body of moisture of breath extracted from me. I pull deep on air, send air deep, as I see a pitcher that I must fill, hold for a second, then pour from me. And again, breathe, and again, until breathing slips the moorings of thought.

  Beat of my heart and its pulse in various parts of my body. Fingertips pick up each pressed just below the skin. If I aimed the tip of a blade at that pulse and nicked my skin I would catch that beat as it escaped from my wrist or neck. A misshaped bubble of sound in a transparent skin of liquid that picks up colors in daylight, just as spilled gasoline shines rainbows.

  Cancer insists on a portion of all expressions of life in me. It wields a knife that seeks its pound of my flesh. It casts a net and pulls what it captures from my lungs. There it is, once more adding lead weights to each of my thoughts to make them crash, overladen. I polish my breath from the mirror for a clear view of my cancer. That is why I nick the skin on top of my pulse. There is cancer looking at me and wearing my face. And again, this time my pulse drives it.

  * * *

  If memory serves me, the man who was famous for standing on a cart while the donkey harnessed to it galloped along was my cousin. Most other drivers would be seated and trying hard not to bounce off the cart. My cousin rode that cart barefoot and I thought of his toes as claws able to grip on to the wood cart and keep him on his feet. He stood with a slight forward lean and his knees slightly bent, and he clicked his tongue at the donkey, which gave its best effort, perhaps to throw my cousin off that cart.

  Maybe both were having fun. My cousin brushed that donkey every day and always made sure it was well fed and watered. He called the donkey “No Time to Lose.” But the way he said the name, fast and collapsed together, it sounded nothing like that, more like “Nautilus.”

  My cousin crashed while fetching water from the village standpipe with his cart, packed with water barrels, roped together, pulled by that donkey. The cart and its payload with the donkey harnessed to it rolled into a trench and pinned my cousin underneath. The roadside trench was dry. Water from the barrels ran along it. The donkey brayed and kicked and tried to stand.

  My cousin could not speak. He vomited. His eyes turned in his head. There were so many hands, digging away the dirt, cutting the rope around those barrels and the harness, to grab him by the armpits and pull my cousin free. The donkey trotted away and brayed, apparently unscathed. My cousin had several broken ribs, and bruises covered him. He could barely whisper. He spent a week in bed. You had to lean close with your ear to his mouth to catch his instructions about how to brush Nautilus and make sure the beast had food and water.

  * * *

  No more niceness at the cost of truth. No more
smoothing of the creases in the tablecloth to help with a pristine banquet out of gratitude that I am among the guests at the table. No more pause and fill in that awkward pause with humor to get past the reality of a hard thing to bypass and maintain decorum. No more belittling of that thing to stop stilted talk about it. No more explaining. No more couching in terms that are easy to digest. No more wishy-washy, namby-pamby niceties to preserve friendly falsities. No more let us do what business we can under difficult conditions. No more such accommodations for the sake of business as usual. No more the past is over and done with and nothing can be done about it to alter its nasty facts. No more in the present for its own sake. No more looking to a future free of a slave past. No more looking away from a thing that scalds the retina and begs me to look at it. No more, skin is not all there is about me, or skin is not the thing that you should be looking at as a condition for cohabitation. No more walking on history’s broken bottles barefoot to demonstrate that it can be done by me so trust me. No more walking on history’s hot coals on hands and knees. No more keeping calm to show control in the face of barbarism. No more that holding of hands all the time to get through a difficult time. No more setting that table for a feast. No more feasts. No more running on the spot to keep up with a present that moves without me as a part of it. No more running for the sake of keeping up with a thing that tries to leave me behind and lose me. No more. Enough is enough.

  For you keep lynching us despite all that we do to make you feel at ease. You keep us in a second-class space. You keep using us and throwing us away as if we were not people and not alive and cannot feel and have no memories. Stop. The well is dry. I fetched buckets of peace from it until it ran out of peace to fill my bucket. You took each bucket and drank from it and looked satisfied and had that look of expectation of more from me. Stupidly, I returned to the well, thinking as long as you drank and looked contented I could find peace also and make progress with you. No more.