Believe me, I pulled my hair and beat the ground with my hands and feet to get at him in my head and in the ground he walked on that I worshipped. Hadn’t he delivered England to me and all the seasons of England, all England’s shires and the fog he’d left out of his serenades, no doubt just to keep some surprise in store for me? The first morning I opened the door that autumn and shouted “Fire!” when I saw all that smoke, thinking the whole street on fire, all the streets, London burning, and slammed the door and ran into his arms and his laughter, and he took me out into it in my nightdress, he in his pajamas, and all the time I followed him, not ashamed to be seen outside in my thin, flimsy nylon (if anyone could see through that blanket) because he was in his pajamas, the blue, striped ones, and his voice, his sweet drone, told me it was fine, this smoke without fire was fine, “This is fog.”
* * *
The first time I see my father is the last time I see him. I can’t wait to get to the front of the queue to have him all to myself. When I get there my eyes travel up and down his body. From those few gray hairs that decorate his temples and his forehead and his nose to the cuffs at his knees, and at his ankles a pair of sparkling black shoes. He wears a black suit, a double-breasted number with three brass buttons on the cuff of each sleeve. He lies on his back. There is too much powder on his face. Let’s get out of this mournful place, Dad. We have a lot of catching up to do. He has the rare look—of holding his breath, of not breathing, in between inhaling and exhaling—that exquisitely beautiful corpses capture. For a moment after I invite him to leave with me, I expect his chest to inflate, his lids to open, and those hands to pull him upright into a sitting position as if he really were napping because he has dressed way too early for the ball.
There are myths about this sort of thing. Father enslaves son. Son hates father, bides his time, waits for the strong father to weaken. Son pounces one day, pounces hard and definite, and the father is overwhelmed, broken, destroyed, with hardly any resistance, except that of surprise followed by resignation. Son washes his hands but finds he is washing hands that are not bloodstained, not marked or blemished in any way. He is simply scrubbing hands that no longer belong to him—they are his father’s hands, attached to his arms, his shoulders, his body. He has removed a shadow all the more to see unencumbered the father in himself. There is the widow he has made of his mother. He cannot love her as his father might. While his father lived he thought he could. The moment his father expired he knew his mother would remain unloved.
I alight too soon from a number 53 bus on Blackheath Hill, disembark while the bus is moving, and stumble, trip from two legs onto all fours, hands like feet, transforming, sprouting more limbs, becoming a spider and breaking my fall. That same fall is now a tumble, a dozen somersaults that end with me standing upright and quite still on two legs with the other limbs dangling. Onlookers, who fully expected disaster, applaud. I walk back up the hill to the block of council flats as a man might, upright, on two legs. My other limbs dangle and swing high. Some days I will be out of breath, I will gasp and exhale, and the cloud before me will not be my winter’s breath but the silken strands of a web, or worse, fire. Other days I might look at a bed of geraniums planted on the council estate and turn all their numberless petals into stone. A diamond held between my thumb and index finger crumbles in this mood, in this light, like the powdery wings of a butterfly.
Some years later I stare out of an apartment on the twentieth floor of a tower block overlooking the nut-brown Thames. That wasp on the windowpane nibbling up and down the glass for a pore to exit through, back into the air and heat, tries to sting what it can feel but cannot see. My father is the window. I am the wasp. Sometimes a helping hand comes along and lifts the window, and the wasp slides out. Other times a shadow descends, there is a displacement of air, and it is the last thing the wasp knows. Which of those times is this cancer time of mine? I want to know. I don’t want to know. I am not nibbling or trying to sting. I am kissing repeatedly, rapidly, the featureless face of my father. It feels like summer light. It reflects a garden. Whose is that interfering hand? Why that interrupting shadow? My child’s hand. My child’s shadow. My son or my father? My son and my father. Two sons, two fathers. Yet three people. Three entities: my father, my cancer, and me. We walk, we three, behind a father’s name, shoulder a father’s gene pool and memory. Wear another’s walk, another’s gait. Wait for what has happened to him to happen to me. Our bodies with this scar of cancer genes. His maladies that surface in me.
I want to shed my skin. Walk away from my shadow. Leave my name in a place I cannot return to. To be nameless, bodiless. To swim to Stevens’s Key West, which is shoreless, horizonless. Blackheath Hill becomes Auden’s Bristol Street, an occasion for wonder and lament. Blackheath at 5:45 a.m. on a foggy winter morning becomes Peckham Rye. There are no trees on Blackheath, but angels hang in the air if only Blake were there to see them. On the twentieth floor towering above the Thames, water, not land, surrounds me. Everything seems to rise out of that water. Look up at ambling clouds and the tower betrays its drift out to sea.
* * *
Night, cancer. You had me in a vice for most of this year of plagues. I bear six scars on my stomach from our encounter. Those are the ones you can see. The ones that you can’t see, well, that’s a song, “Me and the Devil Blues,” that Robert Johnson sings better than anybody. Consider me one of the lucky ones. You turned up in me and we parted company, and, for now, I live.
About the Author
Fred D’Aguiar was born in London of Guyanese parents. He spent his childhood in Guyana and returned to the UK for his secondary and tertiary education. He has lived and taught in the US since the 1990s. He is a professor of English at UCLA, where he teaches literature and creative writing. He lives in Mid-City Los Angeles with his family and spends some time with his wife, Debbie, rescuing stray cats. Dexter, the family dog, doesn’t mind since two of his house pals, Clementine and Moonlight, are cats.
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Also by Fred D’Aguiar
Novels
Children of Paradise
Bethany Bettany
Bloodlines
Feeding the Ghosts
Dear Future
The Longest Memory
Poetry
Letters to America
Translations from Memory
The Rose of Toulouse
Continental Shelf
An English Sampler: Selected & New Poems
Bill of Rights
British Subjects
Airy Hall
Mama Dot
Plays (Stage and Radio)
High Life
A Jamaican Airman Foresees His Death
Days and Nights in Bedlam
Mr. Reasonable
Copyright
year of plagues. Copyright © 2021 by Fred D’Aguiar. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
“Black Lives Matter” was first published in a slightly different form in A Restricted View from Under the Hedge, no. 3 (Autumn 2018), edited by Mark Davidson (www.hedgehogpress.co.uk/arfur).
The memoir essay, first published as “A Son in Shadow” in Harper’s Magazine (March 1999), appears here in a revised form.
“I Wake with His Name on My Tongue” was first published, in a slightly different form, in the Summer 2021 issue of Poetry London.
first edition
Cover design by Milan Bozic
Cover painting © Frank Bowling. All Rights Reser
ved, DACS 2020.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for.
Digital Edition August 2021 ISBN: 978-0-06-309154-2
Print ISBN: 978-0-06-309153-5
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* Carole Boyce-Davies, Left of Karl Marx: The Political Life of Black Communist Claudia Jones (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008).
* Lewis Hyde, Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth, and Art (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998).
* Kumiko Kiuchi, “Oxymoronic Perceptions and the Experience of Genre: Samuel Beckett’s Ghost Trio, . . . but the Clouds . . . and Beyond,” Journal of Beckett Studies 18, no. 1–2 (September 2009): 72–87, https://doi.org/10.3366/E0309520709000284.
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