Theory

by Dionne Brand

  I look forward to you, Odalys. We will sit in a vineyard drinking wine. I said this to myself when I was sitting in a vineyard with an older couple. This couple seemed happy and at the same time separate. I look forward to you, Odalys. We will sit in a vineyard drinking wine. Before I met Odalys, these were the thoughts I had about the someone I would meet who turned out to be Odalys.

  I never wanted to get married. I never saw the need nor did I have the desire, if those are different concepts. I said to Odalys, Why do we have to get married? In your eyes, what does it legitimize? My feelings for you? Odalys took these questions as wounds and I, seeing the wounds, did not like inflicting them. I couldn’t carry on a decent argument with Odalys. She always ended up spiritually wounded, she said. I tried another way. I explained to Odalys what it was to live in ideology; I summarized Althusser. Affirming Althusser, Odalys refused to admit to “believing” in ideology. I said it’s not a belief; it’s how you exist. Added to this, Odalys wanted the most distressing manifestation of a wedding. She wanted a particular dress, she wanted rings; she wanted a priest of some kind. She wanted flowers and music and food. She wanted a public declaration; she wanted the most conventional performance of a wedding. I knew that Odalys resented my not having descended to one knee to present her with a ring. I asked Odalys, Can’t we imagine a different method by which to express whatever this is that we are doing? Admittedly I had no alternate scenario laid out—and this is the difficulty with progressive politics, the scenarios of the conventional are so deeply ingrained, so routine and systematic, so normal that it’s impossible to imagine counter-scenarios, or rather the counter-scenario leans so heavily on the scenario as to be disturbingly undifferentiated. Isn’t it possible, I asked, that we simply live together as autonomous individuals who share at times drink and food and sex without becoming a corporation? Without privileging our weaknesses, and frailty, as the economy of our living? At the same time, it’s important to note that that philosopher, Althusser, killed his wife.

  As with all the things I’m attracted to, Odalys frightened me. I think that it’s love I feel, but it’s fear.

  I’m anxious about my dissertation, as usual. It feels as if it’ll never be complete. I plunge into one idea and it sets off other ideas and I abandon the first idea. And all this happens before I can write the past idea down. But primarily I’m working with Gramsci’s definition of “common sense,” which he variously defined as “the public and manifest form of the national culture…a given social structure’s ‘popular science’;…the traditional popular conception of the world—which is unimaginatively called ‘instinct’ although it too is in fact a primitive and elementary historical acquisition.” I’m interested in a complete overhaul of the way we live. Sometimes I sit at a café and watch a street go by and I’m struck by the smallness of the social world. Others have drawn this conclusion before, but still we’re like a colony of ants chewing away at a patch of earth unaware of the whole universe around us. Sitting there I feel strangely apart. The data from the exosphere, the Milky Way, the signals from another hemisphere flood in, giving me an awareness that does not illuminate me so much as make me resentful of the people passing by clutching their bags of groceries, fighting their petty wars, occupying the slender earth without seeing. It strikes me, therefore, how inconsequential the quotidian is. I might say under different influences that the quotidian is in fact the important thing, the beautiful thing. But that’s for another day. On the days when I observe the dreadful gluttony and smallness of this present reality, I can’t ignore the cravenness, I just can’t. On those days I observe the persistent futility of these daily activities. When I say I feel apart, it’s not that I feel superior, as if I know something others don’t. It’s that I truly feel apart, as if I am an animal looking at another species. Again, what do I know of other animals to speak this way? I mean I feel the singularity of consciousness and not of the body. The body is an inefficient encumbrance, or liability—or a thing whose liability is obvious. It is fussy and fragile and unaware of itself as useless and futile. When I said all this to Odalys, she accused me of pessimism or snobbishness. She referred me to some higher power she is pursuing at the moment.

  I was not the best person in the world. Forgive me for that admission. It seems honest enough to say it, but that honesty is, in the end, weaning sympathy. This is how a sentence begins sometimes: I was not the best person in the world. And then the speaker goes on to malign the person who was unable to forgive them their failings. At any rate, thinking back I recognize that in regard to Odalys I wasn’t the best person in the world and I expected her to forgive this flaw in me wholesale. Odalys was her real name. She had been through several names, she told me, as she found her way around this city. She was Marta, for a cleaning job in the financial district; Angela, for a front desk at a lawyer’s office; and Ségolène, for an interior design company. When I met her she was Ségolène, but she told me her true name was Odalys and she had begun life in a small town outside of Cartagena. This is what first endeared me to Odalys—this changeability and self-creation. I immediately thought of García Márquez’ Aracataca. I sometimes think that for an academic I’m far too seducible by fictions and that is how I get involved with the wrong person. In the town where Odalys was born (and I forget the name of it now), there was one bus in and out every second Thursday of the month. Odalys said she loved that bus as a child and couldn’t wait to get on it when she grew up—never to return to, yes, San Basilio. When she said this to me, Odalys had such a look on her face that my usual curiosity dried on my tongue. It was a subject I decided that I would let Odalys return to in her own time. Whenever she did, I was silent. This way I learned that in San Basilio, each afternoon at 2 p.m. Odalys heard the nasal chime of the lottery seller saying, This is your lucky hour! This is your lucky hour! “Es tu hora de suerte, es tu hora de suerte!” These two events—the bus every other Thursday, and the call of the lottery seller at 2 p.m.—Odalys said, wrenched her out of her childhood. This was Odalys’ power over me. The power to silence me. What could I say in the face of her childhood? Mine had been uneventful by comparison. She said the call of the lottery seller was desultory and hopeless in the hot afternoons of those years. He himself seemed without luck. His clothing was dishevelled, his shoes laceless. After he sold what little he could in San Basilio, he disappeared in the late afternoon, dust seeming to envelop him at the perimeter of Odalys’ depth of vision. If he were offering something that he himself had enjoyed, Odalys said, she might have forgiven him. If he’d come wearing fine suits and rings, he could’ve been excused. Even if his disposition were hopeful inside his dishevellment, he would have made a better case. That he came morose and ill clad, and made no effort at joy, dismissed his entire proposal, causing Odalys’ rancour toward him. There was no need to sell poor people more disappointment and grief. Even as a child, without the words to say so, Odalys cursed him and consigned him to hell. Yet the people of San Basilio would buy his tickets and live in impossibility until the weekly draw brought them back again to their present lives.

  When I met her, Odalys lived above the auto-body shop on Affinity Street in the south end—just before the highway out of the city, beyond which was the lake. Above the shop one heard from below the constant clanging and pounding and swear words in various languages—a mix of invective, aimed at car doors and engines, in Russian and Polish and Italian and Brazilian Portuguese. The smell of engine oil, the smell of burnt metal and soldering material, mixed with Odalys’ cooking in what I was sure was a toxic ether. I said to Odalys that this was atrocious, that she should move before some heavy metals sedimented in her blood stream. Odalys always had a worse story for me in response to any problem I pointed out. She spoke of how people disappeared or of how insects disappeared from the world, of how frogs disappeared, and on and on. In response to my worries, she got Marat, the owner of the auto-body shop, to build a large plant box atop the building; this way, she told him, the greenery wou
ld compensate for the toxicity of the paint and solvents and the soldering. Odalys planted herbs and grapevines in this box, making a green canopy over the wrecks and carcasses of dismembered cars and trucks. When I stood at the bus stop across from Odalys’ place on Affinity Street I recalled Adorno’s statement, “There is no aesthetic refraction without something being refracted, no imagination without something imagined.” I decided that I lacked the “imagined” that would imagine what Odalys imagined in that derelict place. And in my dissertation I was investigating that very imagination, the ability to see beyond the flatness of the existence that I attend to—my own. I couldn’t imagine what Odalys imagined along Adorno’s calculus. I only had Odalys’ imagined world, her world as she imagined it and described it to me.

  There had been nothing in San Basilio, Odalys said—nothing for her, at any rate. Odalys said she saw this as soon as she was born. Odalys claimed to have her first memory as a baby, in the arms of her mother. She said she remembered a stranger pinching her cheek, leaning into her face, and she remembers how upset she was at this. I asked her if she meant her mother. She said of course not, it was someone else, a man or a woman—she couldn’t tell at the time, but someone strange. She thinks that she was only days old and it was when she first opened her eyes. This memory has followed Odalys. She always thinks that there is a strange, curious and intrusive being staring into her.

  Now that I think of it, Odalys loved the auto-repair place because of the noise, the cursing, the clanging. A recipe, she said, a balm for the dead silence of most of her young days. She would pause at this, and drift far away from me. Her childhood seemed to me like a pause, a space in a room. Any room we lived in, my own or hers, the pause occupied like an object. Sometimes, when she did not know that I was looking, she stood in front of this pause with the look of a scolded child: her face turned down and away. That is the look I see in all our photographs. There is a pause where I should be. Odalys isn’t looking at me, she is turned down and turned away from me. She is addressing whatever else is in the scene, whatever else…so I’m not there at all. I wonder at my lying in wait like that—that is the way I saw myself in relation to Odalys, lying in wait—coming between Odalys and silence.

  These are all ramblings in the unexplainable. I have no idea what I’m saying and I never had any idea what I was saying when I was with Odalys. My academic life was irrelevant to her; it was like another kind of medicine that Odalys disagreed with. Why am I always finding women who haven’t any interest in what I do? Although I must say, in Odalys’ case my work wasn’t so much uninteresting to her as it was unintelligible except as a source of occult power. Despite Odalys’ hatred, her downright hatred, of her girlhood, she dealt in the arts of herbs and ridiculous potions and spells she had learned then. This is a big postmodern city and so you might not believe me—but the ancient arts of Africa, China and India and this continent are practiced beside the glass mountains of modern commerce. I learned this from Odalys. I’m not interested in the occult, and had I known how deeply immersed in it Odalys was, I would never have become involved with her. But there I was again, thinking that if offered a scientific analysis of the world, that is, a materialist analysis, anyone would jump at that rather than resort to magic. I’m delusional, as anyone can gather by now. I’m always trying to save women. But I remain confident that my intentions in the case of everyone I’ve mentioned so far were pure. Pure. As I said, given the materialist analysis that I was willing—compelled—to impart, you would think that anyone I was involved with would begin to gather a true sense of the world, not to resort to prayers, incantations and silences.

  In the beginning it seemed that I was making headway with Odalys. She nodded her agreement when I analyzed the inequality sedimented in the relations of Third World to First World countries. She nodded, I assumed in agreement, when I said the Amazon was being eaten away by corporate predators. It didn’t occur to me that my description of the Amazon probably sounded fatuous to Odalys’ ears. Even when I launched into some more detailed arguments about the depletion of water because of soybean production, Odalys seemed to understand and agree. But then she suggested we recite a certain incantation each morning. Why in hell did she think that merely saying an incantation each morning would somehow dissuade these predators? How would they hear it? How would they know? I asked Odalys. How would they know that you are putting your magic arts toward the restoration of the Amazon and toward their demise? Come to think of it, they have their own incantations which are more powerful than yours. This kind of encounter, which increased as our time together lengthened, didn’t strengthen our love. Odalys would withdraw, saying that if I knew so much why didn’t I solve the crisis.

  Can I say that I loved Odalys? I was more fascinated with than in love with Odalys, I suppose. I loved Odalys because she reminded me of a certain affect I experience at certain times or, shall I say, over the time of my life. That’s not well put. You are born into time and place, more place than time, and the sounds, the colours, the gestures and movements of people around you come to form your aesthetic. I was in thrall to this aesthetic before I came to know Odalys. And so Odalys walked into my aesthetic practices. When I say practices, I mean the way I see, the way I apprehend pleasure, the sounds that are most pleasing to me, the touches, et cetera. Of course et cetera does me no good here, things must be listed, delineated. I loved Odalys’ skin, pure and simple. I hate similes; they are usually so inadequate, I won’t try to make one. Odalys’ skin was…Let me say from the outset I loved Odalys’ body the way one loves a theory. Not, say, the theory of relativity—that would be too simple and unitary, I suggest. And besides, I know nothing of science. A theory such as the theory of language is more the theory that comes to mind. How it is acquired and why certain sounds occur in certain regions; the uses of the tongue, et cetera. A theory such as one suggested by Chomsky’s works might best describe my fascination. To be more precise, it wasn’t Odalys’ body but the sense of Odalys’ body, like a universal weight in the world. Perhaps, perhaps it was the weight of her presence, the “mental grammar.” Sometimes I think I created Odalys out of what I needed, and what I needed was a balancing weight to my theories—some presence that would deny or counter those theories through embodiment.

  To clarify, I loved Odalys’ aura—the very thing I proceeded to try to get rid of in her. Or perhaps I wanted to understand it, to get it under my finger like an insect—to examine it. And when I examined it, there was nothing there. This is the disagreement between me, as an academic, and the world. And by the world, I mean my lovers. My lovers never change. It is as if I’ve loved the same person all those years. My lovers have come in different manifestations but they are essentially the same person. I don’t know why I’ve redirected my account of Odalys in this way. Perhaps it’s because Odalys filled me with a certain fear—so much so that I fear that giving an account of her life will violate her privacy. Yet I’m not certain of the truthfulness of what Odalys said to me about her life. And truly, when I think about it, no one owes me a proper and truthful account of their life. And I don’t owe anyone veracity when it comes to mine. Odalys’ life became more and more obscured, more and more hermetic to me.

  I still have to figure out why I became involved with Odalys. Odalys was unconnected to any other part of my life. She was my experiment in the utterly strange. I tried to immerse myself in her life and the life of her friends whom I met, but here again I found myself at my peculiar angle. They belonged to a small community of Colombians living in the city. I barely understood Spanish and so their conversations were incomprehensible to me. But Odalys explained they were all from San Basilio too. They all, like Odalys, had a certain morose joy. I would feel my way through their conversations, thinking that they were speaking of some bad event that had occurred, and then they would burst out laughing. My angle toward them was patronizing, I have to admit. I therefore did not remember their names or their faces. In my defence, when most of your time is spen
t with pages, with the pages of a thesis, personal engagement can only be superficial.

  I had never married anyone before Odalys. I became swept up in her machinations. I still don’t know how. One day she asked me to marry her and the next day I was in a drum ceremony saying vows after a quickly arranged matter at city hall before a justice of the peace. Perhaps that’s an exaggeration, perhaps it took two weeks or so, perhaps one month. There were rings to be bought and clothing to be decided on, so it must have been a month. At any rate, the party was spectacular. Odalys invented the rituals. I took part. I must’ve been at my most hopeless when this happened, since I can’t say that I made a single decision. I had a view of myself throughout the ceremony as someone looking in on a bizarre life. I was the only person I knew at the wedding except Odalys. Was I embarrassed? Why did I not invite my brother? my father? my mother? Some part of me felt self-betrayal at giving in to convention. But then, I had drifted so far away from convention that I could afford to participate in it as a curious and distant exercise—like a researcher in a lost culture. I would not have wanted my family to misinterpret this experiment as real life, therefore playing into their idea of normalcy. In any case, it did not matter; I was not in touch with my family anymore. At certain points during the wedding party, Odalys’ friends, laughing and dancing, sang the lottery man’s nasal song, “Es tu hora de suerte! Es tu hora de suerte!” Odalys joined in and they danced around in a mad embracing circle and fell down like children.