What We All Long For by Dionne Brand (most important books to read txt) 📗

declaimed at Tuyen’s installations, missed their mark among the people in the room, even though he sent them, as seductively as he could, right at her sharp cheekbones and her full wide lips. Didn’t he, in the middle of his most passionate verse, see Jackie lean over, offering her mouth to the German boyfriend? Oku could not bear to think his name or say it. The German boyfriend, or cruelly, “Nazi boy,” was how he referred to him. Maybe poetry was too obtuse, too angled for his purposes. Which, if he thought about it, were what? His purposes, that is, he asked himself, fumbling stupidly in his pockets as if he could find a cigarette there for her. He always caught himself doing something that he guessed she would find trifling. But if he was trifling, what did she see in that German idiot with the dyed black hair and the ankh in his ear and the bad imitation of Hendrix guitar playing?

“Fresh out, Jackie.”

“You do not smoke cigarettes, Oku.”

There it was again—he felt awkward, more so.

“Listen, Jacks … ah, sorry about the ‘Nazi boy’ stuff …” He felt insincere. He had meant the “Nazi boy stuff.”

“Really! No kidding. ‘Sorry about the Nazi boy stuff’?”

He felt her looking right through him, mocking him. They were stopped at the light. She looked at him directly for so long his face tingled. How rich her skin was. Her face evenly beautiful, not a blemish, not an incongruency. And no innocence whatever. A face that knew everything—everything bad—a face that could search out failure and scorn it. Or find it amusing. Amused is what Jackie’s face told him now. Oku didn’t know which he liked—to be found amusing or to be scorned. To be scorned probably. That at least was charged. To be found amusing made him blush, made him melt.

The traffic light must have changed several times—he had the feeling of other people crossing and traffic moving, then stopping. She held him in a kind of glimmer. He wanted her to look away and he wanted to be held. He didn’t want her to hold him like this, when all she had for him was amusement. But to be held at all by her, by her eyes, was thrilling—it was to be held as if by her body. She hadn’t laid a finger on him, yet he knew this is what it would be like to touch her again. To be held in some knowledge she had, some substance that was tangy.

“Really,” she said again, her voice insinuating yet distant. He knew that he was losing her attention, even her amused attention.

“Jackie, hook a brother up, huh?” He had intended to say something else, something certainly less inane, something serious, but now he’d said this and it seemed lewd.

“You know, Oku, men are so innocent.” She breathed the words rather than said them. “I hear your poems, they all begin as if you’re innocent. Like things happen to you that you can’t predict. You never know what’s going to happen to you. You love innocence, you’re fixated on it. I don’t trust innocence. I’m not innocent. I know what’s going to happen to me.” She spoke slowly, singeing him with each breath.

He noticed with a shock that she had not used the word “fuck” once. The College streetcar was at the light. She had always been aware of the traffic, the lights, the streetcar approaching, her particular plans, the everyday world going on around them. He hadn’t. Jackie was on it before he could recover.

Oku saw the streetcar moving, the doors closing, and her beautiful back disappearing. He felt like a daydreamer just awakened.

Quy

Other tragedies have overshadowed mine. Look at that Catholic priest in Managua, he got himself shot; a plane will crash in the North Sea; some stupid rage—I know all about that—will hack eight hundred thousand people to death in Rwanda. But nothing will suck all the oxygen out of the air in years to come as what they will call 9/11, then the Americans will rampage the globe like thousands of Vietnams, and I, I will be forgotten. You see what I’m talking about?

In my heart, sometimes, I feel a lightness, a nonexistence. I feel it now riding this train. I have these moments, very dangerous, I feel scattered. But I’m here, and I feel like telling you the rest. Not because you’ll get it, but because I feel like telling it.

My life at Pulau Bidong wasn’t always unpleasant. I discovered small things about myself, small pleasures. There was a boy I used to play with in the old rotten boat in the bush tangle, near the rock that resembled the Buddha. Along a slimy path to the boat he would push me and I would push him and we would run and swing on the rotting banisters. There was a sapling growing inside the boat and we would swing and bend it and let it go. And it made a loud slapping noise. We tied a rag to it and filled the rag with stones and we would slingshot the stones up in the air and out of the boat. We would balance on the side beams and chase each other. The boat was just like the one that had brought me to Pulau Bidong. One day, the boy fell off the boat screaming. He grabbed the plank as he went crashing down. I ran down and around to see what happened to him. He was crying, his ragged shirt was ripped open, and there was a little cut in his belly. I tried to pull him free, to help him to stand up, but he cried more. I told him to stand up, but he wouldn’t listen to me. I told him if he didn’t stand up and stop crying, I would go back to the camp by myself. He just kept crying. So I went back to the camp. I knew he would soon come back and tell