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

Instead of the university, he would go to Kensington Market. It was his every day except Wednesdays, when his mother went there. He’d always checked with her each week in case she varied her movements—he’d make a pretence of asking her to get something for him, like guineppes or gizadas. There he would sit at a coffee shop, watching people go by and reading Amiri Baraka or Jayne Cortez. He’d found them while trying to put some life into a class in American poetry at the university, though he hadn’t been able to last out the class even with Baraka and Cortez. So what if he knew the classics, if he understood figures of thought? He himself was a figure of thought in those classrooms—an image and not a being, not a solid presence. So what the fuck, he thought, what the fuck was he doing there? Better to read Baraka and Cortez and Neruda and Lorca and Yevtushenko and Brecht on his own. The classes were a waste of time—holding him back as a poet. So fuck that.

He read and watched the street, and depending on his mood that day he might spend the afternoons with Tuyen and Carla, then in the evenings he would sometimes go up to see his boys in the jungle, though less and less these days—get a smoke, tool around, and then go home when the lights were off and his mother and father sleeping.

It was in the market that he’d met the old Rasta and the musician. Not together, but he’d come to think of them as together. As parts of the same person or the same state.

The Rasta was in his sixties. He worked the blocks of the city, panhandling. Some days he was at the corner of Bathurst and Bloor, some days he was at Spadina and Queen, and some days in the market. On the days that he disappeared, Oku learned later, he was playing the horses at Woodbine. His hair was roughly dreaded. He had a hoary beard, which he tied with green and red rubber bands, his pants were sometimes held up with a piece of twine, and he wore boots, winter or summer. He knew the Scriptures by heart. Oku had met him outside the parking lot, close to the Caribbean food store.

“Beg you a money, dread,” he said to Oku, surprising him. His face close, the smell of outdoor life reeking on him. Oku stepped back, his senses shocked.

“Hey, college bwoy, dread, beg you a money. The street them hard, you know, dread. The air is abstraction me tell you. Give a likkle something for the I and I.” He was aggressive and biblical. “Beg you a likkle something to hold I soul together, man. The spirit massive but the body weak.” He followed Oku down the street.

The poetry of holding the soul together stopped Oku. He turned, fished in his pockets, held out a dollar, waiting for the Rasta to open his hand. He didn’t want to touch him, still scornful of the man’s appearance, but the Rasta grabbed his hand warmly and roughly.

“Blessings on you, brethren. Is the fate of the world you one decide right there so now. Seen? Jah guide, dread. Is I heartbeat unno save. Selassie I.”

Oku escaped across the street to the coffee shop, the Rasta continuing to call after him, “Walk good, dready.” He sat at the coffee shop, a little undone. His hands quivered from a mixture of scorn, fear, and elation. He had sensed what he felt was all of the man in that grasp. The man’s scent repulsed him, but the man had drawn him into a kind of embrace. There was something genuine and plain about it, something vigorous. The man had definition. He was living on the street, but he had definition.

“True brethren, what a merciful morning!”

The next time the Rasta came up on him as he was daydreaming his way past.

“How the I and I today, Rasta? His anger endureth only a minute, for his favour is life, dread. Anything today, Rasta? It rough out here, you nuh know?”

Oku fished in his pocket but could only come up with fifty cents. He gave it apologetically to the Rasta.

“Ah know, nothing, Rasta. Weeping may endure for a night but joy cometh in the morning. You nuh see it?”

The Rasta grabbed hold of him as if to hug him, and Oku shrank with the same feeling of revulsion and allure.

“Is nothing, man. Is only fifty cents,” he said, brushing aside and trying to recover himself. The Rasta had rejected something, some way of living, some propriety, and with all his derelictness, Oku envied him.

“Me ah learn, Rasta, me ah grow and me ah learn.” Often the Rasta stood at his post in the market, his arms over his head in a gesture requesting mercy.

One day he said to Oku, “Me ah give up the business, Rasta. Me ah give it up. What you think? It too rough, the begging.” Oku couldn’t help but burst out laughing. “Me nuh joke, Rasta, it rough. You nuh understand?” he said, as if he and Oku had become such familiars that he expected Oku to dissuade him from leaving the begging business.

He was a gambler too.

“Bwoy, the pony business steep! Jah Rastafari. Schoolbwoy, me was one length from millionaire. But Jah know what is not for you, is not for you. Seen! So me ah struggle. Is what you ah read, read so, Rasta? Is only the one book, dread, only one book.”

Oku wished he could be so single-minded.

And then there was the musician. Some afternoons the musician sat in the coffee shop muttering, a short pencil in hand, scribbling musical notes onto a tattered fragment of a brown paper bag. He kept a worn leather folder of music under one arm, sometimes shifting it to the inside of his grungy coat, sometimes to the table,