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

unlock the door. So, he thought, she knew this would happen. He hadn’t been aware of Jackie locking the door in the first place. She must have decided when she saw him across the street, she must have decided in that moment she would fuck him. They both smiled cunningly at the door, coming to the same fact together. Oku cupped her breast, pulled her to him, and made a deliberate bite on her shoulder. Jackie laughed, “Be that way, then,” she said, opening the door for him.

“See you soon, maybe,” he said, lingering on the “maybe.”

He walked to where he had parked the car. All he could feel was her body, her legs all over him. Her scent was in his nostrils, in his hair, on his face, on his clothing. He pictured himself over and over back there in the bed with her.

Quy

I was twelve years old when the monk took me from Pulau Bidong. He was a Hoa Hao monk. He followed the prophet Huynh Phu So. The prophet believed in hard work, and for sure the monk’s hands were rough from something. He was from Saigon, he said. The war churned up everyone. He ended up in Laos and in Kuala Lumpur, and when I met him he’d come to Pulau Bidong to bring the teachings of the prophet to the refugees, not to mention the trade in Thai sticks. He had a scraggly bunch behind him. Two guys and a woman you could only mistake for devotees if you were as desperate as all of us on Pulau Bidong.

Pulau Bidong was a thriving place. There were little businesses everywhere. Under the hopeless look of things there was a lot of life going on. I was very enterprising, myself. I washed clothes and dishes for a living, and I did errands. I owned two rafts, and I ferried to the middle of the ocean to get things for the cleft palate Ba Chang. At first I slept outside her place, then I made a lean-to. I must say I was good at making things from nothing. The monk was supposed to teach us how farming the land was practising the way of the prophet. I never saw him farm anything except people’s stupidity. I admit that if by then I could say I loved anything, I guess it would have been him, but look, how was I supposed to understand the Four Debts of Gratitude? Gratitude to your ancestors, your country, the treasures, and mankind. But I played along.

He was a city monk, but he said his father had studied with the prophet. I don’t believe a word he said now. But he taught me to read. He told me I was good talker. What you need to know is what’s on paper. Talking only gets you so far, it’s on paper you get cheated. He used to be a politician too, he said. He won a seat once in the Constitutional Assembly back in Vietnam. If life were so good with him, I wondered why he was here. Anyway, I took to the reading. Didn’t hurt. A fast learner. On Pulau Bidong you had to learn fast, change quick, or you’re the bottom shit. I broke my head on his letters, then I learned to read the papers and his books and soon any print that came my way. The things that get hidden in paper! The lies! No wonder I never got off that island till the monk. A paper for this and a paper for that, and when I got there I didn’t even know my good name well enough. And papers, of course I didn’t have any. They were all gone with my mother and father.

Well, after the monk taught me about paper there was no looking back. I read everything I get my hands on up to this day, from the labels on cans to the scratches of birds and monkeys. Don’t you worry, they’ve got their plans too. I read and reread the newspapers that made their way to Pulau Bidong. I chewed up the monk’s book with the verses of the Buddha. My palms sweated the ink off the prophet’s teachings.

By now you have to realize that the monk was doing more than helping people to free themselves from the cycle of reincarnation. All who ended up on Pulau Bidong knew their past life must have been shit. We must have fucked up in our earlier lives. But a clear mind was one of the gifts of Pulau Bidong. The one goal was to get off of that island. And in the meantime grab all that you could. The monk helped with this. You want anything, you ask the monk. He corkscrewed in on the Ba Chang’s business in cigarettes and condoms and matches and ginger and radios. And moneylending. But the cleft palate Ba Chang didn’t believe in the third debt of gratitude—gratitude to the monks. So a low-level war broke out. I was caught in the middle. One day I said to myself, One day I will own myself and not get caught in other people’s mess. Anyway, I chose the monk’s side because he was a man. Everybody knows women don’t win.

It started with the fire at the prayer pagoda. That could’ve been anybody—the Christians who wanted to civilize us or the Muslims who wanted to do the same. But then the Ba Chang sent her attackers to say that the monk had better get off of Bidong and go back to where he came from. The monk decided to fight and sent his pack to burn the Ba Chang’s place down, but she caught one of the men and gave him a public beating. Then, of course, the monk was in trouble with the authorities, who told him to fix his business and move on. He protested, but no one believed him. He had to sell all his stock and quit Bidong, complaining that