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

stools, some bricks and board for her few books, her stereo, four plates, four cups, four spoons, four forks, four knives, a skillet and a pot, her clothes, a clock that ticked loudly, an old black-and-white television. She was going through an extra-antiseptic phase at the time. “Bullshit,” she said, when Tuyen asked her. But Oku got his foot sprained when an undercover dragged him into a van. He was one of the first ones to climb the fence. He made up the opening lines of poems, calling them out to the group he was with. He was enjoying himself, screaming poetry about the downfall of everything. He even enjoyed the arrest. Until his father almost blew an artery when he came home.

He had borrowed his father’s broken-down car again. This time without telling him how long he would be or how far he was going. “He’s just going to have to understand that it’s service to the people, man, service to the people.” Tuyen was clicking away with her camera throughout the whole thing. She was going to use the photographs for an installation called Riot. She photographed the legs of the policemen on horseback as the horses skittered toward the crowd, planning to title it “Dance.” She may have lost Oku when she stopped to photograph the arc of a tear-gas canister, broken glass, and police shoes—she would call this photograph “Overkill.” Oku yelled to her for help, but she didn’t hear him; she saw him as she saw everything, as she imagined.

Her eyes took in every human experience as an installation, her lids affecting the shuttering mechanism of a camera. It must have been a milky evening: the water was grey milk, the sky was stone grey, the boat was disappearing in a noisy rush, and Tuyen’s mother and father must have seen Quy like this—slowly, slowly moving away. Floating, floated away, in the China Sea without a trace. Her mother’s insomnia was caused by this sight. When she closed her eyes at night, she herself saw Quy floating away. So Tuyen kept clicking. She kept looking at what wasn’t being seen, as her brother must have been unseen, and her mother noticing too late, harried with irrational fear. Tuyen saw, heard first Oku’s voice unlike his voice, then saw, turning with her camera to click and click the declensions of Oku’s body being dragged to the van. The arm of the cop entwined with Oku’s flailing arms. She photographed this aggressive embrace, Oku falling to his knees, then pushed, pulled away by two friends, then the cops beating the friends back and shoving Oku into a white cube van with lines down the side. She called this “Tree Falling Against Van.”

Months later, announcing Riot, an installation in her apartment, Tuyen mounted these photographs on the staircase coming up. Oku was very proud of them and brought people he’d met at the riot to see them. The photographs made Carla queasy. She told Tuyen and Oku that they were sick. She rushed up the staircase and into her apartment quickly each time she came in. The photographs, something about the motion in them, their sequence, reminded her faintly of the dream of her mother climbing onto a chair. As a concession Tuyen removed the photographs from the stairwell and hung them inside her apartment. She saw Carla’s flinching ascent on the flight of stairs, her left ear bent to her shoulder as if against the sound of the pictures, as she would have as a child. It was all Tuyen could do to restrain herself from taking a photograph—a way of caressing Carla.

She loved June anyway. The fresh womanly sound of the word, and the way the month never disappointed in any year. The opening of summer. Today, music blared from cars and from the open doorways of dress shops, restaurants, cybercafés, and tea places. Tuyen was ecstatic. She spun around, her camera clicking off shots. She didn’t yet know how she would use them. Through the lens she saw a familiar face and stroked the button to open the aperture; she clicked twice, trying to remember who it was. Binh! She hadn’t expected to see him here, so the face of her own brother was familiar and unfamiliar to her. She was shocked and ashamed at the same time at not recognizing the sibling with whom she had so many recorded and unrecorded fights. Perhaps there was something in her misrecognition that told of those battles, how a brother was both a stranger and a loved one, more than a loved one, the same as you; and seeing his face outside of yourself, of the family, was to see him anew.

Binh was grim-faced, talking to another man whose back was to Tuyen. It dawned on Tuyen that she was standing diagonally opposite Binh’s store, XS. He was using his hands to talk, pointing at the man as if telling him what to do. The man was tall and slight, his head angled as a boy being berated, dangling on the slim stem of his neck. Oddly, the man’s body itself was rigid, a hand reaching out to touch Binh, to hold his pointing finger. Tuyen’s lens caught this hand and the other reaching onto Binh’s right shoulder. The embrace was both sinister and affectionate. Binh broke into a smile, then spun the man around, his left arm taking the man’s right shoulder. Tuyen snapped this series of shots, her own shock translated into mechanical clicking of the shutter. Her camera almost slipped from her hand when she saw the man’s face.

It was the face of a boy, a baby, innocent and expectant. There was something wrong about it. It didn’t go with the rest of his body—something she’d suspected when photographing his back. Binh clapped. Then they turned to watch the celebration in the street and Tuyen kept clicking her camera at them until the roll ended.

Something stopped her from raising her hand to signal Binh—it