Longer Than the Longest Rope
2021; Wiley; Volume: 109; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/tyr.2021.0081
ISSN1467-9736
Autores Tópico(s)Canadian Identity and History
ResumoLonger Than the Longest Rope Dionne Brand (bio) and Canisia Lubrin (bio) Dionne brand and canisia lubrin are writers whose work elides clear distinctions between poetry and criticism, essay and fiction, the archipelagic and the diasporic. In this special issue, they decided to share a discussion mediated through art by revisiting and responding to works they'd seen together. Their correspondence animates an underrecognized facet of deep friendship and artistic collaboration: even when longtime friends think they are speaking directly to each other, they are also speaking through their individual and shared experiences. Language is one form of mediation. Brand and Lubrin remind us that art, and witnessing art, is another. "We encountered these works," they explain, "over the past few years, at the Graham Foundation in Chicago, at the 2019 Venice Biennale, and at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto. In various ways we have lived with these works and we return to them often, and now." —the editors [End Page 101] Click for larger view View full resolution Joël Nankin, Je ne suis pas seul, acrylic on canvas, 2018. [End Page 102] _____ look, the heart has moons. So perfect they are crescents. The heart exceeds its chest. Makes its own turbulences. The skull's insufficient orbit held, too, in the hand. Our selves surpass. We arrive plural and beyond our recognition. This solitary everything. The forest of reeds we become. The red balance of mist, the incipient blue of us. Je ne suis pas seul. All your life after will not make sense until you remember that perfect time standing at the window in your perfect life when you were ten and you heard that song which you will hear again and remember everyone and everything and miss them. Barbara Lewis will sing "Hello Stranger," and you will listen to your perfect time. "Although…," she sings, "it seems like a mighty long time…" Your grandma was dancing in the kitchen and you watched her, and you laughed with her. Laughing, you danced with her. This will last you. Everything you love is in that moment. The next day you will see a ditch filled with jacaranda flowers. Your heart will leap from its cavity. dionne brand I don't know how to draw but I drew a thing once: upside-down Ls crowding into a spot of land. A clearing framed by upside-down Ls. Why did I do this? I had recently, reluctantly, acquired a spiritual adviser, J., who declared his methods to be unorthodox. I should be careful with him, he told me. But before all that he said I needed someone like him. To his credit, he had correctly sensed my discontent, though he could not have known that this was prelude to my leaving. He said, It doesn't matter that you can't draw, just draw things. Just free-draw. He said this sure of whatever it was he would eventually show me. Of my first drawing he said, Hmmmm. He shook his head. I could almost hear the full, peppered accordions of his eyebrows. There's something to hearing a thing you see. That's interesting, he said, what does it look like to you? I thought a brief thing and I said, Some upside-down Ls. Look closely, J. offered back. I said, Well, I see the same thing. That's interesting, he said, because I see many people around a central figure. As though they are feasting from a plentiful source. J. supposed [End Page 103] something about salvation and sacrifice, and that it is sometimes better to note when generosity is too much. In our conversation, I had delayed a sense of the color red, the sun, no moon, though the sun could suggest the moon, its millionth crescent. This was an image rushing back. But these felt only temporarily like mine. A person can be a slit in the earth, alone or not, among other slits in the earth. I did not begrudge J. his commitments, but I knew that my days there were numbered, as was my availability to his insights. To be Black, alive in any place requiring total...
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