Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Semicolonized Mind

2016; Duke University Press; Volume: 20; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/07990537-3626656

0799-0537

Mark Ramsay,

Language, Metaphor, and Cognition

1.Green monkeys have the tiniest hands.The mother grasps the hanging mango with leathery newborn fingers, wrapping her toddler-sized mouth around the skin. An infant straddles her chest, watching you like a dashboard bobblehead, its lazy stare bouncing with her movements. A voice yells for you to stop, control yourself. You roll the feeling between your thumb and index finger as you peel back the palm fronds and stare into bared, sun-stained fangs. There is no point in self-control now.“Bite me,” you whisper. “Bite me.”She lunges sideways, her infant's shrill alarm rising to the top of the mango tree. You watch her throw herself upward, a green shimmer ricocheting from branch to branch. From a safe vantage point, she sits back onto her haunches. The infant unlatches; beneath its unsure grip the thick branch is a tightrope. Topher touches your shoulder, but you shrug out of his grip.“Mount Hillaby is not a real mountain,” you say, turning back to the winding trail. The dirt path is rubbed raw by foot traffic. You can see splashes of red clay beneath the soil.Topher doesn't reply. You wonder if he has already grown tired of the person you are becoming. He has stopped to take a photograph—his back bent to an angle, his feet rooted and spread.His skin is lobster red despite the splotches of un-rubbed-in sunblock on his cheeks and arms; a neon-orange shirt barely spreads over his thick frame. Everything about him is a rugby player.You turn back to the trail. The dank-earth smell gives way to the sea; you can hear it if you close your eyes. Until the monkey's fangs, you were doing well.“Hey, can you see the top yet?” Topher yells, his face obscured by a digital camera.“No, the path disappears after this incline. Sure it's still there?”“Yeah. Look, you went too far. There's a drop. Almost thirty, forty feet.”You look down. The tips of breadfruit trees, the tangle of vines clawing sideways from Neem to Neem, from Poinsettia to jutting Mahogany. A sea of green betraying the absolute ground beneath it.“Josh, the path is down here.”You turn slowly. He smiles at you encouragingly.2.At the top of the mountain that is not a mountain there is a pagoda. Topher reaches it first, swinging his feet over the low stone wall, tossing his bag into the corner. You approach slowly, rubbing your hand along the faded Lion of Judah painted into the outside edifice. The wall is whitewashed, but in places you can see the green, gold, red, black. You can still see the holy faces of dreadlocked prophets. Topher angles his body to capture you in this place. Click. You feel suddenly ill. Click.“Do you think this is some kind of shrine?” Topher asks, his American twang coming out.“It's Rastafari.”“Like Bob Marley?”“Yes and no.”“It's either one or the other,” he chuckles.You think of the time you heard “Redemption Song” in a campus café. The speakers were crap, the sound full of tinsel and static. The golden-haired boy in front of you in the line nodded, said, “This is my song.” You didn't hum it—he hummed it. You didn't sing it—he sang it. The song made everyone else uncomfortable—even you, a brown-skinned island boy, because you couldn't locate your own agony within it.You sigh, say Yes, and suffer through Topher singing “No Woman No Cry.” His put-on accent, his force-dropped g's. His camera clicking away.After awhile he grows pensive and puts his arm around your shoulder. “You know, later I'll show you these photographs and you'll realize that you were happy.”3.It is nearly sunset. There is a road that winds the not-mountain; you will take the easy way home. Topher leans against the pagoda wall, his stare out into the valley below. He has tried over the course of the afternoon. He has done that thing people do where they relay stories of their own suffering: I have been there, I have seen what you've seen. Before rushing back to Barbados for the funeral, he had broken up with his long-term boyfriend. You listen to him, his voice as meditative and small as you'd ever hear it (you can cup it in your hands).“I would never have brought him here,” he laughs softly. You know he is remembering one of two events: Justin in full Julie Andrews drag for Halloween or Justin being jumped by a group of older men later that night on the last metro.He trails off. “He was too much.”“It's okay to miss him,” you say, mechanically. You are staring into your lap, at the Plantation Reserve Sugar tin. At the three and a half pounds of ashes folded within.“She didn't want to be cremated,” Topher tells you, following your gaze. Your skin prickles. Those are not his words to say out loud.“This was the only way I could salvage any of her.”“Yes, but you can bury the ashes,” he says. “Put them in a nice mahogany box. I'll pay for it.”You tune him out, unable to comprehend how a human being can burn so long, so bright, so small. But Topher's voice filters in, fugue-like, responding to its own echo:“It's been three years since you left Montreal …”“I came as soon as you called …”“I know how you felt about her …”“Why did you call me if you won't talk to me …”“I'm trying to help you …”“I'm trying …”4.You loved stray dogs because you saw yourself in them. Lady had no hair when she crawled onto your porch that night. Your Tita squatted down, rattling off some Arabic benediction. She took a wet rag and bathed the dog's body, pouring out a litany of Hail Marys, Our Fathers, Old World curses and New World regrets. They blended together over the dog's parchment skin. Both woman and mutt shivered. You stood in the doorway telling your grandmother to call a vet. She sighed and pulled her white hair back into a bun.“No Abeed,” she warned you. No black ones.On the phone you heard the tiredness in the vet's voice. He refused to come to that woman's house again. You were nine. You pleaded as best you could but he was hard against your fear. He reminded you of unpaid bills. Words said. Words that were overlarge in your small hands. Hands that could barely pick apart the venom in his voice. He hung up.Your Tita knelt, watching as the hairless dog let slip new life onto her porch. “Insha'Allah!” she praised, her eyes full of tears. You lunged forward and hugged her from behind, her bony hands clenching your shoulders. The hairless rat wriggled toward the sound of her tears.5.You and Topher became friends out of fear. You had never traveled out of the island; he had never said he was gay to more than a handful of strangers at a rest stop in Missouri. You both studied engineering: he on his family's money, you on an island scholarship. He didn't need to know your past, your skin, your nose, your accent, your religion. You didn't really understand sexuality enough to question his claims.In your final year you stayed behind to spend Christmas with him and his parents. They had no statues of the Virgin, no looming plastic portraits of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. Their walls were not cluttered with photographs in rusting frames. You looked: under the bed of the guest room, behind the pulled shower curtain, even in the nook between bookcases and writing desks—they had no dogs.Topher's bedroom had a smaller Pride flag than his dorm room. He took it down, folded it in quarters and pressed it into your hand.“Something to remember Montreal—and me.”Your hands were small in his hands. He closed his thumbs around you.6.Lady howled in your arms while your Tita carried the last stiffened pup away into a field behind the house. You didn't have to witness it to see the hand-forked earth, the rat-dogs buried by the banana compost. Lady whimpered into your armpit, trying to nuzzle through you. When you finally released her, she bolted toward the cardboard box filled with old church skirts where she had given birth, turning in circles, confused by the phantom scent of loss.In loss, she became your only friend. You would climb out of your bedroom window at night and lie beside her, whispering things that she would never contest. Even at nine you had become acutely aware of borders: the ones that cropped up around an island and kept you landlocked, the ones that locked you out of family conversations (a deathly quiet when you entered a room), the ones that built themselves between classmates whose mothers warned against you. Lady would lick your face furiously, attracted by the salt of your tears.Your grandmother would never build a doghouse, so most mornings the postman's laughter woke you, curled in the wet ground beside the skeletal dog. In those first moments of wakefulness you would be unable to process the words that climbed out of your consciousness—the words that people used to describe your mother, the words that trickled down to define you. One word persisted: abomination.7.Topher has curled into sleep. You asked him to abandon the pagoda, to see in it someplace someone once loved and had to abandon out of necessity.In a warped way the depression is not all her fault. You have been sitting with your Tita in your hands like a weight. When she was alive and you crisscrossed Saint Laurent and René Lévesque, she spoke to you. Her voice inside of your voice, her actions inside of your actions. Yet out of the four years you spent in Montreal, she called to speak to you only three times. Each time it was to ask, Are you eating? Are you going to church? Then a pause. A tensing. Are you doing what she did?You try to decide the best of all possible outcomes: to bury her or to release her to the land where she spent all of her allotted amount of life. The tin doesn't answer back.You hear rustling. The green monkey climbs out of the bush and up onto the walls of the empty pagoda. She walks awkwardly, one-handedly, cradling the spindly body of her infant. In the sunset everything is fire; you can see the bruises on the right side, even from this distance. They are eggplant purple. Royalty or funeral.She is not mournful like Lady had been. She doesn't circle her little Icarus, disbelieving. She is regal in his death. She lays him down in the middle of the pagoda. Others climb out of the bushes, their tiny hands holding on to the world the best they can. They scrabble up the whitewashed walls, their claws chipping away until the lion resurfaces.You open the small tin, a few specks race away into the Scotland District, down into Bathsheba, across towards Morgan Lewis Windmill.8.No lights worked in your Tita's guest bedroom. The windows were sealed shut. The air-conditioner unit breathed mold. Veins of green slime, varicose, heavy, spread into the corners and crevices. The room housed lives: boxes, piles of batteries, twenty-seven packages of Slam! (the dishwashing liquid popularized in the 1970s by a Soca song), a one-eyed porcelain doll, passports, ID cards, forms, bank notices, invoices, school notebooks (from schools that no longer existed), telephone bills, telephone cords, telephone.Sometimes you opened the boxes, laying everything out as if to break down your mother's life. Photos. Clippings of hair. Booties from when she was a baby. Drawings from school. You were never anywhere among her things. Your grandmother kept only the things that predated you.You came home one day to find the yard filled with boxes, papers, telephone bills, telephone cords, telephone.Your Tita pulled you away from windows. You were smaller then—small in the eye of her anger. You thrashed, but her fingers on your shoulders pinched the soft bell of flesh like you were a stray dog on her porch. A downpour destroyed everything. You cried, but she cried loudest.9.In Topher's small apartment in Montreal you tried marijuana. He pressed his lips against yours, the racing smoke drove you wild. You let him stroke you. You became friends when he relinquished your flaccid penis. When the smoke flushed itself, he calmed you—questioning is fine. What questions were you asking, what answers could he give?That night you spoke out all the bottled words. The dark guest room. The mountain of things. The photos of a woman you didn't recognize. The family who checked you, held you to the light, tried to find out who you were. The grandmother who steadied the truth with a firm hand. Topher listened, tripping in and speaking over you.He curled away, propping his head up. In his own trance you caught phrases, the fear of being outside, hunted, the desperate longing to be renewed, brought to life every day by some grounding reason. A reason that was sure enough to validate and press against the secret, unspeakable fear that being gay rendered him worthless.You couldn't stop, the bottle was uncorked. It spilled. The touch of your Tita's hand, the bruising, the look in her eyes. The jab of her toenails into the side of a sickly cane dog. Her sobbing, curled form around a dying village cat. The hours spent on the back step praying. The hungry nights. The way your hand fell. The way your toenails jab into the side of the sickly cane dog. The sobbing, curled form you make around a dying village cat.The way you learned to be cruel, good, hateful, hopeful, all by yourself.“It couldn't have been all bad?” Topher whispered.You look through him to the dark ceiling. “They would say my mother was an abomination.”“For being queer?”“They don't use that word. I keep telling you nobody outside of Montreal is using that word; they don't even say the word lesbian. If they say it, it carries weight. It's real.”“I've been called worse.”“Anyway, I don't know what she was … who she was. Nobody will tell me.” You tried to explain to him the way loneliness became normalized, until the feeling of being with someone was so arcane that it couldn't make sense. A television set with the sound muted. The blurred image of the coast through the back window of the Oistins bus.“You should talk to somebody about it?” It's a statement-question, a kind of bridge that could connect what you were saying to what he inevitably wanted to share.“I just felt alone all the time.”“Did you hate her?”Nobody had ever asked you that question. You took a moment, processed it, answered positively.In the morning it didn't make sense. In the morning you were not fulfilled.10.You had to spend Thanksgiving weekend at your great-aunt's house in Kitchener. Her staircase was lined with stuffed cats. She forgot that they were soulless and put out milk for them. In the morning the bowls were always empty.When you got into her green SUV, outside the train station, she grabbed your cheeks and twisted your face so that she could see the earring stud under your lip. She muttered to herself. She smelled like cat urine, her hair wild and disheveled. At red lights people peered in, close enough to fog the glass. You didn't know Canadians to be so invasive.You asked her about your mother over dinner. She sucked the marrow out of the snapped chicken leg, slurping noisily.“She was a good girl,” she managed after a while.You scanned the walls. Picture frames blotted out the whitewash, like at your Tita's house, except these frames were empty or filled with stock photographs. White children and black children and everybody else's smiling children.“What was she like, as a woman?”Your great-aunt stopped chewing, her eyebrow rising, “She was like me. She left when she was young.”11.Your Tita let all of the dogs and cats roam freely through every room in the house. They were allowed into rooms with locked china cabinets, porcelain statues, imported rugs. They were allowed into bedrooms and bathrooms—beds and baths. They never fought or made too much noise, and they moved out of her way like brightly colored pockets of steam. They were not loved there. She saw in them what she saw in you: someone in transit.12.Your great-aunt didn't celebrate Thanksgiving. She stayed in her room watching Wheel of Fortune reruns. When she failed to guess a puzzle, she howled Arabic curse words. Your Tita called twice, but they didn't talk anymore. They yelled into receivers, compared pains, compared blame.You helped your aunt down to the kitchen, her swelling knees locking on each step.“What you order?”“Chinese, Auntie Alice.”She sucked her teeth. “Fifteen dollars for rice you could have cooked yourself.”She smothered everything in Trinidadian pepper sauce. Your Greyhound bus was due to leave in three hours. You told her; she waved her hand dismissively.“How you like Kitchener?”“We never leave the house, Auntie Alice.” Your accent came out, magnetized by her voice.“Not as flashy as Montreal, but what can you do.” She crushed a wanton in her palm and ate the pieces. You had come here with a purpose. She noticed your staring. Her eyes were hard and cruel; no, they were partially cataract—not filled with a calculated disinterest.You cleared the table and boiled her coffee.“Your mother make the best coffee.” She turned to you, her mouth softening. You suddenly didn't know what to ask, which questions were the most important, which ones would help you understand. “Everyone else use whole milk, but she use nothing. Just black …” She stood up shakily, “And some cardamom. When I try, it's always too much, no matter how little I add.” She sighed heavily, her face wracked by a memory, and then she let out a sharp, bitter laugh. “Simply too much.”You watched her hands. Arthritis had limited her mobility, and her fingers wouldn't clasp the dinner plate. She stared at it angrily; you knew better than to help her.“Ah well, some things are hard to talk about.” She stood there stiffly—standing, she reminded you of your Tita.“She never talks about her,” you manage.Outside, the first snow was turning to a muddy sludge. Her garden was littered with old television sets, boxes of unused books (warped by a recent rain); anything that grew was gnarled, bent into itself, incapable of blooming. You were rinsing the dishes, stacking them. The house felt cramped and empty at the same time.Alice waved her hand dismissively.“People live and they die, boy. You marry and they die. You have children and they die.” Her words carried the same breathy dismissal of a smoker who knew her lungs couldn't manage much anymore, but her eyes were cloudy with tears. She crossed the kitchen, leaning heavily on her walker.“She was my mother …,” you said.“And she died! You want more, you look somewhere else.” You could see her outline in the kitchen window; see her raising one foot tentatively toward the stairs, as if it might pass right through. You knew enough to understand that the emotion in your voice didn't call it out of her; it was the solipsistic winding of her own thoughts that dragged it out.“Your father was a scientist, that's what she always said.”“I don't care about him—he left—Tita told me he left. I care about her.”“Oh, boy, you don't even know that much?”Her reflection in the glass turned to you, fixing you with a kind of edged sadness. It said I did the best I could with what I had and Who was I to intervene? and There are things you will never understand. You've seen that look on the faces of everyone you pass, even in Montreal, people who didn't know your skin, your nose, your accent, your religion.Halfway up the stairs she was forced to pause, her breathing labored. You kept rinsing the dishes, wiping at the same spots. After awhile you heard her guessing along to Wheel of Fortune, her voice softer, as if she were afraid to disturb the air.13.Your earliest memory was of a nightmare. You were trying to climb the yellow bars of the jungle gym. Giant green monkeys perched on the opposite side. You couldn't turn back, you could only climb toward them. Their fangs gleamed until they were all that you could see. That, and their burnt walnut tonsils. You woke up, damp in your own urine. She was looking down at you. It was too dark to see her expression. She stroked your cheek, picked you up, rinsed you off in the dark and put you back to bed.“White teeth” you mumbled, “Mum, I saw white teeth.”“Your Tita would say that that means that someone will soon be married”—you remember her voice cracking—“and that is a happy thing.”She didn't understand the terror of the needle points; the fear of being swallowed forever. Even at four you understood that things could die, that things could be erased.You remember trying to fall asleep again. The pattern of the wooden roof is vivid. The smell of mothballs and citronella. The sting of sandflies on your cheeks. The sound of two women in the next room, whispering, crying, comforting. You remember the I love yous they shared that night because there are so few in your memory now. The memory exists like a movie reel—a start and end point of pitch blackness. Nothing comes before it; nothing comes after it. It was dark in the room—you don't remember her face.14.A full moon rises behind hills. The bougainvillea is silver. The peak of Topher's cap is silver. The abandoned monkey infant is a silver statue. The inside of the pagoda smells of lavender, like it is folded into the plaster. The mother holds vigil in a tall tamarind tree; her tail swishes low, caught in the moonlight. She announces her distress when you come too close. You step back, palms up, as if she has a gun.“Dude, back up slowly.” Topher has stirred.You hold out the small tin filled with ashes, showing it to her, resting it slowly down beside her infant. She turns and is a silver flash, spirited into the highest branches.“You're doing this to spite her aren't you? I saw the journals too.” His voice is small. You think about it; his voice has always been small. “She wanted to be buried.”Your fingers linger over the filigree of the sugar tin. Topher continues, trying to fill the space between you two.“She hid those journals from you to protect you.”“She was just ashamed. That's all she ever really was, a tiny, cruel, …”—your voice cracks open—“shame-filled woman.”Topher is tensing, wanting to lunge forward and press his body against yours until you feel nothing anymore. You don't have to see it to know it to be true. All that fills your vision is the silver tin. In its patterning you see your mother, rising out of the ocean in the path of a jet ski. Letting the engine tear through her. A therapist plucked this memory out of your mind when you were eighteen and said, Here, hold this agony. And now there are journals. Her journals. Journals hidden for twenty-three years as the bloodied water thrashed on in your mind.You turn to look at Topher because he's always been bald, his expression clearly coded on his face. His eyes are watery, his lips pressed in tight concern. You know what he wants to say and you know the answers to all the questions—so he asks nothing and you say nothing. You will let this consume you. You will let him go.15.On the way down the hill you pass two climbing men you think to be Rastafari. Topher stops them, demanding a photograph with them. They pose; you level the camera. Three pairs of eyes stare into the lens: two sets of apathy, one set of exuberance. You don't press the button.When they move off, they hold out their elbows, cocked. You panic and clutch at the elbows with your hands, cupping them. Wrong. You should have bounced elbows. Even Topher, who is not from this place, laughs at you. The Rastas give you a pitying look.“You sure you from here?”You nod, looking at your foreign hands.Further down the hill the trees open out like a window. The night is wide and full of stars. Topher tries to level his camera at it, but you both know that it won't develop well—it will just be a collection of white specks, grainy, pixelated.His voice is heavy. “You grew up in heaven.”“I grew up in a living room far away from here.”The dark paints his face into something sinister; you have to study it for a few moments to see the sad smile of commiseration, the I have been there, I have seen what you have seen. For once, you imagine that he has.He holds up a grey finger, and the blinding light of the camera display is pressed up against your nose. It is you, taken a few hours ago at the foot of Mount Hillaby. You seem unperturbed; taken out of context it could have been any other life but this life. The sun is impossibly bright in that photograph; your lips are turned up into a smile.“See, I was right. You did look happy.”“Can you print that one for me?”You are amazed by the way you two can fall back into old habits. Talking animatedly but saying nothing.Something catches your sights in the treeline. The green monkey has been following you, tiny in the darkening canopy. You know her by her sad yellow eyes. She seems to be waiting for something. Instinctively you hold the camera face up to her, but she is distant, a blur, and you are a shadow with a light source. Topher, the island, the air that is both moist and dry at the same time, it fades.“Eventually it will be like none of this happened,” you say excitedly. At this she hisses, baring her fangs. Rising up onto her hind legs, tiny hands spread open. It is territorial dominance; she spreads herself wide as if to say, You will be here, on this mountain that is not a mountain, in the moment, forever.Suddenly the white camera face is blinding, you are dizzying back into reality and there is Topher. He tries to take the camera away, but you want to take a photograph of the monkey—to make her tangible, to make it so that forgetting could be possible.You scan the treeline desperately, replaying the last entry in your mother's journal:It would be instant and over. Jet skis do not mangle your body. They pick you up, glide you across the sea, flapping like a kite string.And in that line you know everything there is to know about her—that she wrote poetry in the margins, that she was a geriatric nurse, that she ran to the same place that you ran to (Montreal), that you both folded yourselves around someone who used the word queer.You are left in the limbo world that language cannot fill, a space that death has opened up. You cannot fathom the distance required until the photograph of yourself has no resonance, until it is just a picture—a smile on a hot day, not layered with pain and grief and dis-belonging.You level the camera, tracking the long branch, but the monkey is already gone.