Theory by Dionne Brand

Author:Dionne Brand
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Canada
Published: 2018-09-17T16:00:00+00:00

I keep the photograph of Odalys face down on the top bookshelf. I am afraid of her spirit, to be frank. Odalys believed in spirits. I’m not superstitious in the least. You might ask, then why don’t I throw that photo away. It’s a picture of Odalys and me jumping the broom at our wedding, and I keep it to look at myself in another time and incarnation. Odalys herself is also in another time and incarnation, and I wonder who she is now. I wonder who she was then. Then, when we appeared in the photo, I thought that I knew Odalys and Odalys thought that she knew me. The photograph is a record of this knowing. Knowing is so liminal. Even knowing one’s self. As well, the photo is as a record of the misunderstanding and misrecognition that it now transports. One can look at it the way I have in those last sentences. But the photograph, when it was taken, was taken to record a happiness. Not the misunderstandings and the misrecognitions. As I said, in the photograph I knew Odalys, that is to say, there was the Odalys that I knew. No, I didn’t know Odalys, the more I think about it. I was yet to understand Odalys. I was yet to meet her. We’d met and knew each other in the formal ways of meeting and knowing and having intentions, in the general ways accepted as normal. We’d appraised each other, in the provisional way that lovers do, by attaching great depth and significance to the provisional. How, after all, do you “know” anyone? You take in certain physical and emotional characteristics that you’ve aestheticized, ignoring the facts. You listen to what a lover has to say, taking in the erotic music of their sound, their timbre, while dismissing the lyrics. Consider: “I don’t like eggs.” You never hear this statement, truly. You hear the statement’s quirky chirp, not its unreasonableness, nor its true intentions that are a criticism of your own habits. Nor do you truly listen to other statements like “I want to go on a cruise to Norway”; “I hate reading fiction, I only read biographies of famous people”; “I hate theory, what is theory anyway.” That is why I hate, to this day, music with words. The words are always dreadful. The chords, the movement from one note to the other, these are bearable to me and seductive, especially because they say nothing that we are supposed to know.

I look forward to you, Odalys. We will sit in a vineyard drinking wine. I said this to myself when I was sitting in a vineyard with an older couple. This couple seemed happy and at the same time separate. I look forward to you, Odalys. We will sit in a vineyard drinking wine. Before I met Odalys, these were the thoughts I had about the someone I would meet who turned out to be Odalys.

I never wanted to get married. I never saw the need nor did I have the desire, if those are different concepts.

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