Ficre Ghebreyesus, Solitary Boat in Red and Blue, ca. 2002–07. © The Estate of Ficre Ghebreyesus. Courtesy of Galerie Lelong & Co.
There is a painting by the Eritrean American artist Ficre Ghebreyesus named Solitary Boat in Red and Blue. It is a painting I find utterly compelling, utterly seductive—perhaps because I love the color blue, and who doesn’t? But I find the blue and this painting so luminous, so doubled. Ghebreyesus’s boat drifts on an opalescent bluish green sea along a smoke-bush green, emerald sky. The boat has an ethereal appearance, its reflection drifting below in the water; its destination is everywhere. It gestures to another reality of boats—boats that we know about, distressed in the Mediterranean or the Atlantic. I want to be in Ghebreyesus’s boat and perhaps I am; it has such light in it, and is such an invitation to uncertainty and bounty. I once wrote, “even a wrecked and wretched boat still has all the possibilities of moving.” But Solitary Boat in Red and Blue is not a wrecked boat. It is the spirit of boats that I spoke of in those lines. It is a boat moving with all haste, languor, and possibility. It is two boats, three boats, in combination with one’s own illusive boat: solid, reflective, and imagined. The moths or fireflies that accompany the boat with their own gray-blue translucence almost seem to be floating on water themselves. And where is the boat going, I ask? And the answer, it seems, is to somewhere green. Its lightness and drift indicate its whereabouts and destination. I can’t get enough of the painting. One’s eyes are always rewarded and that is because of its movement. If you glance away, you find it at another place, at a new place. “Solitary” is paradox here.
There is another painting of a boat that I love, Remedios Varo’s Exploration of the Sources of the Orinoco River. A woman, Varo’s avatar, sits in a red, fishlike bucketed waistcoat of a boat. She arrives in this boat at the source of the Orinoco only to find, whimsically or ironically, a coffee table with a glass spilling wine that appears to be the beginning of the river. In the painting, metaphor becomes a critique of such explorations: they resulted only in superconsumption and exploitation.
Unlike Varo’s painting, Ghebreyesus’s Solitary Boat in Red and Blue has no destination so specific and no purpose so directive and acquisitive. Nor one so ironic. There is no one on board, yet it seems everyone we wish to be, or know, is on board; so perhaps someone is on board. Whatever the case, this boat’s intentions are not missionary, with all the attendant violent and coercive relations that go along with “discovery” and “exploration” for future uses; it does not seek information or commodifiable knowledge. It is not equipped with a compass. And the end of its journey is still open to wonder.
***
One hears of shipwrecks, many shipwrecks. Not massive container ships like the Ever Given which ran aground in the Suez Canal, nor the ten-deck, thousand-foot-long cruise ships that move tourists around the world. Not those centuries-old wrecks, popular in literature, that emanated from what was called the voyage and the adventure. Not the shipwrecks where gold and treasure are lost; not those wrecks from that violent age, whose treasures are still sought today by modern adventurers with “scientific methods.” In the shipwrecks I hear of, there is another loss at sea. Human. These wrecks are of small vessels that move people and their precarity across the Mediterranean, the Strait of Gibraltar, the Atlantic, and the Gulf of Mexico. These are the boats and the pirogues and the dinghies, full of people who are trying to land in safety, but who might be interdicted and pushed back in the other direction. Or drowned. Or: arrived, only to be held again on some ship—the Bibby Stockholm—much like the Convict Hulks of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century London.
There are many shipwrecks now. They are attended by border and security regimes; they end in loss of lives. The salvage there, in wrecked pirogues, is bodies, small possessions, wallets, cell phones, T-shirts, raincoats, jackets, keys to houses and rooms, sodden papers, only valuable to the ones who lost their lives. And to those who wait for word of their safe landing. A Tunisian fisherman, Oussama Dabbebi, says, “Instead of getting fish, I sometimes get dead bodies. The first time I was afraid, then step by step I got used to it. After a while getting a dead body out of my net is like getting a fish. Once I found a baby’s body. How is a baby responsible for anything?” These lives were/are animated by need and want, and not by adventure. These lives were/are destroyed by need and want and the adventures of totalizing forces, of multinational arrangements, oil concessions, cocoa concessions, lumber concessions, mineral concessions, toxic waste concessions, and electronic waste concessions.
Those earlier shipwrecks contained the precarious too—the enslaved. But most of the stories that arrive from those times, and propel modern adventurers, are ones of lost wealth/treasure, such as that of the Spanish fleet sunk by a hurricane in the eighteenth century: fifty million dollars’ worth of gold coins and gold chain recovered, and an estimated four hundred million more still hiding in the sea, they say. And along with the gold bullion were the enslaved, who were also treasure to be transformed into more gold.
J. M. W. Turner’s oceans, explosions of movement and color, perhaps hint at this catastrophe below. Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying, Typhoon Coming On (1840) is the most searing of these paintings, although any Turner ocean is tumultuous. Yet Slavers best evokes the indifference fueling the cataclysm that overtook millions of abducted, enslaved, and transported Africans—an indifference that drove Turner’s watercolors to their experiments, no doubt. And a haunting that lead John Ruskin to use the word blood twice, but never once human or slavery, in his high praise for Turner’s Slavers. Even though, that “blood” is “girded with condemnation in that fearful hue which signs the sky with horror,” as Ruskin writes.
As I write, it is four years since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, and throughout this time the boats kept/keep leaving and arriving even as the pandemic itself, its enormity, still may not have struck all of us, except in moments and on days when we cannot believe how much time has passed since something quite unknown—though, we suspect, inevitable and truly uncontrollable—entered our lives. And not only our lives—as so often when we say “our lives” we mean only our social worlds—but our very biological viability. Increasingly we suspect what has entered is something irreparable, something irreversible, undoable. Like wreckage. And those of us who see the wreckage feel like unwanted messengers about the crisis already, always in progress. We recognize the deterioration of the geological life of the planet itself to be irreparable; the coincidence of great human migration and deep geological crisis is not lost on some of us. The migrations from South to North have everything to do with exploitation of the South by the North. Nihilistic resource extraction creates physically, socially, and politically uninhabitable conditions. But those are broad terms: “North” and “South.” Interrelated interests abound in capital. Those of us who live in the South know this complexity well, and those of us who live in the North know it, too—though the blindfold of metropolitan superiority mostly obscures or ignores that knowledge. Whoever “we” are, the passage of this time, these past few years, has been like walking deeper and deeper into a space whose full contours we are still making out. We have run into something. What? And who is “we”?
Capital has slingshot back, and seems to have accelerated in its motion, making up and superseding what it calls its losses over the last years. The pandemic has left the headlines, and we are back to “normal.” Or, “normal” quadrupled, which is to say more extraction, more war—the most rapid means of growth of capital; and more designation/eradication of the human beings extraneous and dispensable to the project of “normal.” “Normal,” it must be concluded, is nihilism-capital, churning up disasters geological and human, since that is all “we” are getting back to. This “we” insists on an aggregate of some kind; but something is always happening to its signification. This “we” that we have all been drafted into has collected around a set of social behaviors that have been made into principles. It is a “we” that takes the historical trajectory of the present dominant economic configuration, with its conflicts, tensions, and contradictions, for granted. This dominant ideology sweeps the boats aside like so much anticipated death, like personal or cultural failures. It calls these migrations the fault of failed states, not the brutal expulsions necessary to the new global political economy. These are what Saskia Sassen names, in her book Expulsions: Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy, the “elementary brutalities” that attend the so-called complex economies.
This pronoun “we” that we invoke is, at base, a “we” of constant, detailed and expanding consumption, refracting in geopolitical and historical ways. All of us are recruited into this “we,” whether we have the means, or whether we are the means by which others extract and consume.
“We” and “us” are always in flux. The meanings disaggregate with self-consciousness. “We” is an aggregate already disaggregated. And even in that partiality there is disaggregation.
We were made still by the pandemic. We were made still, and we could observe the great movement, the articulation of who was “we” and who was “we.”
In the Global North we were forced to come to terms with the rest of world. Not as labor pool, waste dumping site, theater of war, arena of resource extraction; not as Globalization—meaning the complete annexing of the world’s resources and labor supply in the project of neoliberal capitalism. Rather, a broad “we” in the Global North briefly felt the way it is to live in the Global South—under siege, under lack, under restraint. The world folded like cloth or like paper into the uncomfortable recognition of the “we”—of its geological whole. We suddenly felt the earth as if our feet were on the same shaky surface. The earth compressed its air and time together—and briefly made all distinctions superfluous. We went from world to earth to planet, and we realized the planet is indifferent to us. It goes on in any incarnation—it will sweep us away, it has no stake in us, it has no compassion. The pandemic allowed us to see and think; or forced us to see and think; or forced others among us to refuse to see and refuse to think—and it occurred to some of us that this is what it must have felt like for decades somewhere else. This was not some accustomed tragedy happening elsewhere, but everywhere; and for a short while “we” were not someone else, but everyone. Or: we were all someone else; and those of us who were someone else wherever we were, anyway—well, we were everyone and someone else as we always had been. The world altered. The Global North could not distribute its usual knowing looks of pity and blame, divorced from its complicity in the conditions that emanate from our/its way in the world. We stopped. For a short time, that is, or for as long as most memory lasts in the Global North—until the stock markets corrected themselves; until commentators reclaimed the racist narratives of difference. For a short time, we, or many of us, were stilled—until the supply lines figured out their new and old trajectories.
But this world-stillness hovers anyway; it is pressing over everyone and someone, over the indifferent planet; this world-stillness overrides and catapults, despite our ongoing right-siding toward a killing, stratifying, death-dealing normal. It is a stillness we encounter between every moment of living now; a stillness that cannot be described by the markets and the supply lines and the dominant interpretation of the normal; a stillness from whose attentions we cannot be reclaimed fully or returned to that dominant interpretation. In this stillness, we surmise that we must attend to some urgency in the process of defining itself.
Early in this season of stillness, this season of observation, when commentators and reporters tried to collect us into the generalizable “we,” to breathe confidence into the faltering project of “we” in order to keep our spirits up, they asked, “How should we get through this time?”; and “What should we read to get us through?” They asked, “Has any writer provided us with a key, to understand, to transform; to escape this time; to cope?”; “Does the literary canon contain any balm, any advice?” The implied question was, Did a certain set of Euro- or Anglo- American texts provide a roadmap to the way through and the way out? This, of course, pointed directly to the aggregate “we,” the one that coalesces into whiteness, or the genre of the human whose precondition is whiteness. And right on time, someone wrote in the Guardian: “What We Can Learn from Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Years in Lockdown.” The essay went on to read: “After being diagnosed with a severe respiratory illness, the poet was forced to live in isolation. Her response offers great insights into how to cope. Lockdown taught her actively to embrace the freedom to travel when it came.” (And isn’t this just where “we” are now, and why the planet will continue to heave? And just who can travel in this time?) The commentator continued, “Yet the same material was also offering me a fascinating insight into how to cope with what was going on in my own world. … Her grasp of self-invention through a kind of ‘second life’ reminded me of all the friendships we were suddenly reconfiguring on Zoom. I also realized how closely her practice prefigured today’s digital communicators: not just the teenagers and geeks, bloggers and TikTok stars, but citizen journalists, activists and those policed by authoritarian regimes too.” (I wryly note here “second life,” and its resonance with that eponymous online game in which one creates an avatar and interacts with others.) The writer is trying to make some connection, to draw a line from the past to the present, but that’s just it: this connection is through whiteness—the white “we,” metonym for every “we,” innocently, casually summoned.
In fact, we are summoned through the bourgeois life of nineteenth-century England: we are lathered in slaveholding and the fortunes made in enslavement. This summons arrived in the Global North, in the middle of the pandemic, whole and aspirational, and as exemplar—as juridical in its demand. Naturally, if the world was falling apart during the pandemic, then its constitutive elements were also under siege; and if one of those elements was whiteness, then its tropes, its narrative his-tory, needed shoring up. Its narrative proprietorship needed affirming. Or more innocently, the narrative apparatus that undergirded and attended its dominance rallied in its defense.
Harriet Jacobs never came to mind for the Guardian commentator, I observed. Nor did the enslaved woman who is the narrator of Browning’s 1848 poem “The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point.” Elizabeth Barrett Browning, whose family fortune was made through slavery in Jamaica, lived at the same time as Harriet Jacobs, who spent seven years hiding in a crawlspace three feet high by nine feet wide by seven feet long, escaping Dr. Norcom, the white man who claimed ownership over her. She would publish, in 1861, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: Written By Herself. In this slave narrative she would recount her years in slavery, her seven years in confinement, and then her years in the north working to get her children free. Perhaps this is the text we should read for knowledge for surviving. Perhaps we should look for lessons at what Jacobs described as her “loop-hole of retreat” (taken up so brilliantly by the sculptor Simone Leigh); perhaps we should look to Jacobs for an understanding of how to survive the crushing enclosure, and the existential void, for how to imagine and make real something like freedom.
I immediately thought, too, of all the writers I had read through the long time of our enduring, through outlasting the racism that brackets our lives, and hovers over all endeavors, presaging all appearances and events. And I found myself perplexed by these references to a literary canon that had surely tried to excise, by enclosure and confinement, Black experience in the Atlantic world by continually reproducing only white bourgeois experience as “meaning.” But, more innocently, my immediate reaction was of astonishment—as one is always astonished in this long durée of slavery and colonialism. “Goodness,” I thought. “Read any writer in the Black Tradition and you will see how to get through. Or writers from the geopolitical South who also must find a way through and around the glutinous ‘we.’ ”
Read Beloved, by Toni Morrison, where Sethe and Paul D survive slavery and navigate, attentively, their lives in the still fulminating anti-Black rage of Reconstruction and its brutal end.
Read, in Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions, of Tambu, Nyasha, Babamukuru, Lucia, and others whose lives are under pressure as one cosmology forcibly eclipses another. Read Sam Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners, where thousands emigrated by boat to London from the Caribbean, understanding their changing position and navigating this with humor and seriousness and everything that must be brought to bear in order to survive empire in the heart of empire. Read Edwidge Danticat’s The Farming of Bones, where Haitian people in the Dominican Republic, over the course of seven days in 1937, experienced a genocide under Trujillo. In that novel, Amabelle Désir survives with compassion, having lost her lover and those around her. Read John Keene’s sweeping diasporic Counternarratives, which moves from the seventeenth century into the present, from Juan Rodrigues in the story “Mannahatta” to the speakers in the unnamed postcolonial interrogation room in the story “The Lions.” Read these works to understand how sustained, intense pressure shuts a life down, curtails its movement, makes all plans indefinite, shapes all days, yet does not frame its purpose. Read there about waiting. Read there about patience and cunning and imagination and laughter.
So many novels in Black Traditions are novels of endurance and survival through times of material and existential dread and confinement. So many recount surviving and enduring with compassion, with resolve, with knowledge, with humor and a determination to live otherwise. These texts (novels, stories) come out of, metabolize, and work in, the world of nihilistic extraction. Their imaginative field is the great catastrophe that undergirds what we call the Americas. Over a reading life I have sought out and read these works as a salve, as a balm, as a map, as a trace, as an analysis, as a hypothesis, about the coming of freedom from within what is circumscribing and possibly fatal. A world is always ending in these books. A world is about to begin in these books, or about to be forestalled; about to, but not guaranteed to, “be” in these books. And this is the sensorium they chart. The novels’ outcomes are living—when dying, of course; but living as if living.
***
The wreck is the library itself, and the salvage is the life which exceeds the wreck. Exceeds this library. Solitary Boat in Red and Blue exceeds the fragile boats, and renders the full desires they carry and hold.
So, I ask myself, what is a life alert in this sensorium and animated by books, as mine has been? What is a life making its way through this monopoly of interpretation (as Fredric Jameson calls it) that colonial narratives represent? Well, it might be a life animated but also destroyed by books—that is, animated but also destroyed by stories that override life, that overlay experience, that deny experience or quantify experience or adjust experience. What is that life? A life animated by books is something that everyone may understand, but a life destroyed by books is the more complex, contradictory, mysterious proposition. The wreck is, of course, possibly a life.
I observe, and live through, the monopoly of interpretation that relegates the art of those who live through catastrophe to spectacle or pathology, and into a symbol of the always not “we.” Not art. Not an assemblage of the materials of perception that appraise and know life and what is lived. Not a set of insights and gestures of transformation. So the risk of going forward here is the risk of being read by some in this way. When I use the autobiographical, it is as artifice. It is not an invitation to witness transparency. Where it appears, it will have been pored over, turned over, analyzed, refashioned as art, and made theoretical through those processes. The only place the autobiographical appears in my art with a small vestige of itself may be in the fictions that I write. And even then, alloyed.
This book is another kind of forensics. A forensics of how a reader is made. And, unmade. A forensics of the literary substance of which I am made—since it is possible that I am now mostly literary substance—and that I must recover from; and if not recover from, then piece together.
From Salvage, to be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux this October.
Dionne Brand is the award-winning author of twenty-three books of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. Her twelve books of poetry include Land to Light On; thirsty; Inventory; Ossuaries; The Blue Clerk: Ars Poetica in 59 Versos; and Nomenclature: New and Collected Poems. Her six works of fiction include At the Full and Change of the Moon; What We All Long For; Love Enough; and Theory. Her nonfiction work includes Bread Out of Stone and A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging.
