Gumble's Yard - Golden Reviewer > Books: 2020-booker-longlist‎ (13)

The whites are still bright, some glaring and some almost blue, the white of widows, of mourners and renunciants, holy men and women, monks and nuns, the white of those who no longer belong in the world, who have already put one foot on another plane. The white of the guru and his followers. Maybe Ma saw this white cotton as the means to her truth, a blank slate where she could remake herself and find the path to freedom. For me it was something different, a shroud that covered us like the living dead, a white too stark ever to be acceptable in polite society. A white that marked us as outsiders. To my mother this was the colour of her community, but I knew better: the white clothes were the ones that separated us from our family, our friends and everyone else, that made my life in them a kind of prison.

Talking has never been easy. Neither has listening. There was a breakdown somewhere about what we were to one another, as though one of us were not holding up her part of the bargain, her side of the bridge. Maybe the problem is that we are standing on the same side, looking out into the emptiness. Maybe we were hungry for the same things, the sum of us only doubled that feeling. And maybe this is it, the hole in the heart of it, a deformity from which we can never recover.

If our conversations were itineraries, they would show us always returning to this vacant cul-de-sac, one we cannot escape from.

He says my mother and I have always shared some version of our objective reality. Without me, her ties to that may have loosened, sad, but true – yet on the other hand, as a caregiver, the distance might be good for me. It is difficult when everything starts to vanish. He says memory is a work in progress. It’s always being reconstructed.

‘Reality is something that is co-authored,’ the woman says. ‘It makes sense that you would begin to find this disturbing. When someone says that something is not what you think of it as, it can cause slight tremors in the brain, variations in brain activity, and subconscious doubts begin to emerge. Why do you think people experience spiritual awakenings? It’s because the people around us are engaged. The frenzy is a charge that’s contagious.’ ‘Are you saying my mother is contagious?’ ‘No, I’m not. Though maybe I am, in a sense. We actively make memories, you know. And we make them together. We remake memories, too, in the image of what other people remember.’ ‘The doctor says my mother has become unreliable.’ ‘We are all unreliable. The past seems to have a vigour that the present does not.’

This contempt still draws up the moment I feel uncomfortable. I disown so I can never be disowned.

And even now, when I am without her, when I want to be without her, when I know her presence is the source of my unhappiness – that learned longing still rises, that craving for soft, white cotton that has frayed at the edge.

. walking ahead of the Community, Agnes felt proud to be leading, just another kind of creature on a mass migration … finding water the way all creatures must. It wasn’t that she didn’t always feel this way each day they’d been out here. .... But there was something about the scope of what she could see now. . ….. Looking across the vast plain and seeing all the animals moving as one, in one direction, with the same needs, she felt a part of the place in a way she hadn’t before. She’d never realized she felt apart from it. But she guessed she had in some unknowable way. It was their reliance on the water spigots. On the maps. On the fact that they checked in with Rangers. They were never fully living on their own. Not like these animals were every day. Not until now. And she was leading. ….. When they left the City, her mother hadn’t called it a trip, or an adventure, or something temporary. She had said, “This is our new home.” … She felt like that small girl again, listless and coughing, turning a handkerchief red …. But that was no longer her. She was no longer that small girl, curiously watching from a distance, from behind her mother or behind Glen. …. She was a part of it all. It all depended on her.

When she becomes obstinate. When she becomes different from me. What will we share if we can’t share this? Will we be nothing but strangers? I want to grab her in these moments, squeeze her too hard, growl into her hair, never let her go. But she always wriggles free, unfazed, or maybe with a small eye roll. She knows she has everything I can give her. I think of my mother in these moments. She was someone who never did what I expected her to. When she looked at me, I didn’t understand what her look meant. She looked at me sharp-eyed, her mouth twisting and pained. As though looking at me hurt her sometimes. I didn’t understand it until I had the chance to care for this little Fern and I looked at her and saw all that came before and all that would come after and all its potential awfulness and certain beauty and it was too much for me to bear. I looked away, scared, disgusted, overcome with love, on the verge of crying and laughing, and finally, finally, finally I began to know my mother.

It’s mad how you can live in a city and never see any of this. Or you just see faint smudges of it every now and again around the edges of your exi

It’s mad how you can live in a city and never see any of this. Or you just see faint smudges of it every now and again around the edges of your existence but even then you don’t fully believe in it, because even though we live in the same city, where I’m from and where you’re from could be two totally separate worlds. Like say you hear about a shooting on a street you walk down every day on your way to work; it’s a shocking one-off occasion, a rarity, something to talk about, and every single violent incident that you hear of or read about becomes a one-off, or at least a surprise or a shock. But to others these incidents are just the punctuation of their reality.

The next day is Monday so I have to go uni for a lecture and two seminars. Mazey and Gotti are still ko’d when I leave. When I get on campus, I buck Capo and we talk about how that Daniel yout got duppied and then later I’m in a seminar with people who know nothing about South Killy, nothing about their neighbours getting murdered and all that madness, and the class is talking about The Birth of Tragedy. Butterfly knife in my pocket. All I wanna talk about is how a man got slumped in the middle of a rave and how his killers are probably gonna get away with it, as if talking about it here, in uni, in the classroom, might make it normal, because since I touched uni, being around everyone catching jokes and studying and whatever has made me start to doubt that it’s normal. But in the end I don’t say anything because really and truly it feels abnormal that no one at uni talks about things like that when it’s going on in other blocks, in other ends like Pecknarm and Bricky and Hackney, and I barely take part in the seminar which is unusual for me, but all I wanna do is go back to SK and jam with the mandem. In the last ten minutes I snap back into the discussion – hand up – yes Gabriel? and I start breaking down the concept of the Dionysian and the Apolline, art as a beautiful end product that hides the dark and disturbing origins of its inspiration.Our seminar leader Dr Jerry Brotton says that’s good that’s good, says did everyone write down what Gabriel said? I say if anyone wants private tuition come holla at me. Everyone laughs and one girl says Sara would like some private tuition with you and the Iranian girl sitting next to her blushes deep pink burn and holds her book up in front of her face..

I’ve been getting this .. from white people for as long as I’ve been on the roads; I must be mixed race, I must be half black, feds saying are you half Jamaican? Mocking the way that I chat whenever I get arrested. All just a reflection of their instinctive prejudice towards anything in which they don’t recognise themselves, their way of doing, being, thinking.

Always time to kill. Nothingness is long. Turns the day long. Makes it drip, but as it drips down, it doesn’t separate from its source, like honey or golden syrup, a long sticky string, and you’re waiting for the thinnest part of the drip to finally break and separate so the drop can hit the floor. But it doesn’t.

I put the paper down and look around the carriage thinking how mad it is that although we’re all human beings sharing the same space, we know nothing about each other and we never will. We’re just bodies, just muscle and blood, same way the blocks are just concrete and windows, and yet what we can’t see is all the life, all the things that are going on, within. And when we look at another human whose life is unconnected to our own, we sense nothing of the soul inside them at all. Like these people sitting next to me; they’ll never know how I used to eat people, shank people, do all this craziness, how I love listening to trap music and Chopin piano waltzes and I shot coke and write love letters to this girl I met calling her my whirlwind. For a moment I catch myself wishing I could put on the bally and gloves and get the strap and go and do some eats and feel my heart between my teeth beating so hard that I have to bite into it so I can swallow. But there’s no one to do it with now and I force the feeling back down like when you’re on the verge of throwing up, but with all your body focused into the strain of the effort, you manage to force the vomit down, while no one notices.

When you were young and in fighting spirit, growing mealie cobs in the family field and selling them to raise money for your school fees, you were not this person that you have become. When and how did it happen? When you were amongst the brightest, in spite of running kilometres to school and studying beside a sooty candle? No, it couldn’t have been then either. Nor was it in the days that followed at middle school at your uncle’s mission, where you remained focused on a better life and so continued to excel. This leaves only your secondary school, the Young Ladies’ College of the Sacred Heart. It must have been there that your metamorphosis took place. Yet how awful it is to admit that closeness to white people at the convent had ruined your heart, had caused your womb, from which you reproduced yourself before you gave birth to anything else, to shrink between your hip bones.

I extrapolated that question to living bodies. Basically I asked the question whether, if we could mourn the circumstance of certain living bodies we might not create a better world. At the same time those living bodies also need to mourn themselves in order to begin to heal and move forward …my observation has been that women often find it difficult to mourn themselves and their circumstances. In Zimbabwe today a lot of women think they are born to put up with all sorts of abuse, beginning in the families they are born into and equally in the families they marry into. It is the idea that society foists on women that suffering is a woman’s lot. …. Such women do not know how to mourn their circumstances. It’s a question of being allowed to grieve for yourself. One has to see oneself as worthy to be able to grieve about the negative things that happen to one. Grieving and mourning are active. You feel and you wade through the feelings. With depression one does not wade through but more or less drowns. Grieving and mourning, because they are active, pull one through, in spite of being terribly difficult. This, I think, is true whether one is grieving or mourning for oneself, or for someone else. I think that many Zimbabweans have not begun to mourn their situation actively yet. They are still denying it so as not to feel the pain.

I wrote it in the second person because that was the only way I could access the subject matter in a way that I felt made sense. I just didn’t have the heart to use the first person. I needed distance and I imagined the reader would to. On the other hand, I didn’t want to jump into the third person when the other two books were in the first. I also thought that might be too much distance. So I tried it out in the second and I liked the effect.

You drop your gaze but do not walk off because on the one hand you are hemmed in by the crowd. On the other, if you return to solitude, you will fall back inside yourself where there is no place to hide.

Truly I could not imagine that I should have looked around me I another way, and analysed what was taking place from my own perspective. For do that one requires a point of view, but it is hard to stand upon the foundations you re born with in order to look forward, when that support is bombarded by all that is around until what remains firm and upright is hidden beneath rubble and ruins.

You have to wonder what goes through the mind of such a man. Such a narrow and limited man; so closed off. He has nothing to look forward to, nothi

You have to wonder what goes through the mind of such a man. Such a narrow and limited man; so closed off. He has nothing to look forward to, nothing to daydream about.

Sometimes when he was dealing with people, he felt like he was operating one of those claw machines on a boardwalk, those shovel things where you tried to scoop up a prize but the controls were too unwieldy and you worked at too great a remove.

You have to wonder what went through the mind of the judges. Such a narrow and limited novel; so closed off. It gave me nothing to look forward to, nothing to daydream about.

Better to imagine his friends happy than to see their unhappiness up close. And unhappy they certainly would be – that has been the lesson this weekend, hasn’t it? The misery of other people, the persistence of unhappiness, is perhaps all that connects them. Only the prospect of greater unhappiness keeps them within the circumscribed world of graduate school.

And there is the other thing – the shadow pain, he calls it, because he cannot say its real name. Because to say its real name would be to cause trouble, to make waves. To draw attention to it, as though it weren’t in everything already….. The most unfair part of it, Wallace thinks, is that when you tell white people that something is racist, they hold it up to the light and try to discern if you are telling the truth. As if they can tell by the grain if something is racist or not, and they always trust their own judgement. It’s unfair because white people have a vested interest in underestimating racism, its amount, its intensity, its shape, its effects. They are the fox in the henhouse.

There will always be this moment. There will always be good white people who love him and want the best for him but who are more afraid of other white people than of letting him down. It is easier for them to let it happen and to triage the wound later than to introduce an element of the unknown into the situation. No matter how good they are, no matter how loving, they will always be complicit, a danger, a wound waiting to happen.

[this] is why he does not trust memory. Memory sifts. Memory lifts. Memory makes due with what it is given. Memory is not about facts. Memory is an inconsistent measurement of the pain in one’s life.

He smiled because he was not sure how to meet someone’s sympathy for him. It always seemed to him that when people were sad for you, they were sad for themselves, as if your misfortune were just an excuse for them to feel what it was they wanted to feel. Sympathy was a kind of ventriloquism .... ‘Thank you,’ he said, because what else did one say when caught in the confines of someone else’s sympathy?

Cruelty, Wallace thinks, is really just the conduit of pain. It conveys pain from one place to another – from the place of highest concentration to the place of lowest concentration, in the same way heat flows. It is a delivery system, as in the way that certain viruses convey illness, disease, irreparable harm. They’re all infected with pain, hurting each other.

… pressure, the awful pressure of having to hold on to time for oneself. This is perhaps why people get together in the first place. The sharing of time. The sharing of the responsibility of anchoring oneself in the world. Life is less terrible when you can just rest for a moment, put everything down and wait without having to worry about being washed away. People take each other’s hands and they hold on as tight as they can, they hold on to each other and to themselves, and when they let go, they can because they know that the other person will not.

“She does not want to remember but she is here and memory is gathering bones”

“She does not want to remember but she is here and memory is gathering bones”

“Tell them Hirut, we were the Shadow King. We were those who stepped into a country left dark by an invading plague and gave new hope to Ethiopia’s people”

Her body hung off the side of the bed, and by the odd angle Shuggie could tell the drink had spun her all night like a Catherine wheel. He turned her head to the side to stop her choking on her rising boak. Then he placed the mop bucket near the bed and gently unzipped the back of her cream dress and loosened the clasp on her bra. He would have taken off her shoes, but she wasn’t wearing any, and her legs were white and stark-looking without the usual black stockings. There were new bruises on her pale thighs. Shuggie arranged three tea mugs: one with tap water to dry the cracks in her throat, one with milk to line her sour stomach, and the third with a mixture of the flat leftovers of Special Brew and stout that he had gathered from around the house and frothed together with a fork. He knew this was the one she would reach for first, the one that would stop the crying in her bones.

I grew up in a house without books, which was not unusual for the time or the place. The working men who surrounded me bent steel for a living, they built fine ships, or traveled miles into the earth to hack away at coalfaces. We sons took after our fathers. We kicked things—first it was footballs, then it was each other—and as we grew, we had little time for books. We sought apprenticeships or we learned trades. We were proud, we were useful.

But the ruling conservative government cared nothing for the honest, working poor. They set about privatizing most manufacturing, removing all support for nationalized labor. In doing so Margaret Thatcher decimated the working man. Her policies swept all heavy industry from the west coast of Scotland in the span of a single generation and did it with all the disregard of a government separated by distance and several social classes. Steel, ships, coal, all gone. The men had nowhere to turn and they became chronically unemployed. They were emasculated and sent by a woman (no less) to rot away their lives into rented settees.

The Glasgow I grew up in was rife with drink, drugs, and gang violence. Margaret Thatcher and her remote Tory government closed all the heavy industry in the city within a generation; ships, steel, coal—all gone. This had a terrible knock-on effect on all employment, and working families had nowhere to turn; fathers and sons were all put out of work, with no hope, and it ushered in some of the worst addiction and health crises in western Europe ..

”Ah just feel angry for the bad things they say about her. You should fight for her.”
“I do fight for her!” he said. “Mostly with herself, but it’s still a fight.”

“Can you make a new England? You can write a new story. You can write new texts and destroy the old ones, set the torn leaves of Duns Scotus sailing about the quadrangles, and place the gospels in every church. You can write on England, but what was written before keeps showing through…”

“I earnestly believe that only men's faces and the outwards aspect of things change, while the same things reoccur again and again. Thus we are witnessing events that happened earlier. But the alteration in names and outward aspects is such that only the most learned are able to recognise them. That is why history is a useful and profitable discipline, because it shows you and allows you to recognise what you've never seen and experienced"

Once upon a time …. Rami Elhanan, a Jew, a graphic artist … father too of the late Smadar, travelled on his motorbike from the suburbs of Jerusalem to the Cremesian monastry in the mainly Christian town of Beit Jala, near Bethlehem, to meet with Bassam Aramin, a Palestinian, a Muslim . father too of the late Abir, ten years old, shot dead by an unnamed Israeli border guard in East Jerusalem, almost a decade after Rami’s daughter Smadar, two weeks away from fourteen, was killed in the western part of the city by three Palestinian suicide bombers ..

Memory. Trauma. The rhyme of history and oppression. The generational shifts, The lives poisoned with narrowness. What it might mean to understand the history of another. It struck him early on that people were afraid of the enemy because they were terrified that their lives might get diluted, that they might lose themselves in the tangle of knowing each other.

Amicable numbers are two different numbers related in the sense that when you add all their proper divisors together – not including the original number itself – the sums of their divisors equal each other …. As if those different things of which they are compromised can somehow recognize each other.

Borges said to his listeners that One Thousand and One Nights could be compared to the creation of a cathedral or a beautiful mosque … Their stories had been gathered at different times, in myriad places …and from different sources …[they] existed on their own at first .. and were then joined together, strengthening one another, an endless cathedral, a widening mosque, a random everywhere

Eight hundred years of history here. Thirty-five years of oppression there. A treaty here, a massacre there, a siege elsewhere. What happened in ’68. What supermarket was torched in ’74. What happened last week on the Shankill Road. The bombings in Birmingham. The shootings in Gibraltar. The links with Libya. The Battle of the Boyne. The march of Cromwell.

Now she sat in Philadelphia, participating in a losing game called “Which One of Us is Actually More Racist”

Because this land they live in is a land of missing things. A land stripped of its gold, its rivers, its buffalo, its Indians, its tigers, its jackals, its birds and its green and its living. To move through this land and believe Ba’s tales is to see each hill as a burial mound with its own crown of bones. Who could believe that and survive? Who could believe that and keep from looking, as Ba and Sam do, always toward the past?

And so Lucy fears that unwritten history. Easier to dismiss all Ba’s tales as tall ones—because believe, and where does it end? If she believes that tigers live, then does she believe that Indians are hunted and dying? If she believes in fish the size of men, does she believe in men who string up others like linefuls of catch? Easier to avoid that history, unwritten as it is except in the soughing of dry grass, in the marks of lost trails, in the rumors from the mouths of bored men and mean girls, in the cracked patterns of buffalo bone. Easier by far to read the history that Teacher Leigh teaches, those names and dates orderly as bricks, stacked to build a civilization.

Still. Lucy never quite escapes that other. The wild one. It prowls the edges of her vision, an animal just beyond the campfire’s glow. That history speaks not in words but in roar and beat and blood. That history made Lucy as the lake made gold. Made Sam’s wildness, and Ba’s limp, and made the yearning in Ma’s voice when she speaks of the ocean. But to stare down that history makes Lucy dizzy, as if she peers from the wrong end of a spyglass to see Ba and Ma smaller than her, Ba and Ma with bas and mas of their own, across an ocean bigger than the vanished lake.

Generations of authors have molded the mythology of the American West for their own purposes. I grew up on John Steinbeck’s East of Eden, Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House, Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove. Awed, I believed the settings of those books to be gritty, factual, real. As an adult I’ve learned how much of the West in those stories is fiction or exaggeration – including their overwhelming whiteness. I don’t appreciate those books any less. Rather, I take from them the lesson that I, too, have the freedom and audacity to invent the lesson that we call history is not granite but sandstone – soft, given form by its carvers. And hasn’t that always been the way of the American West, epic and beautiful, conflicted and stolen, paradoxical and maddening, which has so captured the imagination that it is difficult to disentangle the myths from reality?

The teacher smiles. “He who writes the past writes the future too.’ Do you know who said that?” He bows. “I did. I’m a historian myself, and may require your assistance in my newest monograph.

“You may go,” the teacher says at last. “All the work we’ve done is useless now.” His voice is bitter. “You understand I’ll be removing you from the history—there’s no value in a half-finished chapter.

But Lucy liked to hear about the next territory, and the next one, even farther East. Those flat plains where water is abundant and green stretches in every direction. Where towns have shade trees and paved roads, houses of wood and glass. Where instead of wet and dry there are seasons with names like song: autumn, winter, summer, spring. Where stores carry cloth in every color, candy in every shape. Civilization holds the word civil in its heart and so Lucy imagines kids who dress nice and speak nicer, storekeepers who smile, doors held open instead of slammed, and everything—handkerchiefs, floors, words—clean. A place unimaginable in these dry, unchanging hills. A place where two girls might be wholly unremarkable. In Lucy’s fondest dream, the one she doesn’t want to wake from, she braves no dragons and tigers. Finds no gold. She sees wonders from a distance, her face unnoticed in the crowd. When she walks down the long street that leads her home, no one pays her any mind at all.

This land is not your land.

Ba taught this trick when Lucy was three or four. Playing, she’d lost sight of the wagon. The enormous lid of sky pinned her down. The grass’s ceaseless billow. She wasn’t like Sam, bold from birth, always wandering. She cried. When Ba found her hours later, he shook her. Then he told her to look up. Stand long enough under open sky in these parts, and a curious thing happens. At first the clouds meander, aimless. Then they start to turn, swirling toward you at their center. Stand long enough and it isn’t the hills that shrink—it’s you that grows. Like you could step over and reach the distant blue mountains, if you so chose. Like you were a giant and all this your land. You get lost again, you remember you belong to this place as much as anybody, Ba said. Don’t be afeared of it. Ting wo?

Ting le? Ma asked, holding her hands over Lucy’s ears. Silence for that first moment. Then the throb and whoosh of Lucy’s own blood. It’s inside you. Where you come from. The sound of the ocean.

There’s no one like us here, Ma said sadly and Ba proudly. We come from across the ocean, she said. We’re the very first, he said. Special, he said.