for Gilberte O’Sullivan, in memoriam
Every time I read Wide Sargasso Sea, I learn more about sadness, horror, history, writing, people, civilization, man and woman relations, race, joy, freedom, the author herself, power, corruption, hate, love, hate again, terrorism, paranoia, mystery, lies, revenge, hate, again and again, cruelty, torture, jealousy, insanity, beauty of humanity, beauty of sea, beauty of blue, beauty of woman, beauty of land, beauty of trees, beauty of being in a green night—sacred beauty of green and blue and black—beauty of prose, of painting, colour, life, music. I see, too, in the prose colours of sunlight and blood, of red wine and bruises. I learn so much, I weep; I choke up talking about the book, and I must cough to hide my feelings from the students. I make a bad joke, something about those crazy white Creoles of the Caribbean. Look! I say: One of them stands before you! He is your teacher! We laugh. But we can only escape history for a few seconds, perhaps a minute, if we are lucky.
Reading Wide Sargasso Sea, I save myself, and each time this happens I learn about what the most important of the arts—literature—can do. It saves me. It has saved me. It will continue to save me. Literature is the only true salvation. It holds the history of humanity to account.
We need better readers.
I say all of this to my students, all young women. Read, I say. Save the world.
They do not complain. It will be enough if they save themselves.
People who read can do anything, I say. Some readers can even save the world.
Then there is the dream, a few days after that class. Alone at night in my big apartment in the desert, I dream of Jean Rhys sitting in an elegant rocking chair on the verandah at Granbois estate. She rocks back a little bit, and forward a little bit, hardly a sound in the bluest hour of the late blue afternoon. Her cotton dress is long and white, cool, and she is at ease, her face expectant of something, or someone. And here she is, Christophine, tall and straight as a golden sunbeam in the forest; she, too, is in white, long and flowing, her head tied with a cloth of red and black. Her arms and neck are bare, the colour of dark rum and dark honey. She has an ornate silver tray with two cups of bull’s blood coffee, and she gives one to Jean Rhys. She leans the silver tray against the railings of the verandah’s banister. Together they sip, looking at each other; they hold hands, they stroke one another’s necks, smiling, sipping the coffee. I can taste it: hot, sweet, and black.
Then something strange and unexpected: Christophine puts her coffee on top of the banister, where it balances miraculously, she takes the silver tray in her strong hands and hefts it, and with a powerful twist of her upper body and arm, her bare shoulder tensing and her white dress dancing briefly, the tray leaves her flicking right hand that shapes into the adieu the hand can give, the sign of farewell, the greeting for eternity. The tray slices and cuts through the green leaves of the island’s forest, sounding like the hiss and crackle of fire.
Then something stranger and miraculous and sad promises to happen, if. In the dream I know that what may happen will change everything, the world will change so much that even human imagination will cease to be as it is. There is a dangerous promise of even the stars going out, of no more stars bursting into existence. A monster will eat us all, with a mouth so vast that mountains will disappear, all the mountains of the world. Then the monster will cough their dust against the stars.
Jean Rhys and Christophine wait, still cool, still elegant, and quiet. They look out over the verandah at the trees, the sloping hills and the greenest mountains, to the sea, its blue the sweetest purest hope any human heart could wish for.
The women gaze into eternity. They yawn once or twice.
Then: “They coming, Mistress,” says Christophine. “Don’t fret. Of course, the men will arrive first. That is the order.”
Jean Rhys smiles, her eyes laughing. She lifts the obeah woman’s hand high, squeezes it, and brings it to her lips.