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“You know depression can show up as anger.” Depression can show up as anger. America has bamboozled us all. We are all defining our worlds with words from America.
From outside, America makes more sense. They want your life to match their soft half-baked theories and when it doesn’t, they burst out with their provincial certainty.
Let’s be civil indeed, as if their quiet evil isn’t the real incivility. The incivility of quiet evil.
They don’t know how to love, these pious people, and they don’t know love. Even the way they help each other is so cheerless and earnest.
But they can’t see because their hearts lack eyes. Their hearts are blind. They are so dead to human foibles, these Americans of the pious class. And they don’t laugh. I mean actual laughter, that sound nature made to lighten our hearts and calm our blood pressure.
She was a famous academic feminist but she didn’t like women. She liked only the idea of women.
Her followers loved her for her bitterness, and even if she ever wanted to let joy in, she couldn’t because she would lose the applause. And anyway it would have to be joy as resistance. Or joy as a subversive anti-patriarchy project. Never just joy. As joy.
In bed, I faked orgasms, but happily.
much of our lives could be explained by drawing simple lines; we inherit our parents’ scars more often than we know.
“I want to share everything with you.” Now I felt ungracious. Was this not what women wanted, a man who did not build walls? And yet I did not want to hear another word.
In the final days of lockdown, I lay in bed thinking of all the things I left unsaid throughout the years, and all my futures that never were. Why do we remember what we remember? Which reels from our past assert their vivid selves and which remain dim, just out of reach?
“Toilet! Modern toilet!” the tour guide barked, and I jumped. “You think you invented the toilet? We did in Africa!” From mumbling to ferocious rage in seconds and he didn’t care about our shock. “We invented the toilet in Africa!” he repeated, and turned to me, his African sister, with a look that said, “These people.”
I understood that his anger was for her question and for a thousand other sneers. How long had he led tours in which sun-flushed foreigners wearing linen and sandals challenged what he said?
“You’re allowed to be victim and something else, not just victim. If you can take some responsibility, if you can say, ‘Okay, he was cruel but I allowed him to be cruel,’ then you can also say, ‘Next time I will not allow a man to be cruel.’ ”
“Why are the dirtiest parts real? The people in grungy places live there because they have no choice, not because they want to be real. They would leave if they could.”
“I mentally prepare myself for hostility in small places, but sometimes it’s in the larger cities that you feel Blackness as this heavy thing that you have to rise above. Moscow was like that. Just not a good feeling.”
We were wary and masked; we were beaten down, defeated by a changed world.
“I know. I found this really good online therapy site. But you wouldn’t need that, would you, Madam Milk Butter, because normal people spent lockdown suffering anxiety while you were busy looking up your exes and reviewing your body count.” “My dream count,” I said.
The living room sat half in shadow, the windows ungenerous with light, and Kadi was in the shadowy corner, on an armchair, and she was gripping one arm of the chair.
Author’s Note Novels are never really about what they are about. At least for this writer. Dream Count is, yes, about the interlinked desires of four women, but, in a deeply personal way not obvious, at least not immediately so, to the reader, it is really about my mother. About losing my mother. A grief still stubbornly in infancy, its so-called stages not so much begun as utterly irrelevant, its contours intact and untouched—the confusion and disbelief, the myriad regrets.
The point of art is to look at our world and be moved by it, and then to engage in a series of attempts at clearly seeing that world, interpreting it, questioning it. In all these forms of engagement, a kind of purity of purpose must prevail. It cannot be a gimmick, it must at some level be true. Only then can we reach reflection, illumination, and finally, hopefully, epiphany.
There is grandeur to our humanity, but to be human day to day is not, and should not be, an endless procession of virtue. A victim need not be perfect to be deserving of justice.
