Is the seduction of hot weather enough
to explain why the first group
became colonizers much more easily
than the second?
No one saw it the way I did,
the snow falling
in fat gentle flakes.
I escaped the island
that seemed like a prison to me
and ended up encased
in a room in Montreal.
A short yellow dress slipping
through the cornfield
that dips down to the river.
I run behind my cousin.
The long summer vacation
still enchants my memory.
You can hear the song of the washerwomen
from the shack of that man
who lives off snail soup
and attends every funeral.
On my eyelids these images
burned by the sun of childhood.
Time moves at speeds so maddening
it has turned my life to a blur of colors.
That is how the polar night passes.
This sad gaiety always descends on me
at the same time.
When the car lights come on
and their beams sweep my room
and awaken my childhood terror.
I hide under the sheets.
The arrow makes
no noise in the night.
The pain visits
so suddenly
and will not depart
before dawn.
Night Train
In the train.
Time softens.
We let ourselves be lulled.
I awake with a start
when in the night we cross
a phantom train.
The livid faces
make me feel
this train is arriving from 1944.
A nightmare flash created
by fulguration (speed and light)
and my foggy brain.
We’re in the middle of the countryside.
Pale glow lighting the houses.
I picture people gathered around the TV set.
The old man eating alone in his room.
The train won’t slow down until we reach
the next city.
Brightly lit towers. Shadows stretching along the sidewalks. And to think those robust trappers who once sold animal hides to the Hudson’s Bay Company have become elegant city-dwellers drenched in perfume. The smell of eau de cologne can’t quite mask the stubborn scent of the forest — an autumnal mixture of rain, green leaves and rotten wood. The vegetable world isn’t so far away. But yesterday’s backwoodsmen have become today’s captives, glued to the small screen.
I imagine it all happened gradually. A long series of concessions led us to this new way of living. It’s the same with individuals. The crowd absorbs us one by one. Today, at age fifty-six, I answer no to everything. I’ve needed more than half a century to recover the strength of character I had at the beginning. The strength of no. You have to keep at it. Stand behind your refusal. Hardly anything deserves a yes. Three or four things in a lifetime. Otherwise, answer no without hesitation.
The main thing in Protestant America is to make sure you never appear pretentious. Individually people want to slip through the cracks of life, but collectively they think they have a legitimate claim on the world. That kind of tension is not always bearable. Toward the end they can’t stand it anymore and start spitting up all the bile they’ve kept hidden in the heart of their being. A flow of black blood. Too late they realize there were no rules. No paradise. They have sacrificed for nothing. A life wasted. And someone has to pay. Someone weaker they can wail away on with all their might. But just when they think they’ve found the energy to live, it’s the end for them.
I escape into my thoughts
before sleep catches up to me.
The surrender is so sweet.
To fall asleep in one city
and wake up in another.
A Poet Named Césaire
The train pulls into the next station. The girl beside me who was reading a Tanizaki novel gets off. A young man waits for her with a bouquet of mimosas and furtive kisses. The platform empties. The couple is still fused, mouth to mouth now. The train pulls away. The girl forgot her book on the seat. She’s already elsewhere. The book, like the train, served only to carry her to him.
I think back to my first suitcase forgotten in one of the city’s narrow dusty rooms. Luckily I was able to hold onto the only things worth saving. A letter from my mother in which she explains, sparing no detail, how to live in a country she’s never visited, and that dog-eared copy of Notebook of a Return to the Native Land by the Martinican poet Aimé Césaire. I still have both those things.
That phone call in the middle of the night. Are you Windsor Laferrière? Yes. This is the Brooklyn Hospital. . Windsor Laferrière has died. We have the same name.
They found my phone number in his pocket. The nurse who looked after him is on the line. In a soft, even voice she tells me he would come and see her when he wasn’t feeling well. Sometimes his attacks were serious. No one else but me could get close to him at those times. A very sweet man despite the anger that was so strong inside him. Your father died smiling, that’s all I can say. Lying on my back, I stare at the ceiling for a long while.
I get off in Toronto. A quick stop to see an old painter friend. We go for a drink in a bar near the gallery where he has a show. Since we’re the same age the same things happened to us about the same time. His father died at the beginning of the year; he’d had to flee the country during the same period mine did. We’re a generation of sons without fathers who were raised by women whose voices became even shriller when circumstances got too much for them. We end up drinking rum in his dark little studio. At dawn, he goes with me to the station.
I always travel with Césaire’s collection of poems. I found it dull the first time I read it, nearly forty years ago. A friend had lent it to me. Today it seems strange that I could have read it at age fifteen. I didn’t understand the devotion the book created among young people from the Antilles. I could tell it was the work of an intelligent man filled with terrible anger. I could feel his clenched jaw and imagine his eyes veiled in tears. I saw all those things, but not the poetry. The text seemed too prosaic. Too bare. Now, on this night, as I finally travel toward my father, suddenly I can feel Césaire’s shadow behind his words. I can see how he went beyond his anger to discover new territories in his adventure with language. Césaire’s striking images dance before my eyes. That all-powerful rage arises more from a desire to live in dignity than a will to denounce colonialism. The poet helps me draw the line between the pain that tears me apart and my father’s subtle smile.
There is a photo of Césaire
sitting on a bench.
The sea behind him.
In a flowing khaki jacket
that makes him look like a frail bird.
His faded smile
and his wide eyes so gentle
do not reveal the rage
that changes him, before our eyes,
into a charred tree trunk.
Manhattan in the Rain
Umbrellas of every color. The air is so warm in New York after the freezing weather in Montreal. My uncles are happy for the warmth, though a bit surprised. It’s almost like summer. Manhattan in the tropics. My Uncle Zachée maintains that nature is giving a gift to my father who hated the cold and compared it to the njustice of men. The rain arrived too late in his case.
A crowd in this big Manhattan church
for a man who lived alone
the last years of his life.
He was not forgotten.
Since he didn’t want to see anyone,