Diva at 50

Not quite frisson and yet...the realization that Alba would be middle-aged in 2007 gives me pause. No longer the jailbait siren on roller skates, muse to the reclusive eccentric Gorodish, possessed of an enviably nonchalant insouciance. Of course we are in a French movie; where else but in French films do heroines behave in ways unrecognizable to women who either don't happen to be French, or never get to be in French movies. Just what am I talking about? Jeanne Moreau in Jules et Jim. Anne Parillaud in La Femme Nikita. Charlotte Rampling in Swimming Pool (okay Charlotte Rampling isn't French, but she's lived in France so long she might as well be.) All these women — as much as little Alba — appear caught on screen, delivering actions that defy sense and logic, but somehow adhere to their characters' intrinsic sang froid and internal engine of mystery and allure.

And Alba is nothing if not alluring. When Jules (of course his name is Jules) first meets Alba, she is casually selecting music albums she has no intention of buying. Alba is no ordinary consumer, she is an accomplished thief. When the store clerk stops her and demands to go through the case in which she stashes the loot, she brazenly obliges with a portfolio of oversize nudie photographs of herself. Exiting the store, the camera follows Jules' gaze, fixating on a moving European monument in the form of Alba's mini-skirted derrière.

This moment, as much as the rest of the Jean-Jacques Beneix's film, feels excitingly modern. Insouciance in Asian form, Paris-style. For me, this was — is — the appeal of Diva, the 1981movie adapted from Delacorta's novel of the same name. Like everything else, Diva wears its drop-dead multiculturalism stylishly.

Diva toys with expectations, flirting with propriety. Of course there is the swooning love story of operatic proportions and postmodern irony. And the criminal element that speaks to the entire fallen demi-monde that everyone but the diva of the title herself inhabits. Between these worlds are Jules, the young chevalier on motorcycle, who transgresses the diva Cynthia Hawkins by capturing her voice on tape, yet somehow retains an air of innocence and adulation. On the other, there is Gorodish, the recluse who dreams of stopping a wave, who practices and espouses zen and the art of buttering bread, who contrives to thwart the machinations of the criminal elements that power the plot with a cool dispatch James Bond would kill for.

As a movie, it's easy to watch Diva for all its surface charms: the stylish saturated colours, the casual cynicism of the characters (hiding out from hit men, Jules takes refuge with a friend whose cat is called Ayatollah), the lyricism of the wordless scenes between Cynthia and Jules walking through Paris in the rain, scored to an insiduously melancholy scale reminiscent of Satie.

The romance at the heart of Diva — like Gorodish's slightly unsavory relationship with Alba — is tarnished, impure. Motivated by worship of the goddess he imagines Cynthia to be, Jules nevertheless violates his beloved in the most unforgivable way: he captures her voice, thereby commodifying what was once unique and ephemeral. Cynthia's gift as an artist — the intimacy she cultivates in her audience through the act of performance — is ravaged by Jules' recording, which changes the meaning of Cynthia's art, displacing her living presence with its artificial representation. The subplot involving a ring of African prostitutes replays the story in a minor key. The connection becomes explicit as Jules transforms a black prostitute into his adored "Queen of the Night" by making her wear Cynthia's stolen gown.

The despoilment of beauty — the imperfection of art — is also at the heart of the scene where Gorodish lures the corrupt police chief Saporta to his undoing. "Disorder," Gorodish intones, as he repeatedly attempts to unsettle his adversary. It's his apparent embrace of the chaotic and non-linear that is the source of Gorodish's charm, and the movie's appeal: seducing us like Alba, with its disarming layers of chic, irony, and action.

In its final scene, the diva and her devotee achieve a kind of reconciliation. No longer enmeshed by the twin evils of commercialism (incarnated by a shady Taiwanese duo) or corruption (the mismatched hitmen, the "Antillais" and bespoke "Priest"), Cynthia hears herself sing for the first time as Jules plays the offending recording. At this point, the seduction is complete. Cynthia does not reject her lover, demanding the destruction of what he has risked his life to preserve. Cynthia allows herself to be captured for the moment; she shares in Jules' selfish enjoyment of her.

Whether she herself enjoys the pleasure of her own captivity or fakes enjoyment only to please Jules is not known. The curtain in a sense comes down and the movie is over. The rest is smoke and mirrors.

Emily B's stitch 'n bitch

On a machine, a basement in Vancouver — a well oiled machine — the plain surface ahead; no shine, no nap, dull matte. Under scrutiny the flaws evident, unavoidable. A seam sewn how many times and here's the bitch of it. Every one inside out gone bad, gone wrong. She sucks back a cackle.

Pieces of cloth decorate the floor, post-modern hopscotch or trip hazard, take your pick. She has not picked up pen or paper of late and this awareness needles her. She does not own the machine that's replaced them. Her timing couldn't be worse: the offspring's dance recital might as well be yesterday. She examines the sewn pieces. All of them, one after another, relentlessly, flagrantly fucked. She's of a mind to find the neglected vacuum and suck up the evident failure. There, she would proclaim to the withering offspring — facing down the corps de ballet elders of identical gorgon glare — it's the void.  Not my fault if the great chasm opens up at last and claims, thank god, only the gaudy bits.

Oh, Mom, the offspring cuts in, nobody gets your jokes. They're ...
What? Obscure? Erudite?
Kind of lame, mom. Sorry, she adds, offhand shrug notwithstanding.

Where did she come from, this junior planetarian without a stitch of irony? And why does she not own the machine that's replaced pen and paper for every writer who writes not a stitch. There are those who sew and those who knit and those who cook and those who wander naked on the moors, blasted heath and weathered stone be damned.

Oh yes, but that was long ago and far away, another galaxy. She was younger then, she had sisters, a brother, an adoring father. They lived together before television, before computers, before machines that razzed and hummed and retorted. They told each other stories. They laughed, they sang, they played and studied interchangeably. They wandered out on the moors in long, ungainly clothes, hair unspeakably neat, nothing and everything indistinguishable from the blasted heath. She put up stories sprung from weather alone, hardwired by the elements. Her sisters shrank from her thunder. You have to write about people, they insisted, you can't just thrash around with bones and mud and gables and stones. So to spite them she did. Banshee-voiced and sinewy, she wrote of souls possessed of the desolate landscape of longing, of cliffs and quarries and lightning.

So goes the fiction. She's heard it all before, endless playlist if she's feeling especially masochistic. Sometimes a tap dance, sometimes a slouch. She sings one to the offspring, who if she bothers to listen between episodes of the Simpsons, complains the notes sound flat, the tune weird not catchy like Rihanna or Britney Spears.

The longer she stares, the more she drifts. It's no use, there's no fix, no salvage, no workaround, no miracle save. She must be rip roaring Jack today, the whole nine yards and more if she's unlucky, and she is.  Get back, she hums. Get back to where you once belonged. To where I was, when I was, what I was ... Can it be so hard to find the means, the technology, the mojo, the juice, the transport, the light saber to blast the goddamn stumbling block to kingdom come?

Hold onto the material.  Don't let slip. Still time. 

The moors...what a trip. The basement of a house she merely occupies, all warmth and comfort, no draughts, contagion, bloody coughs.  No goddamn sickness unto death.

Rip the fabric.  Still time.  Stitch by stitch.

October 1970

Turn on the TV and it snows.
In 1970 it is cold everywhere. I am a beetle in a short black plastic coat over bare legs; I shudder and freeze. I have no idea of winter, how cold it can be, how long it lasts. What snow tastes like.
On TV, the news is on. A man gets out of a car, he is someone important. Journalists surround him, question him about police and guns. He smiles; turn off the sound if you don't want unpleasantness.
In 1970 my mother falls through ice. Not thick ice, not through icy water crossing a lake. She falls on a road, on a small slick of mainstreet downtown.
We are only just arrived, and I am here in this country reluctantly. Just like the year before when we left Trinidad for Miami. In Trinidad, we move three times as far as I recall: from Woodbrook, to Cascade, to St. Anns. Before that, we call Guyana, formerly British Guiana, home. (They had met in Georgetown — my mother's hometown — after my father returned from England, where he'd spent the War and the Depression. He had come back, he would later explain, to bury his first wife—a picture bride of sorts — who developed cancer not long after the birth of their only child.)
They are nomads, my parents. They are driven by fear and mistrust and the promise of riches. The story is they are moving to make a better life for me and my sisters. They are business people; it is only prudent in the circumstances.
My parents are unmistakeably Chinese but neither of them speaks the language. The way they explain it, my father’s mother was too busy single-handedly raising a large family in the bush in British Guiana to have time for language lessons. My mother’s relations are more complicated; with them Chinese seems the least of the family mysteries.
Lacking the language, we are creole Chinese. "Pure" Chinese, yet since we don't belong to the Chinese Association, we are not Chinese enough. In Trinidad in the late sixties, our peculiarity — we are visibly not mixed or creole — is provocation enough. At least, according to my parents. We are used to taunts and jeers of “chinky, chinky, chinee.” What else is new? But to my family, worse is to come. Insults, threats, beatings, attacks and rapes; these are just around the corner. To not see the writing on the wall is to recklessly tempt fate, to invite disaster. Why stay where we can never really belong? America beckons from Florida. America where everyone is safe and free and fortunes can be spun overnight. In Miami we can escape obeah, backoos and all the rest of the Black Power baccanal.
But Miami has other ideas. Havanna is rising in America, Castro be damned. Black people, then as now, occupy the outskirts, white Americans and Cuban emigrés vie for main street. My parents set up shop in Liberty City in northwest Miami. They regularly receive clothes for cleaning from locals entrusting their better laundry to the strange new Orientals behind the counter.
My little sister and I go to Catholic schools. In Trinidad, public schools are Catholic or Protestant, but in Miami these schools are private and charge fees to attend. At my high school I am the freak with the lunches of dark yellow curry, and the accent begging for a bruising. I am also younger than the other girls — there are only girls — in my class (in my school) who are shaving their legs and preening for boys. I become a target of their softball practice, I stumble over the pledge of allegiance, I cannot be more awkwardly ungaingly unlikely to succeed if I try.
So I turn to the women’s movement. I read Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem. (Not in the original, in Newsweek.) I listen to Glen Campbell and Dionne Warwick. I read Emily Brontë and Dostoyevsky and Joseph Conrad. (Not the Coles notes.)
My mother never lets us forget we are worth only half, that it takes two TT dollars to make one Yankee greenback, that everything costs double. Race riots break out in Liberty City and a torch lands on the roof of their premises. They scraped and saved and sold everything for a dream of safety and prosperity gone crazy. On TV, Neil Armstrong walks and bounces on the moon’s powdery surface. We watch coverage of the Liberty City riots from a safe distance, in black and white. There is no mention of a Chinese-run business being attacked. Already superstitious, my mother needs no additional signs to read her future.
That summer we arrive in Canada to a heatwave. Being north of the United States, we assume the whole country is cooler year round. Perhaps we are in shock. We left Trinidad to avoid violence, for “a better life,” and in Miami somehow ran right toward it. But Canada is different, it has to be, it’s a different country. If Miami was a mistake, Canada — Toronto in particular — is known for calm. There are people we know who moved from the West Indies to Canada first; my mother has relatives in Scarborough. If they were brave enough to face the cold and snow before us, then so can we.
We go to the Canadian National Exhibition and my sister and I ride the Wildmouse, the compact roller coaster that scared and thrilled us only three years earlier at Expo in Montréal. Then we were tourists like the rest of the world seeing the Fair. We hardly dreamed of leaving Trinidad and moving to Canada. Yet here we are now settling into a different city in Canada where everyone speaks English like us, where there are real seasons, not just hot and cold or wet and dry.
Who said anything about separatists?
French. Québec. FLQ. It is all new to me. I am a foreigner twice removed, living in a Dostoyevsky novel. My world is all pimples and small breasts and boys fawning over my perfect blonde classmate in her perfect angora sweater pirouetting perfectly on ice.
The first time I see Les Ordres is at least four years later. I am at university, one of the Curtis lecture halls at York U. is screening a new movie, a new kind of documentary. My-friend-the-separatist is having a screening of his short film, and he has heard a lot about the director of Les Ordres. He makes us all go. Or else we will miss not just this movie, this history too.
Crossing Bloor Street in sandals, heels and straps in December, my mother does not see the shiny slick of ice underfoot. She is busy looking ahead, trying to make out how to get by in this cold country. She is bracing herself for what’s coming at her, day in day out. She is not looking down. So when her knee gives out, she lands hard, bawling like an infant its head suddenly tender. Has she taken Bloor for Frederick Street, Toronto in winter for Trinidad in the dry season, ice for banana peel?
Front. I still don’t understand how it happened, how Canada almost went to war with itself, how my mother fell exactly. I wasn’t born here, I remind myself. This isn’t my grudge, my country, my burden to solve. And yet ... My-friend-the-separatist likes to put me on the spot. Why not? To him I am just another anglophone, no one special. He is the one with the accented English, not me. My accent is long gone. Why do I feel so deferential around him? Does he know more than me about his own history? Is he right to be angry about it? I want to shrug like the rockstar politician with the sideburns I remember seeing on TV; forget landed immigrant, I’m an alien, they're more honest in the States.
My friend enjoys my discomfort. He says I am too self-conscious. When he grows up he’s going to have lots of kids and make lots of movies. With him there is no fear of the culture shrivelling into nothingness; it will multiply and thrive in its own, his own image.
Liberation. I picture my mother in a dark, wood-panelled room in a floral nightie against white hospital sheets. Outside the window, white flurries fall and pile up on still more white: dirty beige, soft gray, white white. So many colours of white here in Canada. I learn what my mother never does, to cover my legs in trousers like a man, to protect myself, even in the heat, even back in Trinidad. My mother cannot. She can never violate the law her Popo laid down forbidding pants on girls and women, no exceptions, no excuses, no shifting ground; here be terra firma in perpetuity.
I hardly know my mother without pain; it is the one constant in our lives growing up, even now. Whatever upheaval, whatever vicissitudes, there is always my mother’s pain to rely on. Like an old boyfriend, my mother’s pain refuses to go, against her most strenuous efforts, treatment after endless treatment. As a teenager, I know better than the adults around me. I know my parents have made a horrible mistake dragging the family up to the tundra where the first thing my mother does is land in hospital. What have they done but increase the pain?
I like to think it is events in Québec, the FLQ crisis of the time, that chases my family out of Canada. There we are: refugees of our own making, fleeing crisis upon crisis; in transit, victims of circumstance, of our own design, invisible all the same.
When I watch Brault’s film— then as now —I read the subtitles. In French I pick out individual words, on rare occasions whole phrases without the mediation of translation. Those instances occur less and less. The extent of my second language acquisition remains arrested at about grade 2. While she lives in Montréal and I in Toronto, I visit my sister regularly by train. After years of dedicated study, and living in a bilingual city, my sister is fluent in french. Determined to master the language, she does: writing and defending her masters thesis in french. Where I shadow the culture through food and films, my sister takes on philosophers like Blaise Pascal. I learn to cook the french way, from Julia Child and Time-Life’s provincial and classic french cookbooks. She goes to the Sorbonne, picks up a third language, ancient greek, along the way. At university, Jean Genet glowers disdainfully from an oversize black and white poster on my residence wall, daring visitors to identify him as a writer of anything less than criminal proportions. Provocation, intellect, chic. All these are french to me. Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg in Breathless, what else could they be but French? I have yet to encounter Michel Tremblay, to grasp that french in this country is french-Canadian, that patois here is joual, that poutine rules over paté, that stop signs say arrêt, that people swear on the catholic church.
I wonder if I’ll ever bump into my old friend-the-separatist, in his old uniform: black t-shirt, beard, red lumberjack shirt. Will we recognize each other, what language will we speak — our own or each other’s? Do I feel compelled to talk about language, about Québec, about what I know now, how ignorant I was then, am still. Or do we chat about our children, spouses, work, the weather, old student days, the chances of running into each other by chance? Do we laugh, share a meal together, shuffle uncomfortably, have to go someplace else, shake hands, embrace, return each other’s glance, connect at all? Or pass each other by unobserved, spared by complicit anonymity?
It is May before my mother emerges from the Lockwood Clinic. She has spent all winter — four months — confined in a small tudor-style building of dark wood near the intersection of Bloor and Sherbourne. We visit her regularly, but scarcely, not enough. While she is gone, we gain gloves and scarves, sweaters, tights, ice skates and the knowledge of how to use them. We grow, if not to like winter, at least to live with it.
Mon pays, ce n’est pas mon pays, c’est l’hiver ...
Like my family, I am a nomad. I continue our habit of settling elsewhere, many times over. Unlike my mother, I scratch and dig for the place called home. Unlike her, I live in post-colonial intrasigence, in that treacherous whorl of displaced identities and hybridized reality, where rootlessness is, if not embraced, at least named.
Just watch me, he said.
I change channels.