Theory

I think of Selah and Yara and Odalys now, not as hindrances, not even as transit points to myself or as the lessons of my life – but as the life itself, the theory of my life. They and I are not made of nothingness. They've gone on in their own narratives. I've gone on in mine. I must sit in the knowledge of them; we remain adjacent. They've given me, in part, material for a lifetime of theory, but I can't live in the prosthetic. They are not my arms, not my body, nor my head, not even my imagination – they escape and exceed me and I am left with me.

Theory begins with a footnote about a visit from the narrator's brother, who is horrified by his (unnamed and ungendered) sibling's living conditions. The apartment that the brother steps into, for the first time in years, is a hoarder's paradise of books and papers – some ripped or crumpled; none of which the narrator is willing to part with – and we soon learn that all of this clutter represents every thought or theory that the narrator has written down over the course of the fourteen or so years that they have been working on a PhD dissertation. Nearing forty and freshly invigorated to assemble all of this brilliance into a 700 page thesis (with 2100 pages remaining for a furtherance of their theories), the narrator begins by considering the three lovers that they have had throughout the dissertation writing process. These three women – Selah, Yara, and Odalys – represent body, mind, and spirit, and as the narrator's doctoral focus is a radical evaluation of gender and racial norms, every relationship is analysed through these lenses. There is a skewering of academia (and blame assigned to those self-proclaimed progressives who have benefited from and perpetuate the elitist patriarchal system) and a sympathetic look at a person who aspires to live in the mind but who keeps being drawn back into the world of others. Because Dionne Brand is a celebrated poet, it's her words and phrasing that most intrigued me here, and as a result, I'm going to quote her at length to give a real picture of what this book is like.

The first section is named for Selah – a woman who is the embodiment of beauty and voluptuousness, and whom the narrator loves but doesn't engage with intellectually; Selah is a nice distraction during the early and productive days of dissertation writing:

Back to the body as intelligence: the body is, after all, a living organism – with its own intention, separate from the parsed out, pored over intentions that one can say come from the mind. The mind's interpretation of the body is irrelevant. The body pursues its own needs and its own desires with fibre optic precision not even yet detailed by scientists. Selah's body, for example, had decided on cinnamon, and it has, to my way of thinking, synthesized all of the atmosphere around it to smell of cinnamon. Or let me withdraw that previous statement. Perhaps it is my body, my olfactory nerve, that decided on cinnamon at the appearance of Selah, and so it collected the smell of cinnamon around the presence of Selah. On the other hand, there might be a third theory unknown to both Selah and me that accounts for the cinnamon. Whatever the truth of this, Selah smelled like cinnamon.

The second section is for Yara – an activist artist who collects hopeless stray people, and who is always challenging the narrator to join her revolutions:

I couldn't bind Yara to the normative, to an uncritical monogamy, a monogamy unexamined and taken for granted. And I couldn't deny Yara the full and true expression of her sexuality, especially on the basis of an uncritical acceptance of the norm. The normative was a doldrum we had all been lured into by the forces of capital, et cetera. This is what I knew and felt, even as I also felt a certain sting of jealousy and loss whenever one of those people showed up with Yara. In my analysis this “sting” was a vestigial emotion that probably predated capital, or perhaps had its root in capital, but was nevertheless what remained of different social relations and circumstances. My theory of myself is that any idea I can understand – that is, if it can be explained along ethical and moral lines as essentially unharmful, and as contributing to my intellectual life, my growth as a human being – I will embrace. And who was I, my theory theorized, who was I to claim hegemony over Yara's body? I've never wanted control of anyone, least of all their body. And least of all Yara's. Yara. I wanted Yara to have all she wanted.

The third section is for Odalys – a Colombian woman who believes in all manner of magic, spells, and spiritual ritual. Although they wouldn't seem to have much in common, the narrator and Odalys are satisfied seeing each other once a week:

Let me say from the outset I loved Odalys' body the way one loves a theory. Not, say, the theory of relativity – that would be too simple and unitary, I suggest. And besides, I know nothing of science. A theory such as the theory of language is more the theory that comes to mind. How it is acquired and why certain sounds occur in certain regions; the uses of the tongue, et cetera. A theory such as one suggested by Chomsky's works might best describe my fascination. To be more precise, it wasn't Odalys' body but the sense of Odalys' body, like a universal weight in the world. Perhaps, perhaps it was the weight of her presence, the “mental grammar”. Sometimes I think I created Odalys out of what I needed, and what I needed was a balancing weight to my theories – some presence that would deny or counter those theories through embodiment.

The final section is called Teoria/Theory (“Teoria” being Odalys' nickname for the narrator, meaning “Theorist”), and it goes further into the progression of the narrator's thinking over the years, pushback they have encountered from the PhD committee (obviously due to their inability to recognise groundbreaking genius), and more information about that visit from the brother (which provides nice background about the siblings' homelife and how that might have led to here). Throughout, the narrator is constantly quoting and referencing sources that I'm unfamiliar with: at one point they recall how they used to walk along with Selah and think-out-loud about what they were reading, and when they'd get back home and ask Selah for the details so they could capture them on paper, Selah would reply, “You were talking about some guy.” And that's what a lot of this felt like; the narrator quoting some guy instead of truly self-reflecting – and I'm sure that's the point. There's the nice irony of the narrator relying on the scholarship of (mostly) dead white men to upend gender and racial norms in their work and the slow revelation of a lonely life lived in self-imposed exile in an ivory tower; the piles of books and papers serving as refuge and defense against the unknowable world. It can be a slog to read through the scholarly passages – attributed to other philosophers and the narrator – but that's the life and the point, I suppose; it's a relief to me that the narrator's PhD advisor couldn't untangle their theories either (even if there is truth here):

Our gaze should light now on the male body, its location and its excesses. Theory has failed so far to witness the spectacle of the masculine. Theory has merely assumed the spectacle of the masculine as a priori. Theory has fallen down in rooting out this ubiquitous being that commands everything but appears nowhere, is fed and nurtured on a corpse, and requires more and more feeding. So the female body is placed on the pyre every day, roasted and dressed to enliven this necrophiliac. Who is at the center of this body, how is it constituted, how is it hidden from observation; who enforces this regimen of necrogenesis? This is my line of inquiry. Simply, who is the being that feeds off the corpse of femininity?

Theory is probably a work of genius, but one that I found slippery to get into. While I really liked the disconnects between things that the narrator writes and the things that the reader can see are otherwise in the relationships with the three women, the idiosyncratic writing style (while admittedly revelatory of the character) kept me at an emotional distance. Even so, I found sadness here; how sad is it that someone who thinks so much can know so little? I may not have exactly loved this read, but I can't give it fewer than four stars.