Like most of us, Fred D’Aguiar did not have an easy 2020. Actually, he had it worse than some. The Guyanese-born poet, who moved to the UK when he was 12 and now lives and teaches in Los Angeles, was as impacted as the rest of us by coronavirus. And as a black man in America, he was horrified by the murder of George Floyd.
That would enough to be going on with. But, on top of that, he had to deal with his own health. Because, for D’Aguiar, 2020 was his cancer year. All of these things are part of his new memoir, Year of Plagues.
Today, it’s early August 2021 and over a Zoom call I’m asking him how he is. For once it’s not out of mere politeness. “Thank you for asking,” he says from his home in LA. “When anyone sees the book, they think I’m going to be hooked up to an IV system or something: no hair and looking terrible. That’s one scenario. I’m lucky to have had a U-turn.”
D’Aguiar has come through surgery and radiation and is now living under the shadow of tests every three months. But in the circumstances, that’s a positive.
Near the end of 2019, D’Aguiar noticed that he was struggling to urinate. He eventually had it investigated only to be told he had prostate cancer. That diagnosis, and the subsequent treatment, occupied him almost completely last year. But even then, he couldn’t ignore what was happening in the world.
Year of Plagues is, he acknowledges, a “chunky book”. But then, as he explains to me, it’s dealing with a “chunky dilemma”.
It is also the work of a poet. The result is thoughtful, considered, lyrical, at times funny. As far as it could be from a misery memoir.
That’s not to say there isn’t fear and despair within. For anyone who has been on the same journey with a loved one, much of what he writes about will be familiar. The hospital visits, the waiting for test results, the physical pain, the fear, the discomfort, is never less than vivid.
But D’Aguiar embeds it all in a weave of poetry and reminiscence. He escapes into language and memory. The result is not art as therapy, he says. “It’s not a pill I can take.”
But it was, he accepts, part of his survival strategy. A distraction, a coping mechanism, an engagement with his new reality. “It was really helpful to have the slow time of thinking and consideration that writing allows,” D’Aguiar explains. “If you feel anxiety, and if you slow it down, anxiety wobbles.”
But that didn’t happen straight away. Initially, he just had to deal with the shock of the diagnosis. “It was something I did not expect,” D’Aguiar admits. “I thought it was a mistake. But all the tests said, ‘No, it’s you, and you better hurry up and do something about it’.”
The fact that he had always kept himself fit only magnified the disbelief. His was not “a body in need of attention”. Or so he thought.
“So, I felt totally betrayed by it. ‘You b******. How can you get cancer?’” He laughs. Something he does often in our conversation.
“The diagnosis was a wave that knocked me off my feet,” he continues, “and I was tumbling. And I took a while to stand up and get my breath back. I was not sleeping well, I wasn’t eating well because I was afraid. I thought, ‘I’m not ready to die. I haven’t tidied my office. The way my office is, I need 10 years’.”
The resulting treatment was invasive and difficult, but he embraced “the carpet-bombing of my body”.
It also confronted him with issues of his masculinity. He is candid in the book about his concerns that the drugs he had to take might make him grow breasts or cause his testicles to shrink.
But he finds a dark humour in the experience too. He mentions in passing an idea he had for knitting a special outfit for his testes “to demarcate them from the organs around them”.
If only you’d gone through with that, Fred, I say. He laughs. “I don’t knit, and my wife doesn’t knit. I don’t know where the image came from. It would have been very small …”
Laughter, music, poetry. They all played a part in his dealing with cancer. Near the end of the book, he talks about writing as an act of resistance to the disease.
“It was critical, that’s true,” he says now. “I knew about the power of poetry and the power of imagination. Nobody had to convince me of that.
“I was able to challenge it with language and say, ‘Come on, let’s fence, let’s dance.’ And begin to find ways to get around it and not allow it to always dictate the terms.
“The practice of a poem … let’s say a sonnet. It’s a wee little thing, 14 lines. But it opens a space. And it seems to stop the clock of distress for the time that you are in that formal endeavour.”
But sometimes you can only avoid what is happening to you and around you for so long. The death of George Floyd in police custody in May last year was unignorable.
“I was hurt by George Floyd. Everybody was. It was hurtful to see what we call a slow lynching, nine-and-a-half minutes. Unbelievable. So, it took me out of weeping into my own beard.
“When you’re hurting, people think you haven’t got room for anyone else, but actually there is always a pocket of room in the mansion of your pain to dedicate to somebody else’s. You can actually see it really clearly because of your own and you totally understand it without anything being said. Its calamity, its velocity.”
Today, it is great to see him on the other end of a Zoom call. He looks well. He can joke about the darkest of things. That doesn’t mean the shadow has lifted off him.
“I still have bouts of despair,” he admits. “When I look back, I do see a dark road. I don’t want to have cancer now because the options are very few. I’ve already had radiation. They’ve already operated.”
So yes, he says, he still has a healthy dose of fear. “I have parked in the garage somewhere with a cover on the car. I’ve forgotten exactly where the parking space is, but I know it’s there.”
As for the book, it’s a symptom of something else, it’s about a life in art and a commitment to that idea.
“I didn’t quite understand what a small piece my life is in art. It has a massive force, it has this propulsion, just as cancer can have in my life. I see art now as the counterforce to it, the thing that, with the right attention and practice, can help.
“There is something about it that is shining and positive. This is why I am grateful for the art.”
In 2021 Fred D’Aguiar is alive and writing. That’s something. Maybe that’s everything.
Year of Plagues by Fred D’Aguiar is published by Carcanet, £18.99
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