Christine Finn

            On Thursday morning after song practice I worked a bit on inserting some of my research information into my essay. 

            I got sleepy at 9:30 and took a siesta but only slept for half an hour. I stayed in bed another thirty minutes and then got ready to go to the supermarket. 

            At Freshco the red grapes were cheap but mostly soft. I squeezed the contents of several bags before I found four that were relatively firm. I got a half pint of blueberries, a pack of chicken drumsticks, two kinds of old cheddar, two containers of yogourt, a container of sour cream and a pack of toilet paper. 

            Cheryl was working the express checkout. I hadn’t seen her for a long time and wondered if she'd been off but then I remembered that it was still morning and I’m usually there in the afternoon and so this was probably her regular shift. She shook her head at the way the grapes hike up the bill. They were technically cheap but grapes are heavy. 

            On my way up the stairs to my place Benji was on the way out. I told him he couldn’t leave because covid is outside.

            I had chips, salsa and sour cream for lunch.

            I took a siesta at 14:00 but only slept for about ten minutes. 

            I got up before half an hour was up and went back to work on my essay. 

            I finished in the early evening and was surprised that it was short a page. It was just over four pages while the paper was supposed to be five to seven pages long. The professor said that four pages would be fine if the essay was brilliant. I don’t have high hopes for getting a good mark from these people. I spent a couple of hours doing the citations and uploaded it around 20:15. I wrote the kind of essay I wanted and said as much as there was to say, and I’m glad it’s over. 

            Here it is: 

            Let go of the time we so often lost and the joy it cost to keep asking why – Jacques Brel 

            How Nina Simone Links Despair to Hope in David Chariandy's Brother 

            Two songs sung by Nina Simone are used in the second half of David Chariandy's Brother to address the losses with which the main characters have not yet come to terms. “Feeling Good,” an air of hope; and “Ne me quitte pas,” a hymn to loss, are played to re-establish connection with promise and with the deprivations that caused it to be discarded. These missed experiences come from abandonment by one family member and the death of others. It is through Nina Simone's voice linking these musical pieces that loss and hope are shown to be vitally intertwined. 

            First “Feeling Good" as sung by Nina Simone is established as the theme playing behind a memory of togetherness so distant it can barely be trusted as having been real (Chariandy 84); then it returns years later, altered and modernized to better serve its purpose of healing (Chariandy 90). Her version of “Ne me quitte pas" arrives as two characters use it to vicariously deal with grief through her own coping mechanism of song (Chariandy 174). We are reminded by the author that Nina Simone’s voice is one of the vital keys to this story and then explore how her soulful deliveries deepen the meaning of these songs (Chariandy). It is Simone’s distribution of her self through “Ne me quitte pas” that inspires Samuel to share the song with Francis and Michael (Chariandy 26). It is Ruth’s organic memory of the most important words of "Feeling Good" that heralds her recovery (Chariandy 176). But in the end it is only when the contralto of grief has been listened to that optimism is fully regained.

            “Feeling Good” serves as the soundtrack for Michael the narrator’s earliest and only recollection of his family being together. The happy melody is not named but the "brassy horns" and the joyful dancing that its rhythm and beat demand fit the description of the instrumental parts of Nina Simone’s recording (Nina Simone). Moving in unison to the song are Michael’s parents as the sons are lifted into their father’s arms and spun around to the music. Not only is it Michael’s only memory of his father but it is also his solitary recall of his mother dancing (Chariandy 84). This ecstatic moment establishes the power of song in the novel to fix the highest hope of paternal connection. It also illustrates the gaping absence of that parent in a life that only carries this one memory of a complete family. 

            The song returns years later as a medicinal balm to sooth the shared loss lingering a decade after the death of Francis. When his mother and friend listen and beam together it is the first mention of Ruth smiling since the death of her son (Chariandy 90). Later the tune is identified to be “Feeling Good” as sung by the “lonely voice” of Nina Simone, remixed so that it is “forever looping back (Chariandy 97).” Nina Simone’s blue intonement of that upbeat number is crucial to this moment of healing. It must be continuously repeated to remind the mourning listeners that the singer has felt the same sense of deprivation many times over. It is Simone’s sad delivery that renders the optimism of the lyrics more powerful. Hope must forever loop back to loss. 

            The sheer desperation of abandonment is perhaps no more deeply expressed than in Jacques Brel’s classic chanson “Ne me quitte pas.” When Nina Simone first heard it she did not understanding the words but each time Brel sang "ne me quitte pas" she was overwhelmed with tears (Hirsche 281-283)(Jacques Brel). The lyrics depict someone begging their lover not to quit the relationship, but in Brother the refrain of “ne me quitte pas," is a response to the aftermath of close familial severances, such as the abnegation of parental responsibility by a father and the death of a son and brother. Like “Feeling Good,” “Ne me quitte pas” is first only described before it is named in the story. Samuel begins singing the song to Michael in French making Francis uncomfortable (Chariandy 110). His awkwardness stems from he and Samuel having formed a secret friendship around the song (Chariandy 173). They come together to listen to the sweet sadness of Nina Simone’s tortured voice repeating a phrase that means "please don't quit me now” as if life itself depends upon her not being left behind (Chariandy 174). 

            The author of Brother tells us that it is important while reading the novel "to be able to access and feel what Nina Simone is coding into the music (Chariandy)." She brings to each number “an almost philosophical understanding of the words (Acker 61).” Using a voice layered with notes strange to any instrument, she programs arrangements between the black and white keys with longing and loss honed to a “hard-bitten tenderness” (Cohodas 4)(Acker 16). She transports the listener to a region “where hate has mated with love and given birth to anguish (Cohodas 185).” The lowness of Simone’s voice holds a direct affinity with loss. After she wrote “Mississippi Goddam” in response to the bombing that killed four black girls, her register deepened and never went back up (Light 183). Her interpretive ownership of “Feeling Good” and "Ne me quitte pas" is essential to the connection between hope and loss in the story. She has particular authority to tether these concepts because of the blackness that she shares with the main characters. 

            The mutual appreciation with Samuel of Nina Simone's lament of desertion is poignant for Francis because it comes at a time when he is planning to leave home (Chariandy 26). But it is also a private matter for him that he shares an understanding with an older man how this music softens the bitterness of broken dreams. Francis feels the absence of a father while Samuel has lost the mother of his daughter and two siblings. Sharing loss with another halves the grief and doubles the hope. 

            Near the end of the novel, Michael's mother, as she begins to emerge from grief, unconsciously quotes “Feeling Good” by Anthony Newley and Leslie Bricusse when she declares, “It is a new day (Chariandy 176)”. The actual Bricusse lyric is “It’s a new dawn , it’s a new day / It’s a new life for me” but Ruth makes the meaning organic as she is now living rather than echoing the song. 

            In the final scene of Brother one of these two songs is likely played again. We know the singer is probably Nina Simone because it is “the low voice of a woman cutting the silence”. The only other record by a female singer mentioned in the novel is “Snowbird” by Anne Murray, who is also a contralto. This is obviously a favourite record of Michael’s mother because it was played often enough to be considered a “lurking threat (Chariandy 9).” However, in this final moment when Ruth first “frowns as if in pain” but then gestures for the volume to be raised, the more appropriate candidate for a song to punctuate the novel; a song that starts off evoking loss but becomes hopeful, would be Nina Simone singing “Ne me quitte pas (Chariandy 177).” 

            Brother is grounded in nostalgia for unarrested hope. After the first half of the novel establishes an atmosphere of loss, Nina Simone is introduced as a new but disembodied character, or perhaps even as a one woman Greek chorus responding from the margins. Her voice emerges in crucial moments above the story rendering "Feeling Good" as an anthemic aurora borealis near the pole of hope and “Ne me quitte pas" as an elegiac aurora australis near the pole of loss. In doing so she delineates the shape of magnetic field that connects both ends of one world. 

            

            Works cited 

Acker, Kerry. Women in the Arts: Nina Simone. pdf, Chelsea House Publications, 2004, pp 16, 61. Anthony Newley and Leslie Bricusse. “Feeling Good.” The Roar of the Greasepaint – The Smell of the 

            Crowd, Musical Comedy Productions, 1964. 

Jacques Brel. “Ne me quitte pas.” La Valse à Mille Temps, Philips, 1959. 

Chariandy, David. Brother. McLelland and Stewart, 2018. 

Chariandy, David. “David Chariandy’s Brother has a heart full of music.” Interview by Alexander 

            Varty, The Georgia Straight, 11 October 2017, https://www.straight.com/arts/979486/david-

            chariandys-brother-has-heart-full- music 

Cohodas, Nadine. Princess Noire: the Tumultuous Reign of Nina Simone. pdf, Pantheon, 2010, pp 4, 

            185. 

Hirsche, Mathilde, and Florence Noiville. Nina Simone Love Me Or Leave Me. EPUB, Tallandier, 

            Paris, 2019, pp 281-283. 

Light, Alan. What Happened Miss Simone? EPUB, Crown Archetype, New York, 2016, p 183. 

Nina Simone. “Feeling Good.” I Put A Spell On You, Philips, 1965. 

            Now I have just one essay to expand by two pages for British Literature and I’ll be free, except for having to study for my December 22 exam. I want to get the last paper done as soon as possible because I have things I need to do downtown like get my guitar fixed, return some library books and do some Christmas shopping. 

            I had a potato, a piece of chicken and gravy for dinner while watching the first episode of Quatermass and the Pit. I had initially downloaded this show when I’d gotten the first two mini series but I’d mistakenly thought that this one was from the sixties and decided not to watch it. It turns out the movie was in 1967 but this show was in 1958 and so I re-downloaded it. These stories are paced so slowly!

            It begins with a construction crew finding a very old skull where they were digging the foundation for a building. Dr Matthew Roney is a Canadian palaeontologist who is put in charge of excavating the site. He estimates the bones that he finds to be five million years old and when he and his assistant Barbara Judd put the bones together they discover an upright species of human that existed 4.5 million years earlier than previously found. Meanwhile Quatermass’s Rocket Group has been taken over by the military which plans to build atomic missile bases on the Moon to deter any attacks on Britain. Quatermass disapproves. Meanwhile something else is discovered at the Knightsbridge site. At first it looks like a pipe but it is perfectly smooth. The way the sides curve it looks like it might be an unexploded bomb. The bomb squad comes in and the man in charge trying check for something ticking inside finds that his magnetic microphone does not stick. Whatever this the nature of this object it is not made of metal. Roney calls on his old friend Quatermass for a second opinion. Quatermass learns that the five million year old bones were discovered above the object so it can’t be a WWII bomb and although he doesn't say it, his look implies that whatever this object is it must be as old or older than the bones. 

            Barbara was played by Christine Finn, who was the voice of Tin-Tin Kyrano in the Thunderbirds shows and movies. In the 1950s she had a clerical job with the BBC and she got noticed because of her involvement with the staff amateur theatre group. But other than some theatre work, work on Quatermass and the Pit and the Thunderbirds, her career didn’t go very far.