Fanon

by John Edgar Wideman

  No music perhaps. Perhaps natural sound—assembly-line ratcheting of the Range Rover's engine, the thump, clatter, whine, bash of its tires on questionable tarmac. Modulate the noise. Play it like a kid playing with a TV's volume. Sound erratic and perverse, barely audible, then the ear-splitting crescendo of a chopper bursting into the Range Rover's cab. Fanon imperturbable. Impervious to tsunamis of sound. Not hearing what we hear. To guess what soundtrack he's listening to, follow his eyes. They're fixed on Comandante Chawkwi. We're a bobbing good luck ornament fastened to the dashboard and receive a full frontal view of the driver's face and Fanon's eyes absorbed by it. Jumpy, hand-held realism reestablishes the bumpety-bump ride over a corduroy surface juggling the Range Rover's wheels. Tighten the closeup of Chawkwi's face. Allow the engine's roar to recede, the shaking to diminish as the driver's face fills the screen, implacable as Africa a minute ago after we flew through the window. The stillness, the rugged serenity of the driver's features holds only long enough to register, then Chawkwi blinks, animating the wooden mask. He's simply a man intent on negotiating a dangerous, primitive road very much like back roads on Martinique, Fanon thinks. Chawkwi's ebony brow knotted by concentration, a possessed, almost crazy glint in his small eyes. Is he high on drugs. No. Absolutely not. It's not that movie. Revolution the only drug permitted. He's weary and dazed. He's been driving too long but cannot afford to relax. Past exhaustion, Chawkwi fights to keep an edge, determined not to lose his grip on an opponent he's been wrestling for hours, years, a sly, unrelenting opponent who feigns submission, ropadoping, winking at the ring of spectators that includes every single soul from both villages the two champions represent. Desperate wariness in the driver's eyes, dreading the next sudden lunge or thrashing explosion of the body wrapped in his arms, the opponent who seems drained of resistance till the second you forget his power and then he breaks free again, circling you again, grinning, his orangutan arms dangling, feinting, cuffing you off-balance, beast eyes glowing.

  Fanon can't take his eyes off Chawkwi's fierce scowl. Reads the raw truth inscribed therein: no fighter will exit the ring alive. He studies the indwelling silence and discipline of the driver's stare. Is he dead already Fanon asks himself, a casualty whatever the struggle's outcome. In his journal of the mission, Fanon scores his vision of Chawkwi: Eyes like this do not lie. They say quite openly that they have seen terrible things: repression, torture, shellings, pursuits, liquidations ... You see a sort of haughtiness in such eyes, and an almost murderous hardness. And intimidation. You quickly get into the habit of being careful in dealing with men like this .. . Very difficult to deceive, to get around or to infiltrate.

  Impossible to write more on a jostling, washed-out segment of road, an absence of road, a wish for more road to open mercifully ahead so the jeeps can accelerate, regain lost time, give chattering teeth, leapfrogging bellies a rest. If I don't write now, will I ever get it down, Fanon asks. Reluctantly he wedges his journal into the unzipped bulk of canvas duffel bag his boots pin to the Range Rover's floor. Retrieves a book. Like the driver gripping the steering wheel with both hands, Doctor Fanon uses both his to steady the book he reads when he can't write. Never enough hours in a day. Dozens of wounded tasks stuffed into the dispensary's waiting room, a line of ailing, crippled tasks out the door, into the corridor, down the stairs, straggling into the street, around the block on which the clinic sits. Only ten minutes of office hours remain. And counting down. He spreads a large folio across his knees, pressing down the edges, nearly cracking its spine, cracking a knee when the Range Rover bucks and rams his legs into the dash. The words bounce, helpless as his body flying up and thumping down on the seat. Words unanchored from the page, launched into random flights and formations, new sentences bumped aside by newer sentences disappearing too fast to read. The stately pageant of medieval Mali disintegrates into carnival. The antique empire's dignified history, its orderly dynasties of rulers a hodgepodge bricolage of hyphenated Arabic names, dates, invasions, prophets, migrations, assassinations, dancing to a syncopated fast jook from home, his green island across the sea. No matter how hard he grips and attempts to concentrate, the bouncing words of Mali's story escape. A narrative typed in the air by as many flying monkeys as there are pages, as there are words, as there are riffs and verses and ways to move your feet, your swaying shoulders and dreamy head to the beat of a single island tune.

  Strangely, after a day of intense, withering African heat, a desire for fire the first night in Mali. Desiring fire as much as they'd wanted each tepid sip from their canteens to become a crisp, cool, rushing torrent they could plunge into up to their thighs and splash and swim in as they drank. Fanon had sensed a slight chill descending as the sun dropped toward the horizon, an unexpected chill to match the abrupt, absolute blackness of nightfall. Just the opposite of home, where night doesn't fall, where darkness, as old sharp-eyed chronicler of Martinique Lafcadio Hearn wrote, lazily rises from the land to embrace the sky. Chawkwi, second in command, knows the tricks of this Africa and Fanon is learning to defer to his judgment. Earlier that day Chawkwi had sent three men to gather firewood, extending what Fanon had intended as a five-minute rest stop. Fanon had been a bit annoyed. Why waste precious daylight hours scavenging for firewood. The Range Rover an oven all morning. How much colder at night on a plateau that seemed only slightly elevated above the plains. They'd packed canned rations. Awful, heated or not.

  While he was jotting notes in his journal and the men foraging for wood in a blighted gray patch of forest nearby, a shot rang out. Fanon jumped to his feet. From nomads they'd heard that French soldiers appeared unpredictably, a column of dust on the horizon or sealed in the armored halftracks they called rhinos suddenly crashing through the bush. He seemed the only one concerned by the shot. The others must have understood it was just Chawkwi buying dinner with his antique Mauser—one night a gazelle, another night bustards. Later, when a skinny, dog-sized gazelle roasts over a fire, Fanon alarmed again. Why risk a fire. Even in this desolate wilderness, they'd encountered signs of patrols. No telling whose patrols. The French and their Malian mercenaries used the same equipment. Bluster, Malian uniforms procured in Guinea, donned before crossing the border, sufficient thus far to speed the commando through the only government checkpoint. Proof of his plan's feasibility, more evidence of the accessibility of Algeria's soft underbelly. Still, why alert the enemy with an unnecessary campfire. He chose not to second-guess Chawkwi nor air his misgivings. Fanon wished to instill in the men under his command an impression of coolness, confidence, steadiness. None of them knew Fanon a veteran, that he'd been wounded fighting for the country he treats now as an enemy. Always a foreigner, an outsider, permanently on trial. Even here in Africa the color of his skin not quite right. Nor his perfect French. Always tests to be passed. A few yards from the fire, back turned to the others to piss and the African night drops over his head like a sack. He can't see the hand he passes in front of his face nor his pee striking the grass, a miniature fire crackling, echoing the blaze crackling over his shoulder.

  Away from the fire, the sky's blacker, full of stars. For some reason he's remembering Paris. Its hostility and honeycomb ghettos. The cruelty of white gazes that excluded him yet followed him with an unbroken, calculating attentiveness to his every gesture, every word and breath. Some days his brown skin prickled, beaded by a literal rash. He remembered the indifference and invisibility he enforced upon himself to relieve the tension of constantly being seen, and worse, seen as something not quite human, a creature he couldn't prevent others from believing they saw. He'd given up the struggle. Too frustrating, too debilitating. He refused to allow their eyes to distract him from his goals, disappeared inside himself, left the dark mask of his skin on view, rendered the rest unreachable. Better to let the others think what they wished to believe. If they busied themselves with what they thought they saw, it opened more room for him to maneuver. Why should he help them search for answers to their questions, their ugly que
stions that could transform a crowded room into a cell, him under a harsh light, alone, roped to a stool, interrogated by loudspeakers screaming through the walls.

  Still, he could love that cold, distant city. Love and pity it. Night the only time he relaxed in Paris, deep night, the almost daylight hours when whores began deserting their posts at windows in the clubs of Montmartre. Late at night he'd close the medical text he'd been memorizing all day, exit the cliché of his attic room, and stroll the dark streets. Cross deserted bridges over the Seine. Alone. Precious solitude and quiet in a teeming city. Alone, hunkering down with a glass of vin rouge in a postage-stamp-sized café or just walking, wandering alone, his body relaxing, no raucous soundtrack of daytime traffic, no muttering, shouting pedestrians on crowded boulevards and avenues, just the night pulse of hidden generators supplying the city's energy, the muted hum of the metropole consuming itself, shrinking into itself, retracting till it fit in the palm of his hand, small and warm and tame as his sex after he squeezes it empty. Paris a glowing crystal ball, a miracle of contracted, compressed force swirling within transparent walls, countless bright particles swirling, colliding, crackling, and just loud enough to hear at the sphere's icy core, if he holds his breath and listens closely, a heart like his pumps. The city his equal. A perfect match. Equally fragile. Equally abandoned. Equally doomed. A glorious city of a million times million lights carving a space in the night no larger than the flickering wedge of flame behind him on an African plateau.

  On the first night of the journey north through Mali, did Fanon dream. My answer is no. My answer is that in spite of an exhausting day, he lies awake for hours listening to the tropical forest, his mind retreating, recalling birds, frogs, insects, monsters, and ghosts of his childhood, sounds so familiar, so embedded they must be memories of Martinique, recycled in this primeval setting. But the sounds neither begin nor end in Martinique. He hears the hum of Paris. Paris burning and disappearing and the Seine's lonely murmuring, waiting for Paris to be born once more on its empty banks. The night sounds of Mali are memories older than Martinique, older than Paris, older than memory—how could this be so, he asks himself, even as he thinks the thought—memories older than the first time his eyes and ears opened and his mind began listening. Sounds he hears his first night in Mali convince him they are older than anything. Older than ears and eyes. Old as silence. The Mali sounds drop him onto a dark, damp forest floor. He can't tell from what height, or if he's fallen down or fallen up or jumped or been pushed. No memory of an elsewhere—no nest, no wings, no leafy crotch of branches, no cradling arms or warm breast—only the thump of his heart, the thump of his feet landing, shattering the stillness, his body shaped by waves of silence breaking over him, waves crashing again and again, the same and different each time, and with each blow and between blows he learns himself, his gasps, whines, his coughs and grunts, his breath pushing at the darkness, opening it, sealing it, one more creature in the mix, learning to hear what he is, fear what he's not.

  Alerted by the forest sounds, alerted and thrilled by them as hightension cables bringing power to a New Africa will be thrilled by the passage of enormous voltage. And soothed too. Deeply calmed. Beyond sleep. Emptied of himself. Remembering whomever and wherever he'd been when his feet first thumped against the earth. Falling also rising, weightless as the forest noises he recalls now as he rides beside a driver who scowls at a road which intermittently crumbles to a sandpit or fills with water or skitters off in many directions at once, a fan of game trails, take your pick, the pages turning, skipping ahead, flipping backward. Inhabiting his own story like trying to construct a dam with water. His life never entirely believable. A morning sky opens after a night, Fanon, in which perhaps you had dreamed you'd never awaken. Maybe it's another person's dream you're living. You're only an extra, a bit player. Wouldn't you willingly give up your flimsy role for the solid world of darkness, the reality of creatures you can't see surrounding you, their hunting cries, death wails, scent of their shit and blood, their slithering and wings beating, their fear.

  Whether Fanon slept that night or dreamed his dream of Algerian independence or didn't sleeps with him in one of his contested graves. Why do I need to go there. To sleep. To dream with him. Through a three-inch-wide feeding slot in a solid concrete wall I ask my keeper questions. Will a little bit of conversation soften up the guard. Will he respond to my pleading. Or despise me. Lead me on. He enters the cell and appears to listen, letting me run my mouth, write my book—blah, blah, blah—till he's bored and points to the floor. I drop to my knees and beg. He readies the gag, twisting it thicker between the cogs of his fists.

  Doctor Fanon. Please free me. Release me from angers and fears that consume me. Heal the divisions within me my enemies exploit to keep me in a place I despise. Myself cut up, separated into bloody pieces, doctor. Like you. Fractured, dispersed, in death as in life. Help me, doc. Come then, comrades, Doctor Fanon says, it would be as well to decide at once to change our ways. We must shake off the heavy darkness in which we were plunged, and leave it behind. The new day which is already at hand must find us firm, prudent, and resolute.

  PITTSBURGH—A PRISON

  The wheelchair folds up easily once you empty it. The backrest and seat are wide leather straps and if I stick my fist under the seat strap and punch up, the chair's braces unlock, its metal sides collapse inward. Mash the metal wings together and I have a compact package that fits conveniently into the trunk of the car I rented at the airport for this visit home. Emptying the wheelchair's not so easy. Whether I lift my mother out of it or help her leverage herself from the wheelchair into the rental car's front seat, emptying the chair's an ordeal. My mother's not heavy, the wheelchair neither heavy nor unwieldy; the difficulty stems from the chair's existence and the truth that there's no way around it, the chair a simple, evil fact we didn't expect, didn't plan for, and when it's sitting there waiting to be emptied or waiting to be filled, we hate the wheelchair's implacability, the necessity to deal with it, work around it, include it in our activities. The chair's existence spites us, hurts us like the hateful fact of the prison's stone walls incarcerating my brother these last twenty-eight years. The prison also folds up when prison visits end. Folds up for us, the visitors, anyway, though my brother remains behind, locked in a steel cage. The prison emptied of us folds up for storage in whatever compartment we allot for it, shrinking smaller and smaller once we're outside its walls, so small finally we don't see it except we're always aware that the prison sits like a wheelchair waiting to be filled or emptied, waiting for us to arrive again, lift or squeeze my brother in again, ourselves in, a process far more difficult for him than for us, we come and go but with his legs cut out from under him, like my mother confined in her jail on wheels, he must depend on others.

  For the price of an airline ticket I can reduce the four hundred miles between New York City and Pittsburgh to three quarters of an hour, not counting driving time to and from airports. Hours saved, it seems. A magic erasure of space, it seems. Except while I'm beamed at Star Trek speed from one place to another, my brother's clock ticks at its usual pace, minutes, hours, days bearing good news—more time served, therefore less time remaining to serve, and bad news—more time passed in jail, therefore less time for a life after prison. As both of us age and the years register on our faces, on the face of the good news/bad news clock, I understand a little better what my brother feels when he thinks about time in prison. Inside prison it's hard to ignore how little time there is, how each beginning, if not exactly an ending, is also a diminishment. The hand giving also busy taking away. My life sentence not spelled out like my brother s, but like him I've become increasingly aware that each day alive is one day less of whatever time's coming to me. My brother's prison time not my time, no one can do his time for him, no one can begin to understand the meaning of time the state subtracts from his portion, but on my island I've learned to count like him, learned the weight of minutes that accumulate and exhaust
themselves simultaneously. Never one truth without the other. The count's the count. Stretching. Contracting. Counting up, counting down. Unforgivingly less, always less, even as more appears.

  So what's the damned hurry. My brother ain't going nowhere. My flying carpet saves neither his time nor mine. I carry around the penitentiary walls everywhere I go, like a family snapshot in my wallet, those grimy, unmoving ramparts planted over a century ago alongside water that never stops flowing. What message did the state wish to send by siting the prison on a riverbank. What does a river mean to an inmate who glimpses it through stone walls enclosing the island on which he's trapped. Thick, towering walls built to look like forever and last forever. I didn't know how to react when I heard the prison's going to be closed, maybe razed or maybe converted to a casino.

  How many black men in America's prisons. How many angels fit on the head of a pin. I once kept track of the number of prisoners—black, white, brown, male, female. Now I've lost count. Lots. Lots too many of us serving sentences lots too long, especially when one of the prisoners is your brother beside you, year after year, in the visiting room of the same facility where he's been locked up over a quarter century and counting, a count adding years, subtracting years, depending on where you start, how you figure what he owes the state, what the state owes him, time remaining, good time, suspended time, double time, you could get caught up in numbers, in reckoning, how many angels can dance on a pinhead, how many black men in prison for how long, you could get confused by numbers, staggeringly large numbers, outraged by dire probabilities and obvious disproportions. Ugly masses of brute statistics impossible to make sense of, but some days a single possibility's enough to overwhelm me—how likely, how easy, after all, it would be to be my brother. Our fortunes exchanged, his portion mine, mine his. I recall all those meals at the same table, sleeping for years under the same roof, sharing the same parents and siblings (almost), same grandparents uncles aunts nieces cousins nephews, the point being, the point the numbers reveal: it would be a less than startling outcome to find myself incarcerated. This scene I'm writing could be my brother visiting me, the two of us side by side just as we sit today, myself, my brother, one declared guilty, one declared innocent, variables in an invariant formula, but me in his place, him in mine, our fates switched, each of us nailed in our separate compartment of this hardass bench.