Fanon

by John Edgar Wideman

  Or maybe he's disappointed less by the slavishness of images than by their refusal to be his slaves. Prospero snapping his wand. Appalled by his career's tail end, the gathering darkness of any career winding down. All those pretty candles lit one by one with so much care and hopefulness, then one by one they gutter out, and when you peek over your shoulder, the room's just as black as when you started.

  Stupid to choose a director as betrayed by images as I find myself betrayed by writing, thinks Thomas. Wouldn't our collaboration produce an invisible Fanon, white mask, white skin, white screen, white silence on blank sheets of paper. C'mon. Don't you guys see the albino cows moving about in the snowstorm. Can't you almost hear them mooing.

  He hated the mouse, would stomp it, kill it if he could ambush it crossing the kitchen floor because the mouse, not much larger than Thomas's thumb, had scared him. Not housewife-jumping-up-on-a-chair-and-shrieking-for-help fear. A recoil, a shudder of profound disgust and needle-prick of terror before anger took over and he cursed the stupid twit trespassing on his turf. A quick pinch of vulnerability, unexpected and ridiculous given the mouse's size relative to his. Not about size, of course. The mouse had reminded Thomas he's not alone. Countless other creatures inhabit the planet, creatures unlike Thomas, not enemies exactly, just radically different, as different and chilling as touching feathers or scales or the scraggly brown fur of a hamster when he was a boy. Touches he'd always declined. Unthinkable difference he thought he'd finished thinking about, grown up now, armed with adult fairy tales that cartooned and marginalized beasts who would eat him as nonchalantly as he gnawed on a spicy chicken wing from KFC. The mouse kin to wolf, to sabertooth cat, to grizzly bear, and if Thomas didn't maintain constant vigilance, wouldn't one of his ancient enemies rip him from guzzle to zorch, feed on his steaming guts. Good riddance, maybe. Time maybe.

  Thomas's crossed legs terminate in brown bare feet, one planted on the floorboards, the other aloft. The airborne foot in respect to the floor repeats the angle of Thomas's frozen ballpoint pen relative to the plane of a yellow tablet. Foot and pen mismatched wings of a V that exists nowhere except in Thomas's fancy, like the foraging mouse he probably only thought he saw when his eyes jumped from the daydreaming curtain to the tile floor and found nothing there.

  Film unsettles him almost as much as the idea of fierce man-eaters lurking just outside his range of vision. Holding up a negative or a strip of motion-picture film to light was like staring into a cave, Thomas thought, a voluminous darkness also strangely depthless, all mouth, all surface, yet infinitely deep, as deep as travelers' tales reported the ancient African city of Wagadu to be, a cave with uncountable layers of silvery black and white hunkered down in there, compressed, compacted, each layer invisible as the mouse under the stove until thirst or hunger or curiosity—who knows what it's like under there—drives it across the kitchen tiles. When light streams through the film's dark skin, Thomas sees ghosts. They wait for him to enter their icy cave, wait for his warm breath. Thomas huffing and puffing with all his might, turning himself inside out, reversed like a glove snatched off his fingers, his insides out, outsides in. The film a balloon inflating till it's large as the earth, all the tiny frozen figures scurrying like roaches from my grandmother's oven when she lit it in the morning, scurrying here, there, everywhere across the planet's sticky surface, a story unfolding while Thomas uncrosses his legs, closes the yellow tablet, kicks back into the cushions of the couch to watch instead of write the movie he's making.

  On the TGV Thomas second-guesses his bright idea of asking a Frenchman to direct a film about Fanon and the Algerian revolution. A bit like putting a Georgia cracker in charge of a flick about Nat Turner (the sound flick = film in English = cop in French). To be fair, not all Frenchmen or Frenchwomen or French persons alike. Not all crackers alike. Maybe. There are French Algerians and Algerian French. Pieds-noirs. Harbis. Grown-up mixed babies and mongrel kids in the process of growing up in France who don't know what the fuck they are. French Muslims born in Europe. French Jews born in Ethiopia, Lebanon, Chicago. Senegalese, Indochinese, and Moroccan French who fought for and against the empire at Dien Bien Phu. Brown French Tunisian guerrillas who fought beside Palestinians against Israel. French Israelis. French African Arabs who served in the FLN before they emigrated and settled in the outskirts of Paris or in Mayenne, falling in love perhaps and raising a French family that produced a generation of Senegalese/Swiss, Guadeloupean/Filipinos, Viet/Bretons, etc., and what about the mulatto martiniquaise arriving in Nice after ten years of French civil service in Togo where she wed a Congolese and their son marries a blond niçoise with one Swiss German parent, one from Russia with Afghan ancestors, what kind of French person would that union produce.

  After all, Thomas, you're only choosing someone to direct a film, not save the world, right. Judge not by the color of skin or content of character but by the size of the talent, size of the wallet. Promote equal opportunity or affirmative action or ethnic cleansing or hire the handicapped, fashions come and go, don't they, and shame on us all, so what's wrong with choosing a Frenchman to direct the Fanon film, a filmmaker who push, push, pushes past the point of good taste or logic or obscurity or complicity with any audience but his own wandering eye. Collaborating only with whomever he imagines himself to be. Or not to be. Or pretends to be. One truth for a minute exchanged halfway through a scene for another, more or less, if the narrative, the flippity-flop of the frames slows down to less instead of expanding to more than meets the eye, you know, a guy who doesn't really seem convinced of the content of nobody's character, black brown yellow red. Or loves/hates them all, indifferent to different colors unless they paint a scene. Use value. Surplus value. Marx or Marx Brothers. Who cares. Sauve qui peut. Just a movie, ain't it. A lie. Just play.

  In his essay about the Swiss-French maître's films he would expand the riff above if he ever got around to writing the essay. A writer once. And now. Now he talks to himself, composes notes to himself each morning on long walks and runs beside the East River or across the Williamsburg Bridge, entertains himself with invented selves, free-style, free-forming them, allotting each persona enough rope to lynch itself, herself, himself, as if gender mattered any more than color to the dead. He worries about his idea of importuning a foreign director but also likes the quixotic naiveté of traveling to France. A sentimental journey to find the Swiss-French director and coax him out of his what—lair, lethargy, business, retreat, mourning, last days, resting in peace. Pressing into an old comrade's callused, workingman's hands a Fanon script he can't refuse. Then what. The promise of resurrection. Eternal life in cinematheques, film society screenings, video stores, luxury DVD editions, the film dissected, analyzed in university classrooms, memorized and memorialized, reissued for late-night showings on pay-per-view, immortality guaranteed by the few but fit, who will not willingly let him die. Who die. Whom.

  Recently, accompanied by an actual woman, a precious woman I won't name so as not to jinx a new love, I attended a lecture by a French literary critic whose training in psychoanalytic theory gave her plenty to say about chopping off heads. Though decapitation not the announced subject of the lecture, the topic emerged as a recurrent theme in her presentation and during the course of her remarks she alluded more than once to an encyclopedic-sounding tome she was compiling on beheading. I could barely sit still in my seat. The scholar a star. She'd packed the joint and here she was generating a buzz about the novel I was writing. All these excited, restless, poorly dressed folk around me on the edge of their seats—her distinguished colleagues, the throng of starry-eyed undergrads, the super-serious junior faculty and doctoral candidates researching dissertations and articles they wouldn't dare publish without citing, pro or con, the visitor's writings—were hearing from the horse's mouth the archetypal, overarching significance of my central trope. Man has escaped from his head as the condemned man from prison, she said Bataille said in his journal Acéphale. I wanted to rush home and get b
ack to work. Shoot both arms into the air and holler, Tell it. Tell the truth, girl. I wanted to sneak onstage and sit at her feet. Wanted to gag her. Pimp her. You sitting on a goldmine, sugar. Don't be giving up that good shit for free. Of course if you've been paying attention to how it works around here, you've probably guessed I did none of the above, just melted down in my seat, listening intently until my attention wandered to the cul-de-sac I'd written myself into. My enthusiasm about the talk waned to low-grade depression. The weight of her learning oppressed me. I felt a headache coming on. Like my skull was being squeezed into one of the medieval reliquaries she described, the miniature busts of queens and kings with painted eyes, a tiny hole in the head, a crystal window through which the faithful could check out a saint's bones preserved inside. Gleaming metal spheres celebrating the head's status as intersection of material and spirit, human and divine.

  Though the language of her multidisciplinary rap dazzled me at first—a bling-bling parade of fashion models sashaying across the stage in bizarre costumes—quickly the gaudy models got bumped off the runway, morphing into a funeral cortege, a lugubrious procession of mostly dead men's dead thoughts quoted, paraphrased, and seconded, all gray and rained on, moldering in heavy caskets borne on the shoulders of stoop-shouldered, gray-coveralled workers. Antsy, trapped in my seat, I realized I was hearing a kind of obscure, complicated report on weather anybody with eyes could check out for themselves if the goddamned windows weren't set so high in the cathedral-like auditorium's walls.

  We didn't share a subject—we shared a tooth in an overworked mouth and the tooth was cracking. The distance between what she knew and what I knew about the subject widened as she lectured on. Heads rolling since the beginning of recorded history. Rolling at history's end. Theriocephalous representations of Gnostic archons and astrological decans sitting at the Messiah's banquet of the righteous on the Last Day. Rolling before recorded history—masks and painted faces of primitive ritual the borrowed heads of animals or gods. Heads detached, stolen, appropriated. Heads on platters, heads of state, headhunting, talking heads, heads on stakes at the entrance of medieval cities, heads on billboards, maidenheads excised, circumcision, clitoridectomy, the headsman, axeman, the guillotine, taking heads, giving head, shrunken heads, decapitation as emasculation, castration, sex change, regime change, bundles of heads delivered to terrorize and destabilize a nation, beheading a booby prize if you don't pay your ransom. Nothing new under the sun. She outed my new fiction as old fact. Me whispering to her, Look at the beautiful star, the incredible snowflake. Ho-hum, she replies. The sky's full of them.

  On the way home from the lecture, walking New York's mean streets again, I felt cheated. Couldn't tell my new love why. Undeniably the speaker had radiated a glow. Who wouldn't dig the swirl of Jean-Paul Gautier silk around her neck when she tipped on stage like an adolescent in her first pair of heels. Cheated because she performed a kind of reverse striptease, spinning an opaque cloud of words, silencing the beautiful music we could have made together. My story of receiving a head in the mail yesterday's news. DOA. Too late to earn a footnote in her comprehensive survey.

  Never say die. Fanon to the rescue. I accepted the fact that fact had overtaken my fiction. Waylaid my story. Wasted it. On the other hand, Fanon's story remains relatively untouched, forgotten like novels on the bestseller list the year he died. Or the list from twenty years ago. Five years. Two years ago. Who could name one of those fabulously reviewed, avidly purchased books. Who reads them now. Who will recall today's list tomorrow. Is the list always the same list. I spring Fanon's name on unsuspecting suspects. A few of my contemporaries smile wistfully. Young people generally puzzled. A blank look from just about everybody. Some ask me to repeat the name and on a second hearing, shake their heads, no, definitely, no. So maybe with Fanon a chance to start fresh. Start at the beginning—paint Fanon on my face, wear the mask of him. Pretend he's real because I am. Pretend I'm real because he is. Or was once. Behind a mask he might become real again. Better than crying over spilled milk.

  And speaking of my new woman, the real one I won't name for fear of jinxing our love, I decided the morning after Fanon saved my life that Thomas needed love and I needed a love hook to jazz up the story of going to France to peddle the Fanon script. Autumnal love, a bit like mine. Part mellow and wise, part scared, obsessional, and torrid, you know, like the amours of seventy- and eighty-year-olds in Love in the Time of Cholera. The guy on his way to France with a Fanon manuscript in his suitcase will be a decade younger than the Marquez characters, a little younger than I am. Not much. Let's say sixty. Sixty a good round number, easy to remember. Sixty also for many readers a bright yellow line on the far side of which a person is definitely old, definitely on the way out, if not quite numb yet. Our hero sixty and on his way south, stopping for a week or so in Paris, a city familiar from his student days when, like me, he used to spend lost weekends on the Left Bank, playing hooky from stiff grad school across the channel at Oxford University. And like me, once upon a time in Paris he meets a beautiful woman, one whose sprawling headful of blond, curly hair wouldn't fit easily into the box delivered once upon a time to Thomas's door, a woman approximately ten years younger than Thomas and who, like him and me, is compounded of fickle flesh and blood so she, like us, will stop speaking in the not-too-distant future and vanish, never seen again on the earth, yet after two weeks, one of them stolen from time budgeted for tracking down the film director, Thomas tells her and believes in his heart he means it that he has no desire to outlive her, that life without her company would lose its appeal.

  If you're crazy enough to fall head over heels in love at sixty-odd, why not in a captivating place like Paris. In spite of the fact you know better. Forget Paris is a city as full of enemies as any other city and love's only a game, willed blindness, wishful thinking. Forget the fact you're close enough to your grave to smell death in your sweat, see death yawning on the other side of doors you hesitate to open and walk through for no good reason, unless being tired is good reason, and it's not that simple. Forget disappointments too numerous to count. Forget the peace of mind you've learned to maintain by lowering drastically your expectations of what's possible between two people who discover a mutual attraction. It's spring in Paris. Fall in love, Thomas. Forget the season of discontent sure to follow.

  So let it be the City of Lights and Thomas sixty, eager as a colt for love, even though getting out of bed some mornings he feels like a condemned prisoner mustering for roll call. Well, maybe aging's not quite as bad as all that but you do get tired, awfully tired of sharing a tiny cell with a dying stranger whose stink and noises you abhor, whose whining, constant neediness and selfish demands appall you. Who could love anybody like him, the drool dried on his chin, the earwax, toe jam, wild hairs in his nostrils and ears, the leaks and nasty stains, nasty habits. Who wants to listen to his nattering. This twin who either grumps around belligerently silent or chatters way too much in a language more and more opaque each day whether someone's willing to listen or not. Your cellmate.

  Enough about growing old, Thomas complains. You could just say old's a rerun of youth, of feeling ignorant, sidelined, inadequate. Reexperiencing childish terrors you spent a lifetime trying to put behind you. Painfully eager and willing to please, unable to comprehend why no one seems interested in what you have to offer. Except, back when you were a kid, you believed in time. Believed you had time to grow. Time to prove yourself. Time to hurt others who hurt you. Believed time on your side and the world would change if you just hang on, keep pushing.

  The lovers meet in line at a Paris theater where the latest American hit's showing, dubbed in French or French subtitles, Thomas can't recall which, nor remember who joined the line first, followed by the other, or who smiled first, only recalls that initially neither spoke, except with looks, polite, respectful, casual looks, two strangers acknowledging each other as markers to identify a place in line, glances traded, quickly dropped, then their g
azes bumping again, perhaps accidentally, then the next time not an accident, was it, and it's okay, fine, I see you too and approve of what I see and return your glance's positive appraisal of me with my positive appraisal of you. I'm pleased by the exchange as you seem pleased by it, thank you, you're welcome, time to look away, and it could end easily here, a look away, never a look back. Thomas studies posters on the walls under the marquee—lots of naked flesh, men brandishing oversized weaponry, buildings burning, weird helicopter-like vehicles— looking away from her and then back too soon, both pairs of eyes instantly averted after they bump, a bit embarrassing, except also almost funny, who's pretending they're new at this old business. But it requires practice either way, doesn't it, requires time and luck to get the timing right. Thomas stares over his shoulder at the line that's lengthened nearly to the street. Pedestrians framed by the marquee's glitter and running lights bustle past. As he turns back he widens his eyes and nods, his gaze brushing hers, letting her share if she chooses the information his eyes carry about how rapidly the crowd's growing for this matinee performance in dismal weather and somewhere in there between glances and glances away he says hi or says hello, an English greeting in France, and she responds with the same English word and he repeats it, the echoing maybe a bit too cute, more playful than cute he hopes, aren't adults allowed to be playful, though there's a chance someone standing in this line or in the crowd streaming by on the boulevard would, if given the opportunity, torture you, chop off your head, stuff your carcass in a freezer, or bury you in a backyard pit except for certain delicate tidbits of choice cannibalized before bidding you farewell, sayonara, darling, a person perhaps not very unlike the villain starring in the movie you're about to watch—Silence of the Lambs, wasn't it, Thomas can't say for sure, it seems right, he'll ask her later and ask what else she recalls of their swift courtship or flirtation, whatever, a very unlikely happening whatever you choose to call it, given their different personalities, their different colors, nationalities, the ten-year age gap between them, but eye conversation and a single word spoken three times enough to persuade whichever one of them—Thomas probably—who purchases a ticket first to step aside and wait just beyond the booth for the other, the unknown person addressed only once, only minutes before, enough conversation to convince them both that it makes perfectly good sense to stroll into the darkness of a movie house together and sit side by side, both guessing—who knows to whom the guess occurred first—that it might also be okay when the movie's over to risk leaving the theater together, risk what comes next.