Fanon

by John Edgar Wideman

  Growing old mostly a pain in the ass, so why not perform love's rites one last time in Paris, in spring, in spite of drenching rain when you exit the movie house with her, torrents, geysers, flying columns of rain, loud, splattering, sluicing rain spilling from gutters and eaves onto sidewalks, flooding the streets. Rain he welcomes like the ancient Greeks welcomed it on wedding days because they believed rain augured a fruitful union. Pouring rain a backhanded, assbackwards gift in this Paris case too, because sheets of rain obscure the corny, buffed-up city Thomas's x-ray eyes, sixty and counting, had been straining, without success, to penetrate, searching for the old city's hiding place beneath a new Paris he didn't recognize. A stalled reunion. The city invisible in this downpour not the old Paris he'd crossed the ocean for the first time in twenty-two years to find. Getting soaked not exactly the kind of fun he'd anticipated either till he realizes how tightly she squeezes the hand squeezing hers and he smiles out loud, echoing her laughter, and just as quick as that, with one hit of the magic wand, zingo, there it is, instantly visible, in spite of the blinding rain, his old Paris solid and real around him, risen in the blink of an eye, like Venus on her half-shell from the sea or like a movie flashed on a screen, the whole remembered city intact, remembering Thomas, the old Paris shimmering, its golden stones, bridges, spires, cobbled alleys, rows of buildings lining the Seine like shelf after shelf of elegantly bound books.

  A surprising number of people caught outdoors in the storm, dashing here and there, you know, like water's not wet if they hurry. Thank goodness it's not a cold day, at least not cold unless you're totally soaked as she is, lips blue, teeth chattering, chilled from head to toe. Her feet might as well be bare in those silver harem sandals splashing along beside him through the drowned streets, little sprints from one bit of cover to the next—the theater marquee, a hotel balcony, porticoed entrance of a restaurant, an awning, a cloister scalloping the façade of a grand apartment building—clack, clack, clack, a torn silver strap clacking as she runs. Thomas sees a rain parka in a shop window, cheap, and she lets him buy it for her. They pause under the shop's canopy to get their bearings and her eyes are closer to green than blue when she looks up at him from beneath the canary-yellow plastic hood, lifting her face nearer to his so they can hear each other over noisy rain. Is it okay to kiss her cheek. Yes. Yes. Yes. The yes in her eyes tastes so good Thomas savors it, saves the first kiss for later, for her lips. Shapely, full lips, dark against skin that's washed unnaturally white and bright by rain, skin glowing like marble, he thinks. It's marble Thomas thinks of again when he rubs her chilled feet, later, out of the weather, snug in her sister's apartment on Rue Blomet, alone with her for a couple of hours until her sister arrives with Vietnamese takeout she called and asked her sister to pick up on the way home from work. Delicious, she promised. My, my. Yum-yum. Thomas sixty and counting on this day he's met a shiny new woman, enjoyed a movie, found the old Paris, slogged through it in the rain, and it's barely five, no company expected before seven-thirty at the earliest, so he rubs slowly, each icy lump of foot in turn, chaffed, squeezed in both hands, blowing his breath on those snow-white feet, perfect, Thomas thinks, as a marble statue s.

  If he ever returns to the novel that begins with the delivery of a head, Thomas will be much younger in it. A teacher of creative writing at a university. Newly married, maybe one or two very young kids, maybe, a professor of color adrift in a hostile sea of colleagues and students, a writer afflicted by writer's block, beset by lots of issues, personal and political. Decades younger than the character in the Paris romance (the Paris Romance?—see Hawthorne's preface to The House of the Seven Gables for distinction between Novel and Romance). In Paris no choice about age. Or rather he chooses to give himself no choice. His age is what it is. No choice. No sweat. Sixty plus and counting. In the other story he intends to shed decades. A young man in his prime will receive a head from a delivery person one morning and, like the life fate has delivered to him, he won't know what to do with it. Not like the old fool in Paris who pretends to know precisely what he's doing: who arranges his balding head on a platter and offers it to love.

  Riding the bullet train from Paris south I wonder what she's thinking. If I 'll ever see her again. Rub her bare feet. Kiss her painted toes again. If she were beside him she'd probably be reading. Reading a kind of narcolepsy, a disappearing act she performs. With a book in her lap, she can be talking or staring out a train window and if he looks away from her a minute, poof, she's gone when his eyes return, dropped off the edge of the planet into whatever she's reading. A few words, a sentence or two enough to capture her. If no book of her own available, she might lean over and peek at what he's reading. The pages disappear behind her sprawl of hair. She's gone, caught up in the writing's spell. He'll have to pinch her, tickle her ear to remind her the book where she's hiding belongs to him. A cute habit he teases her about but sometimes a stupid sting of jealousy. Whose writing has smitten her, stolen her. Would his words on a page do the same trick. And so what if they do. Why believe his writing's a special treat for her if somebody else's words will do.

  Thomas daydreams about the pleasure of dreaming about her. Wonders if people dream less as they age, if the dreaming faculty wears out like everything else wears out. He seldom remembers his dreams. Not much practice in dealing with dreams. When he tries to retrieve dreams they fray. He worries rather than remembers the few dreams he recalls, even though worrying them—trying to find words for them—shreds the original.

  On the TGV south Thomas practices dreaming. Imagines making up a dream for Fanon. How would Fanon see himself in his dreams. Wouldn't he disguise himself. Who might he choose to be. Do we choose. A good disguise maybe the key to dreaming. A dose of deception administered to ourselves to cure disbelief. Experiencing alternative possibilities, living other lives too threatening to imagine unless we wear the mask of another's face, unless we inhabit another 's body. A taste of being who you can't be so it's easier to be who you are. Or are not. Or wanna be. Or who you were once. After studying all the required theorists and interpreters of dreams and listening to his patients recite their dreams, how would Fanon respond to his own. Would he be skeptical, condescending, amused. Touched perhaps by naive images sallying up from his unconscious, as if he didn't know better, as if their crude, insinuating costumes not transparent to his expert's eye.

  The dream screen's bright as an operating room. A bearded giant in a surgeon's green smock perches on a high stool or throne and appears to be grooming or perhaps patching up wounded jungle animals he props on his lap. Lots of rubbing or first aid, stroking the creatures tummies, their fur, feathers, hide. A kangaroo, chimp, wildebeest, gazelle, an elephant tilted back against the doctor's chest, its ivory-toed foot grasped in the doc's sure hand, his other hand extracting black quills. A man who looks like Thomas waits next in line, Thomas with his bloody, detached head in his hands, staring down at it like he's gazing into a crystal ball.

  It's not working. He gives up on fabricating a dream for Fanon. Impossible with a made-up Thomas always lurking, always butting in. The screen dims, fades. No more god or Dr. Doolittle tending to his flock. Daylight twists, diamond by diamond, into his eyes. He squeezes his lids shut again, turns away from the burning window, sinks lower in his hard seat, and there, unannounced, a view of her naked from behind, padding on her hands and knees, a lioness, though she's allowed to keep her sprawling mane of hair. Sinuously dangerous, cuddly, she glides in a tropical forest, Thomas standing enthralled, just beyond the picture's frame, watching the syncopated cheeks of her ass squeeze the darkness between them, her sleek haunches, tick-tock-tick, regular as a metronome until she disappears into tall black grass. Be careful, Thomas. Don't embarrass yourself on this French train. Tell your blind, not-too-smart buddy to be cool, be patient. Remind yourself she's not leaving, not gone forever, she's just not here now, at this moment, on this particular train, so cool it, he whispers to himself and doesn't waste breath on his clueless c
ompanion who will swell up anyway and aches anyway imagining himself personally addressed by any random breeze, as if the universe is organized solely for the purpose of delivering each blow or caress upside his bald head. And Thomas asks again, addressing no one in particular, where do dreams come from—where do they go—will this one return—will she...

  Why Fanon. I 'm disappointed when my brother asks the question. The answer's obvious, isn't it. Given the facts of Fanon's life, my brother's life, my life, the decades in prison, the besieged lives of the people we love and who love us, the lives and deaths shared with them, why wouldn't my brother, of all people, understand my need to write about Fanon. Mom not well enough to visit the prison, so only me and Rob, our longest talk alone together in years. I'd just finished sketching Fanon's life—born brown and French on apartheid Martinique, boy soldier running away to Europe to fight for France in World War II, psychiatrist in a North African clinic where he treats French torturers and their Arab victims, then fighting against France in the Algerian war of independence, writing books that helped destabilize Europe 's colonial empires, a visionary philosopher who argued that humankind must liberate itself from the shackles of race to become truly human. After all that, my brother Robby, aka Farouk, had asked, Why Fanon. What else could I say. I felt impatient, upset, even betrayed by my brother's question. He knows better than I do time's running out. Too many of us locked down in places where we desperately don't want to be. Every choice urgent. A matter of life or death.

  The world needs Fanon, not some tale about a dead head in a box. I recalled old black-as-a-bowling-ball, roly-poly Reverend Frank Felder strutting the pulpit of Homewood AME Zion, preaching himself into a sweat. Had my brother nodded off during my sermon. Is he still on square one. Does he expect me to go all the way back and start over. Why Fanon. C'mon, bro, I said to myself. Mize well ask, Why me. Why you. Why these goddamn fucking stone-cold-ass walls.

  Shit, man, I said out loud, then answered him with something more like a fingerpop upside his shiny bald head than an explanation.

  Fanon because no way out of this goddamn mess, I said to my brother, and Fanon found it.

  PART II

  Discovering more about Fanon as I continue this project of writing a life, it becomes clear that Fanon is not about stepping back, standing apart, analyzing, and instructing others but about identifying with others, plunging into the vexing, mysterious otherness of them, taking risks of heart and mind, falling head over heels in love whether or not there's a chance in the world love will be requited or redeemed. At least I think that's what my mother understands about Frantz Fanon, what she shares with him, something like that anyway expressed in her own words, in the actions of her life.

  ***

  I want to take you back, way back, show you around the neighborhood where I grew up, Mr. Godard. Where my mother and other folks raised me. Show you this place from one end to the other. From the end that ends in prison, to the end that has no end (of shame, for instance), to the end that is here, now, this dwelling place where we stand I want to show you around. Let me be clear from the outset. We didn't do this neighborhood to ourselves. Neither we negroes who inhabit the dead end where we're stuck nor we Americans doomed to undertake the task of saving a world we fear by destroying it first.

  Here the shelves are mostly bare and where not bare crowded with shit. Bottom-of-the-barrel shit, unhealthy, overpriced, past the expiration date, dumped here on these empty shelves in these bare streets my mother watches day after day for miracles, watches reruns of the usual suspects strolling up and down, watches for holes to open in the sidewalk or the sky to fall, watches from the top of the neighborhood's tallest residential building, on her sixth-floor balcony of the K. LeRoy Irvis senior citizens' mini-high-rise, watches people going in and out of this store we stand outside looking up at the concrete wall enclosing her perch, hiding her unless she leans up to peer over it.

  Exiting the double-locked-down double doors of my mother's building you can turn right, walk a half-block on Frankstown to the corner of Homewood Avenue, look right, and sometimes not see a single goddamn soul on the entire three-, four-block stretch that once served a busy community as main stroll and commercial heart, no one, nothing, no car or cat till Homewood Avenue disappears under an overpass that carries railroad tracks and a busway to and from downtown Pittsburgh. I won't even attempt to convey to you, Mr. G., how this emptiness shocks me. Shocks. Yes. A dramatic word, an obsolete word you may think, after the numbing horrors we witness daily. Shock a word you may consider dead, dead and empty as these bare shelves, as bareass dead as dead Homewood Avenue appears some days when I view it from the corner of Frankstown, a kind of stranger returning to my mother's house to finish my ailing book and gaze down at a body I made love to many years before but that was then and now is different, the lover's gone, gone, and yes it's one kind of shock dead, and another kind when this lifeless thing quickens and courses through my body, busy groping inside me, touching, arousing me again, shocking, yes, a palpable thrilling current. What's living. What's dead. Who knows which is which here, my friend.

  I know I won't find anything I want on the bare shelves, probably not even the one or two staples—fresh milk, bread—my mother and I need to get by till the next two-mile trek to the nearest decent supermarket can be arranged, but here we go anyway doing what we do every time I'm in town, me stepping up the awkward step backward through the entrance of this store, bumping the wheelchair with my mother in it up and over the paving-stone threshold, her riding in backward too, past the man whose name I've never asked or did ask then promptly forgot, who's outside smoking, tipped back on a busted-up wooden kitchen chair propped alongside the narrow doorway and he doesn't budge to hold the screen door open for us till a voice inside the store hollers at him, Help the people, man. What's wrong wit you, man, the voice of the youngish entrepreneur behind the cash register eager to please the public with his shop full of nothing, full of sugar and spice and everything not good for them that people love anyway, his shelves stocked with products he can afford, staking his cash on bad risks, on the unlikely chance that he might be able to squeeze blood from a turnip, a figure of speech I have been hearing since my earliest days growing up in this community, my Homewood grandmother saying it first I think, squeeze blood from a turnip, and me with not the slightest idea of what a turnip might be and recognizing blood as something that drips or seeps or runs from a bloody nose if you pick at it too much or get punched in the face in the schoolyard I understood blood in that sense and worse if people got hurt in car accidents, but not as a warm fluid filling me up and keeping me alive, binding me forever to certain faces, certain places, and as I think back on the impression made upon me by my grandmother saying squeeze blood from a turnip, I guess the clearest image it evoked was her or my mother, her daughter, squeezing clothes, twisting water from rolled-up shirts or pants or towels when they washed clothes in the double metal sink in my grandmother's moldy cave of a cellar or on their knees scrubbing a floor and squeezing a scrub rag into a bucket to rinse and then dry a patch of linoleum they had just washed with soapy water, and thinking of the women in my grandmother's house, her and whichever daughters happened to be living at home or never left home and the endless chores, the women's work they shared, I probably understood as much as I needed to understand at the time about what my grandmother meant about hopeless endeavors, about needing something badly you're not going to get no matter how hard you squeeze, about people and situations hard-pressed and wrung dry, about foolishly hoping that something that has never worked might work this once, even though I didn't understand then the fact that it was my blood she was talking about nor understand that the problem was the fact that one person or a group of persons could somehow get invisible hands around another person's neck and choke and choke that other person past the point of fighting back, past the point of seeing themselves anything much like a human person, more like an article of clothing rolled, twisted, squeezed as
dry as hands could squeeze, then fed through the rolling-pin wringers of the washtub wedged inside one sink of the double sink, the wash-tub's handle cranked till the flattened, stiff thing that might have been someone's shirt or housedress is squeezed lifeless as a run-over pigeon dried up bloodless along the curb, enough meaning squeezed out of my grandmother's metaphor enough history squeezed up in the words to keep me thinking about them to this day, to this usage and recycling when my mother and I roll in assbackwards through the needle's eye of a neighborhood store the man behind the register squeezes and squeezes waiting for blood that ain't coming, squeezing himself, these bare streets, these bare shelves full of stuff even tackier than what the previous owners stocked, this emptiness greeting us as we pass the half-asleep cook outside the door, the cook the one who keeps us coming back, a dark-skinned guy with godawful teeth, in a white undershirt and a painter's bibbed overalls who only speaks sometimes when spoken to or speaks with his eyes when he sees something he cares to address, the dumb things done or said by customers who sidle in casing the joint or sweep in as if they own it though he or she, lost in space, has not slept indoors for days, who do they think they're fooling with not as much as two thin dimes to rub together in the deep pockets of baggy-assed pants, the cook who always dresses in white or off-white if you will, his measured stares and silences and raised eyebrows keeping account of who comes and goes, nodding if he's greeted, if he chooses to raise his gaze from where it's permanently slunk down at the level of aluminum pans he tends when he's standing behind the steam table, everything heard and seen inside the store, everybody in it something he's cooking, sampling now and then while it steeps, a tiny bit of the broth or sauce from the tip of his big spoon, just enough to fire up the messages that flash through his eyes after he observes people's words and gestures, this cook in white who hadn't stirred to help us through the door till the owner hollered at him is the main reason my mom and I come here every time I'm in town and I wind up scanning these empty shelves for some item worth buying, a purchase for the store's sake, the owner's sake, for the sake of Homewood, any little trickle-down contribution or reparation I could make for the sake of all of us, Mr. Godard, while we're waiting for the cook to ladle out the lunches or dinners Mom and I have ordered into compartmentalized Styrofoam containers whose lids he battens down with Scotch tape before swaddling our meals in tinfoil, that guy in his spattered whites can flat-out cook his ass off I tell anyone who asks and tell them that's why we keep coming back here no matter how dead the place appears from outside, the cook steady takes care of business inside, a compliment I know I ought to pay directly to him and hope I have, and maybe I did or at least tried but he'd be gone before I got the words out of my mouth, too busy doing whatever he's doing to be bothered with listening to what I have to say, not rude exactly, he's just not there, so much not there I'm not certain whether I ever complimented him out loud or if I simply carry around in my head the words I say occasionally to other people but probably haven't said to him since I know better than to waste words on a man past words who cooks for the same reason you make movies and I write, because, you know, who cares about the bullshit, the Hollywood hype and so-called fame. Don't you prefer a bare exchange, bare as shelves I want to knock the crap from with a swipe of my fist, bare as the streets we walked to get here if you sweep away the pomp and circumstance. Who gives a fuck really about the mise en scène, the gleaming church that used to be black before the congregation paid to sandblast its stones, Too Sweets barbershop, the pizza joint, the new cell phone shop, the regal cars parked shining along the curb, all the stuff squeezed out of people who live here, lorded over by the smiling Colonel whose greasy breath you can smell a block away, sweep away all the Hollywood murders drawing real blood, flowing rivers of blood you'd think you could wade in it, wade in the bloody gushing water but not a drop really or droplet if you're the entrepreneur behind the cash register waiting for rain, squeezing a pinkish vegetable shaped like a Christmas tree bulb or is a turnip the gray, weird, wrinkled one with a hair growing out of its eye.