Fanon

by John Edgar Wideman

  And I guess I've about squeezed all the juice out of that metaphor, squeezed it dry, right, Jean Luc, what's in a metaphor anyway, what's in an image. What language does it speak. Is it what it is because it fakes being something else. Can it exist. Be. Like a stone exists or does a metaphor only represent. Both. Neither. And if a metaphor points out something real, in which direction does it point—ahead or behind. Or circle every which way at once. Which direction does language point—past or future. Are words and stones equally unquiet, restless, swirling, bloodstained and dangerous even when they seem to be asleep. Like those Sumerian stones in the next-to-last movie of yours I saw, Our Music, maybe, the camera panning silent acres of stones archeologists were identifying and classifying to decode an ancient Middle Eastern kingdom's past or unfold its future. I really got off on your idea of stones as a metaphor for language. Words written in stone. By stones. Stone writing. Stoned writer. Stones so notoriously associated with lack of speech: stony silence, mute as stones, stone-faced, etc.... Word. A vast field of stones scattered in the desert, meaningless fragments and fragments of fragments, indecipherable signs of disorder, waiting for someone to imagine what they once were, what they might become. Stones disappearing as fast as dreams if you step closer and try to touch, count, weigh and measure, Magic Marker them, examine them for clues. Flying stones that can knock your head off.

  Anyway, I often think of the future as something that has already happened, something I'm struggling to forget and remember so I can believe I'm inventing it. My way. My dream sleeping within the stones. Not something I lost I happen to stumble across. Not like when I imagine my lover's erotic history, her sexual encounters with others before I met her, irrelevant maybe, but also terrorizing because in some form the others may still be present in her body—her secrets, traces of the others she misses, denies, seeks—as my previous lovers may be present in my body, like it or not, the desires and pleasures we're pursuing in each other's flesh are also a continuation of those former episodes, a playing out of remembering and forgetting, a coverup and recovery of old stories, a kind of perpetual archaeological dig. I can't win for losing, Mr. G. Always more stones, a deeper hole, you know what I mean. The stones don't just sit there waiting for me to figure out some past or future for them. They slip out the back door when I run to answer a knock on the front door. They start flying around, screaming, falling down again. Like when you attempt to picture love in your In Praise of Love, like me trying to get words to speak in my fiction.

  Hello, how you doing. Good to see you again [I shake the owner's hand]. And thanks again for the pretty purple umbrella you loaned us. Kept my mom nice and dry in her chair on our way back home. Mom sends her best. Oh, yeah, she's doing just fine. Doesn't like being stuck in a damned wheelchair, of course, but hey. That's the way it is. I'ma get your umbrella back to you next trip. Mom probably be with me. You know we'll be coming round like we always do when I'm in town. Like we been coming even before you took over. Bet Mom's up there now, out on her terrace checking to make sure Homewood's running the way it should. I'll get her a lunch to go when we finish here. Brought you a little business as you can see. These folks stone hungry and I've been bragging on your food.

  This is Mr. Godard. Jean Luc Godard. A very famous filmmaker from France. Famous over here too. And these other folks are his fans, come all the way from across the pond to see what Mr. Godard's up to in Homewood. (Maybe they thought he said he was going to Hollywood. Ha-ha.) They're newspaper, magazine people, you know. Kind of people who tell other people what's good. Critics, you know. They love Mr. Godard. And love to hate him too, don't you folks. They make fun of his black sunglasses. Laugh at his seriousness and seriously resent his lack of seriousness. A good bunch really. They don't mean no harm. I enjoyed getting to know them this way, guiding them through my old home place and telling them gritty Home-wood tall tales so they'll have something to write about besides Mr. Godard's movies which, no offense, are kind of a pain in the ass to watch and make sense of. They could write about Mr. Godard himself but that's not very much fun either since not much juicy gossip for years, and in interviews, with him hidden behind his shades, they can't tell whether he's laughing with them or at them, so I'm hauling them around, helping them cop quotes from the locals, you know, authentic bullshit from the mouths of the people to pump up their articles with what's real. Then the story won't look exactly like the story they brought over here with them, you know, the story their readers pay to hear and they get paid to write. I volunteered to handcarry them around a day or two, tour the happenings up close and personal so they'll be experts and can fuss at whatever Mr. G. comes up with in the film it's rumored he just might direct here, on location, you know. A rumor about Mr. Godard enough to bring all these folks to Homewood. Not only from France. You got your Dutch and Italians, Spaniards, Germans, Swiss, and comrades from the former Eastern bloc and a couple from godforsaken countries I never heard of before they applied for membership in the European Union. Told you Mr. Godard was famous, didn't I. And if you feed these good folks good, they just might make you famous. Put this sorry joint on the map. That's how it works. Ask Mr. Godard if you don't believe me. He sprechens very good English. Better than me or your mama probably. Lotta these white folks speech good English. I could tell by their eyes when I bragged on your grit. Warned everybody your place ain't fancy. But see, they don't seem to mind. They look happy to me. Just a plain swarm of nice hungry white folks no different from you or me when we're hungry under our skins. Hey, my friends. No table service. Just step right up to the steam table over there and order from the man. You don't need to speak English. Just point. The cook sure don't speak your languages but I guarantee his food does. Man can cook his ass off, folks. Step right up.

  [Dissolve to...]

  To me and Mr. Jean Luc Godard side by side on a mourner's bench with a bare shelf serving as our tabletop in a corner of a local mom-and-pop grocery store just north I think of the intersection of Home-wood and Frankstown Avenues enjoying heaped plates of soul food and casually discussing our respective crafts while Jean Luc Godard, in another language in another conversation to which I'm not privy, considers the possibility of shooting a film in Homewood or perhaps shooting himself in the head in the spirit of all the shootings of one young person by another around here and I consider, in my language in another conversation I'm not absolutely certain Jean Luc Godard doesn't overhear, various means of impressing him with my knowledge of cinema, writing, and life in general, hoping he'll be tempted to request a copy of Fanon, the script I have yet to write in any language, and turn it into a movie.

  Can Homewood's language be reduced one-on-one to another language—film for instance. What's the point of language if another language renders it transparently, disappears it. Why pretend anything can be established by words except other words, either in the same language or different, and if different and they establish the same thing, how and why are they different, except arbitrarily, they being the two languages reduced, elided, identified, passing away, redundant, the words of both languages pointing to the same referents, a verifiable reality that finally strips away each language's pretensions to difference, any language a slow boat to China, groaning under the weight of its slowness, inconsequence, its inadequacy because what everybody really wants is China.

  Enough scene setting, props and marks on the floor, scenery, greasepaint, costumes. Lights—action. Dialogue's needed to animate this obviously fake establishing shot. It's always obvious isn't it, Mr. G., the transition from one fake reality to another fake reality. Always requires the benefit of the doubt—active resignation, suspension of disbelief. The suspended sentence in one language ending in air before it takes off again in another language, or doesn't...

  JLG: (whose English is excellent) Very good grit.

  JEW: (whose English is heavily accented) Blah-blah-blah.

  JLG: Bien sûr.

  JEW: There are some advantages to balance the disadvantages of b
eing from the hood. Especially when I'm in the hood. Like a seat at the closest thing to a table in this joint, for instance. Or like the way these reporters, your fans, Mr. G., fawn over me, hang on my every word. Clingy as starlets. They desire more than anything access to the top, and for a minute while we're here in the hood, I'm the top. Observing their behavior you'd assume, if you didn't know better, each of them is my best friend. They all want to eat and drink and rap with me. The men want to hoop and hang out afterwards all funky getting high. Women want to braid their hair, take off their clothes, shake their booties. All them, men and women, want me to take off my clothes. Each one would murder for a little extra smidgen of precious, chimerical, one-on-one access. Power feels good, Mr. G. You know. Even reflected power. Especially in the hood after all the shit some us underdogs must eat to gain a little power. Fifteen seconds' worth. And that fifteen seconds more than most people, particularly the ones stuck in this bareass ghetto, get. Here you better go ahead no questions asked and snatch what you can snatch when the snatching's good. Do you have that word in French: snatch. Have it so it's noun and verb and can mean pussy and to grab. France is an old country, very much older than the US of A, of course, so youall gotta have a word for grab, like when you snatched those beautiful islands from the sea and those big hunks of Africa and Southeast Asia, you know, and naturally like every other country youall got a long list of nasty words for a woman's private parts, but does French have one word like snatch that stands for both. Not important really. Just a sound check, so to speak. Me, I'm always getting off on language. Weird words, tale-telling words like rapture and rupture. You know. Bet you get off on images the way I groove on words. Like when you see something you always also see something else, right. A sous-conversation as your Ms. Sarraute puts it, me and the language having this private conversation, underground, offstage, off-color, off the track, just plain off sometimes (do you have the word off in French so it's as multipurpose as motherfucker, a noun, verb, adjective, preposition, proposition, off meaning just about anything, from crazy to insect repellent to ejaculating to murdering somebody all in one word). Anyways, me and the language have these conversations going on between us, between the cracks, so to speak (crack, we won't even go there, Mr. G.), conversations in my head cracking me up sometimes, crackling below the surface of what's being said out loud, a tête-à-tête, two invisible old heads nodding and exchanging words nobody else can hear, except strangely enough on occasion somebody else does overhear and jumps in giggling or frowning, surprised as I am, and I wonder which conversation is which, who's talking and who's listening and maybe it's never me but the language always in charge, willy-nilly sort of anyway cause it talks to itself too and gets confused: you know like I can't speak French worth beans but now and then I find myself speaking bits of it in-side-my-head, French sneaks in without me knowing and it feels natural, you know, like merci, like a spot on the dial bleeding into another spot, I'm picking up a sous-conversation between the English-language station and the French-language station that's been going on time out of mind and sometimes I think I'm just plain going out of my mind but it ain't all bad, no it isn't, Mr. G., but I've strayed far afield, as my mom complains age strays her, and all I really wish to say is there are advantages hidden in the disadvantages of being from around here, for example the two of us seated one-on-one in this space you could say resembles a restaurant booth though it's a church pew if you study it closer and god knows how it wound up in this store, maybe the same guys stole it who ripped off the stained glass windows from my mom's church, Homewood AME Zion, cause the thieves around here are some desperate, shameless motherfuckers, man, and maybe they offed them as much of a pew as they could snatch and stick in their pickup, if the trifling motherfuckers had a pickup the night they robbed the pretty colored glass from the back end windows of the church, and maybe they swapped the pew for a meal or two, who knows, the point is, here we are, Mr. G., receiving a bit of special homeboy treatment, seated regally one-on-one with good food and a measure of privacy within a homely but authentic wooden parenthesis that used to rest in peace in church.

  And speaking of how shockingly empty and bone-dry Homewood Avenue appears sometimes, do you think there will be a flood one day, Mr. G. You know, like rain, rain, rain. Rain not stopping till everybody drowns. Our Mr. Baldwin's fire didn't finish the job so the flood's turn again. Everybody, including us, floating around bloated, mouths full of smelly shit we shat in our pants when we saw death by drowning bearing down fast as a tsunami. If the flood happens, one consolation in my view is that for a while it will be quiet round here. At least people won't be making noise with their stopped-up mouths. So a flood wouldn't be all bad, would it. What do you think.

  Do you think the meaning of life evolves in one direction toward a future like your spooled films running from reel to reel, unwinding, gathering momentum as they roll on from the snapshot that is the first take the audience sees and hears. Does meaning accumulate from what comes next and next. Or is meaning in place, fully articulated in the first snapshot before the film advances a single frame and then swallowed when the film's over and the lights come on, meaning drowned in the same darkness the first frame's light seemed to interrupt.

  When you make movies do you know what you're doing, where the film's headed, or is the making of a movie a gradual revealing, nilly-willy, of shit the camera just happened to catch. Not the narration of a story you had in mind from day one of the film's inception but a kind of Damn, what the fuck do we have here discovery of shit you never thought of till it's on the screen, in your face. Does meaning reside within images and words, meaning released as a sentence or scene unspools, or is meaning a regression. Meaning a film running backward we experience as if it's progressing, because our eyes fool us like they do when they reverse upside-down images on the retina and turn them right side up so we don't think we're pitter-pattering along in the world on our heads propelled by tiny dready feet growing out of the top of our skulls. You know. Like your Mr. Sartre said life's a train ride going one way and we sit on seats facing the other way, so everything we see from our pew done been here and long gone.