Fanon

by John Edgar Wideman

  Nothing stands still, does it, my friend. Including meaning. The light beam interrupting the darkness of the theater, the darkness of the screen only appears to break a stillness. The world never stops, never slows down for us to catch up. During the split second when darkness becomes light, the audience pretends to slip into a movie's flow, riding the light that propels the camera's gaze, then our restless gaze, across a moving field of images. We focus on the first frame and the next and next, as if we're being born again, born innocent of meaning, but the first frame's full, not empty of meaning. Too much meaning erupts. The meaning for instance of you, your person, your history, your culture, Mr. G., your language and ideas at a given moment all packed up into the first frame, a frame drowned, saturated with meaning, like a cell containing invisible prisoners, an unruly mob of prisoners, scrambling madly to escape through one tiny porthole of light.

  Have you ever considered what you'd do if someone stole the only copy of a film you'd just completed and chopped your movie into single frames, piled the celluloid chips on a table in a closed room, and turned on a powerful fan. You know. Let it blow, let it blow, let it blow. Till there's a mess worse than the Sumerian stones scattered in the desert. What would you do after the fan hit your shit. Would you call the janitor to shovel the pieces out the door. Would you gather up the humpty-dumpty pieces and begin again. Would you try to reassemble the frames in their original sequence so your film would appear onscreen intact. As if the shitstorm never happened. Or would you remake your film so it tells the story of its destruction, recounts the brutal scissors and knives dismembering it, the howling tempest, swirling chaos. What would the film mean if it carried no memory of its history, if you skipped its history and showed your film unmarked by its death and resurrection. With the modern advantages of digital remastering, who'd know what you left out or what you slipped in. I don't expect you to answer my dumb questions. I mean everybody lies, right. I mean imposing order also preserves disorder, and etc. Blah-blah. Or vice versa. Or something like that. I mean people get caught lying because the first lie leads to another and another and the lies start tripping over each other. Down you go. Like our Mr. Pryor's grandma says, "Everybody got roaches, Richard." And everybody acts like they don't.

  Hey, folks, don't study your plates too hard. Eat up, youall. It's true grit. Bon appetit.

  [Dissolve to...]

  Exterior: The corner of Frankstown and Homewood Avenues, quiet in a photograph taken at dawn from the sixth floor of the K. LeRoy Irvis senior citizens' residence. Shot should include the shops on the north side of Frankstown across Homewood from Mason's bar. No people in picture. A kind of postcard of the neighborhood before its residents hit the street. The screen's divided to accommodate below this frozen image a string of words subtitling French spoken by offscreen voices, words passing like the crawl at the bottom of a TV newscast. As the crawl of words from invisible speakers—English words translating French words taken from a case study Frantz Fanon appended to The Wretched of the Earth—moves across the screen, the photograph of Homewood blurs and darkens, gradually disappearing altogether, the screen black finally as the interrogations below end.

  Voiceover

  Today in the trial of two Algerian boys aged thirteen and fourteen accused of murdering their European playmate, transcriptions were read in court of conversations between expert witness psychiatrist Dr. Frantz Fanon and the two accused. Because they are minors, the accused boys are designated in the following excerpts as Thirteen-Year-Old and Fourteen-Year-Old.

  The Crawl

  The Thirteen-year-old

  We weren't a bit cross with him. We used to go and play together on the hill outside the village. He was a good friend of ours. One day we decided to kill him because Europeans kill all the Arabs. We can't kill big people. But we could kill ones like him, because he was the same age as us. We didn't know how to kill him. We wanted to throw him in a ditch, but he'd only be hurt. So we got the knife from home and killed him.

  And yet you were pals?

  Well then, why do they want to kill us.

  You know he is dead now.

  Yes.

  What does that mean?

  When it's all finished, you go to heaven.

  Does having killed somebody worry you?

  No, since they want to kill us...

  The Fourteen-year-old

  At home everybody said that the French had sworn to kill us all one after the other. Two of my family were killed. And did they arrest a single Frenchman for all those Algerians who were killed.

  I don't know.

  Well, nobody at all was arrested. I wanted to take to the mountains, but I was too young. So my friend and I said we'd kill a European.

  Why?

  In your opinion, what should we have done? I don't know. But you are a child and what is happening concerns grown-up people.

  But they kill children too.

  That is no reason for killing your friend.

  Well, I did kill him.

  Had your friend done anything to harm you. Not a thing.

  Well.

  Well, there you are...

  [Dissolve to...]

  To a young man of African descent standing on the corner of Frankstown and Homewood. Around ten-thirty at night. Summer. He's about fifteen or sixteen, the age of my dead nephew Omar, my jailed brother's murdered son, when I took him once upon a time to buy a black-and-gold Pittsburgh Steelers winter parka his mother couldn't afford at Sears on Hiland Avenue, a department store that's since disappeared from East Liberty, a section of town to the west adjoining this part of town, Homewood, whose chain stores have also disappeared as my nephew disappeared from these streets, though the kid my nephew's size and age on the dark corner, from the distance we're shooting, could be Omar, his familiar man-sized shape in a fat T-shirt and droopy pants, a silhouette cut out distinctly then unresolved again, merging into shadows draping the corner on which he stands fidgeting, a figure partially visible in patches of fire thrown by passing cars or light cast by a streetlamp or shed by the gleam of a cell phone store's neon lights and Too Sweets barbershop sign on the opposite corner and I wonder if my nephew Omar, alive again in my thought about the boy on the corner, had ever thought of me dead. I had thought about him dead often, a victim of Home-wood's dangerous streets. Wouldn't it have been more natural once upon a time for him to think that thought about me, his elder by three decades, than for me to have thought it about him. Natural for Omar to have imagined me, if not dead exactly, removed. Out of the picture. Out of the goddamn way. Me and everybody else my age and older moving aside to give him room to breathe, give him some room for himself, room to make something of himself. King for a minute of these streets with next to nothing in them. What happens to you. Where do you go if someone thinks of you as dead. To be in someone's thoughts or stories keeps the dead alive, the Igbo say. But what if a person thinks of you as dead. Or you think of someone as dead. If you think yourself alive, does your thinking protect you, change the power of the other's thought to remove you to wherever a person goes when someone thinks of them as dead. When anyone thinks of someone else as dead, are they also with this thought returning that other person to life, a sort of life or imitation life at least since life is all we know, all we've experienced and continue to experience till the end, so if we hold another in our imagination even if we think of them as dead, do we grant them a chance, however slim, however temporary, however inconclusive and inconsequential, a chance, something like a reprieve, to be in the alive state we are, since any other state, anywhere else is beyond our power to conceive, the state of being dead for instance, though dead we may be in another's thoughts, but is that too a kind of life, like the Igbo say, though we might be remote, out of the picture, beyond our power to recall ourselves, as it seems the case might be if we are dead.

  The young guy on the corner, for all his fidgeting, stares intently at Mason's bar, even with his back turned toward Mason's, he stares at Mason's. Ma
son's an eyesore, Mr. Godard. From this distance, in the poor light, you can't see how looking at Mason's damages the boy's face, how it fucks with him, but it does, it does. My mom could tell you about the shenanigans going on outside and inside Mason's twenty-four-seven. People inside drinking and shooting up, people outside pissing, shitting, turning tricks, sleeping, eating golden nuggets of Kentucky Fried Chicken in the mess of weeds and rubbish just beyond the bar. Mason's a doorway into one of the few structures left over from neighborhood renewal of the block of Franks-town across from the senior citizens' residence on whose sixth and topmost floor my mother rents an apartment subsidized by the city of Pittsburgh. Mason's occupies the ground floor of an otherwise empty two-story brick rowhouse, and next comes its boarded-up Siamese twin, empty except for vermin, and next the toilet of weedy vacant lot and next more rowhouses, some partially occupied, then a fenced, carefully tended green space advertising itself as the future site of the Homewood Bruston African-American Cultural Museum and finally, blessing the block, recessed and elevated from the street to separate it from the Velvet Slipper Lounge on the corner, a large Baptist church set in immaculate grounds, looking dazed and brand-new after the congregation paid to sandblast away a century's worth of steel-mill soot and grime blackening its stones. You can see this entire block of Frankstown and beyond disposed as I've sketched it in what you could call a bird's-eye view from my mother's terrace, but that's not the perspective of the young man on the corner, his wings have been clipped, when he comes and goes he hip-hops low to the ground or glides along permanent grooves in the sidewalk. He hustles, flees, perpetrates, pinned down by something that never permits him to stretch up to his full height of over six feet and breathe deeply. He leans in at a stylized slant so as my mom peers down at him he appears to be going about his business pressed down by a transparent slab of glass, thick enough to reach from his head and shoulders to the sky, a blue sky some days, framing Homewood's highest hilltops, blue sky plotted for flight paths into Allegheny County airport, so the sky's crowded at certain hours by planes my mother watches, and though she'd miss him, miss him terribly if he left and didn't return, my mother tries to think of the boy on the corner elsewhere, on a plane headed to someplace where he is not dead so soon so often and she wonders who decides where those planes fly and who decides who rides them and who decided that her old frail body, locked down in a wheelchair, will outlast the boy's.

  The young man can't take his eyes—eyes we can't see, only imagine—off Mason's. We watch him like my mom watches, reading his posture, his motions, for any sign we can gather at this remove of what intention or errand might have brought him here, stalled him here. She can guess. She could whisper his story to us and probably get much of it right. She prefers to give him, as her father, my grandfather John French, used to say, the benefit of the doubt. She observes meticulously. Reads the signs of what he's doing in the dim light of that shadowy corner, wondering if he's one of her daylight regulars she tracks up and back, up and back on Frankstown or Homewood Avenue, her folks working the grid of streets as if the streets have walls, are tunnels and chutes and corridors allowing no slack, no escape as her people go about their business. Her regulars instantly recognizable when they enter the maze visible from where she sits six floors above the sidewalk and each regular also for an instant could be a stranger or could be a grandchild, a grand-niece, a great-grandnephew, could be herself down there strolling or slouched on a shadowy corner at night smoking a cigarette. Does smoke warm your mouth, your lungs, the smoke inside you and outside, is it nasty or nice with a burning stick squeezed in your lips, how would she know, how could she guess unless she watches, watches him staring at Mason's as if he belongs inside the door, longing for it to open or shut, for someone to enter or leave so he can tag along unnoticed where he wants to be so badly she guesses his mind's already inside, trapped inside as he's trapped outside, the lungs one place, the smoke in another, wishing to mix, to slink into Mason's or slink outside and down to the corner and be whole she guesses as she watches him send messages of himself to somebody inside Mason's door, the door not closed, a black hole sealed at this hour by night and she guesses the young man would need more than the strength he possesses in both arms, both legs to push into the bar or push himself back out into the street if he's inside, need every ounce of strength in his body, more power than he can muster for the moment to brush the curtain of night aside so he waits on the corner, sends messages down the block into the black entrance. Someone with something the young man needs sits on a barstool or stands inside Mason's. Or someone outside Mason's waits for him to arrive with something badly needed. For unknown reasons the exchange stalled. Is it impossible or dangerous or what. Or who. Why. How could she know for sure what keeps the young man standing where he is, his eyes fixed on Mason's, feet shuffling like he's chilly and can't get warm in all this July heat. A million little tiny going-nowhere dance steps. Why doesn't he begin walking the ... what, twenty, thirty steps from the corner to Mason's or better yet why not go in the opposite direction, any other direction, go the twenty or thirty steps across Homewood Avenue, go, go, go young man, go that way please, please run, run away please she begs grandson or great-niece or great-grandnephew whom the streets make strangers for that instant when they first appear and the shape at a distance could be anyone coming or going down there in the street till the next instant a heartbeat, heart burp, or sigh away when the miracle she's watching for is something else again, not a lost one returning, not one saved, but the same old regular thing again happening.

  ***

  When it's the next frame of the movie and after it the next and next and next, enough frames per second to restore an illusion of motion, of life to a scene that for an instant seemed neither old nor new, seemed outside time as if time sleeps when we sleep as if time slows down when motion slows and somehow we inhabit a slowed-down seamless space outside time, disembodied in the stoptime of a snapshot or perfect word until we return to ourselves and the movie that never stops seems to start up again because we're watching again and our attention's seized again by what appears to move across the screen, but something's wrong, the next frame, next scene can't possibly be the next, it doesn't follow, we've missed something, something has intervened, the boy has moved from the corner and is lying shot to death in the vacant lot next to Mason's. Where have we been.

  [Dissolve to a woman in a wheelchair on a balcony of a six-story public housing facility for the elderly. The recessed balcony, guarded by a solid, waist-high metal wall, is long and narrow, a space in which two and a half coffins lined up head to foot or assbackwards, foot to head, would fit snugly. The woman is approximately eighty years old. Depending on the light, the distance, and the angle from which you shoot, she can seem decades younger, decades older. Retain a tight focus on her face the entire time she delivers her monologue. Her features should more or less fill the screen, unnaturally large at first, monstrously oversized features, a wasteland of skin so the viewer doesn't feel comfortable, confronted on an exaggerated scale by the mix of familiarity and strangeness any human face expresses. The closeups of elderly faces in In Praise of Love could serve as a guide here.]

  The Woman: Well, I was outside, you know, like I like to be if the weather's decent, sitting up here in this chair, minding my own business (you mean minding everybody's business, don't you, Mother dear), a hot day in a hot spell, middle of the afternoon I remember because they said on the noon news expect thundershowers or thunderstorms later today breaking up the heat and cooler tomorrow the man promised but you know how changeable the weather is and they get it wrong it seems to me as often as they get it right but I listen anyway and to give credit where credit's due they did warn people about the terrible winds and the flooding this spring and it's a good thing too they got that right because the storm tore up Pittsburgh, big trees down everywhere and roads closed, people's basements full of water and I saw on TV the whole insides of some of those houses out in the suburbs f
loating away but nobody hurt bad or killed thank goodness and thanks to the weather people too I guess, to give credit its due, anyway no sign of rain on that afternoon the news had promised rain the heat still laying like a wool blanket down there in the streets and I'm up here a little sleepy the way I get some afternoons, tired, though it seems I don't do much of anything these days except sleep, sitting here dozing off, then trying to wake myself up by thinking about what I might fix for my dinner and nothing I can think of sounds like much I don't know some days why I bother to eat just don't have the appetite I once did but you know the eating habit not a good one to break so this afternoon I'm telling you about it's around time to start thinking about fixing some little thing or another for my dinner but I'm not coming up with much with nothing really I have a taste for because I'm never hungry the way I used to be hungry chasing all day after youall and it worries me some because you know your mother always loved to eat, that's where you got that big appetite of yours and I know it won't be me anymore, not myself anymore if I don't care about the food on my plate and it's late in the afternoon school-bus time but no school bus because it's summer I can't say the hour exactly, I hate to look at my watch, I love my watch because you bought it for me but I don't let myself get in the habit of checking the time all the time it just makes the hours go slower time gets heavy on your hands when you're always watching the clock you know like heat's worse when you think of heat so it's best not to think heat if you're trying to stay cool, best if you put your mind on something nice and cool and sometimes time flies if you leave it alone it used to fly anyway when I had no watch no time to myself not with all youall needing this or that or your father's table-waiting white shirts to iron, the food, food, food everybody looking for every hour of the day, mouths open, hands out, I'm hungry Mom my hands always busy and time seemed to fly but when you stop and really think about it, time doesn't change doesn't go fast or slow just goes on its own sweet time, it's the same time really going fast when youall were little and going slow now with me locked up in this chair still the same time it's always been, only me that's changing when I stop to think about it, me coming here a baby to this old earth and leaving here old and still the same time it's always been since long before I got here and long after I'm gone from here the same time, not slow, not fast the way people say it goes I have that thought sometimes and it doesn't go any further than I just said, just a dumb old woman's thought I think sitting here cause I don't have nothing better to do than sit in this wheelchair and think while I watch the people down there in the street doing whatever it is they think they're doing I bet you walk up to one with a microphone in your hand like on TV they wouldn't know what to say if you asked, What are you doing, ma'am. Why are you out here in these streets with the sun beating down on your nappy head. I wonder sometimes if anybody has the slightest idea of what they think they're doing except they're doing it, like me sitting up here in this chair, doing it because I did it yesterday and got used to doing it and now it's what I do, it's too late it's not really worth thinking about too much if you think about it. Listen to me going on. See, that's what happens when you're alone. You start to talking to yourself. Harebrained conversations don't stop, don't start or stop just come from nowhere and go nowhere you talking to yourself just to hear somebody talking, talk that wouldn't make the slightest bit of sense to anybody else besides you and as a matter of fact makes precious little sense to you sometimes, you're just talking to hear somebody talk and you're the only one listening so it don't matter start on one thing and jump to another thing without finishing what you started who cares just a way to pass the time and sometimes time goes faster that way or maybe slower you don't want to know either way so don't look at your watch, it might make a liar out of what you want the time to be and still a long way to go before it's time to get ready for bed not bedtime yet the sun's still up it's bright afternoon sleepy-head old fool, school's just out, school-bus time if the school bus had been running that July afternoon I'm talking about and I remember thinking there's a clock inside me with no hands on its face but I hear it tick-tock telling me the school bus taking the children home been here a couple minutes ago and stopped just down from the corner of Frankstown and Homewood to let the little boy lives cross the street off, stopped and he hopped down that last tall step and scoots across Frankstown Avenue, looking both ways up and down like I holler every time he better look, the bus stopped sure as if I'd seen it stop and seen him hopping down and crossing with my own two eyes, though I know good and well no school and no school bus in summer.