Fanon

by John Edgar Wideman

  [Dissolve to the woman's face on the balcony]

  She's always wondered if she'd given him his taste for coffee. Her first son. From the beginning of the time he'd been inside her, every morning she'd splashed the island where he lived with a tide of strong hot coffee and the Carnation evaporated milk that served her as cream. Then him, at last, outside at her breast, coffee's flavor and color seeping from inside her into him as she rocked him while he suckled. A strangely full, ready-to-burst almost achy feeling lately takes her back to those early days in Washington, D.C., barely more than a child herself, bellyful of baby and nothing all day to do—how many times a day can you sweep and dust a one-room flat, how much cooking of the single meal two (three) share—too timid and tired to walk very far on streets lined with block-long stone buildings packed with strangers, learning to tie a scarf around her telltale hair and sneak into whites-only movies a few afternoons when there was a spare dime for sneaking, bearing a child, afraid of it, afraid of a new city, then the miracle finally, from her flesh comes flesh more precious than hers, yet her flesh too. After all, the simple truth is he had dropped out of her bottom, down there where she opens to pee and shit and bleed, opens for a man, yes, he'd dropped out from down there in a noisy, embarrassing shower Goddammit, nurse, who fed this woman beans so it's true and not true they are mother and son, coming and going, not exactly the same flesh, not exactly separate either, a hopelessly mixed-together oneness now and always with this "he" she named with his father's and her father's names John Edgar. She must feed and cradle and comfort him in her arms, sing to him not because anyone tells her she must, she has no choice, understood from the first instant that her arms, her legs belong to him, his puny limbs and blind fingers are hers, preciously, forever hers like certain expressions on his tiny face she sometimes coaxes from him are hers, expressions mirroring her huge face hovering, breathing into his, speaking to him without words in a language her body had learned from others to express with the muscles of her face, passing on family looks becoming his looks and though she understood she must be the source of much of what he saw then she saw spreading across his features, she also discovered new likenesses she had never perceived in herself. She was beginning to know herself in a different fashion, recognizing features she carried, looks taught by glances she exchanged with this baby. Not exactly as in a mirror. He was so different, far more precious than she was. Except watching those big eyes, small ears, that nose, that mouth, strangely she suffered his pains and pleasures deeper inside herself than the truth of her own sensations. But she couldn't pee for him or bleed for him, only mop up the damage, watch the hungers and aches inside him flow one to the next, relieved or not, tended to or not, pleasure or pain. His body would go on about its business, coping, thriving, or limping along as his flesh willed, while inside her, anything that had hurt or threatened him kept on terrorizing her flesh. She would see lifetimes of pain twisting across his face. Enough pain for many generations, the old people's pain from long ago, undreamed pain still to arrive—as real as her memories, as her perpetual fears of what might come to pass—all flickering in an instant across his features and after this unhappiness passes, he might smile, coo, fall asleep and there she'd sit, tears welling up in her eyes, a crew of phantom aches cruising through her body like they say you still feel in the space where an arm or leg used to be before a doctor cuts it off. His body, long gone from the nest inside hers, yet it's still eating her bones, her heart.

  Her coffee inside him, wherever he's sipping his first cup this morning. Not really hers. Not from the cup in her hand, not from the pot she just brewed. From inside her. From those loneliest, fullest times in D.C. No. She'd never be that silly, silly little girl again but feels the vaguely familiar fullness again of carrying him inside, a heaviness and fullness puzzling, puzzling, with her helpless as a baby now in this womb of chair. No. The damned wheelchair not a womb. It's her chain, her steel-barred cell. The evil jailors starving her with a torture worse than withholding food. The apartment's stocked with frozen dinners, cans of beans, boxes of rice and macaroni, a two-day-old roast sealed in jellied gravy at the bottom of the CrockPot in the fridge, cold cuts, one stale-ish, two mostly fresh loaves of bread, milk, Maxwell House instant coffee, orange juice, Pepsi, cereal, bananas, and so forth, she can list to herself a couple weeks' worth of provisions because it's not about not having stuff to shovel in her mouth and load up her stomach it's about appetite and the torturers are killing it, deadening day by day inch by inch her will to fix and chew and digest a meal. A ghost heaviness balloons inside her while she wastes away in the chair. Nothing she eats will return strength to her twisted legs. No amount of food will help her rise up out of the chair and go on back to doing the things she's been doing day by day, all these hard years to keep herself alive.

  Oh, pity, pity, poor me. One of my pity party days is how she tries to explain it to him and herself when he says her voice over the phone sounds like it's coming from a deep, dark pit. Oh yes, she's tempted to answer. Do you really want to hear how deep and dark, my son. A hole if somebody was digging it to find oil they'd have given up and put a cap on it long ago. Ha-ha. And you know how greedy those oil-drilling folks can be. You know cause a Texas one of them runs this country and he's drilling us dry, drilling down down till the greedy hole's all the way through to China and almost out the other end and this poor old world's gonna spring a leak, groan, cut one long hissing fart, and all the nasty air gon run out she'd like to say something silly like that and laugh with him, hissssss, phew-weee all their troubles, bad as they seem, bad as they are, trouble don't last always, my son, right, but no appetite for silly sayings or dumb stories she makes up from reading the news or watching TV when she talks with him on the phone to prove she's okay, that she's still fighting still following what's happening in the big world around her little squeezed up one shrinking shrinking to a greasy-looking stain and a bad smell, all that will be left of her in the chair one day, soon.

  These are not precisely her words, of course. Not mine precisely either. A mix, we'll say. As everything turns out to be. I'm making up words. Exchanging words with her to teach myself whatever might remain to be said. At times anything's better than silence. Better than silently abiding her illness and loneliness, the slow, sure progress of losing touch. Better than the silence of sitting alone, crippled in a goddamn wheelchair above those bare streets watching for miracles. Anything's better. Fire. Flood. It's okay to knock her up, even. Have her a girl again, walking D.C. streets again. Expecting. Heavy and uncomfortable in June heat. Unwed. Baby's father unknown. Maybe the daddy's you, Mr. Sneaky Motherfucker Godard. You, Mr. Luc lucky John. Maybe she'll be sitting six floors up on her balcony one afternoon so big the dumb chair's bowlegged under her young girl's fully packed lushness miraculously recovered and she howls a bloodcurdling air-raid-siren howl everybody hears from one end of Home-wood to the other, hears it all up and down and around the axis of Homewood and Frankstown Avenues, a ground-zero howl so loud even all the vanished folks can't stop up their ears against it when Mom pops wide open and surprise, surprise out comes Frantz goddamn Fanon, lips all bloody munching on the barbecued afterbirth. I'm back.

  [Dissolve to me and Mr. Jean Luc Godard side by side on a mourners ' bench with a bare shelf serving as our tabletop, etc.—you remember, the place where we were before. We 're still sitting here waiting between one dissolve and the next.]

  So what you're saying, Mr. G., or not saying since I been jabbering nonstop and you ain't squeezed out a mumbling word for hours, I guess what you're telling me bottomline is you'll be in touch, right. In the sous-conversation of things not said aloud, you're hipping me, aren't you, my man, saying, Don't hold your breath. Well, I hear you, bro. And I appreciate your candor. It takes the pressure off. Thanks. I can go on about my business now. Write my Fanon book without worrying about a shooting schedule, balky stars, budget overruns, guys in suits, censors, distribution rights, percentages, anxious banks, my poor Fren
ch, and your good English. You know. Hey. There's just one last thing I need to tell you. I fell in love in Paris once. In spring. I love Paris in the spring, love spring everywhere it breaks between the cracks in your beautiful old country, even where those ferocious hedgerows grow they say men died like flies fighting through on D-Day. You've seen the movie, haven't you.

  Dear Frantz Fanon:

  As you've probably figured out for yourself, I'm reluctant to say whether my evolving project is fiction or nonfiction, novel or memoir, science fiction or romance, hello or goodbye. A little tweaking and maybe it would fit in one category or the other. On the other hand, the hand supposed to keep track of what the other's doing, that tweaking, those categories one might say, are what I've been writing about, or trying to write my way out of, not only the last few years, but since the beginning. Perhaps that's why I'm dazed now and subdued by a sense of bittersweet resignation when confronted by the necessity of tweaking, and the implacable either/or categories. Anyway, gotta go now. The doorbell's ringing. I'm expecting a package.

  PART III

  I want to tell you one last little story about why I need to tell your story, Frantz Fanon. I'm going to employ the license you often employ in your writing, narrating a story in the present tense as if it's happening as you speak. For the writer, writing's always in the present, isn't it, in a vanishing moment the writing attempts to communicate, to transform into something tangible, lasting, something not lost, not gone before it gets here, something not disappearing the instant it's set down in words, words that disappear too, like dreams, like the writer writing them. Remember me sitting on a deck one evening in a garden at the back of a small house in Brittany composing a letter to you, claiming I was trying to save a life. Remember. I promised to say more about the evening, and here's the more:

  I'm sitting in a small garden. Dinner, an improvisation of what-ever's at hand, about over. Me outside, quiet on the deck, finishing off the last of the wine, my wife inside, noisy at the sink, hurrying through dirty dishes, me outside, grateful inside for the simple rhythms of this day still ending, still some time to go, watching the light fade or rather sitting here thinking about how slowly light leaves the sky this far west and north in France, fades reluctantly, the word popping into mind not so much a word about the imponderable light's way of leaving, it's a word expressing my mood, my awareness of the simple back-and-forth between two people that can render a day's passage unspeakably more than satisfactory, create a feeling of regret almost, a reluctance to let the day go, melancholy threatening to settle in, though the day's still quite alive, dishes rattling, my nearly empty glass a mysterious thing delivering intimations of other dimensions of time and space, bouncing light, refracting light, light swallowed, sliced, pooling in a dark mirror as I slowly swirl the glass's contents, each configuration unpredictable, once and only once, only here and now, because there is no way to experience what I look at, what I see this moment, unless someone, a god, would start up a universe precisely in the manner some god had started this world I inhabit and give me or another person in that matching universe exactly the place I hold in this one and then wind up the parallel universe and let it play forward to precisely this instant, a silly idea all around, god, starting up, precisely, yet those words like the word reluctantly alive in the air and I need to say something, make something with them, because they say themselves to me, part of the give-and-take rhythm of this day at approximately 10:15 P.M., words like everything else nameable and unnameable, part of me and not me, not mine exactly, like the light outside and inside still strong enough to keep night at bay longer than anyone would have the patience to watch, really watch it slowly diminishing by imperceptible degrees, my wife inside at the sink with her back to the sky, and I can almost hear her thinking out loud. Can't wait to get upstairs and plop down in bed with my book, she's saying inside, water running, dishes clattering, not much mess really, she'll zip through it in minutes and quickly get her wish then take her time once she's upstairs in the bathroom, just like she took her own sweet time earlier rinsing salt from her skin, washing her hair, scrubbing her face, applying ointments, creams, oils, color after our swim in the ocean, busy upstairs till she was good and ready to come downstairs while I improvised dinner in the kitchen, set the table, opened wine, me busy downstairs while she takes her time upstairs and you get the point, I hope, we take turns, or more to the point, I'm beginning finally after sixty some years on the planet to understand how people are always in each other's way and not and both always and therefore when two people want to love one another they must be clear and lucky and learn bit by bit what either one can give or take, what either one's willing or able or chooses or chooses not to give or take and learn a comfort with the things living together allows them to change in each other or things they can't change, fabricating space, slack, turns taken not in order to earn credit on some blackboard keeping track of whose turn, who's in debt to whom, no, more like discovering you're turned on head over heels, learning to dance or screw or talk with somebody and the other person seems to be enjoying it at least as much as you are, happy doing whatever it is you're doing together and you don't even need to give it a name, don't want to give it a name that might jinx it, because whatever you're doing isn't like it was on other occasions, doing it with anybody else. These new sensations of being glad and being willing to give what it takes to improvise dinner, to wait, to relax into the doing of needful things or silly things, clean up the dishes, get to bed, stare at an almost empty wineglass I jiggle in my fingers. Soon I'll go up the stairs, find a woman waiting for me and not waiting, not locked up by my expectations, in sync rather with a mutual, unspoken rhythm, the woman I've always hoped I'd find and now she's here, for no particular reason, every possible reason required to unfold this piece of the world as it is, just so, her hair sprawling to bare shoulders, bare breasts, she's leaned back against two big pillows, a book resting on knees steepled under the sheet, a part of me up those stairs already, opening our bedroom door, seeing her skin's soft glow, its many hues shadowed, bathed in light from two hooded reading lamps, one on either side of the bed, I'm getting there, on my way, though first the business of this inch or so of wine in a long-stemmed goblet I doodle in my fingers, tilting it to catch glimpses of other possible worlds, night inching not falling and the Fanon book measurable in inches too, inches or note by note, since I prefer conceiving my project not as a mountain I must struggle up inch by inch but as music, finding it, playing it note by note, word by word, trying to teach myself to play and listen at the same time, as if I'm jamming with another player, listening and playing at the same time, listening for notes the other will play, listening to myself play in my mind the notes I'm guessing might sound good with what I guess I'll hear when the other's music rushes at me from the silence, listening to music nobody else hears, there and not there, inside and outside, beyond me, though the music fills me up and I'm playing before I know I'm playing, breaking silence already broken by the other's music not waiting for mine, searching for mine.

  When I listen closely and listen well, what I hear when the best musicians are playing together at their best is give-and-take, the possibility of touching, of closing the space that separates each thing from every other; each player's solos remain just that, alone, solos reaching out, as if to say you can't go here, but listen and maybe you can taste a little bit of how it might feel if you could, and played by a master's hands that little is a lot, and hearing it means something is being made, being resolved out of nothing, out of the wish to touch, to play in the silent space enfolding another, the silence beyond words always separating one person from another, something's crossing the uncrossable space, a contradiction like the god I don't believe who's also real for me because my mother loves him with an enormous, unconditional love she mistakes as his love for her, and so it serves as such, she's sure her love's reciprocated, no, more than returned, magnified because she believes his love for her humbles her love for him, his lov
e burning a million times brighter than her unbounded adoration, his love saving her in spite of her unworthiness, she believes, another proof of his bottomless compassion, a mystery she's content to worship without understanding and her mistake about him, her belief generates an appetite for love, a flickering presence around her and an abundant radiance within her she shines on me, and who needs, who comprehends more reality than that, I wonder, though it's also a reality I do not share, only observe, ponder, enjoy, envy, a reality crossing through the silence of these thoughts I play and listen to inside, filling in the blanks, reaching out with words like reluctantly to describe a sky darkening by the minute, by the millisecond, by inches, by notes, this wineglass reflecting, refracting, drinking light, infinite skins peeled one after the other, bright ellipses floating to the liquid surface, endless layers of what's possible, what's real only for this instant and no other, for no one else, anywhere, moments thinner than nothing where billions of us fit effortlessly as angels fit on a pinhead, each moment giving way, each one a kind of lifetime, a kind of eternity, each a world, like this solid, solid, solid world seizing my attention, this one breaking apart always as I watch, except it's more not less real as I reach out and attempt to cross the silence, reach out and nothing's there, falling short always of your music, if indeed your music's playing out there, Fanon.