Fanon

by John Edgar Wideman

Here is the itinerary or log so to speak of Fanon's Great Escape, his journey from an old New world to a new Old world, after a false start on Dominica. I learned the details of his getaway in a book Fanon never had the opportunity to read so the information's thirdhand at best, an outsourced search for truth, documented by the plausibility of facts, facts unconfirmed by Fanon, untouched by his hand dead forty years before the book published. Welcome information in any case (thank you Mr. David Macey, assiduous historian), welcome as some of the facts might have been to Fanon on those fitful nights conflicted, stalled on Dominica. A healing glimpse of the future. Proof the rumors of the wanderer's return home are true. The flock of vulture suitors will be routed one bright morning and Penelope will never be forced to wear the wedding gown she weaves in public by day and unravels in the secrecy of her bedchamber each night.

  First a voyage of four days from Fort-de-France, on the island of Martinique, to the island of Bermuda. A night's layover to take on supplies etc., then an Atlantic crossing of fourteen days in a convoy of one hundred twenty ships to Casablanca, Morocco, arriving in North Africa March 30,1944, after departing from the West Indies March 12. (Coincidentally, my Seiko said March 30, 2005, when I wrote the words above and today as I reread them, believe me or not, it's March 30,2006.)

  In Fort-de-France (the former slave port Fort Royale) Fanon had boarded a decrepit transport ship, the Oregon, with a thousand other myrmidons, all men of color except for a tiny cadre of officers. The beke, Fanon's fellow countrymen, descendants of the old original white French settlers of Martinique, chose not to volunteer for war. Why participate in old Europe's bloody orgy of self-destruction. Why not stay home and mind their island business. Perhaps the shameless beke were still pouting over the ouster of their champion, Admiral Robert, Martinique's Vichy governor. Why should they take sides. Who could say which side's the good guys, which the bad, and in the final analysis, the beke reasoned, whichever side wins, war is good for beke business.

  This tub should fly a black flag, Fanon quipped, surveying the brown faces mustered on deck for inspection.

  A skull and crossbones, his homeboy replied.

  And speaking of threads, check out the place names on Fanon's itinerary. A surrealist poet spinning the globe and tapping it blindfolded couldn't have lucked up on a more numinous trio of names. Oregon. Bermuda. Casablanca. Perhaps the unscheduled touchdown (1941) of André Breton, fleeing Nazi Europe and encountering fascist Admiral Robert's police and prisons in Martinique, had infected the island with seeds of hazard objectif.

  Check it out. Oregon, the name of the troopship on which Fanon crossed the Atlantic, is also the name of one of the states of the United States of America. Oregon a western state on the North American continent's Pacific rim, as far west as you can go on land before you begin going west on the sea, the edge of the west where we all agree the sun must set after it rises in the east. Oregon not only identifies how and where Fanon's journey commences, Oregon foreshadows where it terminates, here in the good ole US of A, Fanon drowned by a surfeit of white cells, leucocytes, in a hospital in Bethesda, Maryland, a state on America's eastern coast, a fact that predicts the inevitable arc of his story, how his star will rise again from the east and return to light up the west.

  Bermuda: an island giving its name to a fabled black hole of lost ships, lost souls. A liminal zone, a magic triangle of darkness and destruction in the Caribbean: Forsake hope all ye who enter here. Bermuda a mysterious New World isle surrounded by waters that devour intruders, inspiring Shakespeare to shipwreck a band of Neapolitans in a place very much like it, or as much like Bermuda as he could imagine, given that the real place and the place in his play exist nowhere but in his mind. A brave new world, wrote Mr. Shakespeare, that passeth the understanding of the shipwrecked newcomers, a world where Prospero has been awaiting them, dreaming for years of revenge upon a city and its citizens who transported him, unjustly he's certain, with his infant daughter, Miranda, to exile on a faraway island for the alleged crime of practicing black arts. Prospero equipped with an arsenal of fairies, gremlins, elves, and high-tech clones who serve him as surveillance cameras, listening devices, a posse of visible and invisible presences spreading rumors, telling tales, telling lies, sowing disinformation, mounting simulations. Marooned on the island the new immigrants are ensnared and befuddled by a multimedia spectacle of illusions, a garden of virtual delights Prospero's crew creates. Prospero, whose more powerful magic had defeated (slaughtered) the resident witch Sycorax and appropriated her island, her secrets. Prospero displacing the rightful heir, Caliban, her son, the first shall be last, demoting him to hewer of wood, bearer of burden, a dispossessed beast-man, man-beast sentenced to dwell in darkness because Prospero fears Caliban will be tempted by fair Miranda's beauty and dare to desire what Prospero must deny himself. Prospero teaching poor, segregated Caliban the language of shame, language of sheep—baa-baa—blah, blah, blah, you know the rest, Caliban's only profit on it, he learns to curse.

  Casablanca: "white house" in Spanish. In American English White House means the big house on Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington, D.C. El Presidente's headquarters. Government property, white outside and inside from its first days to this very day, no matter how many dark ghosts you observe shuffling in and out of offices, galleries, conference rooms, bedrooms. Casablanca. The big whitewashed houses of beke. Chateau. Hacienda. Manor. Mansion. Castle. All the king's white houses. All the king's white men and black men riding roughshod over the poor who huddle in tiny hovels and sprawling shantytowns under the shadow of the Casablanca, the peasants, slaves, serfs, grunts, the many, many, many, many who serve the few. The many who are enthralled, zombied like Prospero's castaways by artfully administered doses of spectacular sound and light. Fill in the blancs. Fill in the little casas. Catch Humphrey Bogart in the movie of the same name, Casablanca. A classic from the epoch when Hollywood the king. Long live the picture show. Cornucopia of images. Hollywood proving life's a dream. As it is for Prospero's Neapolitan prisoners. Just a dream, a game, a video game, you know, like these mini-Hollywood studios you can carry in your pocket, hold in your hand. Turned on. Tuned in. Tuned out. Hey. It ain't nothing but a party, a game show, sponsored by the makers of a gadget soon available in a model installed before birth, no bulky gear you got to lug around, a chip in your brain, so no chip on your shoulder, soldier. A peaceable kingdom, invisible, weightless, wired to our internal wiring, delivering twenty-four-seven virtual voices in the air, bells and whistles tolling the hours, Tinkerbell, Ariel at your service, this sprite or that, musaking you along and here comes old cuddly teddy bear Caliban, your sidekick, ancient boon-coon Tonto buddy loping along beside you, grinning, eager to please, to bear your sorrows, your pain, all your tons of luggage, no problem, just a little-bitty extra lump or two on his broad, sloping, furry, bowed back, hey, it ain't heavy, he's your brother, and a man, my mon, give the old guy a penny, watch Caliban smile that old black magic full of cunning and guile smile he learned in the mirror from Prosperous Prospero, the pair of them, master and slave, watching the shaving ritual (as Fanon used to watch Casimir and I watched my daddy Edgar), two pairs of eyes scanning the same mirror, all four eyes spying on Miranda through the open bedroom door behind them, naked Miranda who rises knuckling sleep dust from her eyes, thumb-nippled breasts rising too as she stretches, yawns, sits up in bed, letting silky covers settle around her hips, part girl, part woman, maybe part fish with her mermaid bottom concealed under the white heap of sheets, Miranda half one thing, half another, like me, Caliban thinks, perhaps my sister, he thinks, a beautiful princess awakening from a five-thousand-year sleep, her skin fresh, sprawling hair to her waist, careful old horny frog Caliban, don't jump to conclusions, just watch like your master watches, Miranda's not real, she's on the tube, a pale maiden behind you dreaming, rising from her dreams. Don't wake her. Enjoy her on the same split-screen channel featuring Prospero's old cleft chin, his square jaw scraped hairless after he wipes away last gasps
of lather, of blood left behind by the blade, and with the same towel unsteams the mirror because he doesn't want to miss anything, he paid big bucks for the flat plasma screen, the split screen belongs to him, after all, his mirror after all, and everything it holds—the half-naked daughter, naked beast-man he watches watching him, the dark creature's eyes taking beastly notes all the time, learning to mimic me, whistling the same tunes I whistle working on a new face each morning, grooming myself for the business day, my mirror, my gaze, two identical talking heads, silent on the screen, four eyes alert, hungry, dangerous as the gleaming razor, as the teeth of my doggie slaves, see the fire of my resplendent suit of lights, creature, behold the dazzle and fly dash of my chain mail, Caliban, my boy, you may look, but never touch, never wear the fabulous fabric of my skin, shining like the pitted, running sea, white as the sail of a tall ship suddenly breasting a blue horizon, bright ships loom, bright ships loom rising fully formed as my Venus daughter from an oyster shell.

  Oregon. Bermuda. Casablanca. Many names, many stories embedded within the barest outline of Fanon's journey. Sampling just a few ought to suggest what could be garnered if we learn to listen, sound the depths of each clue to divine Fanon's fate. His many fates in one. How Fanon's fate connects to ours.

  Paris burning in an African campfire. Fanon's journey from Martinique to the metropole to America crackles there too, smoke rising into the darkness, the false start to Dominica burning like all the stories true and false, threads that a curious, determined boy must follow, teaching himself to risk anything, everything, even squeezing out of one skin into another, his life, his fate always unknown, always in his hands. Will he steal from his father again, lie, kill. You never know, do you, what life will require of you, Fanon, what kind of skin you must learn to fit into or when a life begins or ends. Maybe a French patrol will spot a spark from the campfire. Led by a Senegalese scout, commandos in camouflage gear—their brown faces, beige faces, white faces all painted black—are inching closer, slithering silent as a python through tall grass.

  On Martinique, part of a crowd lining a broad avenue in Fort-de-France, Fanon had watched a saint's day parade. Why did he cringe, lower his eyes. Why couldn't he just laugh out loud, shout, clap his hands, sway in place to the infectious rhythms thumping from drummers on a flat-bed truck, search out a familiar face in the swirl of old-school beke planters' white linen suits, straw hats, the long, spinning dresses with matching madras turbans and aprons, beige men, beige women high-stepping, cakewalking, white grins splitting brown faces ear to ear. Then next, more marchers dressed like ghosts of themselves, this time in traditional Breton costumes, men in dark suits and Saint Paddy's Day hats, shuffling along with the stiff-legged wobbly gait of punch-drunk boxers, women with heads detached from their bodies by wimples, pale faces displayed like pies on platters, this unit cadenced by more drums, bagpipes, flutes playing Breton country music with something somehow very African, very Arab Fanon hears—nasal whine, counterpoint, falsetto keening and wailing. Simple melodies repeated, faster, slower, almost monotonous, then an unexpected note graced, rising, falling. Like memory Fanon thinks. Something new squeezed out of old air trapped in bagpipes, whistles, accordions, breath compressed and released. Inhale. Exhale. Air squeezed into many different noises—grunts, screams, moans, yelps—animals rushing from a cage. He'd read that men from Brittany crewed France's slaving ships, the swift blackbirds flying from Nantes to West Africa to the Antilles to Nantes. Bretons manning the sails, cracking the whips, drumming chained Africans up from the suffocating hold to exercise on deck. Is that why he heard Africa, the East. Heard the shameful, evil exchange. The deck on fire. Breton drummerboys and pipers hustling to keep up with burning, jumping African feet. Is that why no eyes in the shuffling cortege of Bretons meet his. Does the music remember. Music mourning dead tribes, dead players, dead lovers, unrecoverable nations. Could any of these ordinary folk spruced up for a saint's day celebration say the names of the dead they pretend to be. Could you, Fanon, say the name of one African ancestor whose dark skin is your costume. Whose history, whose dead mimicked by these mummers, these fake Celts, Goths, Vikings, Arabs, Indians, Mandingos, Igbo parading through the streets of Fort-de-France. Mummy history. Bandages wrapped round and round the living. The public buildings of Fort-de-France, of Paris, Algiers, draped by flags, tombs for gloriously dead Greeks and Romans.

  Though he's near enough that afternoon to touch the musicians, the music plays at a great distance, reaching him only as an echo, as a memory. The music refuses to honor his claim to it, though it opens a space, a melancholy absence he hears and feels and yearns to fill, yearns to close. A place that neither lets him in nor lets him go.

  The old Breton music stubbornly, single-mindedly itself, yet it couldn't help echoing other music, each repetition of itself affirming the silent ground of all music. To become itself, it recalls more than itself, recalls the silence it shares with other music. Each music plays that silence differently—as his life will play out differently from any other life against death's silence, his life a small truth like a particular music's small truth. No revelation small, Fanon guesses, if you can learn to listen.

  Many years later, camped in the bush, listening to the noises of the African forest, he hears Breton pipes and drums, an unexpected layer pushing up through the silence, pushing down to raise the silence, a kind of creature breathing in the immense black night. Something's out there, a story about him, if not exactly him, out there breathing in the night. An empty pocket waiting for him to fill it. Would the pocket disappear if he stepped out to fill it. Would he disappear. Of course, he'll never know. Only knows he's risking his life, the lives of the men he commands, searching for a road which might very well be a fiction. A fiasco. A quixotic obsession. Mumbo-jumbo. Hoodoo. Power from the barrel of an imaginary gun. Dreamy Frantz. More poet than warrior. Rhymes instead of reasons. Rapper before his time.

  He'd watched the saint's day pageant pass the Palace of Justice, then continue along the Schoelcher Library toward the grassy park of the Savanne where the statue of Napoleon's beke wife Josephine stands headless, a monument to her treachery. The stone empress decapitated by terrorists, her guillotined head rolling down the street, vanishing, never seen since. The missing head proclaims her guilt, the absent lips confess crimes against humanity. Her bee-stung beke lips which had begged a favor from her emperor husband: Just a few more years of slavery. What harm could it do, my sweet. A little more bondage for blacks who've never been free, who know only slavery. Just a few more years, a decade and change perhaps, my darling. You wouldn't want to bankrupt my family, would you, beloved. Why would you deprive them of their hard-earned property. And you mustn't forget that your wars cost money. Empty coffers can't be taxed. If you let us keep our slaves a few more years, we'll make it worth your while. Beke gold as good as gold, sire. France is not an island, my master, and that distant island of Martinique a purse, not France. Black is not white and never will be. There nor here. Despite the Convention's mad proclamations. Her words poisoned honey she pours in the emperor's ear before she finishes off the blacks with a squeeze of her thighs.

  Empress Josephine, Napoleon's kidnapped island prize. Her blackened Creole whiteness a fashion statement in Paris. Court ladies imitate the lilting island lisp of her French, her jungle cat's tread and stealthy grace. Gold chains drape her neck, many silver rings spool like threads around a single finger, cascades of tiny, multicolored trade beads are miniature curtains dangling from her ears. How elegantly she stands, her long, lean back arched like the trunk of a palm tree, her rump protruding like a slave's, her corkscrew curly hair sprawling like the palm tree's fronds. She wears silk sarongs cunningly wrapped, their transparency more revealing than nakedness. India-cloth turbans twist around her hair in the style of mulatto concubines whose sultry glances decorate a lavishly illustrated book, executed at the emperor's command, his window on the exotic islands he rules but would never risk the sea to visit.

&nbs
p; On page 1794 of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary the word savannah appears below the words savage, savagedom, savagery and above the word savant. The English savannah, savanne in French, derived perhaps from an African or Carib word zavanne. Martinicans borrowed savanne to name the green market square of Fort-de-France. The word savannah employed in French and English to name a type of landscape common on continents and islands Europeans believed bore no names, no history, lands whose inhabitants babbled in multitudes of baa-baa tongues, none worthy of the name of language, lands whose natives wouldn't think of attaching words to ideas because thought didn't dwell there, no one, nothing there humanized by the touch of words, only a wilderness of anonymous mountains, flora and fauna, murderous weather, deadly insects, disease, endless grassy, treeless plains, an emptiness awaiting baptism, awaiting conversion to the real. The word savannah a sign of inclusion in god's plan, his kingdom—one day nothing, nothing as far as the eye can see, only a vacancy of nodding grass and then, miraculously, the savannah stretches forth, a green sea, green plain, a bountiful green park, God's will, his plenty and power made manifest, a green ark, a green playing field stinking of sewage some Sunday mornings from the backed-up Levasseur canal when Fanon and his brothers Joby and Felix gather on la savanne with other Fort-de-France brown boys to play soccer beneath the stone ramparts of old Fort Royale that loom above one edge of the island, protecting it from the sea.

  A towering fence of ragged tamarind trees marks another border of la savanne and one morning Frantz Fanon, galloping after a scuffed white ball, stuns the other boys by bounding higher than the tamarinds, hanging in the sky a moment, tongue in cheek like Michael Jordan, grinning at the others. Every player's mouth wide open, eyes popping before Fanon soars beyond the treetops, never to be seen on the island again.