Fanon

by John Edgar Wideman

  Felix to his right, Joby to his left, Frantz attacks. A magic triangle. Crisp passes back and forth, a flying wedge cutting through the other team's defenses. The field rough and uneven, a tilted, scuffed, pebbled surface but on mornings like this with his brothers on the wings and him in the center charging the goal, they skim across the Savanne like skaters on a frozen pond. Their opponents, helpless as tarbabies, are signposts nailed to the ground, unread by Fanon as he zips past, an arrow speeding to its target.

  When the game's pumped up to its swiftest pace, it slows down for the best players. Calm in the eye of the storm, Fanon watches the game unfold frame by frame, watches himself watching, directing. Plenty of time, all the time in the world between one moment and the next. Running full speed down the middle of the pitch you head-feint right, cock your knee as if surely you intend to blast the ball to Felix on the right, Felix who is your brother so he's seen that feint, that hitched leg before and doesn't hesitate, doesn't wait for a ball he understands isn't coming, but accelerates, sprints ahead into the gap between two defenders his brother's false pass creates, and in that space open only an instant Felix receives a pass from Joby, a shot on goal a split second after Frantz has punched the ball ahead to Joby on the left.

  Fanon scans the field quicker than thought. Thought's trumped by action. Pumping hard down the middle of the pitch or bounding high above the tops of worm-eaten tamarind trees, he is as stunned as the others by what's happening. He drives the ball with his instep, then he's alive inside it. Not exactly surprised, not exactly in control, driving, accelerating to weightlessness. You've prepared for this moment, been here before, you've done this running this passing this micromeasuring and parsing and orienting, this assessing of other players' skills and habits, this breaking down of lanes, angles, distance many times on the field and in your mind and there's no time to be wrong now, wrong would be slowing down, falling out of the flow. Wrong would be not playing on. In the rush of the action, speeding faster, speeding past, you exercise options you don't recognize as options until after you've executed them. No choice, no right or wrong decision, only a goal or no goal, a pass completed or not, a deeper, more dangerous penetration, or nothing—stalemate, the dissolve of the action, the clock slowing down, your feet back on mangled turf till the next chance if one ever comes.

  Fun while it lasts, Why doesn't it last. Why so many cells squeezing the life out of time. Stealing time. Killing time. Unlike most of his fellow dreamers and revolutionaries of the sixties, Fanon neither was gunned down nor served time in prison (in spite of numerous alleged plots to capture or kill him). Thus his life evades those myths of martyrdom so handy for settling accounts. For closing the book. Fanon's accounts of his life prevent him from being written off in other people's accounts. We have his words; we can count on them. Fanon uninventible, or you might say resists invention. He's no more or less a fiction than any person writing about him. Fanon's been here and gone. Free. Played the game till it was too dark to see the ball. You can't touch that.

  When I think about it, bro, I don't know why you keep beating yourself up trying to write intelligent shit. Even if you write something deep, you think anybody wants to hear it. Everybody out there just like the guys in here. Everybody just wants out. Out the goddamn slam. Quick. Why they gon waste time reading a book. Book ain't gon get them out. Deep down they know they ain't never getting out. Don't need no book telling them how fucked up things is.

  Anyway, real smart motherfuckers don't listen to nobody nohow. They know better. Busy wit their own scheming. And dumb motherfuckers don't understand shit even if they standing ass-deep in it. So when I think about it, big bro, I give you credit for being an intelligent guy, but, you know, I got to wonder if writing an intelligent book's an intelligent idea.

  In 1942 Frantz and Joby were sent from Fort-de-France to board with their schoolteacher uncle Edward in Le François, a small town about an hour from the capital. The Fanons' idea was to remove their sons from the dangers of a rumored Allied invasion of Martinique, which would undoubtedly target the French warships stranded in Fort-de-France's harbor and the Vichy government that had installed itself in the city. Removing Joby and Frantz to Le François would also rescue them from a city unsettled by war, plagued by poverty, crime, school closings, its population near starvation and harassed daily by the increasingly ugly racism of mainland French sailors marooned with their vessels by the Allied blockade.

  Ensconced within the relative safety, quiet, and isolation of Le Francois—more country village than town—Fanon, under the tutelage of his uncle Edward, would have begun reading more and thinking more about what he read, habits encouraged, as biographers and critics have noted, when Fanon returned to Fort-de-France, by his new teacher, poet Aimé Césaire, who stimulated not only Fanon but a whole generation of students, including Edouard Glissant, for instance, young men who become pillars of Martinique's intellectual and political life. But wouldn't enforced notification in Le François also have been experienced by young Frantz as punishment. Fanon a city kid exiled to the country. I think of Emmett Till, teenager from Chicago's black South Side, bored, restless, inventing mischief to pass the time during his summer in Money, Mississippi. Fanon an urban outsider in rural Le François, learning to turn inward for company. Cultivating studiousness, self-reflection. Infected by more than the standard measure of adolescent alienation, resentment, anger, and anxiety at being abandoned by his parents, separated from his comfort zone in the city streets. Or is another story intruding here. Thomas's story. Thomas a stranger in a strange land. The only one of his race in classes and extracurricular activities at his 97 percent white high school.

  During a tour of a local chateau with classmates from his uncle's school, Fanon heard a guide's tale about the beke who'd purchased the chateau from the beke who'd constructed it in 1750. Whether the guide addressed the story to the entire group or one-on-one to Fanon, whether the story was part of the official tour menu or a spontaneous aside, whether it was narrated in standard French or Creole, what the teller intended by the telling and whether the teller was male or female, whether black, white, brown, beige, red, yellow, or an inextricable mix of all the above, I can't say, and in a sense none of the above matters. What matters is Fanon listened and must have remembered the tale years later when he decided to write about how some groups of people control the lives of other groups of people.

  The story the guide recited a simple one. Familiar to all the beke's neighbors and their slaves because when he was drunk, the master of the chateau loved to brag about his success and wealth, his army of slaves, the chests full of gold he'd stashed away in the woods. Brag how with a single bullet he'd protected one chest's secret location and sealed Old Tom's gossipy lips, dooming the lazy good-for-nothing slave to guard the chest forever. A good trick played on cranky, balky Tom whose meddling tongue had forgotten too often over the years who was master and who the servant. Fanon didn't learn from the guide's story whether the beke said or didn't say goodbye to his ancient companion, only that the beke drew a pistol, pulled the trigger once, and left Old Tom silent, bloody, crumpled across the chest in the pit Tom had spent half a morning excavating, the pit over whose edge Fanon stares, tracking a sweating, grizzled brown head after the rest of the body disappeared from sight when Tom wrestled the heavy chest down with him into the hole he'd never leave.

  At school next day, instead of an essay extolling the architectural splendors of the chateau and listing the inimitable artifacts imported from Europe gracing its rooms and galleries, Fanon produced a short story. Unfortunately it has not survived. However from Joby's testimony (and Mr. David Macey's summary of that testimony) we know the story involved pirates, stolen gold, murder, a ghost's revenge. Autobiography in other words. Young Fanon's version of the guide's tale. Only with a different twist, I bet. An eye for an eye, most likely. The last becoming first, etc.

  Years later, composing Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon must have recalled the legend of th
e beke who sentenced Old Tom to eternal servitude. Wouldn't Fanon have admired begrudgingly the beke's cold logic. Slaves belonged to their owners from cradle to grave, the law declared, but the beke had demonstrated that a slave's usefulness could be extended beyond the arbitrary limits of birth and death. After all, didn't unborn slaves serve the master, visions of sugar plums dancing in a master's head, the added incentive of profit if lust not enough motivation for humping his slave women. If work could be squeezed from virtual slaves before they reach the cradle, why not work after the grave. Fanon was familiar with the scary tales about Haitian planters who poisoned their slaves and transformed them into living-dead zombies. The problem with zombies is they possess bodies—powerful, tireless, mindless bodies able to wreak havoc on a plantation. The Le François beke had a better idea. A scheme more efficient, elegant than his Haitian peers'. Though he left the head on his slave's bloody shoulders, he separated Tom's mind and body. Freed Tom for eternal servitude. So what if Old Tom invisible. So what he's a ghost. The clever beke invented ghost work for Thomas's ghost body to perform. The circle unbroken. An endless cycle of production and consumption. Slaves sown to produce slaves, slaves producing babies that grow into trees that become lumber that becomes wealth that seeds more wealth that purchases more slaves, etc. No escape alive or dead as long as Old Master rules, Fanon concluded many years later, writing about how some groups of people rule other groups of people by transforming those others into phantoms. The colonizer dooming invisible natives to ghost work. Scaring them with ghost stories of irresistible, godlike beke in charge during daylight hours, fearsome monsters and evil spirits reigning after night falls on the island. The circle unbroken.

  Each person an island in a sea of time. Isolated by the sea, each person's fate determined by the sea's traffic, by voyages that risk the sea's treacherous currents and vast distances, voyages that may seem to master seas they navigate, but any sea mastered is also, always, an island in a greater sea.

  Until he tells the woman in the wheelchair, Fanon had never admitted to anyone except his brother Joby how much the snow blanketing the French countryside had frightened him. More frightening than death, he had confided to Joby. Winter's whiteness a season experienced only in picture books, and then, fighting a war in frozen forests and mountains east of Lyon, he'd become more certain each day the people who lived there had forgotten how to turn the page. Did Fanon turn the page, peek ahead to the end of his story, and see snowy cells of leukemia drowning him.

  No preparation for snow. Only island stories about petite neige, strange white flakes falling from the sky, white dust each morning after Mount Pelée grumbled at night, pale ash powdering roofs of villages and sleeping cows in the weeks before Pelée erupted and unleashed a pyroclastic blast leveling St. Pierre, incinerating in a minute the capital city's thirty thousand inhabitants in a firestorm rolling down the mountainside (a black prisoner in an underground dungeon cell the only survivor, the story goes). Petite neige. Little snow. Now he'd crossed oceans and found big snow. Or snow had found him. Not the snow of postcard France. The postcards lied like the smiling brown faces on postcards of Martinique. Winter besieged France as relentlessly as war. Trapped you in a kind of living death, a skin-cracking and -splitting zombie in-betweenness. No escape because snow squeezes inside you. Back home on his island, death turns things soft and runny. Things rot, stink, change colors. Here his flesh and blood would harden, become a transparent chunk of ice, exploding finally, the swirling particles of him swept up by the wind, then drifting slowly back to earth, indistinguishable from the snow, buried forever in a cold white sheet.

  His first snowfall arrived obscured by darkness, mixed with freezing rain, cold blots on his cheeks, his eyelashes, pellets of icy rain pinging the column's vehicles as the men bivouacked for the night. Not until the next morning did he see big flakes hovering everywhere around and about him, countless particles descending in slow motion. The dust of his shattered, frozen bones floating in front of his eyes. How could he have slept through Pelée's fiery hands tearing him apart.

  Was snow drifting down or was the entire earth rising, slowly, slowly, climbing into the sky like the fir trees crowning a ridge in the middle distance, feathery trees lifting themselves and drawing up behind them the hills in which they're rooted.

  Snow falling slowly, thickly, unbelievably quiet as war before war starts up each day. He's the first to burrow from a jumble of tents pitched under a truck's giant, dragon-toothed tires, a truck whose canvas-covered bed is packed with frozen sticks of men, and for a moment he believes he's the only one awake in the world. But why him. Why here in a place so far from the green mornes and golden beaches of his island. Why is he imprisoned in this fortress Europe that has beckoned then betrayed him, this hell of killing and being killed. Peering up through the screen of snow, he sees a sky bright blue already at dawn, an unexpected, unnerving blue like the eyes many years ago burning cold in the face of an ancient, tarry-fleshed martiniçaise. Blue not a sign of the sky's presence but its absence, he decides. Nothing above the falling snow except a vast hole, a hole punctured by countless other holes to let through the white flakes surrounding him, this snow tasteless on his tongue, a net dissolving into nothing when his mittens bat it.

  It is a year since I left Fort-de-France. Why. To defend an obsolete ideal ... If l don't comeback, and if one day you learn that I died facing the enemy ... never say he died for the good cause ... the idiot politicians must not delude us any longer. I was wrong ... nothing justifies my sudden decision to defend the interests of farmers who don't give a damn...

  Crossing the chilly Atlantic he'd wondered if snow falls on the ocean. It must fall on the seas at the top and bottom of the globe. White bears, white seals, floating white islands. Snow must fall there. No snow on the Atlantic passage. Unlike his first run to Dominica, the sea calm. No weather to speak of, except the restless weather inside him, the turbulence of a soldier's excitement laced with dread. From birth he had lived surrounded by water so his uneasiness the first days at sea surprised him, the water, water in every direction as far as his eyes could see, water close up too, constantly lapping the troop transport's side with the gross weight of its tongue. Water sloshing on deck, stinking of gasoline and salt, vomit, piss and shit. He was sure the shadow the ship dragged beneath its hull was also a black hole thousands of feet deep and any second the ship's ponderous bulk would be lifted then dropped by a wave, breaking the hole's seal, sending the ship plunging down, down, the sea instantly closing without a single pucker or bubble to mark its plunge. Almost sick the first few days, then the unease subsided. Surely the huge armada protected by size, its sluggish pace, its tedious routines, the obliging, neutral weather. The convoy just might steam on forever. Why would a foe attack ships sailing nowhere so slowly. Fanon imagines a giant naval operations table with a map of the seven seas painted on its surface, miniature ships nudged by inches east, west, north, south by officers with sticks like pool cues (maybe they are pool cues) who speak in low, secretive tones of grand strategies and tactics whose success depends upon the ballet of little ship-shaped, colored chips. No danger to his transport unless a steward (brown perhaps) carrying a tray of coffee and croissants bumps the board, knocks their convoy's marker to the floor, kicks it under the table. Forgotten, the convoy a Flying Dutchman. No destination, no home, no port, shuttling back and forth over the sea, ghost ships worn thinner and thinner by the elements till they're invisible, mired in the green Sargasso Sea or locked in the crushing ice of Antarctica. But one consolation of being stuck on the bottom of the globe, Fanon thinks, is yes, he'll be able to answer for himself the question about snow falling on the ocean.

  ***

  White snow. Why doesn't it fall in other colors like leaves, Fanon asks the kind woman sitting next to his bed. White the color of ghosts. Of fear. White-hooded lynchers in America. White-wimpled nuns and nurses in France. Snowstorms scramble the hospital room's TV. White chaos sometimes silent, sometim
es buzzing and screaming, limbo scenes neither alive nor dead. The lily-white chill of bloody France. White sheets shrouding blackened faces of the dead. White beke linens drying in the sun after washerwomen have beaten them against black rocks lining the riverbank. He narrates for her the story of a flash flood in Le Pilot that drowned two blancheuses. Howling wind drove water in a foaming rush through a river's narrow channel, toppling the women, ripping sheets, towels, pillowcases from their hands, sending the beke's whiter-than-snow laundry high into the sky. The bare-legged washerwomen, skirts hitched up brown thighs, never had a chance. Knee-deep in the water, gossiping, singing when the storm hit and then years later in a country where war rages Fanon hears their mourning voices. What else could snow be. The fiery breath of Mount Pelée frozen, drifting in the air, white ash on blackened corpses and charred stones of St. Pierre, a white curtain dropping to hide the carnage in France. Show's over, folks. Time's up. Shame, shame. Nature fed up with rumbling artillery, the screams of mangled animals, the bloody mud, the suck of marching jackboots, jeeps whining, tank treads crushing seeds stillborn inside the earth. Fanon's cold brown skin ashy, his feet dead lumps of ice in snow-encrusted boots.

  Who promised you death by drowning in a warm, clean sea. Many maroons died sealed inside the chill fastness of mountain caves, icy caves turned to cooking pots by flame-throwers, Afghan caves mashed by percussive, bunker-busting bombs, an Algiers cave behind a casbah basement wall the paratroopers could not penetrate with their eyes but electronic listening devices inform them terrorists crouch like mice behind the bricks listening to the paras' ultimatum, the countdown before plastic explosives blow them to smithereens ... seven ... six ... five ... four ... three ... two...