What do you do, Fanon asks Death, and Death answers, I connect the dots.
Perhaps Fanon's first snow also the first for many of his comrades who, like him, hail from tropical zones—Algerians, Malians, Moroccans, Tunisians, the island men of Guadeloupe, Martinique in this motley brigade of colonial infantry. Some of whom will be dead by nightfall. Is that why the day had dawned so miraculously serene and bright. A reward. A tease. This first snow your last, my orphaned children, so here's a sample of how beautiful snow can be. A taste of what you're going to miss you can take to your graves, my sons. See. Open your wide, hungry eyes. Look. See. Here's what you're not going to get, this spilling white rainbow of wonders never ceasing. Enjoy it before the brutal wind kicks up, before gusting snow blinds you and bullets of ice penetrate your layers of protection and you're sopping wet inside your uniform, as if bathed by sweat, good sweet tropical island sweat, until you begin shivering and freeze. Button up, gear up, move out, and hit the road, Jack, Jacques, Amin, Mohammed, Caesar, Abdul, Michel, Kwami ... Time to stop thinking dumb thoughts, trying to make sense of your first snow by comparing it to things familiar or frightening, Fanon, things desired, things lost and neglected during war. Forget love. Your sex exploding would shame you, a cold puddle in your drawers as you hurry off to more war.
Baptized doubly by the fire of battle, the winter of France, how could he explain to Joby, let alone any stranger, the fear, the beguiling ache of loneliness each rare snowfall since. Why is he trying to tell this woman who sits beside him, touching his cold flesh with her warming hand. Is she the one humming the blancheuses' song.
You could insert something like the spooky Twilight Zone riff now and flash forward, Mr. Jean Luc, Mr. Lucky John, ringmaster and emcee, flash ahead to the end of the movie. Snowflakes we've been watching become a blizzard of leucocytes, a lynch mob of white cells attacking Fanon's body, stripping, choking, stomping him, hacking off souvenirs of his flesh, beating him black and blue, obliterating any trace that a man might once have dreamed and suffered in the hospital bed, vacant now, covered by a rubber sheet, a stack of snowy, folded linen at its foot. Depending on the meaning you wish to attach to Fanon's death in a Bethesda, Maryland, clinic, if you've taken my suggestion and segued from a screenful of gently raining snow to a frenzied storm of white cells, you might as well go ahead and bring on the angels at this point—pale, translucent, computer-generated special effects, like gigantic anthropomorphic snowflakes or diseased white cells that have metastasized and stylized themselves into vaporous, part-human, part-bird snow things, alien and scary almost but also graceful, even elegant as they descend, wrap Fanon's dark, limp body in appendages not quite arms, and then rise, returning through the hospital room ceiling that their unlimited powers render porous. Spectral, winged messengers. Snow angels. An intelligent viewer will make the connection and understand the meaning of the transition. In any case, if you think the scene's too supernatural, too Hollywood, later in interviews with the press, blame Fanon. Blame the patient dying in the bed, his feverish condition at the end, his delirium, his liminal not-quite-dead/not-quite-alive zombie consciousness, his convulsions, his body furiously evacuating itself from every orifice like a hanged man. Blame Fanon who can't manage his own swollen tongue, surrounded by hostile strangers who can't speak his language even if he could articulate his thoughts, Fanon desperately seeking a way out and not surprisingly when a way out appears that might free him, free him at last, the imagery of escape figures itself in terms of the Catholicism remembered from his youth, his mother's religion, the holy relics and lithographs on her bedroom walls, the rites of confession, absolution, and salvation, those weirdly persistent, overheated, cross-cultural, multidisciplinary ceremonies so often evoked by his patients, the tortured and the torturers, Christian and Muslim, Fanon treated in Algeria at the Blida psychiatric clinic. You'll be off the hook if you blame Fanon. Sympathetic viewers won't exactly fault him, either. A real temptation at the end, in extremis, to revert to comforting childhood memories, to wishful thinking, to baroque fantasies and magic realism with their once-upon-a-time happy-ever-after promises. Why wouldn't Fanon go there during the few semilucid intervals when drugs liberate him for a minute or two from a constant drubbing of pain.
Or if you choose, Mr. Director, none of the above, score the end in a different fashion. Downplay it. Perhaps skip it altogether. Click. In the middle of the action the screen goes black. Click. After a decent interval, the house lights come up. No gory details. The end's the end—no intervention, divine, directorial, or otherwise. The end arriving at a different point each time the movie plays. Arbitrary. Random. Untranscendental. Unheroic. No end. Just letting go. Why not just let it go. Let it end. Click. The end. Fini. Always the same story. Leukemia, like life, no respecter of persons. An agonizing, relentless assault, the disease dispatching whomever it lays low, no matter how many surreal, special-effects angels dancing on the head of a pin or snow drifting down, covering a black iron fence, then all of Dublin, the whole wide world. No. There's nothing pretty, nothing worth saving in Fanon's last hours. Not anything that would fit on the screen, anyway, emptying it or filling it with meaning. Certainly nothing to drop in an audience's lap as the film's final shot and expect people to rise in their seats and applaud. Let it go.
Instead of dwelling on the end, jump cut to the African wilderness. Stygian night. A fire burning bright—yes, yes—as a tiger's eye. It crackles, dances, throws up sparks, reassures Fanon, who pees and breathes deeply for the first time in days, sure no marauding mercenaries will visit the camp tonight. In the morning we'll be on our way. In four days the mission complete and we'll be back safely at headquarters in Tunisia. The senior staff, spotless in knife-creased khaki, will gather and listen to my plan in a different way now, with different ears and eyes because we will have demonstrated the feasibility of a supply line from south to north, through Mali to Algeria. Like Lawrence of Arabia in the film of the same name, when he returns from his mission of stirring up the Bedouins, I'll wear the map of the journey imprinted on my weary body, on the filthy uniform I won't change until after I brief the high command. The certainty of victory will blaze in my tiger's eye as I form each word of the story.
Whatever happened to Fanon's plan. Did any of it really happen. Is an ancient Malian trading route still patching itself together through the jungle, fossilized on stones, written on water. At night, if you peer up between black towers of twisting, snaky foliage, will you find the road's bright shadow mirrored in the sky, a road of light carved through dark treetops, a path mirroring the long scar on the ground, the old wound scuffed into the earth by camels, men, horses, and mules a thousand years ago, the wound Fanon would rip open to heal Algeria, heal Africa, heal himself.
In a way the world situation ain't all that complicated, my brother declares to me. Then he says words to this effect: What it is is the right hand don't know what the left hand's doing. Simple as that. You know. Cause it's all about one person, really. Hey, I don't know shit about biology and shit but it's like we all in one body, we all the same person who lives spread out over the whole world, everywhere, you know, one giant body with people the cells of it, different cells but all part of the same big old body. Ain't about no two lonely people like Adam and Eve in a garden fucking and making babies and babies making babies till you got all these different people ain't never seen one another, spoke to one another. Huh-uh. We's all one person, all the same body. Fuck color and countries and religion and male and female and she-male, that's all bullshit. You got this one human person trying to make a life for itself on the planet. Seems like a lotta us, but we's all the same one, doing the same thing—hunting for something to eat every day, a safe place to lie down at night. Wanting good loving and good talk. Some singing and dancing and maybe getting a little high now and then. We stay alive by having babies, growing new cells cause the old cells get tired and wore out. You and me and everybody else all rolled up together into one big One. But the trouble is
the hands of the body done forgot each other. Everybody into they own mind, they own thing, they own little world and that's cool, maybe that's how it's always spozed to be. Plenty room for that as long as the big old body's hands keep track of one another. As long as they don't forget they working for the same person. I mean, the way it is today the hands don't speak no more. Squabbling. Fighting. Grabbing. Hands hate each other in a way, you could say. Trying to strangle the one neck they own. People so stuck up in they own little worlds they forget they live in the same body and got to depend on the same two hands.
Like when he was in Peabody High, my brother reminds me, and they killed King, my brother says, and me and the fellas tore up Homewood Avenue and started a strike in school. Mr. Glick the principal, same principal as when you were there, right, bro, anyway, ole Slick Glick all shook up and called us strike leaders down to his office on the first floor. What do you want, he asked. Straight up. No hello, how you doing bullshit. What do you want. Just like that and I thought to myself, you little, bald, four-eyed motherfucker, what the fuck you think we want. We want what you want. We want what you got. Want your money, your watch, your nice house up on Hiland Avenue, your car, some pussy from your cute little four-eyed daughter. Want a good job like your son gonna get. I wanted everything I thought Mr. Glick had, and maybe even before all that stuff, I wanted him the fuck out of my fucking face asking questions. That's the shit I think I really wanted. I wanted to be asking the questions. I wanted my goddamn cops outside the door so I could call them in to haul Glick's ass to the slam if he didn't give me the right answers. Thinking all that kind of bullshit or something like it it seems to me now sitting here thinking back on it. Course I didn't say nothing. Just glared at Slick Glick cause I didn't know what to say or how to say it. But what I should have said, even if it didn't do no damn good, which it probably wouldn't have, is this—We the same person, fool. Get your foot off your own neck. Stop choking me with my own hands. Don't you know you're dissing yourself when you disrespect me. Ain't you figured out that you hurting your ownself when you hurt me. Go ahead. Toss my ass out of school and pretty soon ain't gon be no Peabody High. You out a job, sucker. If I ain't got nothing, one of your hands is empty. The empty hand won't be there when you need it. And when that hand goes to stealing and shooting to get what it needs, who you think it be sticking up. Whose kids gonna be out there in the street running crazy wit me or from me. Who's gonna be sorry when raggedy Pittsburgh ain't fit for nobody.
That's what the world situation's about. What the terrorism shit's about. One hand trying to outhurt the other. Stone confusion. People scared of they own damned selves. Cutting off heads, cutting off hands like we got heads and hands to spare. We done forgot we the same person. Killing off our own body, part by part and soon ain't nothing gon be left. We scared cause we doing the bad shit to our ownselves. Scared and can't stop.
A cruel world, bro. Every mother's child knows it's true. Mom's right but she's wrong too. Trouble does last always. Sure it does. A person can't hardly get along even with all the body parts in good shape. Every day on TV you see these pitiful crazies. Serial killers, folks who snap and kill up everybody they can shoot before the cops kill them. It's like people locked up in dark little rooms with a penknife and so fucked up scared and lonely they start whittling little pieces off they own body. Tiny bits so it don't hurt too much at first. You know. They keep slicing away at theyselves and afterwhile don't feel nothing. Maybe even start liking it. Damn. One hand cutting off the other and they think they solving they problems.
The younger Fanon was tardy. Very late indeed. Only a quarter-hour remaining of the afternoon session when he sidled into the rear of the classroom through the back door and slumped onto his seat. He'd been missing since recess. Earlier I'd asked my nephew Joby the whereabouts of his brother and received no satisfactory reply. I assumed a sudden illness had indisposed the younger Fanon. Or rather, that had been my most charitable supposition. Neither Joby nor Frantz a bad boy, and among my sister's children, Frantz plainly had something especially salvageable about him, though I'd detected good minds and abundant natural talent in all my Fort-de-France nephews and nieces. However, Fort-de-France bad habits and pernicious influences cannot be eradicated by a few weeks here in Le François attending my school and boarding in my home. Absolutely no backsliding can be tolerated, so the fellow would be punished for his offense. Illness no excuse, if illness it was that caused him to absent himself from school without seeking either my permission or instructions as to where and how he should spend the vacated afternoon.
Ordinarily the disciplining of my young charge would have begun the moment he attempted to slink into the classroom, assuming his place as if it's his prerogative to come and go as he pleases, as if his presence or absence were purely his affair and would not be noticed by every single pupil sitting at his desk, nor the professor at the lectern intent on the business of instruction. I would have pounced upon this disrespectful disruption of the usual routine and stung the young man immediately, employing the occasion to impart a general lesson to my struggling scholars, yet something about the manner in which my nephew slid, no, crumpled onto the bench of his desk warned me against greeting his very late arrival with too harsh, too peremptory a reprimand. A beaten look about him. The look of one who had been severely disciplined already. I was reminded of some of our country people, poor cane cutters, domestic workers, landless peasants, their shoulders bowed eternally, resigned to whatever punishment their betters impose. That guilty-before-charged submissiveness of slavery days retained in the bodies and minds of far too many of my island brethren. Pained, ashamed by what I saw, I decided, for the moment, to let an exasperated nod, a withering glance suffice as response to my nephew's trespass. In vain I waited for him to raise his eyes and dare meet my gaze. I was denied a full view of his features until I'd resumed my lecture and then I observed him snapping—snapping the only appropriate word—snapping to attention, stiffening his back, squaring his shoulders, drawing himself up as tall as he could be while seated at his desk, the posture I taught my students their first day in my classroom and insisted upon every day thereafter. Clearly this organizing of himself came at a considerable cost. Directed finally, as they should be, toward the front of the room and the lectern behind which I stood, his eyes were utterly devoid of expression. I was unnerved by the blankness of his stare and could not repress a shudder. The boy's eyes looked through me, through the wall behind me, his empty gaze shaking the school building, toppling it, demolishing the town, sending the entire island to hell, beginning with this small corner of it I believed I'd consecrated to learning and progress.
Empty eyes. Shattering eyes. No disrespect, no challenge in them. Nothing. Nothingness I cannot expand upon because finally that's all the eyes held. Nothing. An island superstition says that mirrors must be veiled during periods of fresh mourning to spare the living a glimpse of the newly dead's fear. One lifts the veil at one's peril, and perhaps unwittingly I'd committed just that trespass, blundered into the abyss of my nephew's uncovered eyes.
I learned later that he had sneaked away at recess to spy upon the autopsy of a drowned man being performed in the basement of Le François's municipal building. Secreting himself in a narrow passageway at the rear of the town hall, he'd crouched at a tiny ground-level vent and, hidden from the view of passersby, witnessed as many stages of the gruesome operation as he could bear, the horror accumulating until he became ill watching the slicing and draining, watching the scalpel digging deeper and deeper, the prying and sawing, dead flesh peeled, split, butchered till it was nothing but gore, nothing more, nothing, not man or woman, not horse or cat, nothing. The nothing I saw in his empty eyes when, like one of the shades Ulysses observed haunting the shore of the River Styx, he materialized in my classroom.
In November of 1961, the year he composed The Wretched of the Earth, which could have been titled Notes from Underground or Invisible Man or Black Boy or Things Fall Apart, flo
gging himself to write fast because he's aware death is closing in and might overtake him before he finishes his book, the same year whose last months he spends in a hospital bed in Bethesda, Maryland, guest of the government of the United States, Fanon learns his book has been published. The urgency, compression, conviction, and force preserved in certain sections of The Wretched of the Earth remind me of Martin Luther King's "Been to the mountaintop" speech, which was delivered as Fanon delivered his book, just before dying. My point here is that when death is imminent, whether a person stands at a podium in the Mason Temple in Memphis or lies terminally ill in bed or waits at the bottom of a trench to be shot, any place will do as actual location or metaphor to snap truth into focus with resounding clarity. Being there, bearing witness as the end approaches grants unimpeachable authority, a final truth, truth lost as it's found and perhaps that's why such witnessing convinces when it is eloquently reported—convinces and also overwhelms. Another's life shaped into words—Fanon's book, King's speech—how much of it can anyone else really use. Its truths belong to the witness. Darkness abides. The witness's words are evidence of a known world closing down, its light, however bright or small, piercing or shallow, swallowed by the unknown. Fanon's words, King's words reveal a glimmer of truth earned by them, experienced by them, their lives large, their witness compelling because they struggled to know, though the unknown shrinks not one iota.
The first thing a baby be thinking, my brother says, when its little self lands here and it's laying all cozy and warm, snuggled up on its mama's titty, what it thinks is, Hmmm, hmmm, this ain't such a bad place here, I love this place, the baby's thinking and the next thing the lil rascal thinks, my brother says is, Lemme see if I can eat it.
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