Fanon

by John Edgar Wideman

  Shall we carry on with Case Five. I'm ready if you are. I quote the patient: "Those gentlemen in the government say there's no war in Algeria...[ellipsis his]. But there is a war going on in Algeria, and when they wake up to it, it'll be too late. The thing that kills me most is the torture. You don't know what that is, do you? Sometimes I torture people for ten hours at a stretch...[ellipsis mine]."

  I ask the patient, "What happens to you when you are torturing?"

  He answers: "You may not realize, but it's very tiring. It's true we take it in turns, but the question is to know when to let the next chap have a go. Each one thinks he's going to get the information at any minute and takes good care not to let the bird go to the next chap after he's softened him up nicely, when of course the other chap would get the honor and glory of it. Sometimes we even offer the bird money. Money out of our own pockets to try to get him to talk. It's a question of personal success. You see, you 're competing with the others. In the end your fists are ruined. So you call in the Senegalese. But either they hit too hard and destroy the creature or else they don't hit hard enough and it's no good . . .

  "Above all what you mustn't do is give the bird the impression he won't get away alive from you. Because then he wonders what's the use of talking if it won't save his life. He must go on hoping; hope's the thing that'll make him talk."

  Fanon.

  Fanon shuts the famous book of empire. What lessons could he draw from Rudyard Kipling's novel. Where in his book might the Englishman's fake tale ring true.

  This is the great world and I am only Kim. Who is Kim. He considers his own identity, a thing he had never done before, till his head swam. Whose head swam. In what body of water did it swim. The River Ganges? How far. Did the head ever return. Who is the He in Kipling's sentence that begins He considers . . . Who the reported. Who the reporter. Whom addressed. Kim or Kipling. In any case both names begin with the letter K. Perhaps that conscious or unconscious slippage and conflation and punning as good as it gets, as close as author gets to character, subject to object, fiction to truth, black to white, representation to reality, as close as many truths get to one truth indivisible with liberty equality fraternity for all. Who knows what Fanon thinks as he closes Kipling's Kim. Who says he ever opened Kim.

  (Aren't you cheating, he asks Kipling, asks Fanon, asks himself, asks Thomas. All these shifts, substitutions, translations, and denials. Or Fanon asks him. Doesn't biography or, worse, autobiography serve readers primarily as a source for gossip, rumor-mongering, titillation. Thinly disguised voyeurism. An absent life substituting for a reader's absent life. Did you sleep with your lieutenant in a field tent. Did the pair of you rise at dawn and stroll along the riverbank, bathe each other out of sight of the other men. You, Fanon, in carpet slippers, foulard dressing gown, and Hugh Hefner PJs, rather shamefully excess baggage on a bare-bones, tightly packed expedition into the heart of darkness, wouldn't you say, old chap. We prefer your suits, your manners impeccable. Dark, tasteful ties, stiff white shirts adorning your taut athlete's torso. Creased gabardine trousers swaddling your beguine-dancing limbs. Biography a costume drama. Dresses up and undresses. Performed for whose benefit. To whom addressed. Why would anybody bother to open the cumbersome package. It's too late to enjoy your touch, Fanon, your commanding voice, too late to sample your spoor on the breeze, see the aura spun by your quicksilver thoughts bright like a halo in the air above your head.)

  Now that we know what happened to the head, here's a better Fanon quote, a better message to deliver in the box with the head: "A permanent dialogue with oneself and an increasingly obscene narcissism never ceased to prepare the way for a half delirious state ... where intellectual work became suffering and the reality was not at all that of a living man, working and creating himself, but rather words, different combinations of words and the tensions springing from the meanings contained in words ... Shatter this narcissism, break with this unreality!'

  Fanon.

  Lyon. A tourism brochure advertises two of the city's main attractions: Rabelais' villa and the studio of the brothers Lumière, Auguste and Louis, the light brothers, no, no, not the Wright brothers, stupid, the light brothers, but you're also correct, my brother, the Lumières invented flying, up, up and away, lighter than air, faster than light craft, witchcraft some would say, devil's work, our Mr. James Baldwin called it, the trick the Lumières conceived that animates the dead, revives dead images of things, the images people and all other things discard, sloughing off images like skin sheds dead cells, you know what I mean, constant traffic too swift for human eyes to follow as people and things are dispatched molecule by molecule from one world to another world or to many worlds, how would we who are left behind clinging to this one know, but we do understand that we live in at least two kingdoms, a known and an unknown, a visible kingdom and a kingdom we cannot see, the invisible one a mysterious otherness, a counterreality we guess might exist in darkness or inside mirrors or underneath the surface of water, and between or among those kingdoms always traffic, shadowy, dreamlike exchanges, comings and goings, some things gone for good, for sure it seems, then the unpredictable returns of people and things so stunningly reconstituted, as the Igbo insist, we're sometimes halted in our tracks and wonder how we'd believed the things or people had departed forever, anyway what the French Lumières accomplished was a practical means of harvesting and preserving dead images continuously shed from our live bodies, the images that reside swimming, hurtling, frozen in the invisible Great Sea of Time, fast or slow not relevant since everything travels at the same rate there, here, where we are, if not now then in the blink of an eye we're there, here, then gone again, back again too fast for eyes to track, anyway, the Lumières taught themselves—those pioneers and wizards and necrophiles—to fish in the dead zone, the other unseeable kingdom where we leave the consequences of ourselves behind, as falling leaves leave summer behind, marking one season's end, another season's beginning, fall leaves falling into some place that is no season not summer or winter or fall or spring when they let go and drop or the wind shakes them loose and they blow away airborne awhile yes but definitely treeless and on their way out, exiting to make room for the next, next leaf next and next and next, time's up, drifting seldom in a straight line given the randomness of wind tide temperature and fate but falling just as unerringly, inevitably as the arrow fired at your heart that will enter exactly when it's time for you to fall in love or die, exactly that straight and true, bingo, it's over and done and these cunning French brothers developed a technique for recording the time people lose living, the deceased time, used up, depleted, shorn time people in the dark ages had assumed was useless, an empty set, time emptied of time, time given up for dead. Then transformed by the Lumières' magic, the dead images dropping from me and you and the people and things around us, that invisible snowstorm of expired particles, became moving pictures. Think of light as my old pal Charley's assbackwards brush unpainting a sticky dark sky or think of a tongue coated like our tongues with masses of sticky multi-propertied chemicals and chemical reactions, a stew or broth we exchange and consume when we eat something or lick something or stick our tongues in each other's mouths, French kissing, hungry, alive but always also the site and medium of decay and death and change exchanged, no matter how good or bad it tastes, anyway the brothers Lumière discovered how to catch, cook, fast-freeze the dead images which are always dropping and dissolving like dead cells from the skin of the world, from our bodies our breath from every move we make or don't and after preserving this stuff on strips of celluloid, they shined light through them and the rest is history. Astute businessmen, the Lumières realized they'd stumbled upon a goldmine and toured the world to exploit their moving pictures, their movable feast of dead things frozen, packaged, recycled, served up fresh and edible on the screen, real as the real thing, better, many insist.

  Lyon all high-tech clean, dot.com, pharmaceutical now, but once an untidy city of fractious workers, of spice selle
rs and puppeteers, merchant princes whose castles commanded the bluffs along the Rhone River, makers of musical instruments, river pirates, weavers, cosmopolitan immigrants, a funky international hub of France's commerce with the Orient. Lyon a European depot of the fabled Silk Road that once wound through Asia, Lyon's workers spinning gold from thread from mulberry leaves Chinese worms chewed and excreted. How many soldiers from Lyon died at Dien Bien Phu, how many killed and killing, tortured and torturing in Algeria's mountains, Frantz. Do you know the statistics, could you see it all coming over a halfcentury ago, written on the walls of your flat above the Rhone, through the tiny, frosted bathroom window just missing a view of the river that was as much luxury as you and your new wife could afford or perhaps you could afford more, a nicer flat with ravishing views of Lyon, but, you know, the pair of you forced to rent where you are welcome, white woman, brown man, Lyon not paradise after all, then or now, is it, especially the quarter housing Arab immigrants in kennels and hives where you labored each day in your clinic and occasionally drank tea with Muslim men, you a foreigner too, in a Lyon back-of-the-wall ghetto that previewed the casbah, souks, and medina of Algiers, the same poverty and wretchedness, crime and despair you and your future comrades of the FLN will struggle to reverse into a kind of health, as healthy as it's prudent for the oppressed or your patients to become in a sick world, the sickness you saw first festering in Fort-de-France, then Lyon, Paris, and North Africa, different each place and the same, old and new, familiar and alien as your island birthplace, a disease dooming all those cities, all the seas and countries you risk to dispense your freshly coined skills, a native doctor administering hope to the natives, to Africans, Europeans, to brown and white and black, tortured and torturers. Unpeeling Lyon an endless tumbling through history. Like unpeeling your skin. Down which path should your biographer pursue you to catch a glimpse of your true face. The same question dogging you, Fanon, as you pursued your many faces, through many cities, many pairs of eyes. Will I get lucky and unearth a definitive portrait of you. A view of you freeze-framed on the screen, like I chanced upon Emmett Till's battered face once upon a time, a closeup, millions upon millions of fugitive dots momentarily aligned just so to represent a conundrum recognizable as a human face and also undoubtedly your particular face, your likeness, a still photo fixed so I can study it, you know, like an image from the Lumière archives, an original print stuttering, impaled on the end of a quivering spear of light, a ghost face, dead leaf, its stare crossing mine, staring back as I stare, staring till the ancient stock overheats, begins to smoke and curl.

  All that to say or unsay what, he said, Frantz Fanon said to himself so no one heard he barely hears himself in the noisy hospital ward, and if he couldn't hear himself think, obviously it was necessary to bend down, place his doctor's lips at the level of the patient's ear, the level of the prone patient's heart and glazed eyes, eyes immobile as dark stones lining the rocky bank of a river he remembers from his green island, water from high on the volcano's steep slope gushing cool over his bare toes, sun hot on his shoulders, sunlight blackening the unmoving stones as if they were sunken in a shadow of themselves the light deepened, the shimmering light solid as skin stretched over the moving water's surface, a speckled skin—could he, if he tried, reach out and pick off a glittering mica chip of it. The patient's eyes still and dark as those black island stones, all the life in them sucked down to the sockets. Open pits and you know better, don't you doctor, than to step too close to the edge. Though emptiness beckons, you resist. After all, what's to see, what's to find down in there. The lesson learned as a boy in Le François, then part of your training as a physician. You learned to brush aside cobwebs of illusion, of hope when you enter the sick bay, but as you're leaning down to speak into the patient's ear you can't help casting another glance at those dead eyes, a glance slowing as if it's entered a medium sluggish as porridge, slow motion the only possible motion across a strange, bumpy, untidy terrain, the patient's flesh magnified and distorted as your gaze crawls over the wasteland once a man's face, blurred now by nearness and intimacy into something alien, unruly hairs, gaping pores, pimples, creases, rubberish lumps, craters, your eyes trying to sneak mercifully past the disaster of his features and keep the patient at the periphery of your vision where you see but don't really see, you don't need to look, you're not a captive dragged naked across burning coals, but in order to speak to him, to this patient, to say whatever it is you don't know yet you're going to say to whomever this patient might be, this person you've caught a glimpse of by not minding your business when you allowed your gaze to stray too close, linger too long, Fanon, if you're going to speak it's necessary either to holler loud enough to be heard above the chaos of the ward or bend down so your lips are next to the patient's ear and then perhaps he'll hear the words that you're still forming, the words you couldn't share while you towered, doctor, over his bedside. Your pity, your fear aroused, as always, when you consider a millisecond after you read his chart how you might feel if you were him. Then you sneak a look at him and don't look away quickly enough. You see the eyes you'd imagined just a few seconds before as stones, as black holes, are cartwheeling, rolling, swiveling, bursting with wild energy, eyes that would emit bloodcurdling yells if they had tongues. Don't listen, doctor. You must do your duty, you must forget those eyes and regain composure and deliver the message you compose as you lean closer to the stink and dying of him, this patient now wrapped totally head to toe in bandages like a mummy, holes in the swaddling for eyes, nose hole, shit hole, piss hole, one ear hole waiting now for your words, words good for nothing, of course, except to make yourself feel better, doctor, remind him, remind yourself, you're doing your best though you know and he knows your best always far from enough, this throwing yourself on his mercy, on your knees, no, not praying, you would despise yourself for even thinking of prayer, for trying to recall words of prayers you used to perform, kneeling beside your bed, praying out loud so your mother could share the false comfort of that humiliating, fearful ritual, and now you can't go down on your knees without feeling silly, raunchy, no, your mother is not somewhere hovering in the darkness of the room listening, you are a man, standing erect on your own two feet, doctor, so you must not kneel, you must lean down and say whatever words you should say to the patient, not a prayer dammit though it's okay to borrow prayer's rhythm and Bible words, the whispered singsong now I lay me down to sleep, or Yea, though I walk, my, my, how those island habits, island voices, island sad songs and prayers persist, you can't help weeping, moaning a little bit now, in extremis, Frantz, wishing your gimpy old man's legs could dance. Legs stiff under the twisted sheets. His frozen legs burning. He remembers his mother soaking her tired feet at night in a bucket of water, remembers water covering the washerwomen's feet, les blancheuses who squat on black stones lining the green riverbank or sit dresses pushed above their knees, shiny brown legs dangling, toes chopped off, anklebones broken and bent, you'd think, seen from the angle where he crouched one spring afternoon spying on the women, the swift water purling around their shins, around their thighs when they step out deeper, deeper, swaying, singing, their dresses balled around their hips, stepping till the river rears up and drowns them, drowns everything, every part of the washerwomen gone but their voices and what his eyes had stolen creeping up on them, hiding on his knees in the bushes, peeping like the river up their wet dresses, at their wet brown skin, the women laughing because they knew a boy spied on them, they'd get their revenge soon enough, boy, looky, looky, long boy, the roar, rumble, and thunder of the surging river like chaos in the ward he bends to be heard above, bends down to hear, down to an ear, his own ear, little Frantz's grown-up little failing, decaying, stinking black ear, Doctor, save me, kill me, save me, kill me, the message blinking on and off in the patient's darting eyes.

  (No. You tell me how my mother and Fanon wound up in the same place. You figure it out. Me, I haven't reached that point in the story. Maybe I never will, so don't
hold your breath. An explanation might unravel itself along the way in spite of me. If an explanation's necessary. As if an explanation ever changes facts, the fact for instance that in this movie an old woman, my mother in a wheelchair, encounters Doctor Frantz Fanon as he lays dying in a hospital bed.)

  The first time she rolls herself by Fanon's room it's an accident, a coincidence because his room happens to be on a route she follows for no particular reason the day she invents her route for that day, wheeling here and there through the hospital corridors, riding elevators to various floors, tooling through various wards, anywhere within the sprawling, built-yesterday-already-old-today health-care complex neither signs nor nurses shoo her away from. The next time she goes by the room that turns out to be Fanon's, it's less innocent because her curiosity has been more than aroused by the very unusual circumstance of a policeman on a chair guarding a door she'd chanced upon during her previous run, so on her next run, last of the three per day she's authorized and encouraged to undertake, she hurried back, a beeline this time, to ascertain whether or not a cop still sat outside the door of the third-floor room and sure enough there he was, or there one was on a chair (one a woman one day), nodding off my mom thought till he raised an eyelid like lazy old Teddy, who was a girl dog not a boy dog in spite of her name, used to one-eyeball anybody who cracked the frame of the kitchen doorway when Teddy snoozed on her ratty blanket next to the stove. Of course my mother wondered fiercely who could be behind a closed door with a cop guarding it, a burly brown cop who smiles at her the next time she passes, Smokey the Bear with his big leather belts and boots, cowboy hat and a gun in the holster on his wide hip to keep people out or keep somebody in, she wonders which and thinks to herself it's always some of both, no doubt, rolling past again, then many times again, one time the door cracked and a crowd inside, doctors, nurses, suits, uniforms, spilling through the door, hiding the room's occupant, whoever's in the room and a couple people who can't fit inside squeezed outside with the cop in the hall who's standing not sitting on this occasion to keep track, it seems, of what's going on inside as well as outside the room. Cracked that once, the door closed since. Always a cop and always closed. Closed. Closed. She didn't count the closed times because she wouldn't want to lie when the detectives questioned her with a lie detector: How many times have you wheeled past that room which is none of your nosy-old-lady business, old colored lady, why do you sneak past peeking so many times a day, at least once every morning noon and night, don't think we don't see you on your so-called exercise runs you claim the doctor ordered to keep your blood flowing and maybe raise your depressed spirits but we know beyond a shadow of a doubt the doctor sure didn't advise you to scoot straight to the back elevator and up to Three, your old heart beating faster and wheels turning slower the closer you get to the closed door with nothing to do with you behind it, ten, twenty, how many times a day, you tell us, lady, and tell us who pays you to spy and she wouldn't confess anything to them or yes, forgive me lord, if they torture her, she'll tell them, hand on the Bible, every barefaced lie she can dream up, because her business none of their business if the closed door's none of hers. Tell the truth, she'd lost track of how many times she passed the door. Same thing every time. Same ole. A shut door. A big blue bear with a big gun scaring people away.