Fanon
Page 23
Who passes out masks and forces the delegates to wear them. Who decides the masks must be black or white. What colors lie beneath the masks. Will I live to see their faces unveiled, Fanon wonders. When delegates return home, would they be visible without black masks or white masks. Will they ever be free to remove their masks or only exchange white for black, black for white.
It's too late. Masks do not disguise truth. Masks are true. The pure, absolute, reassuring truth of black or white. Pure illusion. Pure white or pure black. Masks truer than the gray shadow staring back from a mirror, your unconvincing reflection that does not disguise the blazing emptiness behind it you pretend not to see.
Stop, Fanon tells himself. Delegates are not wearing masks. They are blind. The conference a school for the blind, teaching delegates to manage a world they cannot see. A world where sightlessness an asset not a handicap if you learn the rules, follow instructions. Everybody's blind, equally blind, equally secure and terrorized by blindness.
And who am I if not a delegate, Fanon asks. A delegate representing myself first and then others, perhaps. Yes and no, because who am I without those others. But I am not those others. Who pays my way. Whom do I owe. What am I demanding from other delegates attending the conference. Why should they risk anything on behalf of Algerians fighting for independence from France, Algerians I claim to represent. Do delegates gathered here represent anyone besides themselves. Do they love anyone.
My brother, my likeness. He often recites those words of Baudelaire to remind himself that what he despises most in another is also always his own face mirrored in their features, his actions doubled by theirs. No matter how clinically accurate and irrefutable his observations of others, in the end he is the balky mule he lashes, the impatient rider straddling his own sweaty back.
Who am I. Why am I here, pretending to be someone solid, substantial I cannot be, someone pure and true I think I might wish to be. The circle unbroken. Delegates are hostages. Hoods over our heads an act of mercy. Blinding us to the truth of our blindness.
Speak. Rise to the podium and speak. It's your turn now, Fanon.
A sea of faces waiting for him to strip off his clothes, dash into the water, and drown. His brothers armed with volleys of applause to fire at speakers who parade to the lectern, rooting them on, shooting them down one by one to cleanse the stage for the next pretender to the throne none of the little monarchs at home or sitting out there on their regal butts is prepared to relinquish until brute force deposes him, vive le roi, vive le roi, le roi est mort. Why such dire estimates of your brothers, Fanon. Why the small, suppressed tingle of excitement, of complicity upon sighting white faces scattered here and there in the front rows. In the hall colored faces could swallow uncolored faces as easily as tall waves gulp down churning limbs. Only a spattering of white faces. Some of those colored, no doubt. No doubt some of the uncolored more friendly, more simpatico, as is often the case, than many of the colored. Why is he quibbling over the meaning of these different shades of color or no color his gaze supplies. As if color makes a difference. Why ponder this incompleteness, these uncolored spaces that with a little effort could or should be painted differently. Would the absence of uncolored faces render a unanimous verdict on who belongs here, who owns the conference, who it serves. Why. Is he secretly pleased by a sprinkling of so-called whites, by the irony that the issue of their removal is on the conference agenda. Will they have a vote, yes or no, to erase themselves. Which is it—the presence or the absence of their faces that signifies the conference's success. Though few, are the few precious because without them the sea he's facing from the podium doesn't exist on the map of the larger world, the map that ancestors of these precious few drew centuries ago, the ancient map of wishful thinking, a cartoon map, really, outmoded then and now, Beware, dragons be here, a map with distortions of scale, flat-out lies and conscious misrepresentations, embedded superstitions and ignorance, a map of dreams, a prettied-up picture of Europe's unspeakable nightmares and aspirations, a map adorned on its margins with occult symbols, coats of arms, saints, imps, mermaids, monsters, portraits of pale faces and pale bodies beautiful as angels, a fairy-tale map abiding till today, this very instant Fanon unseats himself and slowly walks toward the lectern for his turn to speak. Won't these very steps take their measure from the old map, his six or seven strides meaningless, not counting as steps, unless they are plotted on that old map of continents, countries, islands, and seas, the map drawn by a few dreaming hands, by the same ones, their numbers still small, who retain the power in their hands, their heads to draw the old map again and again and squeeze a whole world onto a parchment grid, making it, then and now, everybody's map, white brown black red yellow green, establishing scale and relationship among peoples, among things, determining the place of things, their absolute largeness, smallness, significance—Near East, Far East, West, First World, Third World, on top or down under—the map missing the sea of faces Fanon looks out upon, and no matter how deep and dense this sea appears to him, that immensity does not exist, cannot be located, a blank site, a terre inconnue, emptied of meaning once and forever by the mapmakers because they chose to render no shape for it, appended no names but theirs, left it as an invisible island floating, drowning, a hole, a fearful void in a greater sea that surrounds it, washes over it, conceals it from sight and time. Unless the map, as Fanon understands it, the map that erases him by erasing itself by erasing him, can be flipped over to its unwritten side and then perhaps you could begin a fresh drawing of the world.
Speak
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POSTSCRIPTS
A university professor, Peter Worsely, describes Fanon's speech as electrifying, "an experience to set the pulse racing ... remarkable not only for its analytic power but delivered with a passion and brilliance that is all too rare." Worsely also writes that he noticed Fanon come close to tears during the speech and afterward asked him why. Worsely reports Fanon's response in the words below, words included in the Macey biography, page 432.
Suddenly he felt overcome at the thought that he had to stand there, before the assembled representatives of African nationist movements, to try and persuade them that the Algerian cause was important, at a time when men were dying and being tortured in his country for a cause whose justice ought to command automatic support from rational and progressive human beings.
***
In 1961, Jean-Paul Sartre wrote a preface to The Wretched of the Earth that upset his fellow countrymen more than Fanon's book upset them. Many influential French intellectuals were at least as mad at Sartre for championing Fanon as they'd been when Sartre championed Stalin, a Russian tyrant with the blood of tens of millions on his hands. "Oh fuck. There he goes again, our Voltaire, stirring up the natives, Sartre as wrong about the blacks as he was about the reds."
***
These field notes, compiled while I operated undercover disguised as a journalist, trace some of Mr. Frantz Fanon's recent travels, his speeches at various international gatherings, the reception his speeches received, the fellow travelers who attended. I've included my analysis of the significance of his activities and a number of recommendations based upon my observations and concerns. I hope we will meet and discuss my recommendations ASAP when I return to Washington this Thursday. I'm certain we're heading for a full-scale crisis in this matter and should act swiftly, decisively to avert it.
***
Mom,
Greetings. Hope you're fine. Hope the weather's nice so you can sit outside on your terrace. Romeo is growing locks. Not goldilocks. Nappy brown dreadlocks. Even though his mom's fair-haired and blue-eyed. You never know what to expect, I guess. Given the crazy, mixed-up quilt of folks of all colors rubbing shoulders in Pittsburgh, nobody should be surprised sea-green eyes like brother Dave's pop up in our brown, burr-head clan. Why do those eyes make some people want to kill him. Anyway, Romeo's dready cap is flourishing and looking good and tomorrow the three of us fly to Paris. Believe it or not, I'
ll have a draft of the Fanon script (couldn't have done it without you) in my briefcase.
Heard from Romeo's grandmother in France it's unseasonably hot there. I say bring it on. After this long, nasty winter, I'm ready for sunshine and ocean. Other news from over there not so good. Immigrants burning up in government hotels. Algerian kids and kids from Mali, Senegal, Ivory Coast, Martinique burning cars. Economic woes. People trouble—Muslims vs. Jews, Jews vs. Christians, Christians vs. Muslims, blacks vs. whites, immigrants vs. natives. Some folks shocked France not as cozy for everybody as they believed. Other folks shocked anyone in their right mind could have believed things cozy for everybody. You know how that one goes. I'm afraid the trouble's going to get worse because the loudest, dumbest voices are grabbing this chance to be onstage, stirring up shitstorms the knuckleheads and opportunists and optimists of blind goodwill always kick up. At least the French are starting to take to the streets and to fuss at one another instead of the blah-blah-blah like here that's worse than no talk. Next time you see Fanon, tell him we need him. Need the best of him. Like we need the best of you. The part that says we're all in this mess together, and says question and says keep pushing. The ice is cracking, Mom, but we're on our way across the pond, whatever. Wish us luck. Will try to write soon again.
Love.
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Since the 1960s I have followed Frantz Fanon in the Grove Press translations of the original French publications of his work. I wish to express my gratitude to Grove Press for keeping Fanon's writing available in English. The English translations of Fanon quotations that appear in the text of my novel are from the following Grove Press editions:
The Wretched of the Earth (1963), translated by Constance Farrington
Black Skin, White Masks (1967), translated by Charles Lam Markmann
Toward the African Revolution (1967), translated by Haakon Chevalier
A Dying Colonialism (1965), translated by Haakon Chevalier
The Wretched of the Earth (2004), translated by Richard Philcox
Special thanks to David Macey, author of Frantz Fanon: A Biography (New York: Picador, 2000), an indispensable source book for Fanon's life, thought, and times.
Thanks to Myron Schwartzman, author of Romare Bearden: His Life and Art (New York: Abrams, 1990).
A general thanks to scholars, critics, colleagues, and biographers of Fanon, who will not allow Fanon to be forgotten.
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