by Hilton Als
Fanon’s great hope was that such identification could be replaced by a new, postnational culture, a Third World humanism that the philosopher Achille Mbembe has described as “the festival of the imagination produced by struggle.” It was not to be. In much of the Third World, the dream of liberation from Europe has been supplanted by the dream of emigration to Europe, where refugees and their children now struggle for sanctuary rather than independence. Universalism, meanwhile, has turned into a debased currency: for all the talk of transnationalism, the only two postnational projects on offer are the flat world of globalization, and the Islamist tabula rasa of the Caliphate: Davos and Dabiq.
While writing this essay, I received an email from a friend, an African intellectual based in Munich. “To live in Europe today,” he wrote me, “is to wake up every day to the drum beat of naked racial hostility, with politicians and their supporters lumping us poor black souls together as the wretched and dregs of the earth, vermin for which there is no legal protection or even empathy. Everywhere one turns you are a negative, a constant subject of dehumanization and depersonalization. I am sick of the claim of a common humanity. There is no such thing as a common humanity.”
Fanon, the founding father of Third Worldism, shared my friend’s bleak view of Europe, yet he insisted that if the world was to have a future, it lay in the struggle for a common humanity. For most people, the life he chose would have been a severe test, perhaps an impossible one: in conditions of oppression and exclusion, the bonds of nation, faith, family, and clan provide sustenance, and can’t be wished away by revolutionary acts of will, as Fanon knew from his own work as a psychiatrist in Algeria. In No Name in the Street, James Baldwin writes that in all his years in Paris, he “had never been homesick for anything American,” and yet, he adds, “I missed Harlem Sunday mornings and fried chicken and biscuits, I missed the music, the style . . . I missed the way the dark face closes, the way dark eyes watch, and the way, when a dark face opens, a light seems to go on everywhere.” When Baldwin returned to Harlem in 1957, just as Fanon settled in Tunis, he experienced the peculiar feeling of being a stranger at home.
Fanon, who never returned home, attempted to do the opposite: to become a native in exile, in a country of the future. The emancipated future for which Fanon sacrificed his life now lies in ruins. The racial divisions, the economic inequalities, and the wars of the colonial era were not so much liquidated as reconfigured. The postcolonial world is no less divided between North and South, and no less shaped by spectacular violence, from the imperial exhibitionism of the “mother of all bombs” recently dropped in Afghanistan, to the low-tech shock and awe of throat slittings and stonings by the Islamic State. The boundaries that separate the West from the rest, and from its internal others, have been redrawn since his death, but they have not disappeared: if anything, they have multiplied. The coercive unveiling of Muslim women has reappeared in France, where burkini-clad women have been chased off beaches by police and jeering spectators. In the United States, the killings of unarmed black people by the police have furnished a grim new genre of reality television. The president has surrounded himself with white supremacists, imposed a ban on citizens from six Muslim-majority countries, and declared his intention to build a wall between the United States and Mexico, all to keep out the “bad hombres.” The era of alternative facts and hypernationalism has been a breeding ground for the racialized fears that Fanon so brilliantly diagnosed in Black Skin, White Masks. The gated enclaves, surveillance cameras, and prisons of the liberal West have created cities nearly as compartmentalized as Fanon’s Algiers. When John Edgar Wideman’s imprisoned brother asked him why he was writing a book on Fanon, Wideman replied, “Fanon because no way out of this goddam mess . . . and Fanon found it.” I am not sure that he did, but it was not for lack of trying, and the power of his example lies less in his answers than in his questions—questions that he was driven to ask as if by some physical necessity. How can Western democracies overcome the legacy of racial domination, so that black and brown citizens can experience the freedom enjoyed by whites? How can postcolonial societies avoid reproducing the oppressive patterns of colonial rule? What might be the shape, the identity, of a genuinely free society, an emancipated culture? As he wrote in Black Skin, White Masks, “Oh my body, make of me always a man who questions!” The mess of our postcolonial world is different from the one Fanon faced, but it is no less daunting, and finding our way out of it will require new forms of struggle, and no less imagination.
Sherry Simpson
Lucky You
from Harvard Review
The hundred-dollar bills tucked inside your wallet are so new, so stiff, that you could fold the three of them into elegant origami cranes, one for each day you’ll be alone at the Silver Legacy Resort Casino. Celebrating your anniversary in Reno was your husband’s idea, mostly, and before he left you here to relax for a few more days, you asked him to take your debit card. That’s how well you know yourself. Not that you’re a real gambler, one of those used-up-by-life people hunched over a poker hand, squinting through cigarette smoke as the dealer wings cards across the table, shick, shick. You’re not excitable and giddy like the drunken college kids whooping and hollering around the craps table. Certainly you’re nothing like the bored women sluicing money into $50 slot machines surrounded by red velvet ropes. Still, you visit Reno or Las Vegas once or twice a year, often enough that the boop clang riiiinnngg beep of a casino has become a toccata in the key of cash, a sound that strips the synapses raw and pinballs through the brain. You don’t feel that rush in your head, though. You feel it in your chest, where anxiety and hope cinch together every time you risk a few quarters, a few dollars, a few hundred dollars—the amount doesn’t seem to matter much.
On the first morning you vow to buy meals only with whatever winnings accumulate beyond your original bet. Fifteen minutes of intent but careful playing at video poker, and you’ve made $8, possibly the highest hourly wage you’ve ever earned. How triumphant you feel spending $1.95 for a tub of raspberry yogurt from the little convenience store that caters to people who’d rather not waste money on restaurant food. You might as well have slain a deer with your bare hands and eaten its liver raw right there on the casino floor. Not even noon, and already you’re ahead a few dollars. Your husband will be so surprised when you come home with the original $300 and then some.
Ten hours later, your favorite slot machine, Hot Shot!, spins a thrilling combination of cherries and bells and fire and announces that you have won $277, which you could really use because the day’s budget of $100 evaporated hours ago and already you’ve broken the second bill. A fire alarm clangs away and video flames flicker and sizzle, all of which would seem more exciting if Hot Shot! didn’t fuss over your tremendous good fortune in exactly the same manner when the payoff is $2. But the amount of winnings isn’t nearly as important as the need to ease this clenched, familiar feeling of losing.
A lady sitting one machine over gazes at the numbers totting up your riches cent by cent. “Lucky you,” she says, and you smile modestly, savoring her envy as you sip from a weak—but free!—gin and tonic. As always, you hit the spin button a few more times in case you’re on a streak, and damned if the bells and flames and cherries don’t deliver another $54. Hot Shot! is hot, you’re hot, and your lucky streak is hot, screw probability. Once the machine cools, you punch the cash-out button, and a $250 voucher emerges serenaded by the tinny clatter of fake coins, a sound not nearly as satisfying as the avalanche of greasy quarters that slots once regurgitated in that prehistoric era when people like your grandmother lugged around plastic buckets filled with nickels. The moment you abandon Hot Shot!, the neighbor lady scooches into your seat.
When you flop into bed at 2 a.m., barely a hundred dollars of your winnings remain. You blame the waitress who took forever to deliver a free Corona, a beer that actually cost $84 if you include all the money you lost idly pulling the lever of a slot machine while you waited.
Eighty-five dollars, counting the buck you handed her in the belief that failing to tip even the tardiest of waitresses is profoundly unlucky. Whether this is true, you have no idea. It’s just one more theorem worth testing in your ongoing inquiry into the nature of the universe, one more proposition you’ll interrogate the hell out of before this weekend is over.
For example, is it luck or is it chance when an infinite number of possibilities funnel into that glorious millisecond when the slot reels tick perfectly into place? Statistically, the outcome of any one spin does not depend on the previous spin’s results—you know this—and a random number generator ought not to care whether you’re a Pisces or a Sagittarius, whether you yank a lever or push a button, whether you choose a gaudy new video slot decorated with dancing leprechauns or a clanking workhorse stranded in a lonely corner of a dingy casino, a machine that surely hasn’t paid out in ages, a machine that clearly has so much more to give. Of course the house usually wins, duh, you’re not that stupid, but it doesn’t always win, which you know because you’ve studied those grainy, blown-up photographs of slightly stunned past winners posing with giant foam-board replicas of checks, and if Jimmy S. from Elko, Nevada, could win $11,297 despite that unconvincing comb-over, then there’s no reason you can’t either.
And why not believe in luck, when chance offers only randomness, which implies chaos, which smacks of meaninglessness? To ward off an existential crisis, you have tried to outmaneuver chance in Jacks or Better video poker by memorizing charts that calculate which cards to keep and which to discard if you hope to achieve the theoretical return of 99.54 percent with a perfectly played hand. You have practiced these strategies for hours on risk-free internet poker sites with a studiousness you never mustered for your GRE exams. Even so, statistics don’t stop you from drawing on an inside straight now and then. And it’s not statistics that make you catch your breath when you’re holding an ace, a queen, a king, and a ten, all in the suit of hearts, and you draw the final card already imagining the riches that will cascade through your life should that miraculous jack of hearts appear, which it doesn’t and probably never will because chance is a stone-cold bitch.
But luck—luck is supernatural, persuadable, seducible. Luck notices how you comport yourself through life. Luck is like Santa and Jesus rolled into one. Luck knows if you’ve been naughty or nice, when you tip waitresses, what you deserve out of life.
“Did you win?” friends ask after these trips.
“I always win,” you say, which is true. “The trick is trying to lose less.”
How someone could just hand money over to casinos and corporations and billionaires and probably gangsters is beyond them. Gambling is like riding Space Mountain at Disneyland, you explain. You’re not buying a physical object; you’re buying a recreational experience minus the vomiting. Usually.
Sometimes you insist that gambling is an anthropological exploration of the fascinating behavior of humans. And you do notice when people try to summon luck by kissing a cross or arranging an audience of troll dolls or ritually stroking the glass above a reel of spinning symbols. You’ve shaken your head at ads for more outlandish charms—Gambler’s Gold Lucky Seven Hand Wash, for example, or the penis bone of a raccoon. You know that you can no more harness luck with such tactics than you can siphon electricity into a jar. Luck is a state, a flux, a kind of ectoplasm that, under the right spiritual or mental conditions, oozes from your pores and recalibrates your future.
So, no coon dongs for you. You’re a fan of Jungian synchronicity, the “meaningful coincidence.” That’s why you believe that the more brides you spot on the way to the casino chapel the more likely that you’ll win big, a notion permanently cemented by a four-bride sighting coupled with a jackpot of $362.47 soon after. Encountering Elvis impersonators is also auspicious, especially if Elvis is driving a pink Cadillac convertible with the top down, which you once saw in Las Vegas on a particularly profitable evening. But crossing paths with brides or Elvises doesn’t create luck, exactly. Winning simply means that luck is paying attention to the attention that you’re paying.
On the second day in Reno, you pause at an ATM in Harrah’s Casino and wonder if you remember the PIN for the credit card stashed in a hidden compartment of your wallet, the card that you assured your husband you’d use only for emergencies. This feels kind of like an emergency. And look! Nobody needs a PIN anymore. The casino is happy to dispense up to $500 in cash with nothing more than a driver’s license and a zip code, both of which you possess. Teensy, almost unreadable print on the ATM describes usurious interest rates and outrageous bank fees, not that you bothered deciphering the details. The line at the cashier’s window is long but not nearly long enough to change your mind before it’s your turn to push a credit card and ID through the slot in exchange for three freshly minted hundred-dollar bills exactly like those you’ve already donated to some faceless billionaire/corporation/mobster.
At a cheerfully seedy casino called the Golden Nugget, you inadvertently play a slot machine that dispenses winnings in coins. You feed nickels into the coin slot three at a time, thinking, Well, at least losing takes longer this way. Scooping nickels into the plastic bucket blackens your fingers with the slick residue of all the gamblers who fondled them before you. Real money insists on the grimy truth. Either luck exists, or it doesn’t. Either you have it, or you don’t.
One thing you know for sure is that luck does not depend on how much money you have or don’t have. Otherwise, why would Guadalupe Rodríguez, the mother of fabulously wealthy Hollywood star Jennifer Lopez, win $2,421,291.76 at an Atlantic City casino? In no way is this fair, but it’s difficult to untangle the moral threads because Mrs. Rodríguez claimed that she’d use the windfall to open a $100,000 college fund for her two grandchildren. On the one hand, good for her. On the other, only $100,000? And, really, haven’t the Lopez offspring already rolled lucky 7s simply by being born to Jennifer Lopez?
This kind of thinking raises uncomfortable questions about the role of Providence in your own life. Was it chance or luck that you were born into a white, mildly educated, middle-class family in these United States of America during the late-ish twentieth century? Chance or luck that you weren’t home the morning that the electrical wiring shorted out and burned through the kitchen floor until it flamed into a conflagration that killed your cats and charred the house into ruins? Maybe if you’d been there you would have smelled smoke in time to save everything. Or maybe you would have died like the cats, hiding beneath the bed. How about when the massive grille of a semitruck missed your face by inches when the driver failed to see your tin can of a car as he pulled onto the road? One moment less dawdling in the bathroom, one fewer car ahead of yours at the stoplight—well, you can play this game all day.
So far, deliberate efforts to tilt the balance between chance and luck in your favor have failed, most notably the time you attempted telekinesis on a slot machine. After a half hour of beaming concentrated brain waves at the machine’s innards in an attempt to force three cherries to align, you gave up and moved to a nearby bank of slots. Moments later, the man who claimed your seat won so much money that the red light on top spun wildly and a Klaxon blared through the casino and into the universe. Was that chance, or luck, or simply delayed telekinesis? You couldn’t bear to go over and see exactly how much money he’d won; the naked envy on the face of every person in the crowd surrounding him was enough to sear your heart into a lump of smoking meat. Even now you find it painful to abandon a machine that’s hoovering up your money because any minute now, the universe might pick you to win. Somehow it never occurs to you that the universe might be picking you to lose.
The casino’s mad lullaby rockets around your skull as you lie in bed the second night wondering how to transfer $800 from the savings account to the credit card without your husband noticing. Standing in line at the cashier’s window the next morning you promise yourself that you’ll promise your husband that you will never, ever stay al
one at a casino hotel again. You hope you mean it, you really do.
As you drift through the casino clutching the cash that will finally fix everything, you try to sense which machine will restore all that you deserve, and then some. You’ve always been bemused by the talismans and totems decorating individual slot machines—symbols that represent luck and money (the number 7, the color green), animals noble or whimsical (lions, wolves, lemmings), cultural references flattened into cartoons (Egyptian pyramids, Chinese emperors, American game shows). But now you dither between meerkats or dolphins, flags or flames, Pompeii or Rome. Hope perks up with every scatter win or wild card, sags with every impotent spin. You need to win—that is, you need to stop losing—but you haven’t the willpower or character to simply retreat to your room until it’s time to leave for the airport. Watching reruns of Law and Order won’t help you retrieve all that money.
Perhaps, you reason, as yet another faithless machine confiscates money and hope, gambling is a useful way of practicing Buddhist nonattachment. Money is an illusion, when you think about it, a fluid metaphor that can mean anything you want it to mean. You want money, of course you do, but more than that, you want to win. What were you going to do with all that cash anyway, send it to Darfur? Save it for retirement? Give it to the cleaning woman who stops wiping ashtrays long enough to ask if those red flashing numbers mean pennies or dollars?
And now you wonder what it would be like to gamble as if it didn’t matter, as if the teeter-totter of wins and losses didn’t represent some kind of cosmic referendum, as if there were no need to worry that this disturbing episode is not just a story from your life, but the story of your life. Perhaps all this time you’ve mistaken destiny for luck. Surely there’s a way to turn this loss into, if not a win exactly, then less of a rout. Maybe you could write the whole trip off your taxes as research for an article about the seductive gameplay of the new generation of slot machines, or the exploitive cynicism of credit card companies, or the desperation of middle-aged women who destroy their marriages during an inexplicable but all-too-common gambling fugue.