Mosquito

by Gayl Jones

  Monkey Bread say he don’t just write satires, though, he writes about subliminal love, I think. No, sublime love. But that kinda sound like subliminal love, don’t it? Sometimes he mingles subliminal love into his satires of the neo-Africanists. I’m a neo-Africanist myself, at least from the way that Monkey Bread describes it, but I still appreciates a good satire of who I am.

  And they even get Desdemona to record some of the subliminal messages, because although these are historical figures it’s also a modern book. But they give Desdemona some of Iago’s lines. So she asks, Are you a man? Have you a soul or sense? But instead of the music convincing Othello to return with Desdemona to the play, Desdemona behaves as if she’s still in love with Othello. And so Shakespeare thinks that Othello’s charmed her again with some of his African magic, ’cause he can’t believe she’s really in love with Othello, He thinks that Othello is just more cunning than even he imagined him. For Desdemona to naturally love an African to him seems inconceivable. Maybe in his play that he has control over, but not in the neo-African novel. He decides that if Desdemona truly loves Othello then love must be some type of cult rather than the true religion. Shakespeare furthermore decides that he’ll just let Desdemona stay in the neo-African novel because her character is too flawed to return to his play, that he need someone who lets their reason rule over their passions. Then LeRoi Jones appears. . . .

  I knows he has a new name.

  . . . Yes, but he uses his original name and talks about the sensuality usually associated with the white woman and wonders why there isn’t an African woman in the book. Then it’s discovered that Iago’s wife has only been pretending to be white, ’cause she thinks that whites have an aura of mystery and are more wildly sensual than her own tribe. I’s just been pretending to be one of whitey’s treasures, she says, quoting LeRoi Jones, I think. ’Cause I’s always hearing tales of these big muscular beasts of unbelievable passion. Iago blames Shakespeare and Shakespeare professes that he’s just an artist. Then he tries to seduce Desdemona by promising her the eternal glorification of white ladyness. I do confess my vices, says Desdemona, and returns with Shakespeare. Othello tries to get to know Emilia a little better. And Iago tells the audience that the book has been a farce and a parody and that the European readers can continue idealizing themselves and that the book and that the novels moves too swiftly and is too modern and is not classical enough and besides the relationships of all the characters are clearer in Shakespeare and that if they want to read the true story about Othello and Desdemona they oughta read Shakespeare. He also tells the reader that Desdemona belongs in Shakespeare because if she stayed in the neo-African modern novel she could never free herself from African notions of what the universe is. And that she would have to continue to deny her whiteness, and therefore her own humanity. Then Othello reappears and tells the reader how to make a certain kind of medicinal chewing gum.

  I don’t know him personally except from Monkey Bread’s letters but that does sounds just like him. Monkey Bread said she met him at one of her star’s cocktail parties when they was discussing making the movie and having her star to play Desdemona and when he met Monkey Bread he referred to her as a naive representative of the race or something like that and told her he would put her into one of his books. I don’t know whether he called her a naive representative of the race or a native representative of the race, ’cause you know I don’t know if that were a typo of Monkey Bread’s, ’cause she uses them word processors now, you know. She says he’s one of them intellectual types of African-American mens but that he treated her like his own countrywoman. I mean he didn’t make her feel like a native, although he referred to her as a native.

  Say what?

  I orders me another Bud Light and starts nibbling on them chocolate pretzels and dipping them in salsa.

  He said that he could relate to some of his other womenfriends intellectually, but he related to Monkey Bread emotionally. Or something like that. I can’t remember all that Monkey Bread said in her letter. When I reads them aloud I can remember them, but when I just reads them I gots to read them again to remember them. Course Monkey Bread thought that was just his way of telling her that he thought she was kinda dumb. But I knows exactly what he means myself. I think when you just relates to somebody intellectually you is more limited. I mean the intellect is a grand thing, but when you relates to someone on the deep level, then you relates to them with everything you is.

  Kinda like Claude McKay.

  Say what?

  Banjo, you know. Banana Bottom.

  Say what?

  He considered you “the masses” but he didn’t relate to you as “an abstraction” like a lotta intellectuals. . . .

  And ain’t too many intellectuals that even know who Lawdy Miss Clawdy is.

  Say what?

  Monkey Bread say that when her star introduced her to him and she started talking to him he said, Lawdy Miss Clawdy. Then he start telling her how he was imagining somebody like her, you know, for one of his books, and there she is. That must be strange for a author to invent a character and then to meet somebody that is just like the character that they invented.

  What?

  Monkey Bread said he usedta write this real obscure poetry about Gurdjieff and shit, but ain’t nobody heard about him till he started writing them neo-Africanist satires.

  Dear Nadine,

  I gots to tell you more about Danny James. I’s in love, girl. I mean we ain’t lovers or nothing, but I met him again at one of my star’s parties ’cause they’s thinking of making his Desdemona book into a movie, you know. The way they is in Hollywood is they spends a lot of time developing these creative properties. But he’s telling me that his true love is writing obscure poetry about the harmonious development of man, you know about somebody named Gurdjieff, and quoting from Lord Byron and them kindsa people, but seem like as soon as he started writing his satires like his first novel, A Pickaninny’s Stories, then they started referring to him as a member of the neo-Africanist tradition and turned him into a marketable author and then everybody started to buying his novels, The Panther Man, Natural African Magic, Turkish Hash with Picasso.

  He took me out to a club and we listened to some freejazz musicians and then he sat with some of his musician friends talking about Albert Ayler and the Congo, the New Republic of the Congo. One of them musicians kinda reminds me of a rajah. They usedta all know each other in Paris. But say that Paris today ain’t like the old days and talking about Wilfredo Lam and Ahmed Yacoubi and even somebody named Cleopatra who ain’t the historical Cleopatra but some woman that they all knowed in Paris who usedta congregate at Port Afrique which were formally known as Bwana’s Table but that were not politically correct so they renamed it Port Afrique. I told him I didn’t know none of what they was talking about, so he gived me a copy of a book called From Harlem to Paris by a French intellectual who writes about Richard Wright and other writers and intellectuals of color and which tells about all the Negroes that usedta go to Paris. Danny James say he been to Paris, but he ain’t in that book, though, ’cause he ain’t considered one of the canonical authors.

  Then we went to some Bizarre little cafe and ate croissants and pretended we was in Paris, though I was telling him that my star might do a film in Paris. We ain’t slept together ’cause he’s got a girlfriend. We’s just friends. He’s writing about a character who’s a sleepwalker. He says I reminds him of Bastet and the Venus Hottentot combined. He ain’t mentioned pygmy like them movie directors that wanted me to play a pygmy. He’s glad I didn’t get that role to play Huey Long’s maid. He knows Nefertiti Johnson, who is us favorite romance writer. He say she ain’t at all like the books she writes and that she don’t write the kinds of books she is capable of writing. But you know how mens is about romances. I am sending you a copy of her newest romance set in Marseilles. I’m glad that you introduced me to the works of Nefertiti Johnson. I knows that this book is not in the bookstores yet, but because
my star is a star I can order copies of all novels before they gets in the bookstores. And I’m also sending you a new satire by Danny James set in the Latin Quarter of Paris, New Orleans, and Morocco. He taught me how to dance the beguine and to do the Argentine tango. I was telling him about Delgadina who knows how to do the Argentine tango and so he taught me how to Argentine tango. He says when he was in Argentina he had him a class with a master of the Argentine tango.

  He says that I’m the freest woman of color that he’s ever met. Course you know the Daughters of Nzingha don’t agree with him ’cause they says I’m still on the plantation. Mats out, Nadine. He created his own martini that he refers to as the Elephant’s Fountain ’cause it a real big martini and I felt kinda like Mada in that play except I don’t be having to drink no big martinis to want to be with this man. He got a girlfriend, though, like I said. I don’t play that. Anyway he’s interested in me ’cause he thinks I’m the character that he’s imagined for his novel, which is about a truly free woman of color.

  We went to a jazz opera and stayed at a hotel owned by Ethiopians (we didn’t sleep in the same room). I have met his girlfriend who is a African woman from London. I thought when he introduced us that she was going to play that game that womens play with each other, but she didn’t. She’s a writer herself and we was all sitting in one of them restaurants drinking the Elephant’s Fountain which Danny James taught the bartender how to make and they was talking about Bricktop’s in Paris and the Bal Colonial and the Nardals and Prince Kojo and Claude McKay, Jessie & Nella, Dorothy & Anna & Emanuel’s wife, who supposed to be crazy, and Angela Davis in Paris reinventing herself. They was all in that book by the French intellectual so it wasn’t like they was talking Greek to me and I even said a few things about Langston Hughes in the Luxembourg Gardens myself, though I ain’t never been to Luxembourg. His girlfriend’s name is Djamila who was named after a famous resister during the Algerian war.

  He knows Clarence Major and Ernest Gaines and Trey Ellis and other different African-American writers. He always satirizes the works of African-American women writers ’cause he don’t believe that none of them knows how to portray a man. I showed him my story about John Henry, but he say that that a story about John Henry as a boy, not as a man. He do say that my boy John Henry is a lot more complex than a lot of these women’s mens, though. I’m trying to learn as much as I can about storytelling. Danny James is always talking to me about them cultures where the peoples learns by listening to the wise old men and womens. He don’t just see hisself as no storyteller, though, but as a literary man. He also give me a brochure that I’m sending you that is put out by this neo-African writers group that gives pilgrimages to Paris so’s that people can see all the places where Richard Wright and them other writers went to when they was in Paris.

  I asked Danny James what the themes is in his works, ’cause every works got to have themes. He say his principal theme is the ethics of ambiguity. But I really likes his African-American characters, even his womens. I was going to say that he is like them African-American male authors that complains that we don’t create complex mens, and then when you reads they works they don’t create complex womens. He satires everybody, though, the mens and the womens, but at least we gets to go with them to the Algiers Café or to eat fried chicken in Amsterdam or to listen to jazz in Skanderbourg or to discuss the metaphysics of ethical morality or to paint astronomical symbols on oyster boats. His books is all metaphors of the African Diaspora and us search for mythological metaphorical and metaphysical archetypes.

  The professionals who noblify the race don’t like his books ’cause he got a character that he calls the cosmic pickaninny. This is a character who appears and reappears in all his novels. She is a minor character in some novels and a principal character in other novels. But she’s kind of a female surrealistic type of character and kind of in the Spanish picaresque tradition. He don’t refer to it as the Spanish picaresque tradition, though, he refer to it as the African picaresque tradition. Sometimes he enters his novels himself. He even put his own mama in one of his novels and they went to Argentina together and learned how to tango ’cause he know all of the master tango dancers in Argentina or in a science fiction story went for promenades on the planet of Venus. I think that she’s a New Orleans Creole or that some of her people is from New Orleans.

  He also makes use of the myth of the noble savage. And has Savage Noble at the Negresco Café or listening to Bird playing jazz on the Rue Fontaine. Most of his characters is African Diaspora types that he tries to reassemble culturally in his novels. He give me a copy of Claude McKay’s Banjo and I’m sending you a copy. I knows that I have always liked mens like Banjo and you have always liked mens like Ray. Read Claude McKay’s description of the port of Marseilles.

  He don’t much like America, ’cause he says in America they makes color a crime. The only white people that appears in his novels is literary figures or them ethnic whites who ain’t Americans. Sometimes he might include a American of the John Brown type, or them types who is always writing books about they participation in various nonwhite movements. I know in some of his early novels he usedta include white people, but he ain’t really explained to me why he don’t include them now. He satirizes everybody in his novels, but he says whenever he satirizes white people they think that his motives is political. And they says he don’t know how to portray white people. I think they is just usedta having white people glorified. I don’t think he should segregate his novels like that, though, but I guess he figure white people got so many writers to write about them or maybe he just prefers to write about African Diaspora peoples. Seem like he would want to include more American whites in them satires, though, because they always satirizes peoples of color, though most of the time they portrays them satires as if they is the reality of who we is. I have always considered “Amos ’n’ Andy” to be a satire, but they is still peoples even in Hollywood that believes that is the true us.

  I am also enclosing a copy of Maya Angelou’s new book, and a copy of a book about a entertainer who used to entertain at Chez Inez in Paris and a book by a poet who says that jazz must be a woman. Here’s a little except from one of his poems. I knows you don’t like obscure poetry, but I don’t think these few excerpts is too obscure:

  The panther woman paints

  Revolutionary ambiguities of

  African heritage

  Can Josephine Baker dolls

  Be purchased here?

  They think I’m Algerian.

  I read L’Album Littéraire.

  The plays of Victor Séjour.

  James Weldon Johnson

  Whispers to me

  Of Paris & freedom

  Is this the Rue Bourbon-le-Château

  Where Malcolm X visits Himes?

  Is love among my possibilities?

  I eat highbrow oysters

  And lowbrow chestnuts

  On the Venus Promenade

  Dreaming of Breton’s canary

  In Moscow’s red zone.

  I read Van Peebles in French

  I drink to the surrealists

  And the internationalists of color

  As if I were Emanuel’s wife

  On the Rue Bourbon

  To tell you the truth, I thinks he is better at satire of the African Diaspora than obscure poetry myself.

  Sincerely,

  Monkey Bread

  CHAPTER 14

  WE’RE IN ONE OF THOSE SCENES LIKE IN THE movies, you know them romantic scenes in the movies, the man and woman in the bathtub together and all these bubbles. ‘Cept we ain’t making love now. Wes just sitting across from each other. I’ve just told him something, and then the camera zooms in on him for a closeup. I imagine all the women in the audience thinking they’s in love. Who that? they be asking and think he a new idol of the screen. Especially now that they is colored mens beside Sidney Poitier that you can refer to as screen idols. I’m always saying Denzel, but I also likes to watc
h them old Sidney Poitier movies. Of course, if I had made them movies for him, I woulda given him some love interest of color or made it like them fantasy-type movies, where a group of us womens of color decides that we don’t like the scripts that they has given Sidney, so we enters the celluloid world and rewrites the script for Sidney with us in the movie. And even though we realizes that Sidney have got to continue to play the role of a credible man, ’cause he got to distinguish hisself from Kingfish and Bojangles, we still tries to coax him to a little playfulness and good humor, least when he’s with us. He don’t become so playful that peoples confuses him with the stereotype, though, like them characters personified by Martin Lawrence y’all know on the television. That Martin Lawrence have a complex personality, but it is so on the side of playfulness that the peoples don’t know the difference between a complex clown, a buffoon, and the stereotype. I tries to think of them actors that refuses to add any playfulness into they roles, ’cause they knows how the audiences is and can’t distinguish between playfulness and a clown. Do you suppose they is more peoples that knows who Step ’n’ Fetchit is than knows who Denzel Washington is?