Fanon Read online

  Whether you've been attentive or not to longer vistas of the East River opening here and there as you proceeded downstream, the Statue of Liberty won't be seen again till you reach Battery Park, and rather than standing onshore or inches offshore as it seemed to stand a half-hour ago when you first sighted it, the statue, situated on its own small, private island, has drifted away from Manhattan, separating itself from the war memorials, souvenir kiosks, and Senegalese vendors of Battery Park by a good half-mile of water you must line up and pay a fee to traverse by boat if you wish to get closer.

  To view the Statue of Liberty from the original point on the river walkway I directed you to earlier, you don't need a perfect day. Unless fog or rain is unusually thick, it's easy to pick out the statue's distinctive silhouette, its imitation of a sprinter wearing a floor-length gown on the victory stand of the 1968 Olympics, fist thrust to the sky in a Black Power salute. The Statue of Liberty pokes up darker, taller than rows of skyhook loading cranes beyond it, a forest of cranes I once imagined as masts of slaving ships, though I knew better. Seen from that vantage point where we began our trip along the walkway, a tiny Statue of Liberty seems to be located directly underneath the Brooklyn Bridge and the Brooklyn Bridge itself appears small, spanning the East River much lower, closer to the water than the Manhattan Bridge, which frames your gaze downriver. Your eyes not exactly deceiving you, just performing the painter's classic trick of rendering perspective by shrinking and stacking things to signify depth and distance, time and space on a flat canvas. I read the language of stacking and shrinking, believe and disbelieve what it says, fully aware that appearances will alter drastically when, for instance, I reverse direction and retrace my steps to the place I started. Walking from Battery Park back to my apartment, if I stop beside one of the Brooklyn Bridge's stone piers and look upriver, I'll see a tiny, distant Manhattan Bridge crossing the river miles lower, closer to the water than the mammoth Brooklyn Bridge I stand beneath. Things once seen above are under and things once seen under are above, just as you predicted, Fanon.

  You know the guys in here say they short after they done half they bit, say they're short, don't care how much time they got to do—it's short time, my brother in prison explained, cause they know they already done that much time once and it ain't killed them so they know they can do that much again. So they short, you know, like running downhill, bro, after running uphill.

  Any plan, any tour is full of holes no matter how carefully organized. No reason to reverse direction now, no reason to overturn the truth my eyes privilege for this moment, a truth allowing me to feel I'm not simply passing through but belong here, and here belongs to me, my senses dependably tapping out a code, tap-tap-tapping a version of the world like a blind person sounds the pavement with a cane. Surprisingly, when I'm lucky, I can manage, more or less, to guide myself through vast stretches of utter darkness by drawing imaginary maps, like this one I'm sketching for you, Fanon, connecting the dots, tap, tap, tap, connecting the emptinesses between dots, to get us from my apartment near the Williamsburg Bridge to Battery Park.

  Given the construction work complicating and rerouting the walkway beside the East River, evidently someone has big plans. Thomas believes the area is being divided, impounded, locked up within a honeycomb of newly erected fences, gates, walls, and soon will be accessible only to those with keys or permission. One day when the many stout enclosures of chainlink fencing scattered along the walkway are employed routinely not to protect freshly planted trees or grass but to cage dissidents swept up from street riots, a day when police patrols deny access to the East River because it's a highway that could carry deadly cargoes from the sea to the city's heart, I wonder, Fanon, who will remember that this locked-down no man's land began as a proposal for a public park.

  Every morning the helicopters come, the infernal racket of them every morning patrolling, attacking or guarding us, who knows anymore, all Thomas can say is that they arrive at dawn, rain or shine, and perform ear-shattering circles in the air above his building, friend or enemy how can he tell, they are so high, so tiny even when it sounds like they're crashing into his bedroom. Choppers impossibly loud in spite of the mosquito look of them, their bodies half eyeball, half string of trailing drool, bearing no markings he can see. Far away, calmly circling at first, then exploding whomp-whomp closer and closer, till he wants to scream, clamp his hands over his ears, throw an arm across his face as the walls buckle. He listens to sirens echoing in the street, hears the firing of air-to-air missiles, hears flaming bugs sizzling down out of the sky, ours, theirs, who knows, who knows who's winning the air war over the city, who knows whose city this is, whose war, except each morning sirens and choppers chop-chopping, but so far, thank goodness, no enemy has broken through rings of spinning steel blades, volleys of laser-guided darts to drop the weapon that will end everybody's troubles.

  THE HEAD DEVOURS THOMAS

  Thomas does not remember when he began to think of the severed head as a message in a bottle. Old metaphor, but he liked it. Kept it around to play with. The metaphor, not the head, stupid. Then one morning he's certain the head not a message intended for him. It had been delivered by mistake. The package meant for somebody not Thomas. Not his head. No problem if he had refused the box. No return address visible, but somebody paid to have it delivered. UPS would have a record. Unless the brown uniform stolen and the brown guy wearing it a terrorist. If the brown person an innocent bystander like Thomas, he would have returned the refused package to the UPS depot. Dumped it in the limbo of dead packages and dead letters UPS must maintain. Thomas off the hook. The incident erased like the naked ladies on his magic slate.

  But the meaning of a message doesn't alter necessarily if the recipient isn't the person the sender intended. A newish book about the black diaspora and internationalism Thomas is reading points out that W.E.B. Du Bois addressed his now famous words "the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line" not to an American readership of The Souls of Black Folk but to a select international audience of distinguished black artists and intellectuals convening in London in 1900. When chasing the meaning of a message, it doesn't make sense to push the notion of an intended, targeted audience too far. Messages and their meanings wind up where Freud contends all writing commences—in silence. And end there. Where writers end. In a black hole big and bad enough to swallow time and space, the chamberpot where everybody does their dirt. You can't escape, Thomas. Your head's there too, waiting for you to claim it, rotting, smelling up the joint.

  The head all gaping mouth now, circled by fat, white, rubbery minstrel lips that momentarily spare Thomas a view of its battered features. The mouth hole's laughing, chortling—yuk-yuk-yukkedy-yuk. I ain't going nowhere, bro.

  This business of communication, of messages sent and received, of meaning and not meaning, of books written and unwritten, ruled by the same law of the jungle ruling the universe from bottom up and top down, Thomas fears. Eat or be eaten. Same circle, same simple principle—an appetite of one magnitude of power consuming until it's consumed by an appetite of a greater magnitude of power. Simple and neat. Figured by the ancient metaphor of a serpent swallowing its tail, or tail swallowing its head, old ouroboros the ultimate black hole, all existence ending and beginning as the greedy python, looking for a meal, whips back upon itself and plunges into its own guts.

  Still, Thomas can't surrender the idea of words making a world. Billions upon trillions of brown UPS guys gathering every morning to receive and distribute messages to every nook and cranny of all forty acres of the universe. Each word delivered becomes real and worlds become real. Except the brown messengers like to play African games. Occasionally they trade messages, exchange routes, lie, steal, scramble messages, shake messages in their fists and shoot crap with them till it's dark and too late for delivery. Eat some. Misplace some. Squat and squeeze out new messages from the ingredients of old ones they've gulped down. Words never exactly say what someone intends
because the messengers can't help misbehaving, Thomas thinks, a little bit like the people back home in Homewood. Wiggle room even when words seem to bring a mandate directly, irreversibly from on high. Words not meaningless but fickle. Grand plans fickle. Fate fickle. Just one slip—a head misdirected to Thomas's door—sabotages the entire scheme. The same words or different words, who knows, will be entrusted next morning to the assembled delivery persons in their brown uniforms. Words will try again and that's the part Thomas clings to, the part keeping his head above water. The part making him laugh, on good days. Words delivering messages over and over again, scripts for plans doomed to fail.

  AFRICA

  When Thomas writes his Fanon book he'll borrow many voices to disguise his voice, speak from behind masks the way Fanon composed Black Skin, White Masks. A simple plan like Fanon's plan for saving Algeria. As simple as Hannibal crossing the Alps with terrorizing elephants to surprise attack Rome's back door. Or an American president dropping a fleet of helicopters at night into the desert of a hostile country to rescue hostages. Or Columbus sailing west to go east. Or terrorists chopping off heads to liberate bodies. As simple as accepting a face in the mirror as real. Simple if you don't ask who is gazing into the glass or who's inside staring back, simple if you don't insist that it's impossible for a face in a mirror to be real unless the one who gazes fabricates a history for it, a story no face in the mirror can take shape without.

  We granted this meeting in spite of our better judgment, Comrade Fanon. Who knows whether a thousand-year-old trading route you discovered in a book about the ancient kingdom of Mali remains passable today. A reverse Ho Chi Minh Trail, you say. A lifeline up from the south to supply freedom fighters in the north. A second front, you say. As if one quick blow could sever the Gordian knot of bloody struggle with the French. Get serious, Comrade Fanon. The risks are unjustifiable. We're engaged in a struggle for Algerian independence, not a crusade to liberate the African continent. In this war we must count bullets as carefully as we count soldiers. No room for error. Treason to squander resources on fanciful notions. An African Legion. Ethiop's dark hand stretching forth to aid the Algerian revolution. Romantic nonsense at best. At worst an insult to the Algerian people who are starving and dying daily for freedom.

  So it's just an eight-man commando in two Range Rovers traversing terrain rugged and treacherous as the worst on his island home. Fanon recalls the night he'd descended alone from Morne Rouge, sliding, stumbling, crawling down Mount Pelée's steep, ravine-crisscrossed slope to a beach where a rumored boat to Dominica might wait. Stealing away in darkness, stealing his father's suit to pay for a boat ticket, stealing himself to go off and fight for France, stealing his presence from his brother's wedding. Fanon and Comandante Chawkwi in the lead Rover rattle like seeds in a dried gourd. The ride's shaking their vehicle to pieces. More than once Fanon's helmet saves his skull from being split wide open when he's jolted to the roof of the cab. Less a matter of following a road across Mali than of doggedly pursuing a meager possibility that beyond the next flooded plain or blockade of boulders or thicket of impenetrable growth a merciful trace might appear, not of paved road but any encouraging sign that once upon a time a caravan of camels, mules, and horses might have squeezed a bit farther north by following this route. Easier now for Fanon to swallow the bitter pill of being refused the seriousness of a light plane or chopper for reconnaissance of the supply line he'd proposed. Mali's close-mouthed hills and forests wouldn't have divulged their secrets to anyone spying from the air. Doesn't the invisibility of the ancient passage prove his point, strengthen his argument. You can see the path only if you're on the ground, only if you shape-shift and become a lizard crawling over the rocks, a gazelle warily fording a swamp, a beetle scuttling this way and that. The Range Rover scrapes ahead into an opening that seems a tunnel through tangled foliage but leads nowhere, except to a precipice beckoning them over an edge. You proceed by reversals, by default. Unsure of your next move. In fact lost, always lost. To free a patient from the labyrinth of illness, a healer must become the patient. Become the map. Live in an alien world, live with unfamiliar rules for choosing right or left, up or down. Physician, heal thyself. Risk the step that may crack the ice of a frozen will. Rumbling down from piggybacked hills, speeding along clear stretches of road, this mission, this cure only as real as each inch, each kilometer the Range Rovers log.

  Riding shotgun, bouncing, shaking in the lead truck driven by Comandante Chawkwi, Frantz Fanon is thinking the thoughts above or similar thoughts it's my duty, my mission, my folly to represent. I'm observing Fanon's vehicle from a low-flying, camouflage-painted Cessna he couldn't convince the FLN to beg, borrow, or steal for his mission. For convenience's sake, let's say my x-ray vision can penetrate the plane's belly, the Range Rover's roof, the helmet, hair, skin, and bone of Fanon shielding the brain brewing the thoughts I seek to translate into words or preferably visual images since my goal is to write a script a famous filmmaker can't refuse about Fanon's life, or to be more precise the last years of his life (occasional flashbacks permitted when appropriate), or to be even more exact and cut to the quick, a film script bringing a dead Fanon back to life.

  It's 1961. Fanon's last year on earth, the year in whose first month, January, Fanon's new acquaintance Patrice Lumumba, first prime minister of a brand-spanking-new Republic of Congo, will be kidnapped, tortured, executed by Belgians and Congolese, his body burned in an oil drum, the year in whose last month, December, Fanon will succumb to leukemia in a hospital in Bethesda, Maryland, 1961 the year of this journey we're shadowing that begins in a Guinean town, Kankan, crosses the border to Bamako in Mali, then goes to Ségou to Mopti to Gao and north, always pushing north toward Algeria's war of independence from France, following the North Star or whichever star shining in the firmament above this hemisphere in the fall of 1961 directs pilgrims to the promised land, whichever star's luminosity and lustrosity beams hope, a beacon and benediction, Uh-huh, oh yeah, don't yeh hear me talkin to yeh, chillen, don't youall just adore that star shinin bright, oh, oh, oh, you are my shining star, the old, new star leading Frantz and his crew in SUVs humping north across Mali. Good golly, Miss Mali, you sure love to ball. Blasts from the past in my earphones, not Fanon s. Before his short life ended, will end just a few months from this moment we're imagining together, did Fanon hear our Manhattans, our Mr. Penniman, our glossy-topped star Little Richard sing "Tutti Frutti" or "Send Me Some Lovin" or "Good Golly," etc., or are these tunes anachronisms inserted into Fanon's stream of consciousness in a Range Rover in late September, early October of 1961. You can look it up. Google the songs' release dates in France or give me the benefit of the doubt. Let the beat roll on. Anachronisms galore sprinkle this story. If that sort of thing bothers you, you're in trouble. The boy can't help it. Fanon lay moldering in his grave (wherever it is) by the time Jimmy Carter's flotilla of choppers on a mission to rescue hostages got chopped in the Iranian desert. And the Ho Chi Minh Trail cutting through what was once French Indochina doesn't become famous until years after Dien Bien Phu and the Algerian revolution. Who knows whether or not Fanon ever devoted a single, solitary thought to Hannibal's sneaky conquest of Rome. And what about Fanon's presence in a future he apparently did not survive to see. This present moment of haves and have-nots slugging it out in the torrid Middle East and Africa. Does Fanon still occupy a ringside seat as the bell rings for another round of a bout that can't end with a knockdown, only a knockout—arena, everything and everybody in it, poof, gone with the wind.

  Good golly. No fun, Thomas, to think too much about Fanon's story or what you think you're going to make of it. No rules for scoring a life. Are there rules for scoring a movie. Who wrote them. Who's allowed to break them. Why not put everything in a soundtrack. Cantatas, garage bands, a DJ scratching, marching bands, shawms and bombards, traveling music, water music. Fanon beside a campfire in the African wilderness chews on a KFC chicken wing while Eine kleine Nachtmusik tinkles in the backg
round. Audio a different story, different language from video. Another country with different coordinates of time and space. No death. No dates. No beginning nor end, a love match if the mix works the way it's spozed to work, Miss Molly.

  Fanon's simple idea. A second front. Black blood flowing north like black gold once flowed from Mali to enrich Europe. When freedom achieved in Algeria the flow will reverse, north to south, inundate the Sahara, the dunes turning green, flowers blossoming, showers of petals, of seeds and fertile rain transforming desiccated land, reviving dusty cities baking in the sun. Africa rained upon, wet and newborn, slick with black blood, black gold, the continent astir, shaking off eons of sleep, a fresh new being who rises, roars. Erect finally, Africa sheds its fear of nakedness, then sheds the myths of gender, the chimerical skins of race and class and privilege, those blankets humankind has been cowering beneath, hiding, sucking its thumb for centuries. A simple idea. Why not.

  What music should play in the background while Fanon dreams his simple idea. If not Little Richard, maybe Otis on the dock of the bay. Or a thumb piano playing picture-postcard Africa on the soundtrack. Smiling giraffes and zebras framed through a Range Rover's window. Then play music to make the frame jiggle like an old film about to go bad on the screen. Play the jeep exploded by a mine. Play the camera fleeing. Play Africa's stillness and immensity surrounding, shrinking the viewer. Africa stretching the frame, like an ocean or snow-capped mountains on the horizon, a reminder that your life ends in the blink of an eye but lasts as long as trips people take when they imagine themselves not alive anymore.