Fanon (6 page)

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 background. 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.

No music perhaps. Perhaps natural sound—assembly-line ratcheting of the Range Rover's engine, the thump, clatter, whine, bash of its tires on questionable tarmac. Modulate the noise. Play it like a kid playing with a TV's volume. Sound erratic and perverse, barely audible, then the ear-splitting crescendo of a chopper bursting into the Range Rover's cab. Fanon imperturbable. Impervious to tsunamis of sound. Not hearing what we hear. To guess what soundtrack he's listening to, follow his eyes. They're fixed on Comandante Chawkwi. We're a bobbing good luck ornament fastened to the dashboard and receive a full frontal view of the driver's face and Fanon's eyes absorbed by it. Jumpy, hand-held realism reestablishes the bumpety-bump ride over a corduroy surface juggling the Range Rover's wheels. Tighten the closeup of Chawkwi's face. Allow the engine's roar to recede, the shaking to diminish as the driver's face fills the screen, implacable as Africa a minute ago after we flew through the window. The stillness, the rugged serenity of the driver's features holds only long enough to register, then Chawkwi blinks, animating the wooden mask. He's simply a man intent on negotiating a dangerous, primitive road very much like back roads on Martinique, Fanon thinks. Chawkwi's ebony brow knotted by concentration, a possessed, almost crazy glint in his small eyes. Is he high on drugs. No. Absolutely not. It's not that movie. Revolution the only drug permitted. He's weary and dazed. He's been driving too long but cannot afford to relax. Past exhaustion, Chawkwi fights to keep an edge,
determined not to lose his grip on an opponent he's been wrestling for hours, years, a sly, unrelenting opponent who feigns submission, ropadoping, winking at the ring of spectators that includes every single soul from both villages the two champions represent. Desperate wariness in the driver's eyes, dreading the next sudden lunge or thrashing explosion of the body wrapped in his arms, the opponent who seems drained of resistance till the second you forget his power and then he breaks free again, circling you again, grinning, his orangutan arms dangling, feinting, cuffing you off-balance, beast eyes glowing.

Fanon can't take his eyes off Chawkwi's fierce scowl. Reads the raw truth inscribed therein: no fighter will exit the ring alive. He studies the indwelling silence and discipline of the driver's stare. Is he dead already Fanon asks himself, a casualty whatever the struggle's outcome. In his journal of the mission, Fanon scores his vision of Chawkwi:
Eyes like this do not lie. They say quite openly that they have seen terrible things: repression, torture, shellings, pursuits, liquidations .
.
. You see a sort of haughtiness in such eyes, and an almost murderous hardness. And intimidation. You quickly get into the habit of being careful in dealing with men like this .
.
. Very difficult to deceive, to get around or to infiltrate.

Impossible to write more on a jostling, washed-out segment of road, an absence of road, a wish for more road to open mercifully ahead so the jeeps can accelerate, regain lost time, give chattering teeth, leapfrogging bellies a rest. If I don't write now, will I ever get it down, Fanon asks. Reluctantly he wedges his journal into the unzipped bulk of canvas duffel bag his boots pin to the Range Rover's floor. Retrieves a book. Like the driver gripping the steering wheel with both hands, Doctor Fanon uses both his to steady the book he reads when he can't write. Never enough hours in a day. Dozens of wounded tasks stuffed into the dispensary's waiting room, a line of ailing, crippled tasks out the door, into the corridor, down the stairs,
straggling into the street, around the block on which the clinic sits. Only ten minutes of office hours remain. And counting down. He spreads a large folio across his knees, pressing down the edges, nearly cracking its spine, cracking a knee when the Range Rover bucks and rams his legs into the dash. The words bounce, helpless as his body flying up and thumping down on the seat. Words unanchored from the page, launched into random flights and formations, new sentences bumped aside by newer sentences disappearing too fast to read. The stately pageant of medieval Mali disintegrates into carnival. The antique empire's dignified history, its orderly dynasties of rulers a hodgepodge bricolage of hyphenated Arabic names, dates, invasions, prophets, migrations, assassinations, dancing to a syncopated fast jook from home, his green island across the sea. No matter how hard he grips and attempts to concentrate, the bouncing words of Mali's story escape. A narrative typed in the air by as many flying monkeys as there are pages, as there are words, as there are riffs and verses and ways to move your feet, your swaying shoulders and dreamy head to the beat of a single island tune.

Strangely, after a day of intense, withering African heat, a desire for fire the first night in Mali. Desiring fire as much as they'd wanted each tepid sip from their canteens to become a crisp, cool, rushing torrent they could plunge into up to their thighs and splash and swim in as they drank. Fanon had sensed a slight chill descending as the sun dropped toward the horizon, an unexpected chill to match the abrupt, absolute blackness of nightfall. Just the opposite of home, where night doesn't fall, where darkness, as old sharp-eyed chronicler of Martinique Lafcadio Hearn wrote, lazily rises from the land to embrace the sky. Chawkwi, second in command, knows the tricks of this Africa and Fanon is learning to defer to his judgment. Earlier that day Chawkwi had sent three men to gather firewood, extending what Fanon had intended as a five-minute rest stop. Fanon had been a bit annoyed. Why waste precious daylight hours
scavenging for firewood. The Range Rover an oven all morning. How much colder at night on a plateau that seemed only slightly elevated above the plains. They'd packed canned rations. Awful, heated or not.

While he was jotting notes in his journal and the men foraging for wood in a blighted gray patch of forest nearby, a shot rang out. Fanon jumped to his feet. From nomads they'd heard that French soldiers appeared unpredictably, a column of dust on the horizon or sealed in the armored halftracks they called rhinos suddenly crashing through the bush. He seemed the only one concerned by the shot. The others must have understood it was just Chawkwi buying dinner with his antique Mauser—one night a gazelle, another night bustards. Later, when a skinny, dog-sized gazelle roasts over a fire, Fanon alarmed again. Why risk a fire. Even in this desolate wilderness, they'd encountered signs of patrols. No telling whose patrols. The French and their Malian mercenaries used the same equipment. Bluster, Malian uniforms procured in Guinea, donned before crossing the border, sufficient thus far to speed the commando through the only government checkpoint. Proof of his plan's feasibility, more evidence of the accessibility of Algeria's soft underbelly. Still, why alert the enemy with an unnecessary campfire. He chose not to second-guess Chawkwi nor air his misgivings. Fanon wished to instill in the men under his command an impression of coolness, confidence, steadiness. None of them knew Fanon a veteran, that he'd been wounded fighting for the country he treats now as an enemy. Always a foreigner, an outsider, permanently on trial. Even here in Africa the color of his skin not quite right. Nor his perfect French. Always tests to be passed. A few yards from the fire, back turned to the others to piss and the African night drops over his head like a sack. He can't see the hand he passes in front of his face nor his pee striking the grass, a miniature fire crackling, echoing the blaze crackling over his shoulder.

Away from the fire, the sky's blacker, full of stars. For some reason
he's remembering Paris. Its hostility and honeycomb ghettos. The cruelty of white gazes that excluded him yet followed him with an unbroken, calculating attentiveness to his every gesture, every word and breath. Some days his brown skin prickled, beaded by a literal rash. He remembered the indifference and invisibility he enforced upon himself to relieve the tension of constantly being seen, and worse, seen as something not quite human, a creature he couldn't prevent others from believing they saw. He'd given up the struggle. Too frustrating, too debilitating. He refused to allow their eyes to distract him from his goals, disappeared inside himself, left the dark mask of his skin on view, rendered the rest unreachable. Better to let the others think what they wished to believe. If they busied themselves with what they thought they saw, it opened more room for him to maneuver. Why should he help them search for answers to their questions, their ugly questions that could transform a crowded room into a cell, him under a harsh light, alone, roped to a stool, interrogated by loudspeakers screaming through the walls.

Still, he could love that cold, distant city. Love and pity it. Night the only time he relaxed in Paris, deep night, the almost daylight hours when whores began deserting their posts at windows in the clubs of Montmartre. Late at night he'd close the medical text he'd been memorizing all day, exit the cliché of his attic room, and stroll the dark streets. Cross deserted bridges over the Seine. Alone. Precious solitude and quiet in a teeming city. Alone, hunkering down with a glass of vin rouge in a postage-stamp-sized café or just walking, wandering alone, his body relaxing, no raucous soundtrack of daytime traffic, no muttering, shouting pedestrians on crowded boulevards and avenues, just the night pulse of hidden generators supplying the city's energy, the muted hum of the metropole consuming itself, shrinking into itself, retracting till it fit in the palm of his hand, small and warm and tame as his sex after he squeezes it empty. Paris a glowing crystal ball, a miracle of contracted, compressed force swirling within transparent walls, countless bright particles swirling, colliding, crackling, and just loud enough to hear at the sphere's icy core, if he holds his breath and listens closely, a heart like his pumps. The city his equal. A perfect match. Equally fragile. Equally abandoned. Equally doomed. A glorious city of a million times million lights carving a space in the night no larger than the flickering wedge of flame behind him on an African plateau.

On the first night of the journey north through Mali, did Fanon dream. My answer is no. My answer is that in spite of an exhausting day, he lies awake for hours listening to the tropical forest, his mind retreating, recalling birds, frogs, insects, monsters, and ghosts of his childhood, sounds so familiar, so embedded they must be memories of Martinique, recycled in this primeval setting. But the sounds neither begin nor end in Martinique. He hears the hum of Paris. Paris burning and disappearing and the Seine's lonely murmuring, waiting for Paris to be born once more on its empty banks. The night sounds of Mali are memories older than Martinique, older than Paris, older than memory—how could this be so, he asks himself, even as he thinks the thought—memories older than the first time his eyes and ears opened and his mind began listening. Sounds he hears his first night in Mali convince him they are older than anything. Older than ears and eyes. Old as silence. The Mali sounds drop him onto a dark, damp forest floor. He can't tell from what height, or if he's fallen down or fallen up or jumped or been pushed. No memory of an elsewhere—no nest, no wings, no leafy crotch of branches, no cradling arms or warm breast—only the thump of his heart, the thump of his feet landing, shattering the stillness, his body shaped by waves of silence breaking over him, waves crashing again and again, the same and different each time, and with each blow and between blows he learns himself, his gasps, whines, his coughs and grunts, his breath pushing at the darkness, opening it, sealing it, one more creature in the mix, learning to hear what he is, fear what he's not.

Alerted by the forest sounds, alerted and thrilled by them as hightension cables bringing power to a New Africa will be thrilled by the passage of enormous voltage. And soothed too. Deeply calmed. Beyond sleep. Emptied of himself. Remembering whomever and wherever he'd been when his feet first thumped against the earth. Falling also rising, weightless as the forest noises he recalls now as he rides beside a driver who scowls at a road which intermittently crumbles to a sandpit or fills with water or skitters off in many directions at once, a fan of game trails, take your pick, the pages turning, skipping ahead, flipping backward. Inhabiting his own story like trying to construct a dam with water. His life never entirely believable. A morning sky opens after a night, Fanon, in which perhaps you had dreamed you'd never awaken. Maybe it's another person's dream you're living. You're only an extra, a bit player. Wouldn't you willingly give up your flimsy role for the solid world of darkness, the reality of creatures you can't see surrounding you, their hunting cries, death wails, scent of their shit and blood, their slithering and wings beating, their fear.