Fanon (11 page)

When I imagine living over the Paris Café, I guess I'm actually daydreaming about living under it. A mile deep where the East River licks and sucks the fill that long-dead workmen once dumped in to tame its flow, the river engaged in a continuous, nibbling assault, hollowing out more space, reclaiming its ancient precincts. Corrosive grains of sea salt pushed inland by tidal swells, then swept back downstream by the current are efficient as sandpaper, deepening the wound beneath the Paris where black water laps in mile-deep darkness and my little yellow submarine swims, its fuzzy, disintegrating finger of light checking out what's down there, groping live fish, suicides, dead kittens and babies, all the unexpected creations of drifting cast-off debris and muck that wind up in a scooped-out pocket of water a mile deep below the edge of Manhattan. A soundless, etherized realm exerting unimaginable pressure as I bob there alone, hidden from view, or if I get lucky, with a lover beside me in my bed
each morning, fellow sailor, mermaid, fellow ship-wrecked isolato sealed like me in our bungalow, denizens of an immortal city beneath the mortal one, marveling at the quiet, the air of our two breaths, our two fleshes quietly mingling, nuzzling, sour and sweet as measureless tons of water at bay just beyond the porthole.

Thomas watches the curtain pretending spring. One of four matching, semitransparent goldish curtains with a darker gold floral pattern veining them. The panel lifts, no, dances in the draft from a window he'd cracked, not because it was spring but because the apartment had overheated during the night, its thermostat predictably unresponsive to changes in temperature outside or inside his old building. Inadequate boilers, clogged radiators, broken traps. Heat on warm days, then AWOL when the city's arctic. A frigid wind agitates the curtain, gropes its folds, and pleats with icy fingers, but the poor pale thing, a colorless rag in the harsh winter light streaming through it, quivers, shudders, would girlishly sigh if it could speak.

Was he concentrating on the problem of representation. Shouldn't he admit to himself at least—who the fuck else is paying any attention—that his mind's as idle as the diddled curtain he watches when he isn't watching for the newly resident mouse to dart from under the stove and skitter across the tiles. Was Thomas contemplating distinctions between literary and cinematic representations of reality or was he speculating on the mouse's next move, stalking the beast, formulating a strategy for killing it. Who knew the French director he'd chosen to rescue Fanon's story from the sorry-assed inadequacy of words would turn out to be fed up with images, falling in love with
literature. Did the filmmaker quote writers more and more in his films because he believed images had lost their tongues. Or spoke too much. Working out to the same thing. A global commerce in images usurping, colonizing, lobotomizing, digitizing, roboticizing thought. Instead of being alive, instead of, you know, possessing agency and unscripted, unpredictable possibilities, images are slaves, prisoners. Images kidnapped, copyrighted, archived, cloned. Property. Images serving power, speaking the master's language, saying and doing what the master orders.

Or maybe he's disappointed less by the slavishness of images than by their refusal to be his slaves. Prospero snapping his wand. Appalled by his career's tail end, the gathering darkness of any career winding down. All those pretty candles lit one by one with so much care and hopefulness, then one by one they gutter out, and when you peek over your shoulder, the room's just as black as when you started.

Stupid to choose a director as betrayed by images as I find myself betrayed by writing, thinks Thomas. Wouldn't our collaboration produce an invisible Fanon, white mask, white skin, white screen, white silence on blank sheets of paper. C'mon. Don't you guys see the albino cows moving about in the snowstorm. Can't you almost hear them mooing.

He hated the mouse, would stomp it, kill it if he could ambush it crossing the kitchen floor because the mouse, not much larger than Thomas's thumb, had scared him. Not housewife-jumping-up-on-a-chair-and-shrieking-for-help fear. A recoil, a shudder of profound disgust and needle-prick of terror before anger took over and he cursed the stupid twit trespassing on his turf. A quick pinch of vulnerability, unexpected and ridiculous given the mouse's size relative to his. Not about size, of course. The mouse had reminded Thomas he's not alone. Countless other creatures inhabit the planet, creatures unlike Thomas, not enemies exactly, just radically different, as
different and chilling as touching feathers or scales or the scraggly brown fur of a hamster when he was a boy. Touches he'd always declined. Unthinkable difference he thought he'd finished thinking about, grown up now, armed with adult fairy tales that cartooned and marginalized beasts who would eat him as nonchalantly as he gnawed on a spicy chicken wing from KFC. The mouse kin to wolf, to sabertooth cat, to grizzly bear, and if Thomas didn't maintain constant vigilance, wouldn't one of his ancient enemies rip him from guzzle to zorch, feed on his steaming guts. Good riddance, maybe. Time maybe.

Thomas's crossed legs terminate in brown bare feet, one planted on the floorboards, the other aloft. The airborne foot in respect to the floor repeats the angle of Thomas's frozen ballpoint pen relative to the plane of a yellow tablet. Foot and pen mismatched wings of a
V
that exists nowhere except in Thomas's fancy, like the foraging mouse he probably only thought he saw when his eyes jumped from the daydreaming curtain to the tile floor and found nothing there.

Film unsettles him almost as much as the idea of fierce man-eaters lurking just outside his range of vision. Holding up a negative or a strip of motion-picture film to light was like staring into a cave, Thomas thought, a voluminous darkness also strangely depthless, all mouth, all surface, yet infinitely deep, as deep as travelers' tales reported the ancient African city of Wagadu to be, a cave with uncountable layers of silvery black and white hunkered down in there, compressed, compacted, each layer invisible as the mouse under the stove until thirst or hunger or curiosity—who knows what it's like under there—drives it across the kitchen tiles. When light streams through the film's dark skin, Thomas sees ghosts. They wait for him to enter their icy cave, wait for his warm breath. Thomas huffing and puffing with all his might, turning himself inside out, reversed like a glove snatched off his fingers, his insides out, outsides in. The film a balloon inflating till it's large as the earth, all the tiny frozen figures
scurrying like roaches from my grandmother's oven when she lit it in the morning, scurrying here, there, everywhere across the planet's sticky surface, a story unfolding while Thomas uncrosses his legs, closes the yellow tablet, kicks back into the cushions of the couch to watch instead of write the movie he's making.

On the TGV Thomas second-guesses his bright idea of asking a Frenchman to direct a film about Fanon and the Algerian revolution. A bit like putting a Georgia cracker in charge of a flick about Nat Turner (the sound
flick = film
in English =
cop
in French). To be fair, not all Frenchmen or Frenchwomen or French persons alike. Not all crackers alike. Maybe. There are French Algerians and Algerian French.
Pieds-noirs.
Harbis. Grown-up mixed babies and mongrel kids in the process of growing up in France who don't know what the fuck they are. French Muslims born in Europe. French Jews born in Ethiopia, Lebanon, Chicago. Senegalese, Indochinese, and Moroccan French who fought for and against the empire at Dien Bien Phu. Brown French Tunisian guerrillas who fought beside Palestinians against Israel. French Israelis. French African Arabs who served in the FLN before they emigrated and settled in the outskirts of Paris or in Mayenne, falling in love perhaps and raising a French family that produced a generation of Senegalese/Swiss, Guadeloupean/Filipinos, Viet/Bretons, etc., and what about the mulatto
martiniquaise
arriving in Nice after ten years of French civil service in Togo where she wed a Congolese and their son marries a blond
niçoise
with one Swiss German parent, one from Russia with Afghan ancestors, what kind of French person would that union produce.

After all, Thomas, you're only choosing someone to direct a film, not save the world, right. Judge not by the color of skin or content of character but by the size of the talent, size of the wallet. Promote equal opportunity or affirmative action or ethnic cleansing or hire the handicapped, fashions come and go, don't they, and shame on us all, so what's wrong with choosing a Frenchman to direct the Fanon
film, a filmmaker who push, push, pushes past the point of good taste or logic or obscurity or complicity with any audience but his own wandering eye. Collaborating only with whomever he imagines himself to be. Or not to be. Or pretends to be. One truth for a minute exchanged halfway through a scene for another, more or less, if the narrative, the flippity-flop of the frames slows down to less instead of expanding to more than meets the eye, you know, a guy who doesn't really seem convinced of the content of nobody's character, black brown yellow red. Or loves/hates them all, indifferent to different colors unless they paint a scene. Use value. Surplus value. Marx or Marx Brothers. Who cares.
Sauve qui peut.
Just a movie, ain't it. A lie. Just play.

In his essay about the Swiss-French
maître's
films he would expand the riff above if he ever got around to writing the essay. A writer once. And now. Now he talks to himself, composes notes to himself each morning on long walks and runs beside the East River or across the Williamsburg Bridge, entertains himself with invented selves, free-style, free-forming them, allotting each persona enough rope to lynch itself, herself, himself, as if gender mattered any more than color to the dead. He worries about his idea of importuning a foreign director but also likes the quixotic naiveté of traveling to France. A sentimental journey to find the Swiss-French director and coax him out of his what—lair, lethargy, business, retreat, mourning, last days, resting in peace. Pressing into an old comrade's callused, workingman's hands a Fanon script he can't refuse. Then what. The promise of resurrection. Eternal life in cinematheques, film society screenings, video stores, luxury DVD editions, the film dissected, analyzed in university classrooms, memorized and memorialized, reissued for late-night showings on pay-per-view, immortality guaranteed by the few but fit, who will not willingly let him die. Who die. Whom.

Recently, accompanied by an actual woman, a precious woman I
won't name so as not to jinx a new love, I attended a lecture by a French literary critic whose training in psychoanalytic theory gave her plenty to say about chopping off heads. Though decapitation not the announced subject of the lecture, the topic emerged as a recurrent theme in her presentation and during the course of her remarks she alluded more than once to an encyclopedic-sounding tome she was compiling on beheading. I could barely sit still in my seat. The scholar a star. She'd packed the joint and here she was generating a buzz about the novel I was writing. All these excited, restless, poorly dressed folk around me on the edge of their seats—her distinguished colleagues, the throng of starry-eyed undergrads, the super-serious junior faculty and doctoral candidates researching dissertations and articles they wouldn't dare publish without citing, pro or con, the visitor's writings—were hearing from the horse's mouth the archetypal, overarching significance of my central trope.
Man has escaped from his head as the condemned man from prison,
she said Bataille said in his journal
Acéphale.
I wanted to rush home and get back to work. Shoot both arms into the air and holler, Tell it. Tell the truth, girl. I wanted to sneak onstage and sit at her feet. Wanted to gag her. Pimp her. You sitting on a goldmine, sugar. Don't be giving up that good shit for free. Of course if you've been paying attention to how it works around here, you've probably guessed I did none of the above, just melted down in my seat, listening intently until my attention wandered to the cul-de-sac I'd written myself into. My enthusiasm about the talk waned to low-grade depression. The weight of her learning oppressed me. I felt a headache coming on. Like my skull was being squeezed into one of the medieval reliquaries she described, the miniature busts of queens and kings with painted eyes, a tiny hole in the head, a crystal window through which the faithful could check out a saint's bones preserved inside. Gleaming metal spheres
celebrating the head's status as intersection of material and spirit, human and divine.

Though the language of her multidisciplinary rap dazzled me at first—a bling-bling parade of fashion models sashaying across the stage in bizarre costumes—quickly the gaudy models got bumped off the runway, morphing into a funeral cortege, a lugubrious procession of mostly dead men's dead thoughts quoted, paraphrased, and seconded, all gray and rained on, moldering in heavy caskets borne on the shoulders of stoop-shouldered, gray-coveralled workers. Antsy, trapped in my seat, I realized I was hearing a kind of obscure, complicated report on weather anybody with eyes could check out for themselves if the goddamned windows weren't set so high in the cathedral-like auditorium's walls.

We didn't share a subject—we shared a tooth in an overworked mouth and the tooth was cracking. The distance between what she knew and what I knew about the subject widened as she lectured on. Heads rolling since the beginning of recorded history. Rolling at history's end.
Theriocephalous representations of Gnostic archons and astrological decans sitting at the Messiah's banquet of the righteous on the Last Day.
Rolling before recorded history—masks and painted faces of primitive ritual the borrowed heads of animals or gods. Heads detached, stolen, appropriated. Heads on platters, heads of state, headhunting, talking heads, heads on stakes at the entrance of medieval cities, heads on billboards, maidenheads excised, circumcision, clitoridectomy, the headsman, axeman, the guillotine, taking heads, giving head, shrunken heads, decapitation as emasculation, castration, sex change, regime change, bundles of heads delivered to terrorize and destabilize a nation, beheading a booby prize if you don't pay your ransom. Nothing new under the sun. She outed my new fiction as old fact. Me whispering to her,
Look at the beautiful star, the incredible snowflake.
Ho-hum, she replies. The sky's full of them.