Fanon (21 page)

Empress Josephine, Napoleon's kidnapped island prize. Her blackened Creole whiteness a fashion statement in Paris. Court ladies imitate the lilting island lisp of her French, her jungle cat's tread and stealthy grace. Gold chains drape her neck, many silver rings spool like threads around a single finger, cascades of tiny, multicolored trade beads are miniature curtains dangling from her ears. How elegantly she stands, her long, lean back arched like the trunk of a palm tree, her rump protruding like a slave's, her corkscrew curly hair sprawling like the palm tree's fronds. She wears silk sarongs cunningly wrapped, their transparency more revealing than nakedness. India-cloth turbans twist around her hair in the style of mulatto concubines whose sultry glances decorate a lavishly illustrated book, executed at the emperor's command, his window on the exotic islands he rules but would never risk the sea to visit.

On page 1794 of the
Shorter Oxford English Dictionary
the word
savannah
appears below the words
savage, savagedom, savagery
and above the word
savant.
The English savannah,
savanne
in French, derived perhaps from an African or Carib word
zavanne.
Martinicans borrowed
savanne
to name the green market square of Fort-de-France. The word
savannah
employed in French and English to name a type of landscape common on continents and islands Europeans believed bore no names, no history, lands whose inhabitants babbled in multitudes of baa-baa tongues, none worthy of the name of language, lands whose natives wouldn't think of attaching words to ideas because thought didn't dwell there, no one, nothing there humanized by the touch of words, only a wilderness of anonymous mountains, flora and fauna, murderous weather, deadly insects, disease, endless grassy, treeless plains, an emptiness awaiting baptism, awaiting conversion to the real. The word
savannah
a sign of inclusion in god's plan, his kingdom—one day nothing, nothing as far as
the eye can see, only a vacancy of nodding grass and then, miraculously, the
savannah
stretches forth, a green sea, green plain, a bountiful green park, God's will, his plenty and power made manifest, a green ark, a green playing field stinking of sewage some Sunday mornings from the backed-up Levasseur canal when Fanon and his brothers Joby and Felix gather on
la savanne
with other Fort-de-France brown boys to play soccer beneath the stone ramparts of old Fort Royale that loom above one edge of the island, protecting it from the sea.

A towering fence of ragged tamarind trees marks another border of
la savanne
and one morning Frantz Fanon, galloping after a scuffed white ball, stuns the other boys by bounding higher than the tamarinds, hanging in the sky a moment, tongue in cheek like Michael Jordan, grinning at the others. Every player's mouth wide open, eyes popping before Fanon soars beyond the treetops, never to be seen on the island again.

Felix to his right, Joby to his left, Frantz attacks. A magic triangle. Crisp passes back and forth, a flying wedge cutting through the other team's defenses. The field rough and uneven, a tilted, scuffed, pebbled surface but on mornings like this with his brothers on the wings and him in the center charging the goal, they skim across the Savanne like skaters on a frozen pond. Their opponents, helpless as tarbabies, are signposts nailed to the ground, unread by Fanon as he zips past, an arrow speeding to its target.

When the game's pumped up to its swiftest pace, it slows down for the best players. Calm in the eye of the storm, Fanon watches the game unfold frame by frame, watches himself watching, directing. Plenty of time, all the time in the world between one moment and the next. Running full speed down the middle of the pitch you head-feint right, cock your knee as if surely you intend to blast the ball to Felix on the right, Felix who is your brother so he's seen that feint, that hitched leg before and doesn't hesitate, doesn't wait for a ball he
understands isn't coming, but accelerates, sprints ahead into the gap between two defenders his brother's false pass creates, and in that space open only an instant Felix receives a pass from Joby, a shot on goal a split second after Frantz has punched the ball ahead to Joby on the left.

Fanon scans the field quicker than thought. Thought's trumped by action. Pumping hard down the middle of the pitch or bounding high above the tops of worm-eaten tamarind trees, he is as stunned as the others by what's happening. He drives the ball with his instep, then he's alive inside it. Not exactly surprised, not exactly in control, driving, accelerating to weightlessness. You've prepared for this moment, been here before, you've done this running this passing this micromeasuring and parsing and orienting, this assessing of other players' skills and habits, this breaking down of lanes, angles, distance many times on the field and in your mind and there's no time to be wrong now, wrong would be slowing down, falling out of the flow. Wrong would be not playing on. In the rush of the action, speeding faster, speeding past, you exercise options you don't recognize as options until after you've executed them. No choice, no right or wrong decision, only a goal or no goal, a pass completed or not, a deeper, more dangerous penetration, or nothing—stalemate, the dissolve of the action, the clock slowing down, your feet back on mangled turf till the next chance if one ever comes.

Fun while it lasts, Why doesn't it last. Why so many cells squeezing the life out of time. Stealing time. Killing time. Unlike most of his fellow dreamers and revolutionaries of the sixties, Fanon neither was gunned down nor served time in prison (in spite of numerous alleged plots to capture or kill him). Thus his life evades those myths of martyrdom so handy for settling accounts. For closing the book. Fanon's accounts of his life prevent him from being written off in other people's accounts. We have his words; we can count on them. Fanon uninventible, or you might say resists invention. He's
no more or less a fiction than any person writing about him. Fanon's been here and gone. Free. Played the game till it was too dark to see the ball. You can't touch that.

When I think about it, bro, I don't know why you keep beating yourself up trying to write intelligent shit. Even if you write something deep, you think anybody wants to hear it. Everybody out there just like the guys in here. Everybody just wants out. Out the goddamn slam. Quick. Why they gon waste time reading a book. Book ain't gon get them out. Deep down they know they ain't never getting out. Don't need no book telling them how fucked up things is.

Anyway, real smart motherfuckers don't listen to nobody nohow. They know better. Busy wit their own scheming. And dumb motherfuckers don't understand shit even if they standing ass-deep in it. So when I think about it, big bro, I give you credit for being an intelligent guy, but, you know, I got to wonder if writing an intelligent book's an intelligent idea.

In 1942 Frantz and Joby were sent from Fort-de-France to board with their schoolteacher uncle Edward in Le François, a small town about an hour from the capital. The Fanons' idea was to remove their sons from the dangers of a rumored Allied invasion of Martinique, which would undoubtedly target the French warships stranded in Fort-de-France's harbor and the Vichy government that had installed itself in the city. Removing Joby and Frantz to Le François would also rescue them from a city unsettled by war, plagued by poverty, crime, school closings, its population near starvation and harassed daily by the increasingly ugly racism of mainland French sailors marooned with their vessels by the Allied blockade.

Ensconced within the relative safety, quiet, and isolation of Le Francois—more country village than town—Fanon, under the tutelage of his uncle Edward, would have begun reading more and
thinking more about what he read, habits encouraged, as biographers and critics have noted, when Fanon returned to Fort-de-France, by his new teacher, poet Aimé Césaire, who stimulated not only Fanon but a whole generation of students, including Edouard Glissant, for instance, young men who become pillars of Martinique's intellectual and political life. But wouldn't enforced notification in Le François also have been experienced by young Frantz as punishment. Fanon a city kid exiled to the country. I think of Emmett Till, teenager from Chicago's black South Side, bored, restless, inventing mischief to pass the time during his summer in Money, Mississippi. Fanon an urban outsider in rural Le François, learning to turn inward for company. Cultivating studiousness, self-reflection. Infected by more than the standard measure of adolescent alienation, resentment, anger, and anxiety at being abandoned by his parents, separated from his comfort zone in the city streets. Or is another story intruding here. Thomas's story. Thomas a stranger in a strange land. The
only one of his race
in classes and extracurricular activities at his 97 percent white high school.

During a tour of a local chateau with classmates from his uncle's school, Fanon heard a guide's tale about the
beke
who'd purchased the chateau from the
beke
who'd constructed it in 1750. Whether the guide addressed the story to the entire group or one-on-one to Fanon, whether the story was part of the official tour menu or a spontaneous aside, whether it was narrated in standard French or Creole, what the teller intended by the telling and whether the teller was male or female, whether black, white, brown, beige, red, yellow, or an inextricable mix of all the above, I can't say, and in a sense none of the above matters. What matters is Fanon listened and must have remembered the tale years later when he decided to write about how some groups of people control the lives of other groups of people.

The story the guide recited a simple one. Familiar to all the
beke
's neighbors and their slaves because when he was drunk, the master of
the chateau loved to brag about his success and wealth, his army of slaves, the chests full of gold he'd stashed away in the woods. Brag how with a single bullet he'd protected one chest's secret location and sealed Old Tom's gossipy lips, dooming the lazy good-for-nothing slave to guard the chest forever. A good trick played on cranky, balky Tom whose meddling tongue had forgotten too often over the years who was master and who the servant. Fanon didn't learn from the guide's story whether the
beke
said or didn't say goodbye to his ancient companion, only that the
beke
drew a pistol, pulled the trigger once, and left Old Tom silent, bloody, crumpled across the chest in the pit Tom had spent half a morning excavating, the pit over whose edge Fanon stares, tracking a sweating, grizzled brown head after the rest of the body disappeared from sight when Tom wrestled the heavy chest down with him into the hole he'd never leave.

At school next day, instead of an essay extolling the architectural splendors of the chateau and listing the inimitable artifacts imported from Europe gracing its rooms and galleries, Fanon produced a short story. Unfortunately it has not survived. However from Joby's testimony (and Mr. David Macey's summary of that testimony) we know the story involved pirates, stolen gold, murder, a ghost's revenge. Autobiography in other words. Young Fanon's version of the guide's tale. Only with a different twist, I bet. An eye for an eye, most likely. The last becoming first, etc.

Years later, composing
Black Skin, White Masks,
Fanon must have recalled the legend of the
beke
who sentenced Old Tom to eternal servitude. Wouldn't Fanon have admired begrudgingly the beke's cold logic. Slaves belonged to their owners from cradle to grave, the law declared, but the
beke
had demonstrated that a slave's usefulness could be extended beyond the arbitrary limits of birth and death. After all, didn't unborn slaves serve the master, visions of sugar plums dancing in a master's head, the added incentive of profit if lust not enough motivation for humping his slave women. If work could be
squeezed from virtual slaves before they reach the cradle, why not work after the grave. Fanon was familiar with the scary tales about Haitian planters who poisoned their slaves and transformed them into living-dead zombies. The problem with zombies is they possess bodies—powerful, tireless, mindless bodies able to wreak havoc on a plantation. The Le François
beke
had a better idea. A scheme more efficient, elegant than his Haitian peers'. Though he left the head on his slave's bloody shoulders, he separated Tom's mind and body. Freed Tom for eternal servitude. So what if Old Tom invisible. So what he's a ghost. The clever
beke
invented ghost work for Thomas's ghost body to perform. The circle unbroken. An endless cycle of production and consumption. Slaves sown to produce slaves, slaves producing babies that grow into trees that become lumber that becomes wealth that seeds more wealth that purchases more slaves, etc. No escape alive or dead as long as Old Master rules, Fanon concluded many years later, writing about how some groups of people rule other groups of people by transforming those others into phantoms. The colonizer dooming invisible natives to ghost work. Scaring them with ghost stories of irresistible, godlike
beke
in charge during daylight hours, fearsome monsters and evil spirits reigning after night falls on the island. The circle unbroken.

Each person an island in a sea of time. Isolated by the sea, each person's fate determined by the sea's traffic, by voyages that risk the sea's treacherous currents and vast distances, voyages that may seem to master seas they navigate, but any sea mastered is also, always, an island in a greater sea.

Until he tells the woman in the wheelchair, Fanon had never admitted to anyone except his brother Joby how much the snow blanketing the French countryside had frightened him. More frightening than death, he had confided to Joby. Winter's whiteness a season
experienced only in picture books, and then, fighting a war in frozen forests and mountains east of Lyon, he'd become more certain each day the people who lived there had forgotten how to turn the page. Did Fanon turn the page, peek ahead to the end of his story, and see snowy cells of leukemia drowning him.