Fanon (25 page)

Case Number Five: European police inspector and torturer—thirty years old—married—three children—came to clinic on his own accord—stated that for several weeks "things weren't working out"—loss of appetite—insomnia—nightmares—smokes three packs a day—what bothers him most are fits of madness. [I quote the patient] As soon as someone goes against me I want to hit him. Even outside my job. I feel I want to settle the fellows who get in my way, even for nothing at all. Look here, for example, suppose I go to the kiosk to buy the papers. There's a lot of people. Of course you have to wait. The chap who keeps the kiosk is a pal of mine. I hold out my hand to take my papers. Someone in the line gives me a challenging look and says "Wait your turn." Well, I want to beat him up and say to myself, "If I had you for a few hours my fine friend you wouldn't look so clever afterwards" [end quote].

The particular incident that precipitated the patient's visit to the clinic happened in his home. He dislikes noise. His children were squabbling and he started hitting them. His wife screamed at him and tried to separate him from the children. He recalls saying to himself, "I'll teach her once and for all that I'm master in this house." He tied her to a chair and began to beat her. Fortunately, the children's wailing and tugging brought him to his senses. He realized the
madness of what he'd done and the next day decided to consult a nerve specialist.

Stop a moment, Fanon says. "Nerve specialist" is the patient's way of saying
psychiatrist.
Be certain the text distinguishes the patient's voice from mine. When I quote him I'm reading from notes transcribed during interviews. I'm quite scrupulous about the accuracy of my transcriptions so that consulting physicians have access to a reliable record. In this book I want readers to hear precisely the language with which a patient describes his or her situation. Perhaps you could insert an extra space to separate blocks of text when one voice gives way to another. Perhaps the patient's voice typed single-spaced to contrast with the normally double-spaced format of the narrative. Underscoring or brackets or quotation marks perhaps around short phrases of the patient's I include in my summaries of their cases. The business about "master of this house..."etc., for instance, or "nerve specialist." I don't want to fall into the trap of treating my patients as the
beke
treat me. Never letting me speak for myself. Or turning my words into evidence against me. The proper representation of these cases is immensely complicated. Perhaps hopelessly compromised by any form of writing. I suppose in some sense I'm always speaking for my patients. Though, in fairness to myself, I often feel the patients speak for me. Not only do I quote them at considerable length. I also find myself splicing into my accounts their exact words or words not exactly theirs not mine either, words I try to imagine the patient might employ in a particular situation. An odd, secondhand, alienated structure's being formed as we proceed in these book sessions. A process that controls me as much as I control it. A sort of bricolage of free-floating fragments whose authorship is unsettlingly ambiguous. Two men or perhaps several attempting to go about their business, each with a leg in the same pair of baggy trousers.

Shall we carry on with Case Five. I'm ready if you are. I quote the
patient: "Those gentlemen in the government say there's no war in Algeria...[ellipsis his]. But there is a war going on in Algeria, and when they wake up to it, it'll be too late. The thing that kills me most is the torture. You don't know what that is, do you? Sometimes I torture people for ten hours at a stretch...[ellipsis mine]."

I ask the patient, "What happens to you when you are torturing?"

He answers: "
You may not realize, but it's very tiring. It's true we take it in turns, but the question is to know when to let the next chap have a go. Each one thinks he's going to get the information at any minute and takes good care not to let the bird go to the next chap after he's softened him up nicely, when of course the other chap would get the honor and glory of it. Sometimes we even offer the bird money. Money out of our own pockets to try to get him to talk. It's a question of personal success. You see, you 're competing with the others. In the end your fists are ruined. So you call in the Senegalese. But either they hit too hard and destroy the creature or else they don't hit hard enough and it's no good .
.
.

"
Above all what you mustn't do is give the bird the impression he won't get away alive from you. Because then he wonders what's the use of talking if it won't save his life. He must go on hoping; hope's the thing that'll make him talk.
"

Fanon.

Fanon shuts the famous book of empire. What lessons could he draw from Rudyard Kipling's novel. Where in his book might the Englishman's fake tale ring true.

This is the great world and I am only Kim. Who is Kim. He considers his own identity, a thing he had never done before, till his head swam.
Whose head swam. In what body of water did it swim. The River Ganges? How far. Did the head ever return. Who is the
He
in Kipling's sentence that begins
He considers
.
.
. Who the reported. Who the reporter. Whom addressed. Kim or Kipling. In any case
both names begin with the letter
K.
Perhaps that conscious or unconscious slippage and conflation and punning as good as it gets, as close as author gets to character, subject to object, fiction to truth, black to white, representation to reality, as close as many truths get to one truth indivisible with liberty equality fraternity for all. Who knows what Fanon thinks as he closes Kipling's
Kim.
Who says he ever opened
Kim.

(Aren't you cheating, he asks Kipling, asks Fanon, asks himself, asks Thomas. All these shifts, substitutions, translations, and denials. Or Fanon asks him. Doesn't biography or, worse, autobiography serve readers primarily as a source for gossip, rumor-mongering, titillation. Thinly disguised voyeurism. An absent life substituting for a reader's absent life. Did you sleep with your lieutenant in a field tent. Did the pair of you rise at dawn and stroll along the riverbank, bathe each other out of sight of the other men. You, Fanon, in carpet slippers, foulard dressing gown, and Hugh Hefner PJs, rather shamefully excess baggage on a bare-bones, tightly packed expedition into the heart of darkness, wouldn't you say, old chap. We prefer your suits, your manners impeccable. Dark, tasteful ties, stiff white shirts adorning your taut athlete's torso. Creased gabardine trousers swaddling your beguine-dancing limbs. Biography a costume drama. Dresses up and undresses. Performed for whose benefit. To whom addressed. Why would anybody bother to open the cumbersome package. It's too late to enjoy your touch, Fanon, your commanding voice, too late to sample your spoor on the breeze, see the aura spun by your quicksilver thoughts bright like a halo in the air above your head.)

Now that we know what happened to the head, here's a better Fanon quote, a better message to deliver in the box with the head: "
A permanent dialogue with oneself and an increasingly obscene narcissism
never ceased to prepare the way for a half delirious state ... where intellectual work became suffering and the reality was not at all that of a living man, working and creating himself, but rather words, different combinations of words and the tensions springing from the meanings contained in words
.
.
.
Shatter this narcissism, break with this unreality!'

Fanon.

Lyon. A tourism brochure advertises two of the city's main attractions: Rabelais' villa and the studio of the brothers Lumière, Auguste and Louis, the light brothers, no, no, not the Wright brothers, stupid, the light brothers, but you're also correct, my brother, the Lumières invented flying, up, up and away, lighter than air, faster than light craft, witchcraft some would say, devil's work, our Mr. James Baldwin called it, the trick the Lumières conceived that animates the dead, revives dead images of things, the images people and all other things discard, sloughing off images like skin sheds dead cells, you know what I mean, constant traffic too swift for human eyes to follow as people and things are dispatched molecule by molecule from one world to another world or to many worlds, how would we who are left behind clinging to this one know, but we do understand that we live in at least two kingdoms, a known and an unknown, a visible kingdom and a kingdom we cannot see, the invisible one a mysterious otherness, a counterreality we guess might exist in darkness or inside mirrors or underneath the surface of water, and between or among those kingdoms always traffic, shadowy, dreamlike exchanges, comings and goings, some things gone for good, for sure it seems, then the unpredictable returns of people and things so stunningly reconstituted, as the Igbo insist, we're sometimes halted in our tracks and wonder how we'd believed the things or people had departed forever, anyway what the French Lumières accomplished was a practical means of harvesting and preserving dead images
continuously shed from our live bodies, the images that reside swimming, hurtling, frozen in the invisible Great Sea of Time, fast or slow not relevant since everything travels at the same rate there, here, where we are, if not now then in the blink of an eye we're there, here, then gone again, back again too fast for eyes to track, anyway, the Lumières taught themselves—those pioneers and wizards and necrophiles—to fish in the dead zone, the other unseeable kingdom where we leave the consequences of ourselves behind, as falling leaves leave summer behind, marking one season's end, another season's beginning, fall leaves falling into some place that is no season not summer or winter or fall or spring when they let go and drop or the wind shakes them loose and they blow away airborne awhile yes but definitely treeless and on their way out, exiting to make room for the next, next leaf next and next and next, time's up, drifting seldom in a straight line given the randomness of wind tide temperature and fate but falling just as unerringly, inevitably as the arrow fired at your heart that will enter exactly when it's time for you to fall in love or die, exactly that straight and true, bingo, it's over and done and these cunning French brothers developed a technique for recording the time people lose living, the deceased time, used up, depleted, shorn time people in the dark ages had assumed was useless, an empty set, time emptied of time, time given up for dead. Then transformed by the Lumières' magic, the dead images dropping from me and you and the people and things around us, that invisible snowstorm of expired particles, became moving pictures. Think of light as my old pal Charley's assbackwards brush unpainting a sticky dark sky or think of a tongue coated like our tongues with masses of sticky multi-propertied chemicals and chemical reactions, a stew or broth we exchange and consume when we eat something or lick something or stick our tongues in each other's mouths, French kissing, hungry, alive but always also the site and medium of decay and death and change exchanged, no matter how good or bad it tastes, anyway the
brothers Lumière discovered how to catch, cook, fast-freeze the dead images which are always dropping and dissolving like dead cells from the skin of the world, from our bodies our breath from every move we make or don't and after preserving this stuff on strips of celluloid, they shined light through them and the rest is history. Astute businessmen, the Lumières realized they'd stumbled upon a goldmine and toured the world to exploit their moving pictures, their movable feast of dead things frozen, packaged, recycled, served up fresh and edible on the screen, real as the real thing, better, many insist.

Lyon all high-tech clean,
dot.com
, pharmaceutical now, but once an untidy city of fractious workers, of spice sellers and puppeteers, merchant princes whose castles commanded the bluffs along the Rhone River, makers of musical instruments, river pirates, weavers, cosmopolitan immigrants, a funky international hub of France's commerce with the Orient. Lyon a European depot of the fabled Silk Road that once wound through Asia, Lyon's workers spinning gold from thread from mulberry leaves Chinese worms chewed and excreted. How many soldiers from Lyon died at Dien Bien Phu, how many killed and killing, tortured and torturing in Algeria's mountains, Frantz. Do you know the statistics, could you see it all coming over a halfcentury ago, written on the walls of your flat above the Rhone, through the tiny, frosted bathroom window just missing a view of the river that was as much luxury as you and your new wife could afford or perhaps you could afford more, a nicer flat with ravishing views of Lyon, but, you know, the pair of you forced to rent where you are welcome, white woman, brown man, Lyon not paradise after all, then or now, is it, especially the quarter housing Arab immigrants in kennels and hives where you labored each day in your clinic and occasionally drank tea with Muslim men, you a foreigner too, in a Lyon back-of-the-wall ghetto that previewed the casbah, souks, and medina of Algiers, the same poverty and wretchedness, crime and
despair you and your future comrades of the FLN will struggle to reverse into a kind of health, as healthy as it's prudent for the oppressed or your patients to become in a sick world, the sickness you saw first festering in Fort-de-France, then Lyon, Paris, and North Africa, different each place and the same, old and new, familiar and alien as your island birthplace, a disease dooming all those cities, all the seas and countries you risk to dispense your freshly coined skills, a native doctor administering hope to the natives, to Africans, Europeans, to brown and white and black, tortured and torturers. Unpeeling Lyon an endless tumbling through history. Like unpeeling your skin. Down which path should your biographer pursue you to catch a glimpse of your true face. The same question dogging you, Fanon, as you pursued your many faces, through many cities, many pairs of eyes. Will I get lucky and unearth a definitive portrait of you. A view of you freeze-framed on the screen, like I chanced upon Emmett Till's battered face once upon a time, a closeup, millions upon millions of fugitive dots momentarily aligned just so to represent a conundrum recognizable as a human face and also undoubtedly your particular face, your likeness, a still photo fixed so I can study it, you know, like an image from the Lumière archives, an original print stuttering, impaled on the end of a quivering spear of light, a ghost face, dead leaf, its stare crossing mine, staring back as I stare, staring till the ancient stock overheats, begins to smoke and curl.