Fanon (3 page)

We must immediately take the war to the enemy,
leave him no rest, harass him. Cut off his breath.

Just a second, Thomas. Are you sure a Fanon quote a good idea here. Why add to Fanon's bad rap as apostle of violence, hater of whites, spawner of terrorists. Posterity already blames the messenger for his message. Like the pharaohs used to kill bearers of bad news to scare bad news away. One death not enough to chase Fanon. His reputation lynched. Reading Fanon's critics, you'd think he committed the crimes against humanity his words accuse others of perpetrating. I understand why you need Fanon in your story, why you're anxious to hook up with him by any means possible, but think about the consequences of introducing Fanon in this manner. And Thomas thinks. Or would he. Think. With a human head (or what he believes is a head) on his kitchen table, wouldn't Thomas be feeling rather than thinking. Feel chilled. Queasy. Scared. Scared of what. Whom. Of everything and nothing. Of himself. The worst kind of fear.
Formless. All encompassing. Thought trumped, he listens to himself thinking anyway, clickety-click, blah-blah-blah.

If the Fanon quote fits, if it pumps up the action ... so what if Fanon guilty by association. Fanon's reputation not Thomas's problem. Not in this scene, anyway. Later, maybe. In a different scene, another story. In the Fanon book he's intending to write. If he ever starts it. If he ever finishes the fiction he's writing now. If he ever finishes reading everything he's able to lay his hands on about Fanon and Martinique and the Algerian revolution. With Fanon so much on his mind, no wonder Fanon's bleeding into everything Thomas writes. Fanon his hero. Pinpoint of light in a darkening world. Doctor, philosopher, freedom fighter, writer, a man of color, man of peace who said no to color, no to peace if the price of color or peace is hiding behind a mask. But how would the sender of the note be aware of his plan for a Fanon book. Beyond mentioning the possibility to his brother and mom, he's told no one (except Fanon) about his project. Not even himself, exactly. Who's spying on Thomas. Listening in on his thoughts. Who knows the head's name. Who's reading stuff Thomas hasn't written yet. The plot thickens.

Why not some other message in the box with the head. A love quote, since whatever story he writes he wants love in it. The nice bit from Rilke, for example, which an Episcopalian priest recited during a wedding ceremony Thomas attended recently, something about love being when two people appoint themselves guardians forever of each other's solitude. Or Fanon's warning from
Les Damnés de la Terre,
his prescient words, ignored when they were written and still unheeded over four decades later, the quote about a long-suffering Third World stepping forward, an awakening Colossus in Europe's face, determined to resolve problems for which Europe has offered no solutions, words quoted in a Fanon biography Thomas just happened to be reading the morning he saw smoke billowing from the Twin Towers. Or another, less confrontational Fanon quote.
Oh, my
body. Make of me a man who questions,
Thomas thinks. Would he think that thought with a head on a platter staring at him. For sure, he'd be asking questions. Question after scared question. Where's the rest of the body. Whose body is it. Who disposed of the body after detaching the head and sending it to Thomas. Who indeed. Who doesn't like Thomas very much. Why not. Isn't Thomas struggling valiantly to make the best of a bad situation. Isn't his life, his fate, like everybody else's in these days of hate and terror, out of his hands—anybody's hands. Too late for Fanon or any other savior to salvage. Doesn't the crawl say so daily in the small packets of information flowing across our screens. Yes. No. Yes. Thomas spinning in place like the hip-hop Sambo kids in the subway for tips. Slow down, Thomas. Nothing to fear but fear itself. But I already used that quote, didn't I, Thomas thinks. You're not responsible for the mess, Thomas. Neither is Fanon. This is work-in-progress, not a story anybody's written. Too early to tell what's going to happen next. Will I be the book's hero, the head inquires. Hold on, my friend. Can't give away the ending. Let's say the Fanon quote,
take the war to the enemy,
etc., included in the box to heighten suspense. Thicken the soup. Teach somebody a lesson. Who. Who knows. Who sez.

Let's get it straight then. Once and for all. If Thomas is imagining Thomas receiving a head in a box, who imagines receiving the thoughts of Thomas. Who's dead. Who survives and imagines me. Thomas for one for sure because it's his story and for his story or anybody else's story to be written, somebody must imagine a second self, a made-up self like Thomas makes up, outside Thomas, imagining that other somebody as we each imagine ourselves, a she or he,
black or white, old or young, alive or dead, a second self imagining. Where. Inside the first self which must be imagined first so it believes it could be the author of the second or third or however many other selves the story we imagine requires. Are we making progress here. Precious little, I'm afraid. Where are we. Where do we wish to go. Someplace simple, I hope. A story with an arc and ending. Fanon's story, the one Thomas can't write.

An old friend, my idol and housemate one year during college, Charley T., whose misfortune was to love Pat, a girl who gave any guy who smiled and asked nicely a hand job because it was such a small, easily managed task for her and seemed such a big happy deal for the guy, Charley decided that his fellow painters who worked the medium of watercolors had things assbackwards. Reversing the traditional practice of moving from light to dark by gradually deepening shade and adding color with washes of paint that conspire with a canvas's original pristine bright white, Charley started by painting his canvases a muddy blue-black. Then with the ass end of his brushes, with sticks, rags, spatula, razor, fingernails, kitchen utensils, an X-Acto blade, sponges, and occasionally paint on the bristles of his brushes, Charley worked darkness back to light. Inevitably the wear and tear of scrubbing, rubbing, scraping, licking, erasing, flogging, and washing destroyed not only the dark skin he'd applied. At some point along the way at the slightest touch from one of Charley's implements the tortured canvas would collapse in tatters and droop from its frame. There it would hang for weeks, months sometimes, until Charley talked himself into beginning again, stripping the old skin, stretching and thumbtacking a new one in place, propping the frame back on the easel. The last time I saw Charley he remained as adamant as ever about the superiority of his method and just as critical of the old way. And remained just as hopelessly in love with Pat, missing for years, presumed dead in a bus crash in Mexico. Charley still optimistic, digging a hole and burying himself like
Houdini in boxes, blindfolds, and handcuffs, a hole deep within the darkness of the canvas, convinced he can burrow out and bring back alive the fabulous light people swear sleeps down there at the end of the tunnel. Hey Charley, mi amigo, say hello if you bump into my head down there.

Romare Bearden, the world-famous painter who attended Pea-body, the same high school in Pittsburgh my incarcerated brother and I attended, said that at the beginning of the Italian Renaissance some artists resisted the demands of their patrons for paintings conforming to the rules of perspective that had become fashionable. Artists feared the deep thrusts cut into their paintings by the new science and math of rendering space. Tintoretto, for example, screwed up on purpose. He believed that illusory holes in a painting could become real holes in which the gaze, maybe the gazer's body and soul, might plunge and be lost forever. Who knew. The point is resist. Painters might tumble in too. Bearden relates how a buddy and mentor of his, Robert Holty, hipped him to an example of resistance one afternoon as they stood studying Tintoretto's "Finding the Body of St. Mark." Holty pointed and whispered something like, See, this goes back and then something happens up here so that you have an hourglass effect. Instead of going right into the depth here—Tintoretto could have if he'd wanted to, he certainly possessed the chops—he made it like this ... so you don't get too much of the illusion of space receding.

Romare Bearden's collages remind me of how my mother, another one of my idols—a life-saver like Fanon—talks. Her stories flatten and fatten perspective. She crams everything, everyone, everywhere into the present, into words that flow, intimate and immediate as the images of a Bearden painting. When she's going good my mom manages to crowd in lots and lots of stuff without creating a feeling of claustrophobia. She fills space to the brim without exhausting it. Without surrendering the authority of her long life, she always talks
about the precise moment she's inhabiting. Makes the moment present and large enough, thank goodness, to include everybody listening. Bearden's collages and my mother's narratives truly democratic—each detail counts equally, every part matters as much as any grand design. Size and placement don't highlight forever some items at the expense of others. Meaning equals point of view. Stop. I sound like a museum audiocassette guide when all I really need to say is
dance
—my mom talking or Bearden at the turntable mixing cutouts with paint with fabric with photos with empty space are works-in-progress inviting me to dance.

And speaking of guides, perhaps Thomas should change his protagonist's name to Tristram, you know, as in Tristram Shandy, the eponymous hero of Sterne's backasswards novel. Except
Tristram's
a clue fingerpointing in the wrong direction. Blaming the dead. As if Fanon and Tristram don't have enough troubles, their own wounds, wars, and ghosts to account for.

Helicopters whomp, whomp, whomp-whomping in the distance across a gray sky. They look like insects skimming the tops of tall buildings, sniffing and declining whatever goodies the towering stamens and pistils offer. An unusually busy traffic of choppers. Are they practicing. Has the shit hit the fan. Vehicles burning, a restaurant car-bombed. Are the helicopters ferrying survivors to emergency wards or bearing newscams to broadcast a spectacular accident, report a traffic jam, a power plant exploding, a flood, a parade, you never know anymore, the sound of choppers may be innocent but once bitten you never look at stray dogs the way you once did.

In the playground below my ninth-floor window an Asian guy heaves a long shot at the basket and when the ball knocks through the hoop the man thrusts both arms into the air.
Three.
A little extra spring in his step as he lopes to retrieve the ball. The guy doesn't hear choppers whomping overhead. Couldn't care less about the choppers mission, the mission of terrorists, the bodies squirming in
agony or hunger or smoldering beside a highway or suffocating in elevators filling up with smoke. Thank you, Jesus, for blindness that every once in a great while allows one of us to hit the target.

There are rules for making a novel, says Thomas, standing assbackwards to his creative writing students, muttering rules over his shoulder while he jots them on the blackboard. On this, our first day together, and thus a sort of birthday, let's begin with point of view, the telling voice, the voice telling the story, the narrative heart that must always be alive, beating at the telling center or there would be no story, no novel, and to illustrate his point, various diagrams and underlined words with arrows like guided missiles connecting the dots begin to appear on the dusty blackboard—green not black its actual color—at the front of a small classroom holding a dozen or so hopeful white college students—their actual color not white nor any other paintbox color—who have gathered together in the name of fiction, a crew of wannabes yearning to learn the secret of doing what Thomas has done—break into print—break into the conversation about their lives books have been conducting since long before the students were born, books unread by them, books whose authors are mostly dead or much older and therefore not exactly qualified to speak about present lives. Does Thomas concur, hearing the nub of chalk in his hand tap-tap-tapping, as if the green chalkboard's a wall between cells and he's tapping a message to a fellow prisoner or the board a door he humbly taps, seeking permission to enter the office of a senior colleague, much older, smarter, more distinguished than Thomas will ever be, the chalk a blind man's cane
tap-tap-tapping the way French impressionists composed a world with dots of color, and sure enough, a picture, familiar and embarrassing, greets Thomas when he steps back to regard his boardwork, a photo remembered from a thirty-year-old article in the alumni magazine of the college where he copped his first gig, a feature about neophyte instructors, featuring rare Thomas, the only member of his race on the faculty, Thomas wearing a sharp, Ivy League-cut herringbone suit, facing a class, the late-sixties shaggy backs of student heads in the foreground, and behind Thomas in the photo's background the rules for writing a novel sketched on a chalkboard—actual color unknown, since the photo's black and white—rules appearing just as slapdash, as spontaneously improvised and freshly minted in the ancient picture as they seem today, same ole, same ole shit recycled almost exactly, startling then shaming Thomas.

What if a former student fast-forwarded to this classroom or one of his present students bumped into the old photo. Would she or he demand a tuition rebate. Demand Thomas's head. On the other hand, don't all professors teach from yellowed lecture notes, scruffy index cards, falling-apart looseleaf notebooks, manila folders stuffed with brown-around-the-edges clippings. Why not. What else do you have to teach, if not the truth of your experience, your witness. Your old school theories precious like the music you grew up listening to, dancing to, fucking to. Midnighters. Five Royales. Turbans, Dells, Diablos, Spaniels, Flamingos. Oldies but goodies. Better now. Right on. All the questions and answers in one harmonized, swooning, dowah falsetto riff. Same truth. Same greasy teenage fingers dipping nonstop into a bowl of potato chips because gobbling chips and daydreaming safer than getting out on the floor and dancing. Same hopeless wishes and lost, lost loves. All good. All true then and now. Word.