Fanon (17 page)

[Dissolve to JEW and JLG—interior of grocery store/restaurant]

I don't need you to remind me that getting my mother's stories on film next to impossible, Mr. G. I share your pessimism about the limits of cinema, about the lost cause of any made-up shit supposed to be representing real shit and I know my mother's old, her stories old stories and who gives a flying fuck these days about old folks' rambling stories, who's prepared to bankroll movies about grungy, smelly tail ends of lives when sexy, young-fleshed lives photograph so pretty, sell so well. I admit my mom's getting old but on the other hand she's not as old as the Sumerian culture you sample toward the end of your latest film
Our Music
to make your point about how
language (thus narrative and meaning in general) operates both forward and backward in what we call
time,
the bit about Sumerian grammar employing a future tense to describe the past. Never goes away, does it, the paradoxical old/new nature of time, so how old is old anyway or how young and who cares Mr. G. when you get down to the nitty-gritty, everybody just wants their own time and more of it, call it whatever you want to call it, past, present, future, who cares it's all the same, my mother's old stories, mine, yours, young again if we're alive to hear them, tell them, see them, act them, the ancient Sumerians singing about past glories as if their history's going to happen any day now, tomorrow, today, yesterday, centuries in the future and keep on happening forever and Sumeria a heap of old stones scattered in the desert in the vicinity of Iraq and Iran, time's stupid and indiscriminate whether it's measured by dynasties or by inflections of verbs or carved up by calendars into months and years and centuries or light-years or the half-lives of elementary particles decaying or annular rings of a tree or geological epochs or intervals on a musical scale, the same bullshit same wishful thinking, whatever talisman or computer program people set to divvy up time, rationalize it, tame it, chain it, preserve it whatever year of this dog or that snake or this bearded savior or that comet or shooting star or quark's rotation around an imaginary nucleus, time stays what it is, waves goody-bye, goody-bye, like runaway slaves wave to Old Massa, old names forgotten, old chains broken, no tick, no tock. Goody-bye.

On one hand, given the above, I understand your reluctance, Mr. Godard. On the other hand, the invisible hand that makes clapping with one hand possible, why not try to film my mother's stories. Why not try your luck, set down your bucket, here, where we sit, Jean Luc, Lucky John. What's to lose. Except time. And there's always plenty of time. It's all we have, right.

And speaking of the future, Mr. G., do you know that the dead talk like niggers. Which means the language of the dead may be nigger language or the dead may be imitating for whatever reasons the language we hear around us in this neighborhood I grew up in. Maybe the dead hang with niggers a lot. Or maybe niggers hang out a lot with the dead. Or it could be the fact that all the dead are niggers. Could be the fact only niggers die, but I don't think so. Shit, to be honest I can't explain why the dead speak like some of my people speak. A thought about why once crossed my mind but I didn't take it seriously. It made me laugh really. The gist of it goes something like this: so-called white people rule this world—who could dispute that, Mr. G., everybody knows white people on top even if it's only a very few really on top of the top and more and more so-called whites sinking down through the cracks into places basically indistinguishable in many ways from Homewood, and yellow people and brown people and purple people and beige people coming on fast, breathing down white people's necks but that's another humorous thought not so funny according to your Mr. Eminem and that's not the thought anyway that cracked me up when it flashed through my mind to explain why the dead speak the way niggers speak. Just grant me the obvious fact that white people or so-called white people because they call themselves white, run the world as we know it, the world striding out of our TVs every day bigger than life and upon that world they run they impose their language as the official language for doing business, for deciding who's famous, who's smart, who speaks intelligently, the language for writing history and the last word on what's good or bad, ugly or beautiful. Their language a sign of who's on top and why and also a way of identifying who ain't on top, who can't be and ain't spozed to be since they speak the wrong language, like nigger language, which is not to say that many languages don't have their places in the world the ones on top administer, the many languages have places just like many so-called non-white, colored people have places and some, a few anyway (even a few niggers), have places you could call significant or desirable, perhaps indispensable in the world they serve, but the point I've already belabored far too much since as I said it's such an obvious point is that at the end of the day and when the day begins too,
whites
or if you will "so-called whites" run things, and a few reap godlike profits from this bullshit called a world, or whatever they call it, profiting even from the bullshit cages you see in this place we're visiting today called Homewood, these cages you might think belong to the people you see caged in them but in fact belong to the ones who built them and got the keys in their deep pockets, and even here in this so-called ghetto white is spoken, whether or not you hear one word of it everybody understands who's in charge whose voice matters but back to my tickling thought which is this: maybe on the other side, the so-called dead side, the side that's located, you know, through the looking glass or just below the surface of water or on the other face of a coin you can't see when you're looking at one face, over there maybe the people whom/who the language ruling this side calls colored or negroes or whatever, maybe over there some of the so-called black people are the bosses. And over there where everybody winds up sooner or later or maybe never exactly leaves, over there maybe—ha-ha-ha—you better speak nigger or else.

[Dissolve to the woman's face on the balcony]

She's always wondered if she'd given him his taste for coffee. Her first son. From the beginning of the time he'd been inside her, every morning she'd splashed the island where he lived with a tide of strong hot coffee and the Carnation evaporated milk that served her as cream. Then him, at last, outside at her breast, coffee's flavor and color seeping from inside her into him as she rocked him while he suckled. A strangely full, ready-to-burst almost achy feeling lately takes her back to those early days in Washington, D.C., barely more than a child herself, bellyful of baby and nothing all day to do—how many times a day can you sweep and dust a one-room flat, how much cooking of the single meal two (three) share—too timid and tired to walk very far on streets lined with block-long stone buildings packed with strangers, learning to tie a scarf around her telltale hair and sneak into whites-only movies a few afternoons when there was a spare dime for sneaking, bearing a child, afraid of it, afraid of a new city, then the miracle finally, from her flesh comes flesh more precious than hers, yet her flesh too. After all, the simple truth is he had dropped out of her bottom, down there where she opens to pee and shit and bleed, opens for a man, yes, he'd dropped out from down there in a noisy, embarrassing shower
Goddammit, nurse, who fed this woman beans
so it's true and not true they are mother and son, coming and going, not exactly the same flesh, not exactly separate either, a hopelessly mixed-together oneness now and always with this "he" she named with his father's and her father's names
John Edgar.
She must feed and cradle and comfort him in her arms, sing to him not because anyone tells her she must, she has no choice, understood from the first instant that her arms, her legs belong to him, his puny limbs and blind fingers are hers, preciously, forever hers like certain expressions on his tiny face she sometimes coaxes from him are hers, expressions mirroring her huge face hovering, breathing into his, speaking to him without words in a language her body had learned from others to express with the muscles of her face, passing on family looks becoming his looks and though she understood she must be the source of much of what he saw then she saw spreading across his features, she also discovered new likenesses she had never perceived in herself. She was beginning to know herself in a different fashion, recognizing features she carried, looks taught by glances she exchanged with this baby. Not exactly as in a mirror. He was so different, far more precious than she was. Except watching those big eyes, small ears, that nose, that mouth, strangely she suffered his pains and pleasures deeper inside herself than the truth of her own sensations. But she couldn't pee for him or bleed for him, only mop up the damage, watch the hungers and aches inside him flow one to the next, relieved or not, tended to or not, pleasure or pain. His body would go on about its business, coping, thriving, or limping along as his flesh willed, while inside her, anything that had hurt or threatened him kept on terrorizing her flesh. She would see lifetimes of pain twisting across his face. Enough pain for many generations, the old people's pain from long ago, undreamed pain still to arrive—as real as her memories, as her perpetual fears of what might come to pass—all flickering in an instant across his features and after this unhappiness passes, he might smile, coo, fall asleep and there she'd sit, tears welling up in her eyes, a crew of phantom aches cruising through her body like they say you still feel in the space where an arm or leg used to be before a doctor cuts it off. His body, long gone from the nest inside hers, yet it's still eating her bones, her heart.

Her coffee inside him, wherever he's sipping his first cup this morning. Not really hers. Not from the cup in her hand, not from the pot she just brewed. From inside her. From those loneliest, fullest times in D.C. No. She'd never be that silly, silly little girl again but feels the vaguely familiar fullness again of carrying him inside, a heaviness and fullness puzzling, puzzling, with her helpless as a baby now in this womb of chair. No. The damned wheelchair not a womb. It's her chain, her steel-barred cell. The evil jailors starving her with a torture worse than withholding food. The apartment's stocked with frozen dinners, cans of beans, boxes of rice and macaroni, a two-day-old roast sealed in jellied gravy at the bottom of the CrockPot in the fridge, cold cuts, one stale-ish, two mostly fresh loaves of bread, milk, Maxwell House instant coffee, orange juice, Pepsi, cereal, bananas, and so forth, she can list to herself a couple weeks' worth of provisions because it's not about not having stuff to shovel in her mouth
and load up her stomach it's about appetite and the torturers are killing it, deadening day by day inch by inch her will to fix and chew and digest a meal. A ghost heaviness balloons inside her while she wastes away in the chair. Nothing she eats will return strength to her twisted legs. No amount of food will help her rise up out of the chair and go on back to doing the things she's been doing day by day, all these hard years to keep herself alive.

Oh, pity, pity, poor me. One of my pity party days is how she tries to explain it to him and herself when he says her voice over the phone sounds like it's coming from a deep, dark pit. Oh yes, she's tempted to answer. Do you really want to hear how deep and dark, my son. A hole if somebody was digging it to find oil they'd have given up and put a cap on it long ago. Ha-ha. And you know how greedy those oil-drilling folks can be. You know cause a Texas one of them runs this country and he's drilling us dry, drilling down down till the greedy hole's all the way through to China and almost out the other end and this poor old world's gonna spring a leak, groan, cut one long hissing fart, and all the nasty air gon run out she'd like to say something silly like that and laugh with him,
hissssss, phew-weee
all their troubles, bad as they seem, bad as they are, trouble don't last always, my son, right, but no appetite for silly sayings or dumb stories she makes up from reading the news or watching TV when she talks with him on the phone to prove she's okay, that she's still fighting still following what's happening in the big world around her little squeezed up one shrinking shrinking to a greasy-looking stain and a bad smell, all that will be left of her in the chair one day, soon.

These are not precisely her words, of course. Not mine precisely either. A mix, we'll say. As everything turns out to be. I'm making up words. Exchanging words with her to teach myself whatever might remain to be said. At times anything's better than silence. Better than silently abiding her illness and loneliness, the slow, sure progress of losing touch. Better than the silence of sitting alone, crippled in a goddamn wheelchair above those bare streets watching for miracles. Anything's better. Fire. Flood. It's okay to knock her up, even. Have her a girl again, walking D.C. streets again. Expecting. Heavy and uncomfortable in June heat. Unwed. Baby's father unknown. Maybe the daddy's you, Mr. Sneaky Motherfucker Godard. You, Mr. Luc lucky John. Maybe she'll be sitting six floors up on her balcony one afternoon so big the dumb chair's bowlegged under her young girl's fully packed lushness miraculously recovered and she howls a bloodcurdling air-raid-siren howl everybody hears from one end of Home-wood to the other, hears it all up and down and around the axis of Homewood and Frankstown Avenues, a ground-zero howl so loud even all the vanished folks can't stop up their ears against it when Mom pops wide open and surprise, surprise out comes Frantz goddamn Fanon, lips all bloody munching on the barbecued afterbirth.
I'm back.

[Dissolve to me and Mr. Jean Luc Godard side by side on a mourners ' bench with a bare shelf serving as our tabletop, etc.—you remember, the place where we were before. We 're still sitting here waiting between one dissolve and the next.]

So what you're saying, Mr. G., or not saying since I been jabbering nonstop and you ain't squeezed out a mumbling word for hours, I guess what you're telling me bottomline is you'll be in touch, right. In the sous-conversation of things not said aloud, you're hipping me, aren't you, my man, saying, Don't hold your breath. Well, I hear you, bro. And I appreciate your candor. It takes the pressure off. Thanks. I can go on about my business now. Write my Fanon book without worrying about a shooting schedule, balky stars, budget overruns, guys in suits, censors, distribution rights, percentages, anxious banks, my poor French, and your good English. You know. Hey. There's just one last thing I need to tell you. I fell in love in Paris once. In spring. I love Paris in the spring, love spring everywhere it breaks between the cracks in your beautiful old country, even where those ferocious hedgerows grow they say men died like flies fighting through on D-Day. You've seen the movie, haven't you.