John Edgar Wideman's Fanon

...Let the beat roll on...

...Fanon joined the Algerian struggle, prescribed violence, and died of leukemia in 1961, at age thirty-six...

...Dramatically, it's compelling...

...FracBOOKS tured, dispersed, in death as in life...

...But in the prison waiting room] we hate the wheelchair's implacability, the necessity to deal with it, work around it, include it in our activities...

...Fanon experienced French racism firsthand, grew jaded, and penned an analysis of colonialist stereotypes, Black Skin, White Masks...

...One more atrocious head pun and it's off with yours...

...It delivers too little information about Fanon, and too much of what we've heard before—the litany of race cards that any African American can justly play against America's shameful history" On NPR, Maureen Corrigan complained that Fanon achieved new levels of authorial self-indulgence...

...Third, Fanon is Wideman's " real life" memoir, an anguished confessional...

...When I was a kid I owned a magic slate...

...Stop, Thomas...

...Ideologically, it's a rant...

...The answer is that this would be a better novel if Fanon's legacy was not only celebrated, but analyzed...

...To Fanon, who himself wrote extensively on language as a tool of colonialist oppression, Wideman argues that America today is beset by the language of convenient and hierarchical boundaries, boundaries such as Fanon wrote about between black and white, settler and native...

...In his biography, David Macey criticizes what he calls "The Americanization of Fanon...

...These novelists set ideas in motion by embodying them in characters and situations of conflict...

...Neither an essay, nor a novel, nor a biography of Frantz Fanon, it's perhaps best described as a personal essay incorporating elements of a fiction...

...Fanon consists of three primary threads...

...They only visit every few months—but again and again they must maneuver through a maze of prison regulations and physical obstructions...

...Fanon is a slow novel...

...Fanon opens with a prelude that has the sixty-year-old Wideman idling in his house in Brittany, contemplating the modern world with dismay while penning a letter to the spirit of his revolutionary hero...

...What are the ramifications of invoking Fanon's name in the securityconscious America of today...

...In his last months, Fanon was transported for treatment to a hospital in Maryland (unsurprisingly, under CIA surveillance...

...Carlin Romano wrote in the Philadelphia Inquirer, "At a time when Barack Obama offers America a new possibility—a successful half white, half black American politician who resists angry, resentment-fueled racial politics—veteran writer John Edgar Wideman returns with a novel meant to honor Frantz Fanon...

...Please free me...

...Reading from the same script...

...Yesterday Thomas was reminded of his slate and his old habit of drawing dirty pictures on it, a memory I inserted into his thoughts when a UPS guy delivered a severed human head (maybe) to Thomas' New York apartment...

...Though Wideman has written several books that fall, broadly speaking, into the social-protest genre, Fanon is his most overtly political novel...

...Fanon," she said, is "a parody of a postmodernist novel . . . a literary failure to commit"—an opinion that she insisted was no reflection upon her own lack of literary sobriety...

...Note how furtively—even speculatively— Wideman introduces Thomas into the text...

...he's magnetically attracted to a life that was, by any standards, remarkable...

...America itself is an invisible prison, its prison walls economic, social, and psychological...

...We readers get it...

...Thomas often casually mentions 9/11 and notes that shortly after the collapse of the towers, "Serene above the network of circling choppers, planes are flying in New York City's airspace again...

...It is a novel that could be a magnum opus, the apogee of Wideman's cross-disciplinary technique, cementing his importance as an experimentalist...

...Wideman lives in New York...

...WIDEMAN HAS produced a fluidly written novel, a sea of glittering, tantalizing, and mischievous episodes— Fanon witnessing his first snow blanketing the French countryside, Wideman/ Thomas jogging along the East River, wondering how to unobtrusively toss a decapitated head, Wideman depressed while on a lecture tour, Fanon dying of leukemia while his blood corpuscles attack each other like clashing armies...

...Fanon's reputation as "an apostle of violence" is unexplored, except insofar as the decapitated head suggests murderous violence...

...History has bequeathed us Fanon the analyst of racism, Fanon the psychiatrist, Fanon the revolutionary, and Fanon the apostle of violence...

...The chair's existence spites us, hurts us like the hateful fact of the prison's stone walls incarcerating my brother these last twenty-eight years...

...The book proceeds by image and associative logic, ironic contrasts, and Wideman's (often desperate and romantic) interpolations: "I wanted to be somebody, an unflinchingly honest, scary somebody like Frantz Fanon whose words and deeds just might ignite a revolution, just might help cleanse the world of the plague of racism...

...Anachronisms sprinkle this story...

...Fanon is a political novel as well, and its success or failure can be tied to considerations of its thesis...

...only the images of Fanon are vibrant, passionate, painful, but also potentially uplifting, mythic...

...The Wretched of the Earth's ominous message was lauded and adapted throughout the late sixties and seventies by romantic rebels, revolutionaries and, yes, terrorists themselves inspired by the image of "the rising tide of the third world...

...It is as if the pressures of Wideman's private life have mounted and pierced a hole in his creative sphere, compelling him to create autobiographical metafictions...

...The backrest and seat are wide leather straps and DISSENT / Summer 2008 105 BOOKS if I stick my fist under the seat strap and punch up, the chair's braces unlock, its medal sides collapse inwards...

...A man named Thomas, who lives only in his stalled novel which doesn't have a name, also possessed a magic slate when he was a boy...

...Points of intersection are suggested, but with the vagueness of rumors and conspiracy theories rather than the confidence of a dialectical argument...

...Let me be clear from the outset...

...Keeps people on the same page...

...Acknowledging that, at his age, this could be his last book, Wideman hopes that it will be his liberation project...

...Wideman has at his disposal a mythic, dramatically circuitous life, and a variety of faces of Fanon to choose from...

...The biographical subject—anticolonialist author and psychiatrist Frantz Fanon—is the ostensible centerpiece of this multilayered narrative that draws heavily from David Macey's authoritative 2001 Fanon biography...

...It's a dramatically powerful evocation of the real social problems that Barack Obama will have to confront if his "change" campaign wins the day and achieves the American presidency...

...The plague of racism continues to blight people's lives, becoming more and more virulent as it mutates and spreads over the globe...

...In the work of the great political novelists—Orwell, Kundera, Siloneperspectives vary...

...Help me, doc...

...Black Skin, White Masks is an antiracist, but not specifically an anticolonialist text...

...Giving Thomas a head-ache either way...

...The Wretched of the Earth is an anticolonial classic and requisite reading in postcolonial studies...

...The aspect of Wideman's style that Maureen Corrigan deems "navel gazing" is that his prose rarely fully embodies a scene...

...Thomas's extended foray in France, seeking out the filmmaker behind Breathless, also connects Fanon to the spirit of sixties revolt...

...Fanon's primary flaw is that although the presentation is complex, the message is incongruously simple: Wideman is angry, his personal life is in shatters, and the modern world is a terrible place...

...For both the writer and the reader, the political novel provides a particularly severe test: politics rakes our passions as nothing else, and whatever we may consent to overlook in reading a novel, we react with an almost demonic rapidity to a detested political opinion...

...The final phase of Fanon's life still dominates the public imagination...

...The Wretched of the Earth tethers upon revengeful excess...

...In many respects, Wideman's Fanon seems less the historical figure who wrote on colonial oppression and the experience of life under conditions of total war than an amorphous symbol of "the spirit of revolt...

...But in none of his previous works has he gone as far as in Fanon, a plotless tour de force...

...Class and racial boundaries in American society are reinforced on the pedagogical level by the academic defense of what is really an arguable line between nonfiction and fiction, the real life and the imagined...

...his fictive alter ego, Thomas, is also a New Yorker...

...his political stratagems are more problematic...

...This is Wideman/Thomas's vision in essence: conditions far and wide in America are weighted, polluted, unacceptable...

...This is fantastic material for a novelist...

...Fanon was born in 1925 in the French colony of Martinique...

...For the writer the great test is, how much truth can he force through the sieve of his opinion...

...At eighteen, the future anticolonialist still so strongly identified with the father country that during the Second World War he volunteered and fought in the French Army...

...Macey writes, " The self-identification of civil rights workers and black power activists with Fanon necessarily involves the misrepresentation of exaggeration...

...Fanon committed himself to the liberation of Algeria after he began to view the mental debilitations his Algerian patients suffered less in Freudian, Jungian, or Adlerian terms than as symptoms of the daily humiliations of colonialism...

...In it, Fanon extols violence as the paramount means by which the colonized subject can re106 n DISSENT / Summer 2008 store his selfhood and manhood (as Fanon put it in the sexist language of his day...

...it is psychological liberation...

...The second thread consists of biographical segments—relatively fact-based accounts of Fanon's life, beginning with Fanon on a military reconnaissance mission after the future author of The Wretched of the Earth has become committed to the Algerian revolution...

...My society polices its boundaries with more and more self-destructive manichean violence...

...Neither we Negroes who inhabit the dead end where we're stuck nor we Americans doomed to undertake the task of saving a world we fear by destroying it...

...If that sort of thing bothers you, you're in trouble," Wideman writes early on, calling attention to the fact that Fanon is top-heavy with time shifts, imaginary conver104 n DISSENT / Summer 2008 sations, and playful witticisms, both a narrative in chronological flux, and a project rooted in admiration for a historical figure...

...The twenty-eightyearold Fanon, by then a professional psychiatrist, accepted an assignment to a clinic in Algeria...

...Public complacency is contrasted with the personal rage Wideman/Thomas feels whenever he revisits his Philadelphia birthplace of Homewood, the setting of most of the previous Wideman novels, a once middle-class neighborhood gone to seed, enervated into the kind of neighborhood that's been abandoned by large shopping centers, while overpriced corner convenience stores sell liquor and stale goods, and lawless youth straddle the entranceways...

...It loosely coheres by juxtaposing images of decay in contemporary America alongside images of the collapse of colonialism...

...For the reader the great test is, how much of that truth can he accept through the sieve of his opinion...

...America, the new global empire, is narcissistic and reactionary...

...Unfortunately, there just isn't that much to get...

...But in Algeria, the violent and exhortatory streak already manifest in Black Skin, White Masks reached an apex...

...Wideman leavens this weighty metaphor by lacing Thomas's narrative with self-conscious literary puns: "The narrative forges ahead...

...First, Wideman introduces a fictional character, Thomas, a New York novelist, who is also working on a novel about Fanon...

...Dr Fanon...

...We Negroes didn't do this neighborhood to ourselves...

...Wideman's Fanon is a beatific martyr—rather than a political scientist and philosopher whose work can be interrogated, or reevaluated...

...Wideman's dramatic choices—the stratagems by which he tries to make his varied materials culminate' with dramatic force, if not unity—are the strongest aspect of Fanon...

...Like you...

...Stylistically, Fanon is accomplished...

...What are the points of intersection between Fanon's conceptions of prejudice, race consciousness, and revolution and expressions of such concepts today...

...rather, again and again Wideman revisits the process by which language attempts to capture a subject— its hesitations, and fleeting missteps...

...The metaphor is clever, and sometimes powerful, but the analogy between war-ravaged colonial Africa (and Fanon's life in it) and the so-called decaying American empire (and Wideman's life in it) remains a stretch...

...his son Jacob has been imprisoned since 1988, when, at age eighteen, he pled guilty to the murder of a school friend...

...The full story of Wideman's tragic family life will have to wait for Wideman's own biography to be written...

...This maddening novel well written, but too insistent...

...Wideman's admiration for Fanon is boundless...

...And doesn't...

...A decision disrespectful of the 9/11 dead...

...American cities are crumbling: "Slums cleared, fresh construction tumbling down as it's completed, new and old consuming each other...

...Violence is emotional purgation...

...David Macey's biography documents that Fanon was a progressive psychiatrist, working in Algeria, pushing toward breaking down traditional psychiatric walls, remaking his patients into community members and his hospital wards into interactive familylike units...

...A magically clean page each time, any time you wished...

...Old flight paths resumed because they maximize fuel efficiency and profit...

...Thomas's early research is bizarrely interrupted when he reBOOKS ceives a mysterious package, via mail, that contains a decapitated head...

...In the society I know best, mine, fact and fiction are absolutely divided, one set above the other to rule and pillage, or, worse, fact and fiction blend into a tangled, hypermediated mess...

...An important American writer in the African American tradition, John Edgar Wideman is the author of twelve novels, a scholar, a former MacArthur fellow—and a man pursued by family tragedies...

...In Politics and the Novel, Irving Howe describes why writing a successful political novel is a risky business: The criteria for evaluating a political novel must finally be the same as those for evaluating any other novel: how much of our life does it illuminate...

...The characters in Fanon—such as Wideman's family members— are sympathetic, but they are called upon to DISSENT / Summer 2008 n 107 BOOKS justify Wideman's perspective...

...In the novel Philadelphia Fire and the short-story collection All Stories are True, Wideman introduces Robbie, Jacob, and other family members into his texts...

...Wideman hopes to cast Fanon's shadow upon contemporary America, but that would require demythologizing the holy body of Fanon, while reducing Fanon's shadow to "the spirit of revolt" leaves an ideological lacuna at the heart of the text...

...DOES FANON COHERE, even by the standards of a laboratory novel...

...Does Fanon have a coherent political thesis...

...To call Fanon "a litany of race cards" is condescending...

...Wideman's older brother, Robbie, has been imprisoned since 1975 on an accessory to murder conviction...

...The magic of it, I understood back then, being you drew upon with your magic stylus and every mark you'd etch on the slate would disappear...

...provocative, but sorely one-sided—made them mad...

...DARRYL LORENZO WELLINGTON is a poet and critic living in Charleston, S.C...

...Has Wideman put his opinions through a critical sieve...

...They reappear in Fanon...

...In a final, ironic twist, Fanon died in the United States...

...the experience transformed him...

...At nineteen, he relocated to France to study psychiatry...

...Or Wideman's latest novel could be, as several of its earliest newspaper reviewers have suggested, a disaster...

...Particularly moving among Fanon's plethora of images are the accounts of Wideman and his wheelchair-bound mother visiting his incarcerated brother, Robbie...

...If the old order "keeps people on the same page," Fanon will fly in the face of it...

...Stipulating differences that matter between fact and fiction—between black and white, male and female, good and evil—imposes order on society...

...Vast chunks of Fanon are given over to a running, poetic commentary on the post 9/11 malaise that has infected both the city and the country...

...How ample a moral vision does it suggest?— but these questions occur to us in a special context, in that atmosphere of political struggle which dominates modern life...

...Reviewers such as Carlin Romano and Maureen Corrigan answered Wideman's vague, angry, and bombastic novel with unduly harsh bombast of their own...

...His readers know that these events and their ongoing repercussions have made his fictions successively moodier, darker, more introspective, and self-referential over the years...

...Business as usual...

...But why the bad reviews...

...It is curious that Corrigan could not at least credit Fanon with a modicum of originality, considering that she—like several reviewers— seemed vexed to define exactly what the book is...

...The wheelchair folds up easily once you empty it...

...Heal the divisions within me my enemies exploit to keep me in a place I despise...

...Thomas travels to France, scheming to interest Jean-Luc Godard in a film treatment of Fanon's life...

...Myself cut up, separated into bloody pieces, doctor...

...Nothing funny here...