Here’s the last line of Lee Siegel’s review of my old teacher John Wideman’s new book Fanon:
"Read Wideman and listen to his astonishing bluntness, and you might start wondering, as Fanon himself must have, why white people keep writing novels—and running for public office—at all."
I do wish Hillary Clinton would drop out already.
And I did spend a good deal of my recent time at MacDowell wondering why write another novel.
But along came Fanon, and I had to hand it to John, whose steady, serious output (this is book number eighteen) has long been a bracing fact, an inspiration and lesson. Despite the fact that one does have to wonder, as his brother Rob says in this latest novel, “if writing an intelligent book’s an intelligent idea.”
John shows us in Fanon what it means to be a grown-up in an adolescent culture: He writes as if it’s his last book, as if a novel is a matter of life and death—it was an answer for me, actually, and not to Siegel’s asinine question.
Write what’s urgent. And nothing else.
He always was one for encouraging idealism in his students.
Herewith, a few last lines. (“And the last shall be first.”)
From Fanon:
Love.
From The Wretched of the Earth.
For Europe, for ourselves, and for humanity, comrades, we must turn over a new leaf, we must work out new concepts, and try to set afoot a new man.
From Black Skin, White Masks.
My final prayer:
O my body, make of me always a man who questions!
(Though I think of it as “make of me always one.”)
And here’s the penultimate sentence from the same book, especially for Lee Seigel:
… I want the world to recognize, with me, the open door of every consciousness.
