Extended Labor

Wideman mixes fiction and biography in Fanon

by Justin Bauer

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Published: Feb 13, 2008

Fanon By John Edgar WidemanHoughton Mifflin, 229 pp., $24

Fanon must have had a difficult birth. As the first novel in a decade for celebrated Pittsburgh writer John Edgar Wideman, the book makes it clear that some kind of "Fanon project" had been incubating unwritten for years. This version bears the scars of a long gestation.

Born Afro-Caribbean in Martinique, Frantz Fanon fought with the Free French in World War II, ultimately qualified as a psychiatrist in France, but spent the close of his life fighting against France in the Algerian revolution. More important is the legacy of his writings — Black Skin, White Masks, which explored Fanon's own cultural dislocation as a black intellectual in France; and The Wretched of the Earth, which psychoanalyzed the dregs of colonialism and jump-started postmodern, postcolonial critique.

Wideman tells Fanon's story, but it's the least important of the three. More an extended meditation than a novel, Fanon opens with Wideman addressing dead Fanon directly, then showily shifts to the story of Thomas, an invented author-manqué worrying away at the same topic. The movement of the book's first pages, from Wideman introducing fictional Thomas obsessed with biographical Fanon, shows the difficulty Wideman has had in approaching this project as clearly as anything he says outright. And the language he delivers, postmodern-precious and cleverly allusive, drowns all but the hardiest of moments — most often memoir-scenes involving the author's wheelchair-bound mother and incarcerated brother.

Those hard, bright, carefully observed moments come from a seasoned writer at the height of his craft; the welter of language that surrounds and isolates those scenes, though, bears witness to what a difficult labor of love this project has been for him. Wideman puts up a dazzling curtain of talk and meditation, but gets at the heart of his project only when he twitches that curtain aside.

(j_bauer@citypaper.net)

John Edgar Wideman will read Tue., Feb. 26, 8 p.m., $7-$14, Free Library, Central Branch, 1901 Vine St., 215-567-4341, freelibrary.org.

 

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