I still believe that the only Captain Beefheart and Frank Zappa songs worth listening to at all are the instrumental sections, the parts where their bogus black vocals straining to be simultaneously authentic and pure irony falls away into the gratuitous shredding of guitars or white noise. Lacking the exact word to describe a kind of blackface in voice, not quite vocal minstrelsy, damn sure ain’t homage, or imitation. And I couldn’t stomach reading Clarice Lispector anymore after her short story on a Congolese pygmy woman. Notwithstanding that her rewritings are beauty, it’s not a beautiful beauty. Was disgusted when Roberto Bolaño rendered Fred Hampton’s account of Bobby Seale and Huey Newton putting up stop signs in their community at a dangerous 4 way intersection as the reductive role of “traffic cops” in 2666. But in my experience, white Latin Americans only find unity at last in their utter hatred and envy of Black Americans (and for blacks living in their actual countries, it appears to be nothing but a violent contempt). I cringe every time I read one of those white Commune Editions poets write the word “riot” in a poem. But in college I roomed with a white man who insisted it was the best poetry coming out. And I was forced to go to a reading of their (cult)ural leaders on my campus, only to nearly fall asleep halfway in, wishing I had sat in the last row like always so I could sneak out the back door into the grey air again and away from faux-revolutionary-anti-black-object-renderings-of-riots-in-which-they-might-be-the-first-to-revolutionary-suicide-if-you-really-think-about-it. Remember discovering and falling in love with the music of Joni Mitchell, soft nights in high school with the lights off only to have that supplanted by her phase in the ’70s of thinking herself an actual black man and dressing like a pimp in blackface, lights turned on voraciously. Virginia Woolf playing Ethiopian. Deleuze and Guattari’s Eastern obsessions. Nina Hagen’s African Reggae, Mark E. Smith’s obligatory niggers, Patti Smith’s rock ‘n’ roll nigger, nigger of the universe.
And this is all to say that the writers and artists who the white world, which is the fake ass universal world I now see, ensconced me with in my youth, attempted to fix me to, the ones you and your friends look up to, my former friend, can settle me no longer. So yea, you could say I’m on that shit that Fanon was talking about in the only chapter from Wretched of the Earth people seem to read. It’s ejection city baby. It’s rejection city baby. Big death.