An excerpt from Writing Frantz Fanon

(A man microphone in hand steps through drawn curtain. Stands spotlighted back to audience)

Man: And now ladies and gentlemen, Mesdames et messieurs, the moment you've all been awaiting. Back by popular demand from gay Paree, the Godfather and Numero Uno of our spectacular Moldy-Oldies revue, the one, the only original gangster, mister G-G-G, G-Hann Genet. Put your hands together and let's hear it for Mr. G-Hann-Genet

(Clash of cymbals-spotlight blinking and a man spins, moonwalks followed by light. Performs short hip-hop-Al Jolson, Bojangles jig in whiteface half mask over blackface make-up. Stops, removes white mask—limps back to original position).

Genet: We all know the dancer (points to place where dancer performs) wasn't me. Just some clown in white face pretending to be me, and this clown in black face isn't me either. Since I'm dead. Right. Everybody knows that. I'm not here to make a fool of myself in whiteface or blackface, but to affix a kind of warning label to this Blanc-face entertainment. Once upon a time an actor friend asked me to write a play for an all black cast. Since in those days roles for blacks were rare on the legitimate stage, I understood the point of his request. But what exactly is a black. First of all, what's his color?

The useful, if not exactly original, contribution of the play The Niggers I wrote for black actors and a white audience, was the idea that masks, though themselves the very embodiment of disguise and deception also clarify. Clarify not who we are, but who we are not.

An old chum, the great sculptor Alberto Giacometti, often lamented that each time he looked away from a model to check the accuracy of his representation of him or her, in that instant consumed by a glance away then back, his model would become a different model. Alberto's frustration is shared by all artists. We are translators of our perceptions, and unfortunately, all translations are doomed by an unyielding anti-Rosetta Stone principle: no word in one language is exactly equivalent to any word in another language. Not even a word repeated in a single language is ever equivalent to itself. Like ticks of a clock, each word, each perception, occurs once and only once, vanishing as swiftly as the dream containing it. No matter how similar two words may seem, each is a different step into a flowing stream and none of us, artist or not, ever steps in the same river twice. When I write, my words are masks wearing masks. No face, no body beneath, only masks waiting to be unpeeled, waiting to be displayed, while the idea of a face recedes, a horizon I set my sails towards but never reach. Thus the emptiness at the center of my drama "Les Negres" and the black hole of this what . . . translation . . . copy . . . turnabout . . . this blowback—Les Blancs, what exactly is a white? First of all what's his color?

(Lights out. Curtain opens )

(A man in a fashionable black suit with a pendant of silver claws around his neck reagally occupies an oversized, straw, high-backed Huey Newton armchair throne. A woman in short-skirted, business suit sits cross-legged, facing him in a desk chair, an expensive, lap-top computer balanced on her knee)

Man: (holding an apple) Sure you don't want one, miss? Or a little bite of "mine."

Woman: No thank you, Reverend.

M: Ain't a greasy chicken leg, darling. Try a little nibble. Bet you like it. (Man offers apple—Woman shakes head, No) Good for you, girl. Keeps the doctor away.

W: No, Reverend, but thank you, Reverend.

M: All about business, aint'you, honeybun. Ok, ok. Your assistant said you wanted to talk about color. Guess you mean what they usta call the color problem. When it was a problem. When it was the problem. Before we all turned Blanc and got rid of color and problem both.

W: Precisely, Reverend. I have a lot of queries and...