CHOMBO

AN EXCERPT THEREOF
BY FEDERICO ANDERSON

“Kenyatta really is writing his myth.” Khalid nodded. “I was just talking shit.” He turned to me. “I told you I read his book right?” I shook my head. He hadn’t told me and I was surprised. “Yeah I read it, I read the whole thing. I got to admit, it’s deep. He really says some shit. And it’s all on that like C. S. Lewis type of logical connections, building a long complicated argument. It’s well done!”

“C.S. Lewis who wrote children’s books?” Keith asked.

“Yes sweetheart,” Khalid talked down, to redeem himself.

“But he was also a philosopher, like a practical theologian, real interesting stuff. Brilliant really! Too Christian centered for me, but anyway, Ken’s book reminded me of The Abolition of Man. You read that Rick, right? Remember how he starts off with a little green grammar book and from it, he started a series of arguments that lead to the like, the decay of the western world and shit?”

“How does he do that?”

“He starts by describing some aspects of the book, and in describing these aspects, he divines the assumptions that the editors must have made in order to have composed the book in that way. Then from that, he draws another argument about certain new ideas and blah, blah, blah. Before you know it, this grammar book represents everything that’s wrong in the world.

“Anyway, That’s what Ken’s book was like. It starts with the assertion that ‘candy is junk,’ that we all teach our kids and ends in human hypocrisy and white supremacy.” He giggled and shook his head. “It’s a wild ride! The way he does it is interesting.” He broke off laughing then sat quietly smiling to himself.

One of Khalid’s most annoying gimmicks was to introduce a subject he wanted to discuss, then get quiet and wait for you to ask him to continue. Usually, he did it when he wanted to share some obscure bit of knowledge, probably only slightly relevant, that would impress you with the extent of his learning. He needed you to ask for it so that he wouldn’t have to recognize that the entire point of it all was to feed his vanity.

“Well *****, are you telling us a story, or not?” I said, though I’d read most of Ken’s book and knew exactly what Khalid meant. I did however, want to hear his opinion and discuss the book with someone else who’d read it.

“Oh yeah, well,” He sat back in his seat, knowing he would have the attention for a while. “He starts off talking about a child learning the lessons of hypocrisy early, from his own parents, who are only trying to offer what’s best. They tell him that ‘candy is junk,’ they encourage him to repeat it. He does repeat it, every time he hears the word ‘candy’. He is later however, allowed, or even rewarded with candy, which he of course, craves and appreciates. Harmless enough it would seem.” Khalid raised a dramatic finger. “He understands that it is no good for you, that we shouldn’t endorse its consumption, but so long as we indulge moderately, we may indulge.
This is it!” He smacked his hands together. “This is the beginning, the first lesson in hypocrisy! The first idea that what we say, doesn’t necessarily have to be consistent with what we do- and that what we say should be the more righteous. He learns that quickly, that it’s more important that we defend the right idea than it is to behave properly.

“As he grows older, he will transfer this approach to the other facets of his life. And religion is where it will show itself the ugliest. (Yo, Ken has no ***** use for religion!) Anyway, the child has learned already to espouse without necessarily complying: to partially mean what he says and also make a habit of saying it often. It is a very short hop in personal philosophy to proclaiming all of humanity to be the children of God, then unmercifully persecuting those who do not believe as you do.” Khalid started laughing. “You have to love connections like that!”

“That’s a long way to go from ‘candy is junk.’” Jamie giggled. I could tell though that she wasn’t looking forward to the argument’s conclusions. She knew that it would probably just provide fodder for the rest of us to bash religion.

“He gives a bunch of other examples of those kinds of things,” Khalid continued, ignoring Jamie’s statement, relegating it to a pause in his delivery. “You know, platitudes that employ the same logic. The ‘creeds of hypocrisy’, he calls them. Culminating, of course, in the grand daddy of all black indignations- proclaiming that all men are created equal, while subjugating an entire race of people and setting a system in motion that would keep them subjugated for centuries. ‘But you sleep easy.’ He says. ‘You have no fear of karmic debt, because you believe-in and espouse all of the right things, so you are not a bad person, if a little powerless in the face of all of the world’s evil.’”

“I like where this argument is going!” Sarah interrupted. There was always sarcasm in Sarah’s voice and it was impossible to tell whether she meant something, or not. I think I said it before, but everything about her was ambiguous, layered and subject to interpretation. I was looking at her face and her smile yielded nothing. That fact made me nervous for some reason. Sarah was the only one who hadn’t gone to school with the rest of us. At one point I assumed that it was because of that, that I found her so difficult to read. I hadn’t known her for ten years like I had everyone else in the room. She wasn’t rooted in a tradition from which any variation indicated her intent. But I know now that it was more than that. It wasn’t that she was not ‘rooted’ in tradition, but more that she seemed rootless. All I ever found in her were those ‘variations’, no sense of the theme, the core substance that they should have modified. Even in memory I couldn’t get a decent impression of her. I tried to imagine her, fix a solid, legible image in my mind, but none would hold. She was all change and shift and from thought to memory her character and characteristics remained fluid. It got so I had to wonder if a photograph of her could hold a consistent image between glances. Though it was a risk, I took the interest she expressed in the book seriously.

“Oh, it’s just getting good.” I said. “I actually told you about this part before.” I was still wary of the glinting irony of her green eyes, or were they Hazel?

“Yeah, this is my favorite part!” Khalid continued “He talks about how it’s a very subtle gift, oppressing is. Especially, actively oppressing without taking any personal responsibility; again, without incurring any Karmic debt.”

“Hell yeah it’s hard!” Maritza refilled the glass of wine she’d just emptied. “That’s why I keep all my subjects liquored-up.”

“No, wait.” Khalid put up his hand excitedly. “This is so good! Then he says that, we must stay aware that so much learning goes on before the age of five, and that we must teach the important lessons early, lest our children fail to develop an aptitude. We have to learn about subtlety of meaning, technical and semantic variations that allow us to support actions that appear to contradict what we have stated. These abilities are not for the simple minded, or the developmentally challenged you understand?” This was Khalid’s long-windedness, not Kenyatta’s.

“They require a life long commitment to an ideal, a standard of perfection in duplicity.”

“Get to his point!” I said, trying to focus him before he took a three-hour detour through a thousand other topics.

“Calm down! I’m getting to it.” He shot me a dirty look. “Anyway, that’s when he arrives at his philosophy. These are our children, and if we want them to overcome, we must provide them with the proper tools, the map and compass that are necessary to navigate the American social landscape. We have to learn and teach, to give as good as we get. We have to begin training our children how to get-over, how to take advantage of their only birthright as black folks- ‘fear’.”

“Fear is their, . . .our only birthright?” Francine asked in confusion.

“Yes, ‘fear’.” He smiled at Francine. “Not any deep-seeded fear of our genetics or any of that ‘black man is god’ shit, but everyday fear of our poverty and thuggery. He gets into this whole analysis of the ‘Invisible Man’ theory, and argues that the rise of black on white violence, and the militant struggles of the sixties, have turned that theory upside down and now, rather than ‘invisible’, the black man is ‘hyper-visible’. On the street he is a target for every wary eye, and every zealous cop, and in the boardroom he stands out even more for his rarity and his cosmetic usefulness. He may not have any power concentrated in his community, but as an individual, he represents one huge, unstable ball of potential. Either he can help you meet your quota, sue you for discrimination, or rob your house- either way you can’t ignore any of his potential and are therefor hyper-aware of his presence. Forced to acknowledge him wherever he may occur. So, while you can continue to disregard and marginalize the community, you have to reckon with the individual. We are the proverbial sore-thumb. ‘Hyper-visibility! It’s the next shit. Yo- he breaks on Ellison too.”

“Yeah,” I said remembering some of the things Kenyatta had said over the years. “He never did like Ellison’s essays. Who he loves is Harold Cruse.”

“I noticed that. I have to agree with him about those Ellison essays.” Khalid nodded. “They are way too ‘rational’ for the fifties and sixties- way to distant, meditative and practical. Wright, Baldwin- even the coldly intellectual Duboise, managed to get some anger into their essays.”

“You’re being polite.” Sarah put in. “They’re worse than too rational. Shit, they’re more accommodationalist than Booker T., eighty years later.” We all laughed. “I loose all affection for him when I read his essays about the community. Anyway, hyper-visibility?” She turned to me. “Doesn’t that have something to do with what you were telling me, about ‘executive privilege’, or whatever?”

“Yes,” I answered. “And I believe Khalid is getting there, in his terse, entirely too detailed way.”

“My account was structured to give the maximum amount of information in the shortest amount of time and I accomplished that masterfully, even if my audience could benefit from generous doses of Ridilin.” Khalid put on his professor’s voice. “I just broke-down hundreds of pages of prose, in five minutes without omitting a relevant detail.”

“Without omitting any detail.” I teased. “And including irrelevant details besides. Anyway, so the point the book comes to is that, the community is entirely devoid of power, but the individual is charged with it. And since we’ve gotten no reparations, no concrete effort to narrow the historical deficit, doesn’t it become incumbent upon the individual to extract the advantage? That is to say, isn’t the intimidation we inspire, the fear of our immediate presences, speaking of the black man specifically, the only inherent advantage that we have over everyone else.”

“Of course! That’s not a new argument.” Keith said, growing bored with the conversation.

“Of course not,” Sarah jumped in suddenly. “It’s the Crime and Punishment argument in another context- it is also the Invisible Man argument, only the flip side. Remember at the end of the book, he begins to use his invisibility to get-over, to live parasitically off of the system that marginalizes him? The oppression itself, provides him with the advantage. It’s really the same thing, but depending on how he breaks the argument down, it could be kind of hot. Definitely relevant! Think about it! Think about that theory and then think about someone like Suge Knight- or from another perspective, someone like Al Sharpton. People downgrade them all day and night for being a thug, or a ‘racial opportunist,’ but working their advantages the way they do is a most ‘American’ way of doing things.” Sarah had caught on quickly. “It is interesting!” Sarah said, turning to Khalid. She was apparently considering some possibilities. “What do you think? You think it could possibly be published?”

“No, . . .” Khalid said hesitantly. “Maybe as a succinct paper, but not this book. I mean, you should definitely look at it. I wouldn’t want to be the person that ruined Ken’s chance, but, it’s not like it’s been researched or has any statistical or factual foundations. You know what I mean? It’s full of interesting ideas, elegantly written, but he doesn’t write like a scholar or essayist. He writes like someone who is starting a religion!” Khalid and I giggled. “It’s like some, way too grand, spiritual manifesto on which the future of the world hinges. It reads like Nostradamus, . . . no, no- more like some of that later Tolstoy- you know that mystic shit. I mean, he’s a brilliant cat, but he has definitely lost touch.”

Though his hesitancy and disappointment at not being able to recommend Kenyatta for publication were sincere (And I completely agreed with what he said), I knew that Khalid was thrilled at having legitimately come to this conclusion. I was surprised that he’d read the book when he’d introduced it earlier, because that book sat in his room for more than a year. I left it for him after I had finished reading it. Khalid would not pick it up. The reason, was fear of finding it to be really good. Fear that, perhaps Ken might be the next brilliant cat that everyone would be talking about. Khalid of course, believed himself destined to be that guy. As though there could only be one such person at a time, he lived in a peculiar fear of finding that someone had more ability than he did. With a pettiness that he hated about himself, he avoided any exposure to really good work done by anyone in his age-range. I’m sure it was residual insecurity from all those years of inactivity, when every name on the horizon seemed to add another nail to the coffin of his career. That doesn’t mean that he never read our contemporaries, what there were of them, he only didn’t read them when it was possible that they were any good. That was rare though, that he would give anyone the credit of possibly producing something worth his jealousy.

Ken though, he had known for years, and even somewhat admired for his need for no-one, for his quiet and reflective personality that didn’t need constant validation from a group of admirers. Ken was about the knowledge, not about the attention. He never felt the need to show off everything he knew and was content to let people believe what they wanted about him. This made Khalid feel ashamed of that need to perform, to show off, to never let anyone leave him without remarking. Ken made him feel inauthentic and shallow. Khalid respected that restraint, that modesty that always eluded him. He worried that next to Ken he would be exposed as a shit-talker.

“He’s a serious thinker.” Khalid continued, nodding his head sadly. “It’s really a shame that he wasn’t even able to finish school.”