Paul Beatty - Slumberland

Klaudia preferred the outdoor activities and spent her days playing ping-pong and tetherball. Fatima, on the other hand, reveled in the bleakness of the Afro-German experience. She dragged me to countless workshops, lectures, and films where I’d watch and listen to a people construct an identity from historical scratch.

Strangely, the whole affair reminded me of being on a porn set, and I couldn’t shake the idea that porn stars and black Germans are a lot alike. Two neglected and attention-starved communities of people who, despite their public nakedness, remain “invisible” to a society that pretends not to see them.

In a class on the history of Germany’s blacks during World War II, the lecturer flashed a slide of a sandy-haired black boy in pleated shorts and mohair vest complete with swastika button standing next to his mother and saluting Hitler’s passing motor-cade with a prim nationalist pride. Another Afro-Junge, some-one’s precocious black child, stood in front of the projection mimicking the salute to crying laughter. I came to the sober realization that the disquietude of forced sterility is the common underlying subtext to porn and Afro-Germanness. In porn menstruation is nonexistent and semen isn’t lifeblood, it’s slander. A gooey expression of political and interpersonal barrenness, and in comparison the history of the Afro-German is literally one of forced sterilization. A systematic sterilization not only of people but of memory. No wonder Fatima was so sad. No wonder they were people in desperate need of a good party.

I’m proud to take credit for introducing the concept of the after party to Afro-Germany. After party —I love that expression. The party after the party. It’s one of those ignoble black-American idioms that, along with frontin’ and turned out, * I wouldn’t sell to Cutter Pinchbeck and the boys at Kensington-Merriwether for a million dollars. The words wouldn’t do standard English any good anyways. They’re nonstandard words for nonstandard people.* And no one’s more nonstandard than a tall, abyss-black German named Nordica still workshopping her existence at one o’clock in the morning.

“Can you turn down the music?” she said. “I need to ask you something.”

I eased down the volume of Charles Stone’s “Berlin Skyline #45” to a level that allowed the party people to continue tapping their feet and ruminate in the flickering fireplace light about German blackness.

“What is happening?” Nordica asked, sounding just like a Hollywood runaway on her first Ecstasy trip.

I didn’t answer her. I was too caught up in her afro. A billowy natural so huge it had its own atmosphere, gravitational pull, and a 37.89 percent chance of supporting intelligent life.

“I need to know what is happening to me. Why do I feel so unsecure? Afraid, and yet not frightened.”

The room rumbled with agreement. Overcome with German inquisitiveness and black paranoia, these sons and daughters of Hegel and Queen Nefertiti wanted an answer. I wanted to tell them that the Schwa’s music leans heavily on semitone, that tiny musical interval that’s a half step between harmony and noise, for a reason. He wants to show us that the best parts of life are temporal semitone, those nanoseconds between ecstasy and panic that if we could we’d string together in sensate harmony. If only we could be Wile E. Coyote walking on air for those precious few moments before the bittersweet realization he’s walking on air. Before falling to earth with a pitiful wave of the hand and a puff of smoke.

I didn’t say any of that because I didn’t know the German word for semitone or if my audience knew who Bugs Bunny was. I simply said, “What is happening is that you’ve been turnt out, baby.”

The Schwa turns us all out sooner or later.

Straight Ahead

My next gig of note took place at the Free University. It was there that I finally answered the cult artist’s eternal bugaboo, Who’s your audience? I can’t count how many times a reporter, a fan, or me myself has asked that very question. Who’s your audience? Who listens to that wild, screaming, arrhythmic, keening, vinyl-scratching capriccio anyways?

I set up my turntables in a Department of Ancient American Studies classroom. Behind me, on the chalkboard, was Professor Fukusaku’s breakdown of what he termed “The Global Battle Royale,” a chicken-scratch list of countries and sovereign states that America had invaded in the past two hundred years. Korea, Turkey, Haiti, Honduras, Egypt, the list almost exhaustive but, as recent news reports had shown, was missing one key territory. I grabbed a piece of chalk and in the tiny space between Samoa and El Salvador I squeezed in “Los Angeles.” Now with the list complete, can’t we all get along?

Clapping the chalk dust off my hands, I turned to face my audience. A pretty, vaguely Mediterranean-looking woman sat patiently in the front row, her hands folded neatly in her lap. It was well past the start time and obvious that no one else but her was going to show up. I scratched my head, wondering whether or not to go on.

“Fuck it,” I told myself, “I’ll play.”

I don’t know how long I played for, but I was inspired. I dedicated every note to that woman in the front row.

I can’t count how many times a lazy writer for a northwestern music zine, a nosy fan boy, or a stodgy music teacher has asked me, “So DJ Darky, who is your audience?”

Well, I finally had an answer to that ol’ bugaboo. Who’s my audience? The chick in the blue dress, her hands folded neatly in her lap, that’s my audience!

My melodies stomped through the room overturning every unoccupied chair, ripping in half every unsold ticket. Throughout the torrential sheets of sound I rained down upon her, she never moved. Never lifted her head, smiled, or tapped her feet. But she didn’t leave either. I couldn’t have spun any better. Exhausted, my eyes burning with sweat, my ears ringing, my mind turned inside out, I flung the last Super Ball — dense, illbientbluegrass-deep-house mash-up of the evening against the back wall. Spiraling in and out of madness, the beat bounced off the walls, it screamed and writhed, a naked patient in the state hospital for the insane fighting against the bed restraints. Eventually it died in a corner with its mouth open, bequeathing nothing to the world save a ghostly silence that, in the absence of improvisational clamor, was hauntingly piercing. The woman in the powder-blue dress never applauded. She stood up, looked at me meekly, and asked, “Are you finished?” I nodded yes, and she exited into the hall only to return moments later bearing a mop and bucket of sudsy water. What if you had a concert and nobody came?

NO ONE BELIEVED she’d do it. Fatima. Her charred skeleton sitting in the lotus position in the middle of Bernauerstrasse, creaking in the wind.

When I got there I could literally see through her, but the bile that rose in my throat forced me to stop looking. Every now and then, from behind my back, I’d hear a sharp crack that sounded like a potato chip being snapped in two and I’d know that a piece of burnt flesh or a tuft of crinkled hair had peeled off her body and was tumbling in the street, being chased down by Klaudia.

I suppose ultimately that was what Fatima wanted, to be skinless and hairless. Featureless really.

Since reunification Fatima had lost a lot of weight, becoming, as Klaudia so accurately described it, “heavily anorexic.” Her kilo-shedding despondency grew deeper with each passing day. What had been the healthy fear of white people shared by most of the country’s colored inhabitants had recently morphed into full-blown leukophobia, or fear of all things white. It was debilitating at first. She stopped answering any mail that arrived in white envelopes. Refused to drink milk or eat mashed potatoes. Polar bears, snowstorms, and Danes had to be avoided at all costs because they were bad omens. And, in blessed irony, toilet paper scared her shitless.