Brion Gysin - The Process

I may tell you, my old Master was more aghast than agoggle to see me. I thought it very decent of him both as a man and as a magician to admit that I was the very last person he had expected to see. Anyone else I have ever come across in that line of business would have said solemnly: “I’ve been waiting for you, son.” Not he: we got down to business at once. Because of Austerity, he no longer had his charming young assistants on hand — they had been drafted — so he took me through into the next degree of Imsak himself; poor old man. I’m afraid I can’t tell you anything useful about that, not at the moment, but I must tell you what happened when we were through. When I asked him if he wanted his money in dollars, he said: “No, dollars are dangerous!” so I handed him over all the gold I was wearing around my neck. Then, the most extraordinary thing happened for, of course, the Master must not ever give the Adept anything but his instruction: it is quite against the rules, but the old man solemnly handed me over the huge emerald you now hold. He hastened to add: “This is not for you. You must give the Seal of the Sahara to a man whose name is not Hassan! When you meet him, you’ll know.”

I got nothing more out of him except that he drew my horoscope for me rapidly with a long bony finger in the sand and, before he wiped it out again, he peered at it a moment and said: “With your new degree of ability, you will become the seventh husband of a princess.” I’d already made my mind up about Mya but he didn’t know that. “The seventh husband,” he said with a sigh, “and the last!” He was most anxious I get out of Cairo immediately with the Emerald because he didn’t want it to fall into the hands of the colonels. Every real ruler of the past has held the Seal of the Sahara at one time or other. Frankly, I cut out of Cairo with the Green Bug — for safekeeping from Customs — shoved right up my ass!

BOAC gave me tea — English nursery tea out of a thermos and wet jam sandwiches — over Aphrodite’s island of Cyprus; let me down for several hot hours in Glyfada near Athens, where I caught Alitalia for Rome. There, I switched planes for Tunis. In Tunis, some anonymous nervous airline lifted me gingerly after a lot of chatter in Arabic about my American passport and dropped me into Algiers. In Algiers, I was expected: the sharklike young cop in a plastic trench-coat had my name on his list. There was an official government car to meet me, sent out to the airport by the Ministry of National Guidance. I was invited, you see, by the twin sister of Amos Africanus; Affrica Fard. She is called Freeky by everyone but her famous husband the Black Doctor, at that time still Minister of Culture: Dr. Francis-X. Fard. He always gave her her full name: “My wife, Africa!” or, “Affrica, my wife!”

You know who I mean; Fard the Father of Fardism, as he’s called throughout the Third World. Fardism is Black Power pressure applied to all those who, up until now, have always liked to think of themselves as ranging only from delicate old ivory to delicious cinnamon brown. It’s hot stuff. Brother-in-law Francis is from Guadaloupe originally and culturally French but he became nationalized in order to take a portfolio in the First Revolutionary Government — what they call, now, the First Wave — right after their National War. Because he was already a world-famous psychiatrist and the internationally Prize-winning author of Paleface and Ebony Mask , Fard was a natural for Minister of Culture and National Guidance, too, except he wasn’t a Muslim and still isn’t, yet. His marriage to Freeky on top of that and the fact that there is, or he always says there is, color prejudice working against him there as much as anywhere else, including Black Africa where they find him too white. “My father sold your father!” It has given him a complex, poor man.

I’ve always steered clear of the psychoanalysts myself, and what I looked into of the good doctor’s works has left me gasping for air. In Islands of Night , his memoirs of a tormented West Indian childhood during which the sun seems not to have shone even once, he has a page-long footnote on transvestites in Trinidad whom, he solemnly assures us, cannot be queer because no so-called Negroes ever are. I wish I could quote it to you verbatim: it’s the most preposterously and absurdly unscientific statement I have ever read in my life. One must presume, therefore, that Francis is a great deal less bright than he looks. As a man, he’s a maniac. At fifty, he’s still out-standingly handsome on the outside but, on the inside, he’s a molten mass of scar tissue stitched together with raw nerve: a matted maze of contradictions, in fact.

“And when is the genuine Egyptian revolution about to take place?” That was the first thing he threw at me. “Are the Fellaheen ready to rise and throw their white Arab oppressors out of Egypt, yet? In all the time you were in Egypt did you ever see a black or even an aubergine-colored Egyptian driving anything but a donkey? Did you ever go into a government office and see any true Egyptian with any job better than sweeper? Cairo has a color bar higher than American Alabama!” I was taken aback. I’ve been going to Egypt since the family first took me there for my asthma when I was a kid and I’ve never looked at it that way, I guess, but I had to admit there was a lot of truth in what he said. “Even in Africa,” Fard insisted, “the real Africans haven’t stood up yet for their names to be called and their numbers to be numbered. There are great peoples, great nations, all over Africa and millions strong, of whom newspaper history has not yet heard even the name, the bare name! But they will! These great peoples, they who have been nothing, they will one day be all! At a cultural conference in Dakar, I met the UN ambassador from Lake Chad who tells me he can read the rock paintings in the Tibesti like a comic strip. Malraux once showed him some enormous facsimiles made at great expense for the Louvre and His Excellency had laughed. You understand, don’t you? What is pre -history for you whites, sure enough, is plain History , now, for us Blacks!”

Francis is an ancient African orator. If you remember that, you’ll know how to use him, I think.

“In the Beginning was the Word, say the white Semites, but the Word was ours ; not yours or theirs. Dates prove it: the words written on the rock walls of the Sahara are admitted to be ten, fifteen, twenty thousand years old. The thickness of the desert patina over them is the measurable proof. Perhaps all that Biblical babble does recount the short shabby story of six thousand years of White man on earth but all the recent discoveries of genetic chemistry spell out the fact that Man with undamaged genes and chromosomes is a Black Man. All you whites and yellows and browns are genetic freaks!”

I wondered how that kind of talk went down with his government because, at the time of my visit, the Fards were still living in an official government residence, a confiscated villa overlooking the harbor with presumably socialized servants doing the housework, leaving Freeky with nothing to do at all all day but entertain me. Supremely comfortable guest rooms, good food and, besides, Freeky and I got along right away like a house on fire: I could see poor Fard’s point of view. You come home from that day at the office to find your wife all flushed and glowing as she confides her life-story to some intimate stranger.

In this case, me, with my new degree of Imsak under my belt. The poor thing needed comforting. Freeky’s tale was a sad sibling story which had hatched in a overly comfortable cocoon of Moroccan-Jewish middle-class life that simply doesn’t exist in the Magreb any more. Behind the imposing façade of the Villa Africanus in Anfah, the elegant Casablanca suburb down by the sea, two girls and their brother were being brought up by traditionally doting parents. Amos and Affrica are identical twins and that was hard enough already on Freeky, who at twenty-four must have looked like Diana the Huntress, good at golf and tennis, a bit of a blue-stocking intellectual and not much interested in the boys. But Mister Right did come along at last and was highly approved by the family. The complex engagement and wedding arrangements were solemnly and joyfully got under way. Launching that kind of a marriage takes months, of course, so the young man was around the Villa Africanus like one of the family for the best part of a year. He was on good terms with everybody; even difficult little sister Ana Lyse, who was only fourteen, precocious and pretty as a young cat. In an old-fashioned family like that, young girls were considered to be still of nursery age until they actually “came out as young ladies,” at debutante balls. Dinner in those houses was still served at Spanish hours like ten or eleven at night so, after a drink or two of an early evening, the young man often dropped up to the nursery to kid a while with young Ana Lyse because all the others were running around about something to do with the wedding.