Brion Gysin - The Process

The streets we flashed through were shining with rain on the tram tracks along which we skidded as we climbed. Patrols of sodden soldiers huddled here and there under the trees in public gardens; their firearms and the whites of their eyes glinted sharply in our headlights, which the driver blinked only for military jeeps. High above the harbor of Algut, sentinels stood guard at the gates of the Saint Georges ; not for the first time in its history, I judge. The hotel itself was locked up like a fortress. From inside, one man opened the door very cautiously to my knock as another man covered the crack in the door with a gun. They had a message for me at the desk to say that two American gentlemen were waiting for me in the Churchill suite. I replied rather grandly that I wanted my room and my bath and a good hot dinner with a bottle of French wine in front of an open fire before I saw anybody. Sponsors be damned, I thought; I was going to be very grand. Positively, I was not about to go crawling up to them, right off the beastly train, on my hands and knees like a suppliant. They had the Foundation money for me; I meant to look good when I accepted it. They probably thought I was being arrogant but I was nothing but tired; and more than a little bit stoned.

As I lay back in my hot bath, I giggled. It was awesome, the matter of fact way Hamid had taken my magical flight. I laughed aloud at the confusion of terms, for what is magical, Hamid considers normal and, besides, he expects nothing less out of an American— his American, at that! Of course, he is right: I have done a very American thing. I’ve forgotten, now, where I first picked up on the Foundation for Fundamental Findings; with an address in Basel, oddly enough. I am not about to explain Foundations to Hamid. Besides, what could I tell him — that a Foundation gives you money if you know how to beg for it and I do? I have taught: I have published. Hamid is not likely to read my History of Slavery in Canada , which served to get me out of the States on my first Fulbright, years ago. My book could have made me a full professor; with tenure, what is more, in almost any good school in the East, and would have, I think, if I had only been white. As I ponder on this, I play with myself in the suds and stand up, creaming my body all over with soap in front of the full-length mirror they have opposite the bathtub in this luxurious bathroom of the General Alexander suite. When I applied for my Fulbright fellowship, I sent them this very white photograph of myself. When we all passed muster at a cocktail party before sailing, I thought some members of the board were surprised to see me in the old flesh, as we call it. It was not a nude photograph; of course not! I laughed and saluted my white sponsors in the mirror, waving my cock at them all, before I rinsed off and became my black self again.

I have been told that Fulbrights are already a legend in the grim groves of American Academe since so many of us are still drifting around the world instead of returning to teach. What could I possibly teach anybody since I have found out how little I know? Why, my first trip to a hammam with Hamid taught me that Americans do not even know how to take a bath! I remember him saying: “It’s a good thing you’re circumcised, anyway; so I’ll not be ashamed to show you to Muslims, at least.” I try to follow the ritual he showed me as I kneel in the spacious tub of the hotel and rinse my mouth out, using only my right hand, which serves me, also, to eat. My left hand, I use only to swab myself after toilet and I never put it in the common dish, no matter how carefully washed. I step out of the tub to drape myself in a giant-size white towel, posing in front of the mirror as Alexander the Great. I figure all these old generals must be regular narcissists if they need these big mirrors to try on their armor. I wonder what kind of bathroom my sponsors must have in the Churchill suite and I wonder if they are busy bathing each other as Muslims would do; or are they just sitting around dressed, listening to the radio, waiting for me?

Then, I struck a very grand Roman pose in front of the pier glass: I am the Great Benefactor endowing poor scholars. Playing both parts, I throw off my toga to grovel naked at the Great Benefactor’s feet. I am the newly manumitted slave who has worked out his indenture to the Great Library of Alexandria. I slobber ecstatically over the Benefactor’s invisible hands and feet, nearly pissing myself on the floor out of sheer gratitude. At that very moment, I heard the hotel servants moving about in my room, so I jumped up to make sure I had locked the bathroom door. A very nice terry-towel bathrobe was hanging on the back of the door, so I slipped into it. I tied up my towel into a towering turban around my head and strode back to the mirror. I felt much more like the pacha ordering his slaves about than the poor stoned wandering scholar I am, waiting for a handout from a Foundation such as the one to which I have, obviously, just sold myself; as they like to say. In my application, I sold them on the idea that it would be of interest for someone with my background to cross the Sahara, taking advantage of commercial transport as far as the village of Tam in Tuareg country. From there, I will strike out back down the old slave trails of the Sahara, which are still being used by the nomads. I will continue right down to the Slave Coast, as it used to be marked on all the maps printed in Europe; because all of Europe was engaged in the slave trade. I intend to find coastal steamers to take me around the big bulge of the continent, stopping along the way at all the old slave markets as far around the hump of Africa as St. Louis in Senegal, north of Dakar. One thing I neglected to tell the Foundation when I applied is that I have left not one foot back in their world, as they think, but a mere fading footprint. This foot I put forward into the Sahara is already firmly implanted in this African world, where my guide so far has been Hamid. I wonder where Hamid is, now?

One Arab hotel servant was on his knees lighting the fire in my drawing room, while another assisted him. Two slightly grumpy young waiters, who looked as if they had been booted out of bed, wheeled in my meal under the direction of a head waiter, while a wine waiter followed him in, nursing the wine, which he set to warm in front of my fire. A fat Arab chambermaid, looking like an animated sack of potatoes wrapped in an old lace curtain, waddled around aimlessly, looking for my bags to unpack my clothes. “This is the way I came: no baggage!” I barked this out in my best imitation of Hamid’s crude country Arabic. They all looked rather horrified and incredulous, as they speak a quite different Arabic here, but they snapped to attention, all right. You can’t treat me like a tourist, is all I was telling them. I settled down to eat my shrimp-salad cocktail and was revolted to find, under the spicy pink sauce, mostly wet lettuce and nameless white fish. I waved without words for my partridge and my bottle of Chateau Latour 1952. Finding it corked and gone a bit thin, I waved it away and back to the cellars for another bottle. I thought to myself: Man, oh, man, if I could only show this to Hamid, he would know it was all an illusion! After all, he and I were living in a leaky two-room house without inside water in the Medina of Tanja, only last week.

A tall, dead-black Sudanese waiter came in with the coffee, all dressed up like the head eunuch of the late pacha’s harem. I had him bring me back the sommelier with a big snifter of poire and asked them to turn out the lights as they went. I sank back in my chair to look at the firelight through my colorless poire in the belly of the glass. What I saw made my hand tremble, for I was thinking of my journey, of course, and there I was in a bright red movie of fire which was being shown like a miniature TV on the convex side of my glass. I peered into the fire where I saw myself like an ant in a torrent of ants, being whirled along by the wind on a burning leaf like a litter or palanquin all in flames, carried on the shoulders of a streaming throng of naked people, themselves all in flames, who ran me along through a country on fire, in which trees, grass and the very sky were blazing around me. We rushed through a river of fire, down which we paddled to an ocean of flames, where I ran up the red-hot iron ladders of a fire-boat under whose grated decks burned a seething, white-hot caldron of Whites. In the flaming red wind, we sailed like an arrow from one burning port to the next fiery town on which we swept down to stoke up our ship’s boilers with a sizzling stream of white Colonials, who flared up and burned like a gem or the core of an atom exploding. I rubbed my eyes, shivering. It was cold in my chair as the fire died away. A second later, I shot up almost out of my skin, utterly startled by the sudden preternatural racket of wakening birds, all screeching at once in the palm trees outside my window. When I looked out it was morning.