TARZAN CAN NOT RETURN
TO AFRICA / BUT I CAN
— PANAFEST 1994 —
-A-
WHY DID I SAY THAT?
"Tarzan, I have come to kill you."
He laughs at my statement.
"Why do you laugh? I am serious. My arrival means your demise. Your death."
He chuckles, "Old boy..."
I stiffen.
"Oh don't take yourself so seriously."
Pause. My eyes flare Ghanaian red as if cosmetically colored with the extract of a traditional root.
Sensing my anger, Tarzan waves a manicured hand. Did you notice how Tarzan's hands are never dirty? "OK. 'Sir!' Shall I call you sir? I don't mean anything honorable by it. You know my contempt. I know my contempt. But I shall lie to you and call you 'sir' if that makes you feel better."
I face him down. "Your last words?"
He beats his chest.
A lion roars. The elephants arrive. A blonde scurries in and adjusts his make up.
"Do you think my right or my left side is better?"
We pause as Tarzan poses, standing still until the director shouts "cut."
Striding purposefully off the set, Tarzan takes me by the arm, "Come, let me show you something."
We walk for a few days along the coast past twenty-eight castles. I keep him in front of me.
"Well? You know, we couldn't have done all of this alone."
I am not going to debate my history with him. "Are you ready to die?"
"Oh, that again."
"Tarzan, I've come to kill you."
"You can't kill me."
"Watch me."
"You can't kill me because I am you and you are me. You are Tarzan, don't you get it? Of course you don't. You think you're free. You think you're African."
Pause.
I advance. Which weapon should I use. Maybe my bare hands. Yes.
"I'm the only Africa you grew up knowing. Novels. Comic Books. Movies. Television. You can't kill how you grew up. Remember swinging on a rope and yelling like me?"
He yells and beats his chest.
"Remember the dumb spear chuckers? That was your Uncle Robert. I gave you two choices: you could be me or you could be them. You could be oog-la-boog-la or you could be Aaahh-Owwww-Ooooh-Ooooh!"
Tarzan chuckles quietly.
"Let's have a drink. Brandy would be nice, don't you think?"
Pause.
"How long did it take you to realize that you had no choices?"
Pause.
I don't know why I couldn't answer him. Why I didn't just kill him right then.
"You know I've learned all of your languages and you've forgotten all of your languages. Dreadful, isn't it? All you have is my tongue."
Tarzan takes his tongue out of his mouth and sits it on the table.
"Go on, pick it up old man. Come, come now. Really it won't bite you. Teeth bite. Tongues don't. Oh, you know sticks and stones, and all that rot. Oh don't be a twit, go on try it. Give it a go."
He nods at me. The tongue is wagging on the table.
"Pick me up. Pick me up. Pick me up."
Tarzan smiles. Nods to me again. Looks away.
I raise my knife. Tarzan turns calmly, looks at me, smiles, raises his brandy sniffer.
"Cheers, old chap. And good luck. God knows, you will bloody well need it."
Tarzan fades to dust. The brandy glass is empty. I am standing with the stupid knife in my hand and you enter the room.
I hear my voice but not my tongue. I look on the table. Tarzan's tongue is gone. I turn to face you and break the silence of our communication with two words.
"Me, Tarzan."
***
"...no white American ever thinks that any other race is wholly civilized until he wears the white man's clothes, eats the white man's food, speaks the white man's language, and professes the white man's religion." said Booker T. Washington in his classic book, Up From Slavery. To which, it is both highly accurate and unfortunately necessary to add, "no Negro either." No Negro ever thinks he is wholly civilized until...
In this regard, those of us who think of ourselves as human beings "just like Whites", who think of ourselves as capable of achieving civilization, have not arrived until we have ceased being ourselves.
Except we never ever fully succeed at either arriving in civilization or leaving our selves. We are forever late, forever leaving. Never making a clean getaway and never able to recline in rest knowing that we have achieved the finished line.
For the Negro there is no finish precisely because the Negro wishes to be other than what the Negro is. And no one can be that. No one can be other than what they are. No matter how much they master impersonation, they are still an imitation. Sometimes technically dazzling, even self-delusionally so. Sometimes able to fool all who witness them. But deep inside, no matter. Because at some point, the lights go down, the audience leaves, the stage is emptied of actors, and one is left to face the truth. We are what we are, regardless of what we want to be or what we pretend to be.
Besides, there are no Black Tarzans. By definition Tarzan (the epitome of the "all knowing" and mythically powerful colonizer) is not a Negro. Not Black. Not African. And no mastery of language, no matter how elegant, will ever transorm us into what we are not.
-B-
GOING TO MEET THE MAN
I am invited to participate in PANAFEST 1994 in Ghana. The official invite comes from John Darkey, the director. I had met Mr. Darkey at an October 1993 Cultural Groundings conference in New York city which was organized through the initiative of Marta Vega, Executive Director of the Caribbean Cultural Center. Marta Vega called me and asked me to stand in for her at PANAFEST. She felt that I could represent our efforts because I was one of the founding members of the Global Network for Cultural Equity and a contributor to Voices From The Battlefront, a book of essays on multiculturalism and the fight for cultural equity. Even though there is less than a month to prepare, I had been hoping to go. At that point I began seriously reorganizing my schedule and started the process of getting immunizations. The only catch was that other than the form invitation in the mail, I had received no direct contact. Would I be accepted as a delegate in place of Ms. Vega? Which of the two chartered flights? What specific time schedule? Would I present a paper?
I want to go but it's difficult to get information. Communication is almost non-existant. More often than not we can't even get a fax through. There is a constant busy signal on the phone lines, even two a.m. in the morning.
Calls to the Ghana Embassy in New York invariably result in a ten minute roundabout through a voice mail system with a prerecorded message that tells you how much the visa costs but neglects to supply an address. Finally, and after numerous and expensive efforts, in the "soon come" way endemic to underdevelopment, direct contact is made. I receive a comforting call from Julialynne Walker. Ms. Walker, a sister from the States, is the director for the Ghana division of the School For International Learning and volunteer coordinator for PANAFEST.
Julialynne Walker tells me the time and date of my presentation, and confirms that all of the necessary information has been received. Her assurances and information fuel my fire -- obviously this was meant to be.
The first step of a long journey is made.
Later, three days after I arrive in Ghana, I find out that from the logistics and administrative standpoint, Ms. Walker is the key person. Working with a staff of Ghanaians, Ms. Walker is the funnel through which most of the day to day colloquium related problems are triaged. In fact, we first meet by what initially seems accident. I'm sitting in the temporary secretariat office in Cape Coast waiting to find out where our housing assignment is and she strides through on a reconnaissance mission. "I was just passing through to see if anyone needed any help and spotted you." As the week wears on, I realize that she was not "just passing through", she was making sure that as much as possible every detail was nailed down and that whatever had come loose was at least noted.
Julialynne Walker has been in Ghana for awhile and is easily the most skilled administrator that we encounter during PANAFEST. Not the least of her skills includes dealing with African (continental and diaspora) male egos which are threatened by her self-assured, efficient and effective leadership. Over and over again, situation after situation makes clear that quiet-fire Julialynne Walker is the engine moving the train down the track.
That a woman is at the center of the inner workings is no surprise, because in most of the African world, on the continent and abroad, in a cross-gender but not inaccurate sense, a central truth reigns: the woman is also "the man."