White Skin, Branks Masks

Brixton Community Arts Centre, 2021.

The final night of “White Skin, Branks Masks,” a week of literary events celebrating the 60th anniversary of the radical Marxist Frantz Fanon’s death.

In lieu of anything quite so redolent of hierarchic, white-power perpetuating cognitive fascism as “a keynote speech possessed of a linear narrative,” Mx. Pippa Hell, the racially fluid 20-something Lecturer in Critical Marxist Street Agitation at Stoke Newington College (part-time, 0.2fte), local squatter’s rights activist and Deputy Editor of that august institution, The Streatham, Vauxhall and Dulwich Anarcho-Syndicalist Revolutionary Subaltern Gazette (not, of course, to be confused with The Streatham, Vauxhall and Dulwich Anarcho-Syndicalist Subaltern Revolutionary Herald), has just brought to a close an untitled, rambling, barely coherent four-hour diatribe against a group she described variously as “whitey,” “wiggers” and “legitimate targets,” in which various practical proposals for the burning of the entire western literary canon – “book by fetid, slavery derived book; page by treacherous, micro-aggressive page” as she put it at one point – seemed to feature with a regularity and an intensity that we might most politely describe as “laden with psychiatric potentiality.”

Up on stage, dressed in a tight-fitting, Black Panther themed cosplay Lycra catsuit, she leans insouciantly against the lectern and awaits her audience’s first question. White powder trails from her right nostril, and, as she swigs from a bottle of absinthe, she glares out at the seven attendees with sullen, contemptuous eyes.

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Teacher: [44-year-old Mr. Brompton. Earnest, bespectacled, well-meaning eco-environmentalist who lives in a tepee on Brockley Common with his wife and her two younger male lovers. He has a crush on Hell, which explains his attendance on this particular evening alongside a select group of half a dozen of his favourite pre-GCSE English Literature students, all of whom have emotional, physical and/or learning difficulties] ‘Pippa [he begins, tremulously, but not without a certain dignity], our, er, class is, ah, currently studying, ehm, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Nig…’

Hell: ‘Collaborationist filth whore!! The man eulogises lascivious, scandalously debauched lifestyles of a kind only possible thanks to the means of production remaining - for now, comrades; for now [she adds, throwing what can only be described as “a conspiratorial leer” at her startled, and, in some cases, terrifed, audience] - in the hands of our vile, oligarchical overlords! Exhume his body and castrate the remains! Rape him! Rape his bones – femur, clavicle, sternum! All of them, one by one! Gouge the marrow from their insides! Eat it! Smear it over your faces!! Lick it!!! ENJOY THE TASTE OF IT!! Violate this beast as he and his fellow class of rentiers have violated you and your forebears since the dawn of capitalism!’

Student A: [15-year-old. Self-harms. Frequently experiences suicidal ideation. Classed as “at risk” by the local education authority. Easily upset.] ‘Erm… Please, Pippa, I was wondering whether you thought Thus Spake Zarathustra was actually about…’

Hell: ‘Only an ill-bred peasant would concern herself with what that syphilitic snake oil salesman’s books were ostensibly “about.” The man is the problem, can’t you understand that, provincial little washerwoman?! The man, don’t you see?! The biological man!! Testes, scrotum, penis - all of them, lurking; all of them, thinking; peeping out at the world from between his nihilstic legs; pondering, conceptualising, philosophising; guiding his hand as he ejaculated infantile little aphorisms out into the world; becoming the genito-urinary literary effluent that we womenfolk are now forced to anthropomorphize, and in anthropomorphising to dignify, via the moniker, “Nietzsche.” “Nietzsche!” [Spits] Testicular peddler of industrial neo-corporatist propaganda. “Nietzsche!” Penile inculcator of false consciousness amongst the masses! “Nietzsche!” Erectile promotor of psychological readjustment to the misery of capitalist alienation through his pseudo-concept of the Overman. No! Dare not speak to me of what this fleshy sac of testosterone’s books were “about,” savant child. Let the streets of Röcken bei Lützen run red with the blood of his descendants, for all I care! Hang them from the streetlights, every man, woman and child of them! Shoot the pets, crush the possessions and poison the ground upon which their petit-bourgeoisie homes once stood! Let the Empyrean fires of the coming socialist revolution cleanse the Earth of these toxic residues from a decaying world!’

Student B: [12-year-old. Currently in care. Chaperoned by her social worker. Suddenly, unexpectedly, she clears her throat…] Ahem. [An expectant hush falls upon her wide-eyed classmates. Mr. Brompton looks over too, surprised, but smiling supportively. Her social worker gently slips her hand into Student B’s, kissing her on the side of her head as she does so. Student B hadn’t previously felt strong enough to speak since the night, almost three years ago now, when her Dad murdered her Mum with a breadknife and then took his own life right in front of her. Drawing breath, she opens her mouth… ] ‘Miss…’

Hell: ‘Do not degrade me with your patriarchal, misogynistic monikers, slut-child.’

[At this point, a distressed Student B is hurried out of the building by her social worker. Some of the other children appear visibly upset].

Teacher: [Clears his throat. Shocked - appalled, actually - but too middle-class to do anything about it. Fiddles nervously with the collar on his knitted, fairtrade Alpaca wool polo neck]. The, ah, question was, I think, ehm, about Madame Bovary perhaps, um, being the first truly modern novel…’

Hell: ‘Flaubert!! Male chauvinist rat that he was [spits], gathering banal everyday trivialities whilst his abused, badly beaten wife sutured the wounds that his petulant, bullying fists had created! This pamphlet of which you speak is nothing but a tawdry paean to the thesis of embourgeoisement, a dizzying cathedral of lies built upon the unpaid labour power of his battered womenfolk. At every turn he sought to conceal the scientific inevitability of historical materialism beneath Emma’s inanities, Emma’s mundanities! Gauleiter! Useful idiot!! Pacifier of the masses!!’

Student C: [Paraplegic 13-year-old, talking slowly through a speech synthesizer]: ‘I… I… I’d be… be interested to… to know… to know… your… your… your thoughts on…’

Hell: ‘Speak up, can’t you, little cripple man? I see the capitalist system which broke your body has now seen fit to piece it back together, no doubt in the hope that you may still be exploitable in some way or another. But we haven’t got all night to stand about waiting for the spoiled effluent of a failed social system to stammer out its pointless questions.’

[Noises emanating from Student C’s speech synthesizer suggest that he may well be sobbing uncontrollably].

Teacher: ‘Erm, Jamie’s, er, question was, ah, about Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Van…’

Hell: ‘Wolfe! Scum sucking, AIDS ridden gigolo! Divisive reactionary peddler of false ideology!! The man eschews the unifying power of class-relations and then shamelessly splinters the revolutionary agent of history along racial lines! Sodomise him! Do it brutally and do it first – first, do you hear me?! [Looks out pleadingly at her bewildered audience.] Before he can manipulate you, all of you, into sodomising the downtrodden colonial proletariat!! Kill him!! String him up!!

Student D: [14-year-old. Mildly autistic. Suffers from borderline personality disorder. Loud noises and violent outbursts have, in the past, led to her being sectioned]: ‘Erm… Houellebecq, Pippa…?’

Hell: [Absinthe bottle now empty, her mouth lace-edged with foam] ‘Capitalist lackey! Imperialist running dog!! Cancerous growth on the arsehole of Trotskyism! [Smashes the bottle against the lectern]. Putrid ejaculate of neoliberal global capitalism!! [Picks up the lectern and hurls it out into the audience]. The man fetishizes nihilism, economic ennui and social stasis in an attempt to shield his readers from the glorious inevitability of the Hegelian dialectic! [Headbutts the projector screen] Hunt him down and let the Socialist Workers Party have their redistributive, bukkake fun with the filthy little money whore!! [Vomits into the orchestra pit below the stage]. Fuck him!! [Now on all fours, punching the stage floor with her fists]. HURT HIM!!’ [Bites at her left-hand, blood now oozing down her wrist and pooling on the floor in front of her.]

Teacher: [44-year-old earnest, middle-of-the-road Guardian reading eco-environmentalist… suddenly aware that he no longer harbours a crush on Mx. Hell, and, were it not for tonight being what his partner and her two male lovers insist on calling “open-relationship night,” would happily have hurried back to his tepee]:  Ahem. Yes, thank you, uhm, thank you, Pippa, but I, er, think we should, ah, perhaps leave it there. This is, er, not quite what we, um, were expecting. And, ah, as you can see, uhm, some of the younger children are, er, a little upset, and I really, uhm, do think that…’

Hell: ‘Impotent, spasticated, servile, eunuch! Emasculated traitor to your class! How DARE you…’

[And so the long South London evening wore on…]

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