UConn’s Humanities Institute (UCHI) held a Fellow’s Talk in Homer Babbidge Library on Wednesday, March 12. The talk was titled “The Fire This Time: Ronald L. Fair’s ‘Many Thousand Gone,’ a Forgotten Fable.”
The talk was given by Grégory Pierrot, an associate professor in English at UConn Stamford, where he teaches American and African American literature. Pierrot discussed the book “Many Thousand Gone” by Fair as a counterpoint to Malcolm X and the globalization of Black politics.
Pierrot first described a “ghost history” during the Black Power era, where a disconnect exists between the United States and European countries like France. Texts never got translated into French or were forgotten in America. The translation or re-emergence of fiction during the Black Power movement in both worlds could help fix a knowledge gap French and American people have on this movement.
Next, Pierrot introduced the term “décalage,” a French word that roughly translates to a shift or gap in time. This term alludes to something taken away that was previously added, perhaps artificially. Pierrot suggests that this idea of décalage can help us understand the Black Power movement.
The moment Pierrot wants to use to juxtapose Ronald Fair’s novel is when X visited Paris in 1964, for the first and last time. He gave a speech at la Mutualité, a conference center filled with African American expats and anti-colonial figures from French colonies.
X gave a speech at the center titled “The African American in the face of the African revolution,” highlighting the overlap between both the civil rights movement and that of decolonization in African colonies during the time.
The French press didn’t have a positive view on X. He came to France as a Muslim connected to the civil rights struggle in the U.S. and the anticolonial movement throughout French colonies. He came two years after the end of the Algerian War, a war of independence for the former French colony of Algeria.
The Algerian people used Islam to unite people to the independence cause, rather than for religious reasons. The Algerian War was also a brutal war, Pierrot calls it an “orgy of violence, massacres and terrorist attacks” which led to the rise of fascism inside the French army and the fall of the fourth French Republic.
An article in a French newspaper about X and the religious organization he played a role in, the Nation of Islam, was titled “The Muslim tide rising in Harlem.” The article’s author scorned X, detested the encroachment of U.S. racial politics and drew parallels between the civil rights movement and the Algerian War.
Pierrot drew on the experiences of another civil rights activist, Angela Davis, to talk about how France used to be a haven for African Americans. Yet, after the events in Algeria, they started to experience heightened racism, as did most immigrants into France.
Pierrot next introduced Fair’s novel “Many Thousand Gone.” Published in 1965, Fair introduces a fable set in 1964 Jacobsville, Miss., a place where slavery was never abolished. Pierrot argues that the book talks about lynching, rape and torture in the same neutral tone that it does comedic dialogue. He also argues that although a fable, a form where one suspends their disbelief to understand the magical story at hand, it is little removed from reality. Critics at the time, who positively reviewed Fair’s work, also thought that it lacked a clear moral or consistent narrative in the story. One critic hypothesized the moral of the story to be “As you sow, so shall you reap.”
Pierrot argues that Fair’s story was heavily involved in the civil rights movement, but that message doesn’t appear in fable-form.
Pierrot read a paragraph, where a wrestler turned leader of a revolution in Jacobsville, waited until half the building was burning to “set his emancipators free.” Pierrot argues that this final act of the fable tells us its core message: Riots can be seen as revenge instead of means to a political end. This is in sharp contrast to the race riots that happened in the summer of 1965 over police brutality.
Pierrot shifts his narrative back onto X, and his second trip to Paris, or attempted trip, in 1965. Airport staff detained X on arrival and eventually he returned to the U.S. to prepare a trip to the Caribbean but was unfortunately assassinated before that came to be.
Pierrot introduced some theories on why X wasn’t allowed into France in 1965. Pierrot believes that French authorities thought of him as harmless during his first visit, deeming him irrelevant due to his status as an anglophone. But, by his second visit, X was entrenched within an anti-colonial political network that French Authorities knew about and wanted to neutralize. The authorities feared that X could come into France and could incite even more fervor in the anti-colonial movement and threaten France’s political landscape.
Pierrot returned to Fair’s novel and brought up another theory for what its core message could be. In the story, agents find out about Jacobsville though a book excerpt from Ebony Magazine. This information makes one critic at the time humorize that maybe one shouldn’t buy copies of Ebony. To Pierrot, he argues that a magazine like Ebony can act as a form of communication that helps African Americans relate their civil rights struggle to that of Africans and decolonization.
Ending his talk, Pierrot quoted X, “1965 will be the longest, hardest, bloodiest summer of the black revolution.” In the ensuing summer, riots ensued over police brutality. according to Pierrot, “The time for fire was now.”
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