SCHADENFREUDE AND CHARLATAN

After I signed my contract, a congratulatory note arrived in my e-mail. "It doesn't look like much of an English department but what great news, Edith."  My reaction was familiar to me.  There was something I couldn't put my finger on about the place. By all accounts, this was a dream job.  But for me, it was an assignment that came with eerie ruminations.  They were unclear and rather unthinkable, yet they were there. Disquieting omens proved to be true. These were fully explained by the two "senior" colleagues:  Masilela Ntongela and Laura Harris. Putting aside the additional specters of Albeit Wachtel and the top dog, another Petrarchan prolapse, President Trombley, the remainder equaled up to what was known as an African and/or African American literature field.

One cornered Harlem plying its Renaissance as a shady sledgehammer and was notable to herself for slaying a Noble prize master, William Faulkner, with an apt intervention stating that while Faulkner did create powerful portraits of black women in the south, he was also known to her to have inhumanely designated one of his characters as a victim of rape.  Using a page from the novel --whose title she had forgotten--to thus accost Faulkner with evidence his fictional characters had been raped by a character of his own making, and to prove his racist agenda, she rattled off mention of a page concordance through her frontal canines with the relish she had been convinced of her forte in raw close readings alone enough to prove her as both an authentic Black woman defending her fictional sisters from their fictional rapists, she festooned the elongating bridge of her nose with cackles of triumphant snorting, and another dead white man was to blame.

The other, Masilela Ntongela, was her nemesis and counterpart. At the startling news that a dead white male author had lived an apogee of master performance and was being for all intents and purposes, maligned by an all BUT-Black radical feminist, heretical enough to condemn a fictional rape as she was taking great advantage of an apt intervention, his vehemence in favor of white authors who he saw as civilizing hordes of tribesmen and their vainglorious free slaves of the South, with proper education in English imperialism through Biblical allegory, he seethed in his bow tie and stoic grimace, pleading with patience for the success of the best, the boldest, those without eccentricities, repugnant and rightfully so.

The economy and the symbiotic equality brewed to perfection between them. As she was ALL but biologically black while he was ONLY biologically black, the two possessed an impeccable symmetry to which she was half owner and contributed a worthy and astonishing simulacrum to his quandary for being with her own quandary for being.  Indeed, the two members of this fantastical field of African and African American letters had been destined to attract in each other what neither could throw off completely-- the teleological end-result of U.S. and South African apartheid-narcissism.  In the incredulous likelihood that each and independently of one another, would so attach themselves to the cultural production and illustrious legacy of two entire continents and through such noxious reaction, nullify one very small but certain flourishing of two masterful intellectual meccas, it only took one look at each of them for me to know, their mercies had been few, and their miserliness profound.