What's not to like? Berlin, my favorite European city, filtered through a gay black intellectual's consciousness during the years before the Wall fell in what must be a deeply autobiographical novel. Darryl Pinckney may be a little hard to follow at times as he alternates between Jed's African American upbringing in Chicago and his expatriate life in what he describes as "the involuntary island" and "the retirement community of the '68 generation" but picking your way through the deeper thickets of his prolifically critical mind often yields some of the sweetest berries.
I particularly enjoyed hearing his father's pithy black maxims, who characterizes philandering like this:
He loved the flashlight more than he did the hearth.
And warns Jed not to flash his money around.
Don’t parade your mule in front of people who don’t have hamburger.
Pinckney employs black vernacular in more obvious ways, too.
Louis Armstrong’s new tailor asked him if he dressed left or right. Armstrong told him to leave room on both sides. “I like for it to swang.”
I may have beat Jed to Potsdamer Platz by a couple of decades, but my vivid childhood memories lack his acute historical perception:
Ahead of us, by itself, out there in front, like the bull of the herd, getting ready to face the Wall, was a blackened building with a short tower. It had been a brewery before the war. It was the last building on Potsdamerplatz. Everything else around it had been bombed, the ranges of brick and dust carted away by the famous rubble women, the women of Berlin who after the war cleaned up wreckage of their own infatuation with uniforms.
Like many gay men, Jed, who eventually finds shelter in a West Berlin commune, is also more clear-eyed than most about unspoken political dynamics.
To bring in soul brothers was a way of beefing up the male presence without antagonizing the considerable feminist faction in the house.
In the hierarchy of oppression, does gay trump black or vice versa? Jed ventures this.
Maybe that was why I really lost it in a house meeting about the bookstore selling Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice, which to them was a classic from the black American revolution of the 1960s but to me had nasty things to say about gay black men wanting to have babies by white men and the rape of white women as Cleaver’s personal retribution for the Vietnam War.
But Jed's open to the perceptions of his Berliner friends, like Manfred, his unreciprocated heterosexual crush, who grew up in a divided society. Jed allows him to destroy a sacred cow even as he offhandedly acknowledges the natural fringe benefits of a communist existence.
East Berlin was so underlit that I could make out the Little Dipper. It suited men like me that the unreal city was surrounded by a society with an inferiority complex. Manfred said that Rosa Luxemburg would have been as nasty as any of them had she gained power. Such people were best in their opposition.
Meanwhile, meditations on a chaotic, middle-class black family life and activism inform Pinckney's infatuation with white culture in an environment where his skin color is more asset than liability, despite his fondness for white wine and cocaine and failure to find love.
Wunderbar!
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