I'm a Fan: A Novel

by Sheena Patel

I thought time stretched out forever, I thought I had the rest of my life to make this decision but I realise I am on a clock and it runs differently for me. I am female. There was never much time and I’ve wasted so much already.

Are the cravings for a fanbase an expression of how politically powerless we really feel? Or is it something else entirely? Though we insist we are Socialist and Marxist in our ideals, is social media and our pursuit for fame within this structure not the purest expression of individualistic, Thatcherite neo-colonial politics where we transform into scripted individual brands, launching ourselves like start-up companies while masquerading as being ‘in service’ to our ‘communities’ by ‘taking up space’ as if by being true to ourselves, we’re doing everyone else a massive favour?

I am mediocre. I have the will and desire but ultimately zero talent. I have to reconcile myself to being ordinary. I am like everybody else.

I am performing all the time, performing being myself, what is myself, who is me.

This is whiteness. It is everywhere, pervasive, its assumption that it needs to be there to sanitise, to give order by creating a hierarchy. Whiteness on its own is empty, it is forceful in its insistence of its peculiar quality of absence. It refuses to be described in and of itself and instead it needs some other thing to define itself against. In whiteness’ view everything else is full of itself, so full and busy with living that those things cannot have the panoramic view which only whiteness can offer. Whiteness is nihilistic, it is the distilled form of the death drive and because it has a cold separation to life, it believes it alone is able to categorise, is the one to get rid of the excess, the one to do the accounts, to formulate the systems that regulate the chaos, to decide who lives or dies—it alone can shoulder this responsibility it made up for itself, so anxiously adrift it is without a purpose. Time must remain static so whiteness’ power can be maintained by any means. The object, the story, the person or the plant cannot follow its own orbit or rhythmic evolution because whiteness forces it into subjugation. Whiteness and white people make themselves pervasive yet think of themselves as separate. It is parental and condescending in tone—it invented the concept of race conferring upon itself—a freak genetic accident—the values of intelligence, advancement, beauty, whereby the lower the level of melanin in the body, the higher your place in the hierarchy, t...

The people he is kindest to are the ones who do not know him.

Fans take their heroes and make them a part of their identity and so it becomes unbearable to ever really take in rumours of bad behaviour. We want them to remain perfect in order that we can telegraph or offload certain archetypes on to them: the truth teller, the champion, the maverick, the trickster. If we turn people into symbols and then create a fandom around them, we don’t have to take on those responsibilities ourselves. They become our spokesperson nominated to do this for us so we can carry on living our lives unperturbed.