We were organizing the Second International Dada Fair. The first had been held fifty-seven years ago in Berlin. The second, we felt, was overdue. Friedrich had asked Jean Arp’s grandson, Guillaume, to exhibit his Static Hobbyhorse #2, and Marcel Duchamp’s daughter, Lise, had agreed to show her Nude Descending Escalator. All very well and fine. But we were stuck for a main attraction, a drawing card, the pièce de résistance. Then Werther came up with a suggestion that slapped us all with its brilliance: waves beat on the rocks, lights flashed in dark rooms. I remember it clearly. We were drinking imported beer in Klaus’s loft, laying plans for the Fair. Werther slouched against a molded polyethylene reproduction of Tristan Tzara’s Upended Bicycle, a silver paper knife beating a tattoo in his palm. Beside him, on the coffee table, lay a stack of magazines. Suddenly he jerked the knife to his lips, shouted “Dada Redivivus!” and thrust the blade into the slick cellulose heart of them. Then he stepped back. The knife had impaled a magazine in the center of the stack: we began to understand.
Werther extracted his prize and flipped back the page. It was a news magazine. Glossy cover. We gathered round. There, staring back at us, between the drum major’s braided cap and the gold epaulettes, were the dark pinguid features of Dada made flesh: His Excellency Al Haji Field Marshal and President for Life of Uganda: Idi Amin Dada.
“Crazee!” said Friedrich, all but dancing.
“Épatant!” sang Klaus.
My name is Zoë. I grinned. We had our piéce de résistance.
Two days later I flew into Entebbe via Pan African Airways. Big Daddy met me at the airport. I was wearing my thigh-high boots, striped culottes. His head was like a medicine ball. He embraced me, buried his nose in my hair. “I love Americans!” he said. Then he gave me a medal.
At the house in Kampala he stood among his twenty-two children like a sleepy brontosaur among the first tiny quick-blooded mammals. One of the children wore a white tutu and pink ribbons. “This one,” he said, his hand on the child’s head, “a girl.” Then he held out his broad pink palm and panned across the yard where the rest of the brood rolled and leaped, pinched, climbed and burrowed like dark little insects. He grinned and asked me to marry him. I was cagey. “After the Fair,” I said.
“The Fair,” he repeated. His eyes were sliced melons.
“Dada,” I said.
The plane was part of a convoy of three Ugandan 747s. All across Zaire, Cameroon and Mali, across Mauritania and the rocky Atlantic, my ears sang with the keen of infants, the cluck of chickens, the stringy flatulence of goats and pigs. I looked out the window: the wing was streaked with rust. To the right and left, fore and aft, Big Daddy’s bodyguards reclined in their reclining seats, limp as cooked spaghetti. High-heeled boots, shades and wristwatches, guns. Each held a transistor radio to his ear. Big Daddy sat beside me, sweating, caressing my fingers in a hand like a boxing glove. I was wearing two hundred necklaces and a turban. I am twenty-six. My hair is white, shag-cut. He was wearing a jumbo jumpsuit, khaki and camouflage, a stiff chest full of medals. I began to laugh.
“Why you laugh?” he said.
I was thinking of Bergson. I explained to him that the comical consists of something mechanical encrusted on the living. He stared at me, blank, his face misshapen as a decaying jack-o’-lantern.
“Dada,” I said, by way of shorthand explication.
He grinned. Lit a cigarette. “They do me honor,” he said finally, “to name such a movement for me.”
The Fair was already under way when we landed at Kennedy. Big Daddy’s wives, cattle and attendants boarded five rented buses and headed for Harlem, where he had reserved the fourth floor of the Hotel Theresa. His Excellency himself made a forty-five-minute impromptu speech at Gate 19E, touching on solutions to the energy crisis, inflation and overcrowded zoos, after which I hustled him into a cab and made for Klaus’s loft on Elizabeth Street.
We rattled up Park Avenue, dipping and jolting, lights raining past the windows. Big Daddy told me of his athletic and military prowess, nuzzled my ear, pinned a medal to my breast. “Two hundred cattle,” he said. “A thousand acres.” I looked straight ahead. He patted my hand. “Twenty bondmaids, a mountain of emeralds, fresh fish three days a week.”
I turned to look into the shifting deeps of his eyes, the lights filming his face, yellow, green, red, bright, dark. “After the Fair,” I said.
The street outside Klaus’s was thronged, the hallway choked. The haut monde emerged from taxis and limousines in black tie and jacket, Halston, Saint-Laurent, mink. “Fantastic!” I said. Big D. looked baleful. “What your people need in this country is savannah and hippo,” he said. “But your palace very fine.”
I knotted a gold brocade DADA sign around his neck and led him up the stairs to a burst of applause from the spectators. Friedrich met us at the door. He’d arranged everything. Duchamp’s Urinal stood in the corner; DeGroffs soiled diapers decorated the walls; Werther’s own Soir de l’Uganda dominated the second floor. Big Daddy squeezed my hand, beamed like a tame Kong. There were champagne, canapés, espresso, women with bare backs. A man was strapped to a bicycle suspended from the ceiling.
Friedrich pumped Big Daddy’s hand and then showed him to the seat prepared for him as part of the Soir de l’Uganda exhibit. It was magnificent. A thousand and one copper tulips against a backdrop of severed heads and crocodiles. Big D. affixed a medal to Friedrich’s sweatshirt and settled into his seat with a glass of champagne. Then he began his “People Must Love Their Leaders” speech.
A reporter took me by the arm and asked me to explain the controlling concept of the Fair and of our principal exhibit. It was a textbook question. I gave him a textbook answer. “Any object is a work of art if the artist proclaims it one,” I said. “There is static, cerebral art and there is living art, monuments of absurdity—acts of art. And actors.” Then he asked me if it was true that I had agreed to become Bid Daddy’s fifth wife. The question surprised me. I looked over at the Soir de l’Uganda exhibit. Two of the bodyguards were shooting craps against the bank of papier-mâché heads. Big Daddy slouched in his chair, elephantine and black, beleaguered by lords and ladies, photographers, reporters, envious artists. I could hear his voice over the natter of the crowd—a basso profundo that crept into the blood and punched at the kidneys. “I am a pure son of Africa,” he was saying. Overhead the bicycle wheels whirred. I turned back to the reporter, an idea forming in my head—an idea so outré that it shot out to scrape at the black heart of the universe. The ultimate act of art. Dada sacrifice!
He stood there, pen poised over the paper.
“Da,” I said. “Da.”
(1977)