(i) Quaqua

It might be necessary to point out that in Double or Nothing the young man does “make it” with a woman after all, though it's far from a show of virility. The encounter is with his best friend's mother: “something motherly about her,” “she was really round all over.” She takes full charge of the situation, “literally lifting him up from the floor.” Importantly this woman is, like the woman of the subway, a Black woman, with the “same enormous ass and same strange exotic smell.” In his high school in Detroit all the young man's friends are Black, including his best friend Ernest—a nod, perhaps, to Freud's friend and biographer Ernest Jones. When Ernest finds out he is at first violently angry, but the two quickly make up. Federman mocks Oedipal configurations by having Ernest observe: “You know something, man, that makes us almost brothers […] no, that's not really it, that makes me almost your son.” When Federman first came to America he was living with his uncle in Detroit, finishing school and working in a factory, hanging out with various jazzmen. His involvement in the Black community is described in Take It or Leave It as a fraternity of shared suffering: “me too sad and lonely slob like them I was hurting inside the guts.” But although they are the same inside, their bodies remain irrevocably different: “I had a little complex (complex of inferiority) next to my black buddies because these guys had enorMOUS pricks” (152). As a “mediocre white-skinned” (154), he cannot ever perform to their level, sexually or musically. Federman's eroticized, “exotic” Black bodies are irrevocably othered; the full implications of which remain outside the scope of this study. I do note that Black and queer bodies share the same fate in Federman's fictional progression—encoded in The Twofold Vibration with June Fanon (Frantz Fanon) and excised thereafter. In the five novels of Federman's early cycle, Black bodies are at once eroticized and appropriated, continuing some of the problematic racial dynamics of Finnegans Wake.

In the “Shem the Penman” chapter of Finnegans Wake, as the persecuted Jew writes in black ink/excrement over every spare inch of his body, he morphs into a “namely coon” of “porterblack lowness.”