Book Club

Lets nominate some short stories for September. We're doing fiction this month.

Last month's book The Wretched of the Earth was finished by the stars of our club. The discussion posts will follow when the laggards finish the book.

Sorry the posts got quiet, busy month, but next month we'll start over!

Hope you enjoy my shitty AI banner

Some people (lol me) benefit from more structured discussions!

Let's use this post to share questions as top level comments. I'm going to re-post some of the questions I had from this post and also from the lists of more generic book club questions found in this post. Anyone who has read/listened to the chapter should feel welcome to respond to any question. You don't need to be an expert or to "know" the answer. Use this space to work out your own thoughts. This is valuable to your comrades!

Please feel free to post your own, and don't be shy! We are here to learn and discuss. It's okay to not get it all and you can't learn if you don't ask 💖

I finished On Violence, the first chapter but I have a long flight ahead where I will probably finish the book. I'm considering what AP wrote and want to write up some replies this weekend. I also started reading The Black Jacobins and it is another really interesting work that probably deserves its own month. How are you all doing?

I got started on August 1 with a copy of the physical book. I am skipping all the intros and contextual information for now and starting with page 1 with On Violence. There is a lot of obvious power in his words and it is very affecting. I find it hard to read more than 20 pages at a time.

Fanon clearly and passionately describes the colonial dichotomy and in his view the only way to deal with it. He approaches violence in this early phase of the book as endemic to the system, in its visual reminders of borders with barracks or the colonial officer so since the colonized is a product this system there is no alternative for them.

Right off the bat I highlighted one paragraph that I want to revisit as I complete the book and the psychology of the colonized later on. I think this is universal and so obvious when it is described. One only needs to look at American and Israeli descriptions to see this manifesting again as if on a historical loop:

"Challenging the colonial world is not a rational confrontation of viewpoints. It is not a discourse on the universal, but the impassioned claim by the colonized that their world is fundamentally different. The colonial world is a Manichaean world. The colonist is not content with physically limiting the space of the colonized, i.e., with the help of his agents of law and order. As if to illustrate the totalitarian nature of colonial exploitation, the colonist turns the colonized into a kind of quintessence of evil. Colonized society is not merely portrayed as a society without values. The colonist is not content with stating that the colonized world has lost its values or worse never possessed any. The "native" is declared impervious to ethics, representing not only the absence of values but also the negation of values. He is, dare we say it, the enemy of values. In other words, absolute evil. A corrosive element, destroying everything within his reach, a corrupting element, distorting everything which involves aesthetics or morals, an agent of malevolent powers, an unconscious and incurable instrument of blind forces. "

• Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth p. 6

!! Posting does not imply approval or agreement !!

This is a 100 page essay by Hannah Arendt which references Sartre's intro and Fanon.

Frantz Fanon’s Enduring Legacy

The post-colonial thinker’s seminal book, “The Wretched of the Earth,” described political oppression in psychological terms. What are its lessons for our current moment?

By Pankaj Mishra

November 29, 2021

“Killing a European is killing two birds with one stone,” Jean-Paul Sartre wrote in 1961, seven years into France’s brutal suppression of the Algerian independence movement. After all, such a killing eliminates “in one go oppressor and oppressed: leaving one man dead and the other man free.” Sartre, despised in France for his solidarity with Algerian anti-colonialists, wanted to goad people into seeing the “strip-tease of our humanism.” He wrote, “You who are so liberal, so humane, who take the love of culture to the point of affectation, you pretend to forget that you have colonies where massacres are committed in your name.”

Sartre wrote these incendiary words in a preface to “The Wretched of the Earth,” an anti-colonial treatise by the French and West Indian political philosopher and psychiatrist Frantz Fanon. Fanon, who had spent years in Algeria agitating for its liberation, was, at the time of the book’s publication, little known and dying from leukemia. He was thirty-six years old. Sartre’s celebrity brought Fanon’s work widespread attention but also colored its initial Western reception. For the book’s sixtieth anniversary, it has been reissued, by Grove, with a new introduction by Cornel West and a previously published one by Homi K. Bhabha. It now emerges as a strikingly ambivalent account of decolonization.

Hannah Arendt criticized Sartre’s preface at length in her essay “On Violence” (1970), but she mostly ignored Fanon’s text, with its many pages on the degeneration of anti-colonial movements and its case notes about psychiatric patients in Algeria. In 1966, a writer in these pages claimed that Fanon’s “arguments for violence” are “spreading amongst the young Negroes in American slums.” A reporter for the Times worried about their effect on “young radical Negro leaders.” Indeed, Stokely Carmichael described Fanon as a mentor, and the founders of the Black Panther Party regarded “The Wretched of the Earth” as essential reading. Those delighting in, or alarmed by, the spectre of armed Black men on American streets barely noticed the specific context of Fanon’s book—his experience of a ferocious Western resistance to decolonization that by the early nineteen-sixties had consumed hundreds of thousands of lives.

In 1954, when France normalized massacre and torture in its Algerian colony, Fanon was working as a psychiatrist in a hospital in Algiers. Confronted in his day job with both French police torturers and their Algerian victims, he became convinced that psychiatric treatment could not work without the destruction of colonialism—an “absolute evil.” He joined the Algerian rebels, with most of whom he shared neither a language nor a religion, and, while moving from country to country in Africa, wrote a series of works on the necessity, the means, and the scope of a revolt by what W. E. B. Du Bois, in 1915, called the “darker nations.”

Fanon’s basic assumption—that colonialism is a machine of “naked violence,” which “only gives in when confronted with greater violence”—had become uncontroversial across Asia and Africa wherever armed mutinies erupted against Western colonialists. In 1959, in Guinea, the killing of striking dockworkers by Portuguese police had persuaded the poet and activist Amilcar Cabral to abandon diplomatic negotiation and embrace guerrilla warfare. A year later, Nelson Mandela, a disciple of Gandhi, led the African National Congress into armed struggle in response to a massacre of Black South Africans in Sharpeville. “Government violence can do only one thing and that is to breed counterviolence,” Mandela said. Fanon presented counterviolence as a kind of therapy for dehumanized natives: “As you and your fellow men are cut down like dogs,” he wrote, “there is no other solution but to use every means available to reestablish your weight as a human being.”

In Fanon’s view, the Western bourgeoisie was “fundamentally racist” and its “bourgeois ideology” of equality and dignity was merely a cover for capitalist-imperialist rapacity. In this, he anticipated the contemporary critique, frequently derided as “woke,” that holds that the West’s material and ideological foundations lie in white supremacy. European imperialists had, he charged, “behaved like real war criminals in the underdeveloped world” for centuries, using “deportation, massacres, forced labor, and slavery” to accumulate wealth. Among their “most heinous” crimes were the rupturing of the Black man’s identity, the destruction of his culture and community, and the poisoning of his inner life with a sense of inferiority. European thought, Fanon wrote, was marked by “a permanent dialogue with itself, an increasingly obnoxious narcissism.”

At the same time, Fanon urged the colonized to “stop accusing” their white masters, and to do what the latter had so conspicuously failed to do: start a “new history of man” that advanced “universalizing values.” In his view, anti-colonial nationalism was only the first step toward a new radical humanism “for Europe, for ourselves and for humanity.” He had already distanced himself from claims to a racially defined identity and culture. The “great white error” of racial arrogance, he had written, ought not to be replaced by the “great black mirage.” “In no way do I have to dedicate myself to reviving a black civilization unjustly ignored,” he wrote in his first book, “Black Skin, White Masks” (1952). “I will not make myself the man of any past.” He also saw no point in trying to shame people through exposure to the grisly facts of slavery and imperialism. “Am I going to ask today’s white men to answer for the slave traders of the seventeenth century?” he asked. In “The Wretched of the Earth,” he warned the dispossessed against adopting a “psychology dominated by an exaggerated sensibility, sensitivity, and susceptibility.”

As Western imperialists ended their long occupation of Asia and Africa, Fanon became obsessed with the “curse of independence”: the possibility that nationhood in the Global South, though inevitable, could become an “empty shell,” a receptacle for ethnic and tribal antagonisms, ultranationalism, chauvinism, and racism. Certainly, writers of the sixties inspired by “The Wretched of the Earth”—the African novelists Nadine Gordimer, Ayi Kwei Armah, and Ngugi wa Thiong’o, the Caribbean poet Édouard Glissant, the Guyanese critic Walter Rodney—saw in the book not an incitement to kill white people but a chillingly acute diagnosis of the post-colonial condition: how the West would seek to maintain the iniquitous international order that had made it rich and powerful, and how new ruling classes in post-colonial nations would fail to devise a viable system of their own. One measure of Fanon’s clairvoyance—and the glacial pace of progress—is that, in its sixtieth year, “The Wretched of the Earth” remains a vital guide both to the tenacity of white supremacy in the West and to the moral and intellectual failures of the “darker nations.”

Fanon’s suspicions about the Global South’s élites came from his own tormented experience as a Westernized Black man who grew up oblivious of his Blackness. Born into a middle-class family in Martinique in 1925, Fanon had been a proud citizen of the French Republic. He grew up reading Montesquieu and Voltaire, and, like many Black men from French colonies, fought with the Allied forces during the Second World War. Wounded in Alsace, he was awarded the Croix de Guerre.

It was only in postwar France, where he went, in 1946, to study psychiatry, that he discovered he was little more than a “dirty nigger” in the eyes of whites—a “savage” of the kind he had previously assumed lived only in Africa. In “Black Skin, White Masks,” he narrates his experience of a formative trauma common to many anti-colonial leaders and thinkers. In his case, it was a little girl in Lyon exclaiming, “Maman, look, a Negro; I’m scared!” Being “overdetermined from without,” as he described it, shocked him out of any complacent assumptions about equality, liberty, and fraternity. “I wanted quite simply to be a man among men,” Fanon wrote, but the “white gaze, the only valid one,” had “fixed” him, forcing him to become shamefully aware of his Black body, and of debasing white assumptions about his history, defined by “cannibalism, backwardness, fetishism, racial stigmas, slave traders.”

Video From The New Yorker

Janelle Monáe on Growing Up Queer and Black

Although Fanon understood the political and economic realities that reduced Black men to “crushing objecthood,” his psychiatric training made him sensitive to the psychological power of the images imposed by enslavers on the enslaved. Fanon knew that Black men who internalized these images would find it impossible to escape their colonized selves in a world made by and for white men. White men had not merely conquered vast territories, radically reorganizing societies and exploiting populations. They also claimed to represent a humane civilization devoted to personal liberty and equipped with the superior tools of science, reason, and individual enterprise. “The Europeans wanted gold and slaves, like everybody else,” the African narrator of V. S. Naipaul’s novel “A Bend in the River” remarks. “But at the same time they wanted statues put up to themselves as people who had done good things for the slaves.” Naturally, “they got both the slaves and the statues.”

Fanon wrote about how the Black man, cowed by the colonists’ unprecedented mixture of greed, righteousness, and military efficacy, tended to internalize the demoralizing judgment delivered on him by the white gaze. “I start suffering from not being a white man,” Fanon wrote. “So I will try quite simply to make myself white.” But mimicry could be a cure worse than the disease, since it reinforced the existing racial hierarchy, thereby further devastating the Black man’s self-esteem. Inspired by Sartre, who had argued that the anti-Semite’s gaze created the Jew, Fanon concluded that Blackness was another constructed and imposed identity. “The black man is not,” he wrote in the closing pages of “Black Skin, White Masks.” “No more than the white man.”

This argument also underpins the political programs that Fanon proposes in “The Wretched of the Earth,” in which he argues that, because colonialism is “a systematized negation of the other,” it “forces the colonized to constantly ask the question: Who am I in reality?” By the time he wrote the book, however, his focus had shifted. “The misfortune of the colonized African masses, exploited, subjugated, is first of a vital, material order,” he wrote, against which the grievances of educated Black men like him did not appear as urgent. In a withering review, published in 1959, of Richard Wright’s “White Man, Listen” (1957), Fanon wrote that “the drama of consciousness of a westernized Black, torn between his white culture and his negritude,” while painful, does not “kill anyone.”

For much of “The Wretched of the Earth,” Fanon raises an issue that he thought Wright, obsessed with the existential crises of literary intellectuals, had ignored: how “to give back to the peoples of Africa the initiative of their history, and by which means.” Distrustful of the “Westernized” intelligentsia and urban working classes in the nationalist movements fighting for liberation, he saw the African peasantry as the true wretched of the earth, and the main actor in the drama of decolonization. According to Fanon, “In colonial countries only the peasantry is revolutionary,” since “it has nothing to lose and everything to gain” and, unlike bourgeois leaders, brooks “no compromise, no possibility of concession.”

Fanon did not seem to realize that he shared the indignities of racism and his self-appointed tasks with many anti-colonial leaders and thinkers. Gandhi, after all, had once been as loyal to the British Empire as Fanon was to the French, and, while working as a lawyer in South Africa in the late nineteenth century, had likewise been racially humiliated into a lasting distrust of the identity politics of whiteness. So, too, did Gandhi’s vision of political self-determination draw on a need to heal the wounds inflicted by white-supremacist arrogance. His concept of nonviolence fashioned a new way of thinking and feeling, one in which human good would not be defined only by Western males.

Many other Asian and African leaders of decolonization had a similar intellectual and political awakening. Educated in Western-style institutions and inhabiting the white man’s world, these men were often the first in their countries to be directly exposed to crude racial prejudice. Renouncing their white masks, their failed attempts at mimicry, they took it upon themselves to rouse and mobilize their destitute and illiterate compatriots, who had passively suffered the depredations and insults of white colonialists. As members of a tiny privileged élite, they saw it as their duty to devise non-exploitative economic and social systems for their people, and foster a culture in which alienating imitation of the powerful white man gives way to pride and confidence in local traditions.

It was Fanon’s broader experience of the colonial world in the nineteen-fifties that refined his political consciousness. In 1954, a year after moving to Algeria to take up a psychiatric residency, he witnessed the beginning of the Algerian revolution. Within a couple of years, his opposition to the colonial crackdown got him thrown out of the country. He joined the revolutionary movement, the Front de Libération Nationale, and, from a new base, in Tunis, travelled across Africa—Ghana, Ethiopia, Mali, Guinea, Congo—as a representative of the F.L.N. and its provisional government-in-exile.

By this time, Africa and Asia had manifested a range of ideological alternatives to racial capitalism and imperialism: the peasant Communism of Mao Zedong, in China; in Indonesia, Sukarno’s brand of Islam-inflected socialism, Pancasila; Kwame Nkrumah’s Positive Action protests, in Ghana. Meanwhile, the Cold War was drastically curtailing the autonomy of newly liberated nations. To protect their interests, Western powers were replacing costly physical occupations with military and economic bullying. They cast about for collaborators among élites and sometimes overthrew and murdered less tractable leaders. One of the most prominent victims of a Western assassination plot was a friend and an exact contemporary of Fanon: Patrice Lumumba, the first elected Prime Minister of Congo, who was killed in 1961. Political and economic incapacity in many fledgling nation-states also forced their leaders to seek help from their former overlords. A few months after Kenya, Uganda, and Tanganyika gained independence from Britain, their leaders sought the British Army’s help in suppressing mutinies over low pay.

Oddly, “The Wretched of the Earth,” published during this partial transfer of power from white to Black and brown hands, barely mentions Asia or much of Africa, and has nothing at all to say about the Middle East. Fanon appears not to have intimately known any of the societies he travelled through, not even Algeria. Yet, by reflecting scrupulously on his experience as a powerless Black man in exile, he was able to see through the Cold War’s moralizing rhetoric to the insidious new modes of social and political coercion. It was probably during his time in Nkrumah’s Ghana that he developed his view of single-party rule: “the modern form of the bourgeois dictatorship stripped of mask, makeup, and scruples, cynical in every aspect.” The formulation has, in the past six decades, accurately described the political systems in Kenya, Tanzania, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, and many other countries.

Fanon also presciently described the politically explosive gap between urban prosperity and rural poverty, and the toxic consequences of inequitable development, even in countries he never visited. Those bemused by the spectacle of an educated middle class and a globalized business élite devoted to India’s Narendra Modi, a far-right autocrat, can find a broad outline of this situation in “The Wretched of the Earth”:

The national bourgeoisie increasingly turns its back on the interior, on the realities of a country gone to waste, and looks toward the former metropolis and the foreign capitalists who secure its services. Since it has no intention of sharing its profits with the people, it discovers the need for a popular leader whose dual role will be to stabilize the regime and to perpetuate the domination of the bourgeoisie.

The defects and omissions in Fanon’s book are also revealing. His relentlessly male perspective reduced liberation from colonialism to the frustrations and desires of men like him. Proposing that the native’s virility and will to power could counter the violence of the colonialist, he reinforced a hypermasculinist discourse of domination. Not surprisingly, politics remained a vicious affair in Algeria for decades after the French departed.

As an heir to the secular French Enlightenment, and seemingly unaware of non-Francophone cultural traditions, Fanon was blind to the creative possibilities of the past—those deployed, say, by Indigenous peoples in Canada and Australia, in their battles for survival against logging and mining corporations. Conversely, his theory about the revolutionary potential of African peasants now seems all too clearly the romantic fantasy of an uprooted, self-distrusting intellectual. In Africa, the urban working classes turned out to be far more important to decolonization than the peasantry.

Countries in which peasants proved crucial to national liberation, such as China and Vietnam, came no closer to starting a new history of man. Contrary to what Fanon ardently hoped, even the strongest post-colonial nations, such as India and China, are “obsessed with catching up” with their historical tormentors, and have engendered, in this imitative process, their own rhetoric of obnoxious narcissism.

Still, Fanon’s misgivings about decolonization and his insights into the connections between psychic and socioeconomic change have never seemed more prophetic and salutary than in today’s racially charged climate. Nonwhite people’s growing demands for dignity, together with China’s ascendancy, have destabilized a Western self-image constructed during decades when white men alone seemed to make the modern world. This weakening of imperial-era authority has resulted in a proliferation of existential anxieties, marked by a heightened exploitation of culture-war talking points in politics and the media. Thus, attempts to reckon with the long-neglected legacies of slavery and imperialism collide with cults of Churchill and the Confederacy, and critical race theory becomes an electorally potent bogeyman for the right. Meanwhile, as Éric Zemmour, a demagogue of Algerian Jewish ancestry, raises the banner of white supremacy and Islamophobia in France, and Taliban fanatics inherit a devastated Afghanistan from retreating Western powers, decolonization seems far from being triumphantly concluded. Rather, it resembles the bleakly ambiguous and open-ended transition depicted by Fanon. Sixty years after its publication, “The Wretched of the Earth” reads increasingly like a dying Black man’s admission of a genuine impossibility: of moving beyond the world made by white men. ♦

The sartre intro was famously asked by the Fanon estate to be removed, lets read about why when we consider the reading

Books & the Arts / June 3, 2024 In the Zone of Nonbeing Frantz Fanon in his time—and in ours. Ken Chen

Illustration by Joe Ciardiello. This article appears in the June 2024 issue.

During the first weeks of Israel’s bombardment of Gaza, I biked through the streets of New York weeping. Once home, the hours I spent reading about Palestine slowly developed into an obsessive ritual. I took screenshots of each new outrage against humanity. I downloaded every video of this violence, which seemed both distant and immediate in its horror. My somewhat pointless acts of witnessing constituted a desperate attempt to archive an already historic present, to save its texts, jpegs, and avi files in the face of a world that was not concerned with saving Palestinian life.

In my state of mourning, in which I did not quite know how to be a person, I also did something else: I read Frantz Fanon. Perhaps the most infamous postwar anti-colonial intellectual, Fanon had fled his Caribbean homeland of Martinique and the heady cultural ferment of postwar France and joined the Algerian war for independence. As I read his descriptions of a violent revolt by Arab insurgents against the settlers occupying their country, his words struck me with temporal vertigo. Scarcely had I lifted my eyes from his description of settlers reducing the natives to “zoological terms” than I read New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman characterizing Arabs and Iranians as an infestation of wasps, spiders, and insect eggs ready to hatch. As if some mischievous editor had swapped our proper nouns for his, Fanon seemed to be describing our present.

So long as colonialism endures, so too will Fanon’s critique of it, but his perpetual relevance can also be traced to a problem he presents his readers with: that of his charisma. No other political theorist sounds like Fanon, because no one else has written in a register so naturally attuned to both analysis and affect. His language is hyper-dense, muscular, barbed—force unleashed. Each sentence is a performance; each line advances with a tense, Beethoven-like straining, each word compressing an accusation, a worldview, and a social terrain of struggle. Fanon’s first book, Black Skin, White Masks, exposed the politics of cross-racial desire, and his last, The Wretched of the Earth, advanced a structural diagnosis of how settler colonial-power functioned. A writer of both fury and messianism, Fanon was always multiple. He was a revolutionary who wrote about love—simultaneously a theorist capable of sweeping geopolitical abstractions and a clinical psychiatrist who listened silently to the patients in his ward. A patron saint of Third World Jacobins, he also sought to heal the colonialists.

Like The Communist Manifesto, Fanon’s works often imparted something beyond their specific arguments: the announcement that another world was possible. For even as he described the divide between the French settler and the Algerian native as Manichaean, Fanon also speculated that they might one day recognize their shared humanity. Once the colonized people freed themselves, they could create a new society, one that molted off the identities of colonizer and colonized. But until that happened, Fanon directed his gaze back to the West, to those worlds from which empire and its violence emerged. No one, he insisted, is innocent of colonial violence—not even those of us in the metropole who weep over the massacres our own nations helped author.

For this reason, the arrival of Adam Shatz’s new biography, The Rebel’s Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon, could not be more timely. Treating its subject with a healthy dose of veneration and criticism, Shatz’s book is also a remarkable work of intellectual synthesis: a comprehensive, readable introduction to Fanon’s writings that places his incredible life against the political and cultural debates that informed it. Joining a large body of work on Fanon—including David Macey’s definitive Frantz Fanon: A Biography—The Rebel’s Clinic introduces new material as well. For one thing, Shatz conducted extensive interviews with Fanon’s secretary, Marie-Jeanne Manuellan, whom Fanon called his “tape recorder” because of how accurately she would transcribe his thoughts as he performed his sentences in the air. The book also glitters with wonderful details, such as the fact that French policemen jailed Gabriel García Márquez because they thought he looked Algerian, or that Fanon’s wife, Josie, demanded that his publisher remove Jean-Paul Sartre’s preface from The Wretched of the Earth because Sartre’s “pro-Zionist attitudes” after the 1967 Six-Day War “were incompatible with Fanon’s work.”

Like Macey’s book, The Rebel’s Clinic seeks to demystify its larger-than-life subject. If the apocryphal Fanon tore off the straitjackets from his Algerian patients, we’re reminded by Shatz that the real Dr. Frantz prescribed sleeping tranquilizers and electroshock therapy for them. Airlifting Fanon from the purgatory of New Left nostalgia, Shatz instead puts him in conversation with Sartre, Albert Camus, V.S. Naipaul, and countless other literary figures.

But this approach can have its costs. In his effort to demythologize Fanon as a revolutionary, Shatz sometimes obscures the reasons why Macey called him the “apostle of violence.” In his own moment, Fanon’s most important readers were not literary figures like Camus and Naipaul—comparatively conservative writers whom Fanon likely never read—but the insurgents in the training camps of Che Guevara, the African National Congress, and the Palestinian fedayeen, as well as the Black Panthers, whose leader Eldridge Cleaver said Fanon’s words could be quoted by “every brother on a rooftop.” This revolutionary Fanon is also in Shatz’s book, though often quarantined from its more humanist, almost liberal portrayal of Fanon as the creator of a literary oeuvre.

The Rebel’s Clinic also tends to psychologize Fanon’s politics. Shatz relies on Tunisian theorist Albert Memmi’s declaration that what really motivated Fanon was a desire to belong, which means his commitment to the North African insurgency is sometimes reduced to a feeling—a longing to be accepted by what Shatz calls his “elusive object of love,” Algeria. Over and over again, Shatz traces Fanon’s public political commitments to private explanations—a standard tack for a biographer, but the opposite of Fanon’s own practice. For, as a doctor, Fanon widened the aperture of psychiatry and showed how the world also made a person; and as an insurgent, he identified the true agents of history as not its intellectual heroes but its masses.

Born in 1925, Fanon grew up in a middle-class family in Martinique, a French Caribbean colony split between a Black majority, a creole ruling class, and the béké—descendants from white planters. When the Nazis conquered France, Fanon wanted to join the resistance because he still believed in French republican ideals. His brother discouraged him by quoting their teacher: “Fire burns and war kills…. What is happening in Europe is no concern of ours. When whites are shooting each other, it is a blessing for Blacks.”

But Fanon remained undaunted. He fled Martinique in 1944 and joined the Free French Army in Morocco and Algiers, where he fought in the great struggle against fascism while also observing racial segregation in his own barracks. In fact, when the resistance triumphantly marched into France, the Free French Army held back its Black African soldiers so that the official liberation of Paris would appear to be accomplished only by whites.

These events foreshadowed Fanon’s own experiences when he moved to Lyon in 1946. As he drank in the thrilling currents of phenomenology and existentialism, he also experienced racist encounters that vitiated his faith in the French vision of egalitarianism. On the train, a boy spotted Fanon and said to his mother, “Look, maman, a nègre!” The word’s derogatory connotation in French is not unlike that of the N-word. “Look how handsome the nègre is,” the mother replied, as if Fanon were not there. He replied, with his characteristic aggressive charm, “The handsome nègre says, fuck you, madame.”

Fanon recounted this anecdote in Black Skin, White Masks, a wild, feverish deconstruction of the psychology of colonial racism and cross-racial relationships. Challenging the individualist circumference of psychiatry, Fanon insisted that we must look not only toward the self but also at the social conditions that turn all of humanity into peoples separated by race. While a typical psychiatrist might analyze the mind, Fanon also focused on the tormenting of the body, anticipating our own movements against police brutality. Oppressed people “revolt” when it becomes “impossible…to breathe,” he declared, words that originally referred to the Vietnamese resistance against the French but that also prefigured the dying words of Eric Garner and George Floyd.

Yet Black Skin, White Masks also ventured a plot twist. It narrates the grievances of being Black or Arab in French society only to announce that we must then transcend these externally imposed identities. The invention of racial categories, as Fanon later wrote, may have been “the white error,” but attempts to reclaim race constituted a “Black mirage.” Like the caste abolitionist B.R. Ambedkar, Fanon believed that freeing oneself from the colonizer meant annihilating rather than recuperating one’s race: “In the world I am heading for, I am endlessly creating myself…. I am not a slave to the slavery that dehumanized my ancestors.”

Fanon’s trickiness lies in how he seduces the reader with a moral outrage that he immediately deconstructs. Starting from a position of anti-colonial fury, his books ascend to a universalist crescendo. This can function like a trap for any reader who wants a monolithic Fanon, whether revolutionary or humanist, nationalist or internationalist, romantic or realist. Rather than stabilize him, we must allow him to be both—sometimes at once but at other times in progression. We must accept the dialectical Fanon, a thinker larger than the mutually defining opposites he described. To understand him, we cannot split him, as the psychiatrists would say. For in protecting Fanon from one aspect of himself, we ultimately end up trying to protect ourselves.

Far more sympathetic to Fanon the cosmopolitan humanist, The Rebel’s Clinic sometimes raps his fingers when he deviates from this role. When confronted with the more revolutionary, more nationalistic, more violent, and more truculent Fanons, Shatz’s book can emit a note of high-minded frustration or bewildered rebuke.

Seeking to recover Fanon as a protagonist in the Western tradition, Shatz correctly states that Fanon would never have endorsed a “sweeping critique of ‘reason’ as an instrument of Western domination.” But there is something hasty and defensive here, an almost repressive urge to give Fanon a makeover into a more legible European positivist and simplify his relationship with the West. Fanon did see himself as belonging to a French lineage represented by Sartre and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, but he often wrote like a gleeful arsonist, happily applying his flamethrower to the high-minded pretensions of Western civilization. We must see Fanon not just as an heir, but also as a renovator of the Enlightenment, a project that posited the universality of reason but cast colonized people into a subhuman “zone of nonbeing,” even as he acidly observed that his French contemporaries were “concerned about Man but strangely not about the Arabs.”

While Fanon was in conversation with Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, and Simone de Beauvoir, the writer who arguably influenced him most was his fellow Martinican Aimé Césaire, the surrealist and communist poet best remembered for cofounding the Black literary movement négritude and for his critique of Western reason. Shatz describes Césaire as a crypto-nationalist who “drew on sublime or ecstatic modes of expression…at odds with reason,” but in essays like “Discourse on Colonialism” one finds Césaire working out a far more sophisticated politics in line with his communist internationalism. A surrealist critique of Western bourgeois society, the essay also lodged an internationalist attack on European chauvinism and a communist rebuttal of those liberal humanists who advanced nuanced arguments at home to defend European violence abroad. Rather than condemn European rationalism in an act of self-exoticizing primitivism, Césaire identified it as the engine behind the violence in both Indochina and Auschwitz; his position was not unlike that of his contemporaries Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, who also wondered if the Holocaust suggested something pathological about Western thought.

Fanon would later break with Césaire, but it is intriguing to think of how Césaire may have influenced the surrealist philosopher in Fanon—the leftist who critiqued Western militarism and rationalism using surrealism’s lexicon of the grotesque, the oneiric, and the fleshly. Like Césaire, Fanon wanted to touch his readers “irrationally, almost sensually” with the “magic of words,” to pour on them a “bewildering lava of words the color of hectic flesh.” Shatz spends little time on Fanon’s theatrical works, which he says “could have been written by any number of melancholy young literary men in France.” But these possibly terrible plays reveal the young Fanon not as a positivist intellectual but a budding surrealist. Consider the following kooky, even baffling disruptions of reasonableness and good taste: “Stop, choruses of criminal children, drops of clotted blood in the trough of orbits”! “Lébos, star-harped city, weigh on your coherence!” You can immediately spot Césaire’s mashing of viscera and abstraction, his furious shifting from direct address to non-explanation, his lobbing of words as projectiles—all tactics in surrealism’s assault on a respectable bourgeois society that unleashed massacres around the world.

Both Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth start with furious condemnations of colonialism, only to move toward a new horizon of possibility. Fanon may have learned this dialectical arc from Césaire’s poetic epic, Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, which narrates and then transcends the apocalypse of slavery. Apocalypse, too, figures in Fanon’s imagination. The first line of Black Skin, White Masks announces an enigmatic detonation that has not yet occurred: “The explosion will not happen today. It is too soon… or too late.” It may be helpful to remember that the word “apocalypse” does not just mean destruction; it also means the lifting of a veil, a revelation.

Just days into the annihilation of Gaza, the Frankfurt Book Fair rescinded an award to the Palestinian author Adania Shibli. The reviews of her novel Minor Detail describe it as a searing work of social conscience, but rather than write a novel of moral witness, Shibli showed how state power can make one’s regular emotional framework malfunction. The line between violence and normal society trembles, making a coherent self impossible. In one scene, Shibli’s protagonist goes to her apartment complex, where a soldier points a rifle at her—an occurrence she does not find “unusual.”

Later, she drives from one city to another—an act we might consider ordinary. No, free movement for her is abnormal. Since she must pass through military checkpoints, the mere act of driving fills her with dread. When we read Fanon, we learn how those navigating the colonial context are not normal people stuck in a difficult position. Rather, the violence and domination of state power deforms their very selves. Feelings of moral righteousness, guilt, and pleasure become warped, as if the brutality and invidious power divide inherent in colonialism generates a black hole. “I am dead from inside and will not be able to continue,” the photojournalist Motaz Azaiza posted after being airlifted from Gaza. Fanon dedicated his life to treating Arab patients in France and later Algiers, and as he listened to them, he came to see “madness” as a way that “man has of losing his freedom.”

Because he traced mental illness back to external power imbalances, Fanon became skeptical of psychoanalysis’s emphasis on the self. If Freud saw the oedipal struggle as the foundational trauma, Fanon located that rupture more politically: in the moment when someone realizes they are not a person but a racialized or colonized subject. He rejected Freud and, interestingly for a theorist who wrote like a poet, he also stripped the unconscious of its metaphors. While Fanon did write frequently about dreams, he typically used them to symbolize false consciousness in waking life. As for our nocturnal lives, he did not see actual dreams as fantastical sexual riddles to be decoded. When a colonized person dreams of a gun, Fanon wrote, he is not picturing “a penis, but a genuine 1916 Lebel rifle.”

To put this another way, Fanon inverted dream and reality. Life under colonialism is a phantasmagoric nightmare; dreams serve as transcriptions of real life. Shatz finds a “certain crudeness” in Fanon’s dismissal of Freud, but reading Black Skin, White Masks, I thought of Charles Gabriel Seligman, an anthropologist who traveled across British-ruled Asia, Africa, and Australia. As he collected and studied the dreams of colonized people, Seligman too began to doubt the oedipal complex. Those he interviewed dreamed of violent men, but they weren’t mythic patriarchs; they were British soldiers. Fanon’s rejection of Freudianism stemmed from his own materialism: We cannot ignore the conditions of life, the power imbalances that create “the fact of blackness,” as he titled the most influential chapter in Black Skin, White Masks. For Fanon, healing the patient likewise required something concrete: decolonizing the society in which they lived.

In 1952, after leaving Lyon, Fanon began working at the Saint-Alban hospital in southern France, run by the anti-fascist François Tosquelles, who sought to abolish the divide between psychiatrist and patient. No longer captives in their wards, patients farmed the land, participated in committees, and wrote for the hospital newspaper. A year later, Fanon left France altogether and brought these egalitarian practices to a place that would politicize him: Blida-Joinville Psychiatric Hospital, not far from Algiers.

Fanon arrived at just the right moment. In 1954, a militant vanguard had formed the National Liberation Front (FLN) to push the French from Algeria. Fanon began to treat its insurgents in the wards of Blida-Joinville, which became a way station for Algerian fighters. First a sympathetic observer, then an FLN member, Fanon wrote for the group’s newspaper and represented Algeria as its ambassador to Ghana, where Kwame Nkrumah had led the country to independence and convened a burgeoning Pan-African movement. Fanon did not speak Arabic, but he soon became one of the insurgency’s most prominent figureheads, creating a way to represent the Algerian revolution as a Black revolution as well.

Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth abstracted from these experiences to create a manual for would-be revolutionaries against imperialism. The text describes settler-colonial society as a zone of pure violence: The native inhabitants are starved, impoverished, and disciplined by policemen and soldiers—their only contact from across the divide separating the native necropolis from the opulence of settler society. Unlike most theorists, Fanon thinks corporally and narrates spatially. He describes how the native feels the settler’s violence “on the surface of his skin like an open sore which flinches from the caustic agent.” As for the settler, his “feet are never visible, except perhaps in the sea; but there you’re never close enough to see them.” Fanon places himself always at the eye level of the oppressed: What do they see? What do they experience? Violence.

The settler teaches the native “that the only language he understands is that of force,” Fanon writes, so the native reciprocates the settler’s violence by fighting back, finding in that violence his own agency and empowerment. Those who are scandalized by Fanon’s work sometimes act as if he’d simply written the phrase “Let’s all be psychopaths!” ad nauseam on the typewriter from The Shining. But Fanon was describing an already existing war, not advocating individual acts of aggression. Sartre’s famous introduction to The Wretched of the Earth declares that “to shoot down a European is to kill two birds with one stone, to destroy an oppressor and the man he oppresses.” But Fanon’s own words say something else: “At the level of individuals, violence is a cleansing force.” Even this is a mistranslation, Shatz notes. Fanon actually says violence “dis-intoxicates”—it removes one’s stupefied compliance with the colonial order. Shatz adds that Fanon also sought to prevent a settler conspiracy to assassinate the visiting French prime minister, Guy Mollet, and concludes that “there is no evidence of Fanon’s being directly involved in violent operations.” Rather than being a harbinger of Jacobin terror, Fanon dreamed of a liberated world to come, one where the colonizer could share a common humanity with the colonized.

This is true, but there has always been another Fanon. The first words Fanon wrote as a child were “Je suis français” (“I am French”), but when he saw the violence between the Algerians and France, he knew which side he was on: the insurgency’s. In The Rebel’s Clinic, Shatz does give us glimpses of this other Fanon—the one who helped cover up the massacre of 300 villagers at Mechta Kasbah and the murder of his ally Abane Ramdane, all killed not by the French but by Algerian sectarian infighting. Fanon also hid FLN fighters, glorified Algerian women who planted bombs in public spaces, and traveled the desert in a quixotic attempt to open another front in the war. He wanted to avert Mollet’s assassination not out of some pacifist commitment but because the settlers planned to pin the murder on Algerian insurgents.

Fanon may have wished that violence was not a fact of modern life, but he did not hide from it; nor was he untouched by it. As David Macey writes in his biography, a bomb exploded outside of Fanon’s house in Blida and the French police interned his staff and even thrashed one of his colleagues and threw him in a pigsty. One morning, Fanon woke his childhood friend Marcel Manville in a fit of trembling fury and drove him to the village of Cazouna, where a French militia had just executed 19 Arab men; the only survivor was one of his male nurses at Blida-Joinville. In Rome, Fanon himself narrowly avoided an assassination attempt. For Fanon, violence was not just a tool of the colonial state but the motor of its existence. Even in American society, we may go through our lives enrolling in a university, executing a contract, or signing a mortgage, but as the legal theorist Robert Cover notes, such nonviolent activities rely on or implicate the hidden force of police power.

Rather than separate violence and nonviolence, Fanon observed how the colonizer must constantly construct an ideological architecture that maintains its own innocence and amplifies the violence of the colonized. When Western soldiers commit the stray massacre, we are told to see these acts as unfortunate exceptions, instances of an idealized liberal nation being “unfaithful to its history.” But when the anti-colonial army deploys force, such violence merely “confirms its nature” as “an underdeveloped people.” The native soldier is expected to fight back “cleanly, without ‘barbarity’”—to paradoxically wage a nonviolent war.

Here Fanon recalls Walter Benjamin’s argument that because the state controls both violence and the law, it deems violence against it as illicit. Because the settler supposedly brings Western democracy, law, and justice, his own, often far greater violence remains legitimate—as Fanon notes, “The police agent who tortures an Algerian infringes no law”—while even nonviolent challenges to settler sovereignty are automatically framed as violent and criminal; in France, peaceful anti-war protesters were attacked as treasonous supporters of terrorism. This is why, when we read Fanon, we must disinfect his work of the moral panic that surrounds colonized people struggling for their freedom. Rather than dehumanize insurgents as acting out without reason or out of a bloodlust, Fanon says we must remember that those who fight back are humans too, acting against the histories of violence inflicted upon them.

Yet Fanon’s humanism did not extend only to oppressed people; at Blida-Joinville, he treated French policemen as well. One of them suffered a panic attack during treatment when he saw one of his former victims—an Algerian patient who’d also glimpsed his old torturer and then ran to the bathroom, where he tried to kill himself. Like Césaire, Fanon believed that colonialism had a decivilizing effect on the colonizer, too, and hoped for a solidarity that could eventually abolish the chasm separating settler and native. “Many members of the mass of colonialists,” he wrote, might even “reveal themselves to be much, much nearer to the national struggle than certain sons of the nation.”

But here, too, one must be careful: Fanon’s vision of a multiracial movement with Western sympathizers might imply a more universalist vision of struggle, yet it did not imply pacifism or liberalism. Because liberals did not recognize “the right of peoples to self-determination,” Fanon saw them as advocating only “the necessity, on an individual level, for less racist, more open, more liberal types of behavior.” However, colonialism is defined not by “individual relations but the conquest of a national territory and the oppression of a people,” so Fanon believed that liberals ultimately supported a “twofold citizenship” of segregation. But French leftists also saw Algeria as indivisibly part of France—and Fanon warned that if European socialists did not prioritize decolonization, they would, in the words of the French leftist Marcel Péju, “build up a luxury socialism upon the fruits of imperialist robbery.” Confronted by the material conditions inside Algeria itself, Fanon fashioned a heterodox Marxism adapted to settler colonialism. “In the colonies the economic substructure is also a superstructure,” he wrote in The Wretched of the Earth. “The cause is the consequence; you are rich because you are white, you are white because you are rich.” Unlike Marx, Fanon did not believe that the proletariat would be the revolutionary force in the colony. Earning far larger wages in the port city, he noted, the urban working class of “tram conductors, taxi drivers, miners, dockers, interpreters, [and] nurses” relied on the colonial economy and functioned like a bourgeoisie.

For Fanon, the agents of revolutionary change were those Marx often ignored: the peasants who composed most of the population and the lumpenproletariat of the unemployed, criminals, and vagrants. These groups had nothing to lose and everything to gain by rising up against colonial encroachment. Shatz says Fanon overrated the peasants’ revolutionary potential partly because the French confined large segments of Algeria’s rural population in resettlement camps. Yet the French occupied the countryside precisely because any insurgency must win the masses. Rather than assessing Fanon’s accuracy as a prophet, we can instead see him as someone working with the rural communities at hand and essentially inventing his own Maoism.

When The Wretched of the Earth came out in 1961, Fanon lay dying from leukemia in a Bethesda hospital in what he called the “country of lynchers.” He was only 36. The war in Algeria had intensified during the final years of his life. During the Battle of Algiers, Algerian women slipped into the city and planted bombs in the settlers’ quarters. The French army retaliated with aerial bombings, population transfer, imprisonment, and torture. Such excessive violence won the military engagement, but it so delegitimized the settler project that French citizens voted for Algerian independence, which was granted the year after Fanon died.

But when the French antagonist left Algeria, so did the common enemy. The FLN outlawed other political parties, and the country eventually broke into a devastating civil war that killed as many as 200,000 people. Violence can create a political as well as an ethical problem: It hides underlying cleavages and may cause a creep toward authoritarianism. Fanon anticipated these problems in his description of the native as an “oppressed person whose permanent dream is to become the persecutor”—a damning prognosis that could be applied as well to the settlers who historically have often recovered from defeat elsewhere by building a militarized society on a new frontier. Every Frenchman had a cousin in Algeria, as Fanon paraphrased one French politician, and such deep bonds meant the settlers’ cancerous despotism could contaminate the mainland. As settlers allied with French conservatives to conduct what Fanon called the “colonization of the apparatus of the state,” the “scandal” of Algerian liberation deformed the entire “curve of French political life” and caused the Fourth Republic to collapse. Liberals then joined with conservatives to reform the French government under right-wing strongman Charles de Gaulle—a warning of how colonial violence can return home and drive even liberals toward what Fanon described as “violent, totalitarian, in short, fascist” ends.

“Today Fanon’s project for the postcolonial world lies in ruins,” Shatz concludes, but is it accurate to say that he would have found the “geography and architecture of modern power…unrecognizable”? Shatz correctly notes that we’ve left the Cold War age of national liberation—when’s the last time you saw anyone wearing a Che Guevara T-shirt?—but The Rebel’s Clinic often elides one more Fanon, the pessimistic theorist of neocolonial extraction. “Since you want independence,” he saw the retreating colonial powers as saying, “take it and starve.” Once the old masters left, Fanon predicted, the native bourgeoisie would step in and take their place, stuffing “its pockets as rapidly as possible” while the formerly colonized country “sinks all the more deeply into stagnation.” He would have seen the past decade’s global anti-corruption movements as a limit on this parasitical extraction, and he had already diagnosed why these movements failed: They focused on protests, not organization, leadership, and demands—an error that Fanon identified as the peril of spontaneity.

We read about Fanon’s past to understand our present. Often this means foraging for parallels and metaphors, but when he casually mentions stolen Iraqi oil, resources wrenched from Congo, and American interventions in Haiti and Latin America, we can hear the reverberations of empire and neocolonial extraction still sounding today. This is why Fanon’s writings on the Algerian War continue to haunt us, with their echoes of insurgency and massacre, of imperial overreach and subsequent delegitimization, of liberals clamoring toward a common cause with a militaristic right. Fanon may have been a figure of his time, but the disorders he diagnosed are far from over.

During the annihilation of Gaza, I saw the words “Refaat” and “If I Must Die” scrawled on several sidewalks and alleyways in Brooklyn. The line comes from a poem by Refaat Alareer, a professor in Gaza who live-tweeted life during the Israeli bombings with an intimacy that led many to call him by his first name. “We can’t breathe: These are not clouds,” Refaat wrote on October 29, posting pictures of what appears to be white phosphorus. The next day, he wrote, “Alive. Still. We were saving a small loaf of bread for the night. We found it already was colonized by bread mold. It’s ok. The birds can have this one.” On December 7, Refaat was killed in the Israeli bombing of Shujaiya; he had foreseen his own death in a poem that ended: “If I must die / let it bring hope / let it be a tale.”

Refaat’s poem, viewed 33 million times on Twitter, is the most famous poem written in my lifetime. Every time a protest had to cross the Brooklyn Bridge, activists would write his name on the High Street station for the A and C trains. The city would erase it, and after the next protest his name would reappear, an act of lexical resurrection like the one narrated by the poem. I would glimpse his name as I descended into the subway to attend, say, a children’s birthday party, a literary event, or a gala—all acts that felt obscene, since Gaza had turned us into ascetics of catastrophe. But if Fanon howled his rage at the West and Refaat transubstantiated it into a poem, in New York to possess a conscience became a perversity, a furtive act prohibited by society—but one far more common than I could have guessed. A hermit of Instagram, I assumed no one cared, but when I would surface from the subways, when I would bump into friends or stumble upon a street protest, I found that Palestine was all anyone could think about. Palestine had become the subtext of society, our empathy, our complicity, our unconscious, so whatever words you spoke, you said “Palestine.”

It can be terrifying to express your conscience, knowing you will be punished for it. It can also be ennobling—even dis-intoxicating. I was surprised to learn that Fanon didn’t initially sign his name to the Algerian liberation movement, because he feared reprisal. As he witnessed settler violence firsthand, however, he began to speak out and, perhaps like Refaat, came to identify writing as a vital political tool. Through writing, we can “invent souls,” he said, quoting Césaire, and “relentlessly and passionately…teach the masses that everything depends on them.” Believing this might occur through storytelling, Fanon described colonized and oppressed writers as passing through three stages. When such writers first try to beat the colonizers at their own game of aesthetic excellence, they find themselves becoming “individuals without an anchor, without a horizon, colorless, stateless, rootless—a race of angels.” These writers then seek refuge in racial pride, but their own isolation from their people reduces this into a “banal search for exoticism.” But Fanon suggested a third stage as well: to leave behind aesthetics and identity and write for the revolution.

In the West, we know poetry makes nothing happen, but what has made this moment utterly different is that we are now listening directly to Palestinians themselves, not to the states that demonize them or the forces that claim to fight on their behalf. While Western media has dedicated itself to producing perplexing contortions of the passive voice, many Americans have read poet Mosab Abu Toha’s account of being detained, assaulted, and finally released, or watched the videos of Palestinian journalists Bisan Owda, Motaz Azaiza, and Plestia Alaqad. We saw Wael Al-Dahdouh persist in reporting even after Israeli airstrikes killed his wife, his daughter, and later his surviving son, Hamza, who was killed while reporting in southern Gaza. We glimpsed Amr Al Dahoudi faint on camera from exhaustion. We cried as these journalists buried another of their more than 140 colleagues killed in this war, placing their press vest on their coffin.

To achieve decolonization, Fanon wrote, we who live in the center of empire must realize how we’ve “often joined the ranks of our common masters” and then “wake up.” As our states murder the people of Gaza, many protesters in New York, London, and Paris have done exactly that, occupying train stations, highways, and now universities. These actions would have been impossible without the storytellers of Gaza, our own radicalization being their achievement. For many, Palestine has triggered the political awakening that Fanon foresaw, the universality alluded to by South African minister Ronald Lamola, who at The Hague quoted these words by Nelson Mandela: “In extending our hands across the miles to the people of Palestine, we do so in the full knowledge that we are part of a humanity that is at one.” For we who are the colonizers, to see the Palestinians as humans is to become human ourselves, to reject the disgraced identities given to us by our nations. We discover what Etel Adnan once called “the only true love…the love of the Stranger.” In the apocalyptic hour, as Fanon predicted, humankind reveals itself to the world.

Fanon’s writings represented colonialism as spatial immobility: a wall blocking an alleyway, a claustrophobic maze you cannot escape. But Refaat’s elegy for himself also suggested visions of mobility, change, and the prospect of life beyond walls. To dream, to float free in the air: In Refaat’s poem, he tells his readers to sell his possessions and buy a kite, which a Palestinian child may someday see as a symbol of hope. This tentative, delicate image suggests the piece of paper on which one writes a poem. The freedom of the kite evokes the red balloon floating past checkpoints in Elia Suleiman’s film Divine Intervention. And perhaps another subtext lurks in its soaring flight: the banishment and qualified freedom suffered by those in the diaspora, which artist Larissa Sansour suggests in her image of a Palestinian astronaut lost in space.

Now, as I write this, the sky outside is an absurd mix of blue and bubblegum pink—how shameful, how moving, to think we share the same sky as those still breathing in Rafah. Refaat reportedly wrote his poem for his eldest daughter, Shaima, whom he perhaps once imagined as the child looking up at the kite. On April 26, a missile strike killed her, as well as her husband, Mohammed Seyam, and their infant son, Abdul Rahman. Our solidarity alone may not save Palestine, but against the world’s armies, the Palestinians refuse to leave. They insist on existing. The narrator in Ghassan Kanafani’s short story “Letter From Gaza” writes to tell his friend that he’s decided not to enroll in an American university, since he does not want to abandon his home. “I won’t come to you. But you, return to us!” he says. “Come back, to learn from Nadia’s leg, amputated from the top of the thigh, what life is and what existence is worth. Come back, my friend. We are all waiting for you.”

https://politicaleducation.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/CLR_James_The_Black_Jacobins.pdf

Reader: https://libcom.org/article/black-jacobins-reader

Haitian inspiration: On the bicentenary of Haiti’s independence

Along with the Wretched of the Earth, it would be nice to read some wider anti colonial struggles to refer think about while reading about Fanon's analysis of anti colonialism. In this case Haiti

We're preparing to read Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth for August but no time to start reading like the present. I found some generic book club questions from the ALA website which I pasted below. Please post any additional questions you have or objectives ahead of reading so that we can look back after reading and reflect on our presumptions and questions towards the end of the month. You don't need to answer all of these questions word for word, just a guideline of things to post about in the coming weeks.

https://ia601708.us.archive.org/3/items/the-wretched-of-the-earth/The Wretched Of The Earth.pdf

Thanks for joining!

1. If your book is a cultural portrait --of life in another country, or different region of your own country--start with these questions first:

• What does the author celebrate or criticize in the culture? Consider family traditions, economic and political structures, the arts, language, food, religious beliefs.
• Does the author wish to preserve or reform the culture? If reform, what and how? Either way—by instigating change or by maintaining the status quo—what would be gained or what would be at risk?
• How does the culture differ from yours? What was most surprising, intriguing, difficult to understand? After reading the book, have you gained a new perspective—or did the book affirm your prior views?

2. Does the book offer a central idea or premise? What are the problems or issues raised? Are they personal, spiritual, societal, global, political, economic, medical, scentific?

3. Do the issues affect your life? How so—directly, on a daily basis, or more generally? Now or sometime in the future?

4. What evidence does the author give to support the book's ideas? Does he/she use personal observations and assessments? Facts? Statistics? Opinions? Historical documents? Scientific research? Quotations from authorities?

5. Is the evidence convincing? Is it relevant or logical? Does it come from authoritative sources? (Is the author an authority?) Is the evidence speculative...how speculative?

6. Some authors make assertions, only to walk away from them—without offering explanations. It's maddening. Does the author use such unsupported claims?

7. What kind of language does the author use? Is it objective and dispassionate? Or passionate and earnest? Is it polemical, inflammatory, sarcastic? Does the language help or undercut the author's premise?

8. Does the author—or can you—draw implications for the future? Are there long- or short-term consequences to the problems or issues raised in the book? If so, are they positive or negative? Affirming or frightening?

9. Does the author—or can you—offer solutions to the problems or issues raised in the book? Who would implement those solutions? How probable is success?

10. Does the author make a call to action to readers—individually or collectively? Is that call realistic? Idealistic?Achievable? Would readers be able to affect the desired outcome?

11. Are the book's issues controversial? How so? And who is aligned on which sides of the issues? Where do you fall in that line-up?

12. Can you point to specific passages that struck you personally—as interesting, profound, silly or shallow, incomprehensible, illuminating?

13. Did you learn something new reading this book? Did it broaden your perspective about a difficult personal issue? Or a societal issue? About another culture in another country... or about an ethnic / regional culture in your own country?