Frantz Fanon (1925-1961) lived a life of acceptance of his position, resistance to his position, and finally a revolution against his position. And he began life as what he himself would call a “colonized subject.” But he ended his life, or, his life ended, when he was a free man, a revolutionary, who was in the midst of fighting one of the most powerful empires on earth: the French empire.
That is a hell of a distance to travel, and in his one single lifetime he reached y’know great heights, and he wrote beautifully because he wrote consciously. This was an extremely literate, an extremely learned man, who with all of his intellectual gifts contributed everything – everything! – to the revolution in Algeria and against the French empire.
Why is it important for young people to read Fanon? Well, once you read him, you can never unread him. And I think that for very young people – as I was, when I first began reading him, I was 14 or 15, and it was mind blowing, it’s formative – once you read him you can never put him down in your mind because he said so much. He said it so clearly and so forcibly that it developed new grooves in consciousness, new grooves in your brain and you would look at the world differently.
This is a man who, I think, wrote – and I know now because y’know I studied him for several years and I thought about him for several years – when he wrote, he didn’t sit down with an ink pen or kind of typewriter and banged it out and write it off. He literally dictated it, right? His wife would write what he said, and they would give it to someone to type. But he dictated, he’d be walking around just speaking about ideas. And it seems to my that once you know that you read him differently, right, because he delivered it in a form that I call stream of consciousness.
Why is that important? Because all writers, when you learn how to write, you learn what not to write. You learn because you are disciplined think along the way you were taught. But Frantz Fanon wasn’t writing, he was dictating, he was orating, and it comes straight unmediated from consciousness. He wanted to speak a powerful truth that once people read it or heard it they would understand why was revolution necessary.
So he writes in a way that other writers did not write. He comes out in the very beginning of “The Wretched of the Earth” and he says what, he says: “There were two species living in this country: One the colonized, the other the colonizer. And they are separate and distinct species because one is free and the other is unfree, and they live in two different worlds. And he describes the colonizer’s world, then he describes the world of the colonized. And he said in the world where the colonized people live, people don’t stand-up straight, they walk around bent because they are in so much trouble because of overcrowding and hunger and needs, right? And he says that one has clean streets and green grass, the other has pebbles and broken glass and garbage. So he describes in graphic terms, so you can think about it, right, and understand that it order to be human, to be fully human, they have to fight, they have to fight for their freedom, and he makes it abundantly clear. And this is a lesson that young people need to absorb and understand because everything that they have been taught in their public schools, in their primary schools, and in their secondary schools was nothing but lies.
Frantz Fanon is necessary because he writes truth.
With love, not fear – this is Mumia Abu-Jamal
