The Wretched of the Earth

That happens to me sometimes too, but that's only when it's like super dense.

Like I need to figure out a way to read The Wretched of the Earth, but, uh, that one literally put me to sleep, not because it was boring, but because trying to understand it was just so much work-

Mm

... uh, that I just was exhausted.

And so this was during the period of my life where I found books to be incomprehensible, staid and uninteresting because of the books my father wanted me to read.

The Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon, Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Freire.

And so I was just like, this is boring.

And plus my librarian and teachers in middle school wanted me to read books that I wasn't interested in, like Tuck Everlasting.

Yeah, and I think speaking of writing, because you mentioned Frantz Fanon earlier, and I think one of his...

I remember when I read Wretched of the Earth, and it was so emotionally evoking, reading about almost like a psychoanalytic view on how dehumanizing the process of colonization is.

And you've talked about him before and about how his understanding was that this level of subjugation is not only political, economic or military, but also profoundly and inherently psychological.

And I'm aware that he's a French West Indian psychiatrist.

That's one of the things I was hoping for when I encountered Fanon was when I saw the Democrat in him, as I would call it, I thought, okay, I hope he can teach me something about democracy, about how to think about democracy as I understand it, because he's thinking it in a colonial and racist context of France and Algeria.

And that the kind of inspiration for the project, which goes to one of your questions, was that I hoped he could be... help me refine or change or rethink my way of understanding democracy because he didn't because i tend to think of it in the context of the state and capitalism uh whereas he's thinking in the context of racism and colonialism And the sort of long story short of that is that I didn't find very much more there than I did in those passages that I was so fond of in The Wretched of the Earth.

But mostly what I found was a Sartrean, Hegelian Marxist who was resentful of systems of oppression and couldn't think beyond this same old way of thinking, which was first we must destroy the structures of power and then we can finally breathe, right? That kind of thinking was mostly what I found in Fanon's work.

Well, it's interesting because I think there is more there, but I would actually look less to his writings and more to things that aren't in the writings.

And Sartre's playwriting, but it's two different characters that kind of come and go in the texts.

And really it does paragraph to paragraph, it can change.

And certainly this is more so true in both Black Skin and The Wretched of the Earth because those books are so much less tight than those FLN essays or the psychiatric work.

And, you know, of course, we have to do this rigorously.

Of course, they're born in respective nations and hold passports.

And you, you might not like this idea too much, but I'm, I'm, right now I'm reading, uh, The Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon, and he was a, a, a fighter in the Algerian, uh, resistance to France.

Trouble is, he was obviously, from my reading of his book, and I haven't read his other stuff, he's obviously a socialist.

So anybody who, who reads his book is gonna get, uh, a heavy dose of socialism.

Well, that might be a good idea.

All right.

It's The Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon, and his last name is F-A-N-O-N.

And, uh, in the, in the last section of it, he, he describes a lot of the case studies of the psychological disorders that happened amongst the people who were either tortured, who were members of the resistance, uh, that they interviewed after they won their independence from France.

I went on a wild little search this morning.

I found that Franz Farron argued in The Wretched of the Earth that for the colonized and oppressed, violence is not merely a tactic but a form of expression, a radical, cathartic communication that claims agency when colonial structures deny the oppressed any voice or personhood.

It sounds like a legitimate language.

And even civil rights leader Martin Luther King said, while strictly advocating nonviolence, famously noted that a riot is the language of the unheard.

Then he writes on the kind of sociological realities of the Algerian Revolution.

And then he writes The Wretched of the Earth, which people have called a kind of Bible for decolonization.

So some of it, I think, has to do with Fanon himself.

Also, Fanon gets picked up by the Black Panthers very early.

He is reading widely.

But that's really shocking to people.

And I bring that up, again, not to take away from Fanon, but to say that if we want to understand the history of Algerian nationalism, the wretched of the earth is not where we should start.

It's something that allows us to understand how the FLN is positioning itself.

is he really that influential? He was a disciple of Frantz

Fanon, who wrote The Wretched of the Earth.

Talon probably knows that very well.

But he exploded into the educational scene.

She introduced him to the political philosophy of the Black Power movement, to the writings of Malcolm X, Angela Davis, and Eldridge Cleaver.

He became immersed in the movement and read voraciously, encountering people like Frantz Fanon, who wrote Black Skin, White Masks, and Wretched of the Earth, definitive texts on post-colonialism, and the psychology of colonialism's effect on Black folks' sense of self.

Fela later said of Sandra Isidore, Sandra gave me the education I wanted to know.

She was the one who opened my eyes.