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A review by mateitudor
The Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon
4.0
This is a book everyone, especially white people, should read. I read it in English, which has an addendum about how the translator & editor were going back and forth regarding certain words like 'colonised' → 'colonist', trying to more accurately represent the state pushed onto those people by the white colonizers. Even the word 'colonizer' gives power to people that shouldn't have it.
This version also tries to simplify the "1950s pompous writing style", as the translator writes, to make it easier to understand for younger generations.
Truthfully it's been difficult to read it. Some chapters I read twice because of their immense importance and... relevance, ~60 years later. Other chapters I read with a knot in my stomach, especially those that describe in detail methods of torture the French state was conducting in Algeria, just... awful.
But it was in that chapter I learned in more depth about the psychiatric effects of racism, from his time as a resident psychiatrist at Pontorson, Mont Saint-Michel, dealing with victims of racism but also torture — on both ends, which I found fascinating. Although I have zero empathy for police, it has a few stories about the trauma those pieces of shit also felt from the immense amount of people they tortured, day in, day out. Hope they rot in hell forever. I piss on their graves.
But anyway, here's a good quote:
“The truth is that colonization, in its very essence, already appeared to be a great purveyor of psychiatric hospitals. [...] Because it is a systematized negation of the other, a frenzied determination to deny the other any attribute of humanity, colonialism forces the colonized to constantly ask the question: Who am I in reality?”
I loved the sprinkled parallels to Palestine throughout the book, but also zooming out and pointing out how deeply rooted racism is on the whole planet. We should be ashamed of ourselves.
The one thing I hated with a passion was his speciesism. He talks about slavery but casually writes a story about solidarity — how poor families should lend their only donkey to transport revolutionaries into battle. And if the donkey gets gunned down they should not get mad, they should only ask if the revolutionary survived. Cognitive dissonance at its finest.
This version also tries to simplify the "1950s pompous writing style", as the translator writes, to make it easier to understand for younger generations.
Truthfully it's been difficult to read it. Some chapters I read twice because of their immense importance and... relevance, ~60 years later. Other chapters I read with a knot in my stomach, especially those that describe in detail methods of torture the French state was conducting in Algeria, just... awful.
But it was in that chapter I learned in more depth about the psychiatric effects of racism, from his time as a resident psychiatrist at Pontorson, Mont Saint-Michel, dealing with victims of racism but also torture — on both ends, which I found fascinating. Although I have zero empathy for police, it has a few stories about the trauma those pieces of shit also felt from the immense amount of people they tortured, day in, day out. Hope they rot in hell forever. I piss on their graves.
But anyway, here's a good quote:
“The truth is that colonization, in its very essence, already appeared to be a great purveyor of psychiatric hospitals. [...] Because it is a systematized negation of the other, a frenzied determination to deny the other any attribute of humanity, colonialism forces the colonized to constantly ask the question: Who am I in reality?”
I loved the sprinkled parallels to Palestine throughout the book, but also zooming out and pointing out how deeply rooted racism is on the whole planet. We should be ashamed of ourselves.
The one thing I hated with a passion was his speciesism. He talks about slavery but casually writes a story about solidarity — how poor families should lend their only donkey to transport revolutionaries into battle. And if the donkey gets gunned down they should not get mad, they should only ask if the revolutionary survived. Cognitive dissonance at its finest.