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.
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.
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 terra.
Collection
[
|
...
]