“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.”

4.5/5 stars, leaning 5. a dense and challenging read, in many ways, but a seminal text on colonization and revolution that could not be more relevant today. the careful and intentional way that fanon uses language (shoutout to the translator!) to articulate his points is incredible to witness.

“Once the colonized have opted for counter violence, police reprisals automatically call for reprisals by the nationalist forces. The outcome, however, is profoundly unequal, for machine-ginning by planes or bombardments by naval vessels outweigh in horror and scope the response from the colonized.“

“Whatever gains the colonized make through armed or political struggle, they are not the result of the colonizer’s good will… but to the fact that he can no longer postpone such concessions.”

“National liberation and the resurrection of the state are the preconditions for the very existence of a culture.”

“Exposed to daily incitement to murder resulting from famine, eviction… children who are nothing but skin and bone… the colonized subject comes to see his fellow man as a relentless enemy.”

This was good, but dense, and I think I only absorbed a fraction of it, and will have to give it another go sometime. I honestly don't know how to begin rating or reviewing this kind of work. I kept finding parallels between what Fanon was saying about the colonized peoples, and the black population of North America, so argument for reparations hit a little deeper (especially after reading Te-Nehesi Coates essays and Ibram Kendi earlier this year).

His psychiatric case studies of the effects of colonization were also fascinating. It really shows the long term psychological effects of oppression.