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"The collective struggle presupposes a collective responsibility. . . Yes, everyone must be involved in the struggle for the sake of the common salvation. There are no clean hands, no innocent bystanders. We are all in the process of dirtying our hands in the quagmire of our soil and the terrifying void of our minds. Any bystander is a coward or a traitor."

There are some books that are so influential and so firmly lodged in the collective conscience that no one actually reads them anymore, and I think this is one of those. Most of the reviews on this very site will give you the impression that The Wretched of the Earth is a protracted defense of revolutionary violence, even though that’s really only half true at best. Quite a few reviewers quote the preface by Jean-Paul Sartre but none of Fanon's own words, which seems especially fucked-up (if predictable) given that the book ends with a total denunciation of European ideals and a call to "leave this Europe which never stops talking of man yet massacres him at every one of its street corners, at every corner of the world." I like Sartre as much as anyone, but, I mean read the room.

What The Wretched of the Earth actually is is harder to say. It's true that there’s a fair amount of stuff about the need for colonized people to rise up violently and overthrow their oppressors, a lot of talk about being cleansed in the purifying fires of revolution and that sort of thing, but really Fanon treats all that as more of a foregone conclusion than a point that needs arguing. Plenty of African nations—including Fanon’s adoptive home of Algeria—had already reached the revolutionary stage or even won their independence by the time of his writing in , so he hardly needed to convince anyone that war was the answer. (I suspect Sartre may be to blame for the violence-centric reading, since that's what his whole preface is focused on. Those damn existentialists were always kind of bloody-minded.)

Really Fanon himself is more interested in the politics of colonial war—the motives and behaviors of different factions, the speed at which things should get done, the structuring of a post-colonial society, etc.—and the psychological process of shedding the colonial mindset than he is in the gritty, blood-under-your-nails mechanics of combat. He’s not exactly what you'd call a nationalist—he calls for unity among once-colonized people, not exceptionalism—but his number one priority is nevertheless the establishment of fully independent, fully liberated post-colonial nations. Tribes, races, religions, and even history and cultural traditions are only relevant to his vision insofar as they aid or impede the project of nation-building—as is, for that matter, violence itself.

I read somewhere that Fanon didn't do any sort of outlining or planning when he wrote, he just put his thoughts down as they came to him, and that spirit definitely comes through in WotE. The book is divided into five chapters, each of them with a nominal throughline, but the prevailing feel is more free-association than five-point essay. I've seen a few comments on here about the clarity of Fanon's prose, and that confused me at first because personally I found his style kind of a slog. There are moments of really powerful revolutionary rhetoric, but they're accompanied by long passages of dense academese that made me wonder who exactly the audience is supposed to be:

"This reification, which seems all too obvious and characteristic of the people, is in fact but the inert, already invalidated outcome of the many, and not always coherent, adaptations of a more fundamental substance beset with radical changes. Instead of seeking out this substance, the intellectual lets himself be mesmerized by these mummified fragments which, now consolidated, signify, on the contrary, negation, obsolescence, and fabrication."

Not exactly a rousing call to the working class. After some digging around, I think part of the problem was my translator, Richard Philcox. For a long time the only English translation out there was the one by Constance Farrington, but then RP here decided to do one of his own that I guess was supposed to preserve more of the philosophical lingo of the original. ('Cause God knows what readers are clamoring for is more jargon.) I don’t know enough about such things to say whose is "best," but going by chapter titles alone I'd much rather read a book of Farrington’s prose ("Spontaneity: Its Strength and Weakness") than Philcox’s ("Grandeur and Weakness of Spontaneity"). Reader be advised. (I'd also recommend skipping the long foreword by Homi K. Bhabha, who's even more impenetrable a stylist than Philcox.)

All in all it's hard to know what to make of Fanon or his book. I was pretty much onboard with his call to arms through the first four sections (let's face it, the only revolutions we Euro-Americans ever have qualms with are the ones launched by brown-skinned people against white-skinned ones), but then he seems to shoot himself in the proverbial foot with his grim final chapter, all about the lasting psychological trauma of colonial war and its brutalizing effect on oppressed and oppressor alike. I appreciate Fanon's honesty about the horrors inherent in even a just war, but it makes for a strange, almost cautionary coda to a book otherwise dedicated to the idea of violent revolution as a force for positive improvement—and in turn made me question some of his earlier assertions. Certain other reviewers have pointed out Fanon's masculine focus (you won't find any discussion of the role of women in the revolution here), and I think that's a fair critique too. And of course there's a lot of important context about African liberation movements that I, as an ignorant white American, simply don't possess—which leads to the question of whether my ignorant white opinions on a book like this even matter in the first place. Fanon isn't talking to me, so who cares whether I agree with what he's saying?

But some books, especially books like this, are just as important for their legacies as for their contents. In the almost years since WotE was published, it's been a continuous inspiration for revolutionaries, activists, and post-colonial theorists the world over. It's a foundational work, a cornerstone upon which many other ideologies have been built, and in that sense it transcends whatever particularities of history or style we might find to pick at in the text itself. I'm a white American reading this in , but the conditions Fanon describes and reacts against haven't gone away. I live in St. Louis, on the very street that divides the predominately black, predominately poor side of the city from the whiter, more affluent one. I work for a library in a trendy neighborhood, but most of my regular clientele is unhoused and unemployed. I'm in a mixed-race relationship in a border state, with all the dirty looks and disapproval that entails. It's impossible, if your eyes are open, not to notice the disparity in opportunities and incomes, the racially-conditioned responses of police and employers, the politics of every interpersonal exchange and the tension that is always simmering just below the surface in any occupied territory. The specific tactics of the colonizer may have changed a little, but the context we're living in is still thoroughly colonial.

When that's the case you either find some way to fight it or you choose to be a collaborator. But whichever way you decide on, Fanon warns us, you'd better be damn sure you know what you're in for.

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