T.J. Clark in the LRB [h/t: Leonard Benardo]:
Frantz Fanon is a thing of the past. It doesn’t take long, reading the story of his life – the Creole childhood in Martinique, volunteering to fight for the Free French in the Second World War, his career in Lyon as arrogant young psychiatrist, the part he played in the war in Algeria, the encounters with Nkrumah and Lumumba, his death at the age of 36 – to realise that his is a voice coming to us from a vanished world. ‘Annihilated’ might be more accurate. Yet the voice breaks through to the present. Its distance from us – the way its cadence and logic seem to shrug aside the possibility of a future anything like ours – is transfixing. Its arguments are mostly disproved, its certainties irretrievable. The writer is trapped inside a dialectical cage. That’s why we read him.
Fanon’s prose defies translation: even his titles are obscure. Les Damnés de la terre doesn’t mean The Wretched of the Earth. Not really. Not unless you know what ‘la terre’ signifies to the French (too much, alas) and where the whole phrase fits in the history of class struggle:
Debout! les damnés de la terre
Debout! les forçats de la faim
La raison tonne en son cratère,
C’est l’éruption de la fin.
Du passé faisons table rase
Foule esclave, debout! debout!
Le monde va changer de base
Nous ne sommes rien, soyons tout!Arise! Damned of the earth
Arise! Prisoners of hunger
Reason thunders in its crater
It is the eruption of the end.
Let’s make a tabula rasa of the past
Slave crowd, arise! arise!
The world is going to change its basis
We are nothing, let us be everything!
How the British and Americans have struggled with Eugène Pottier’s great hymn.
More here.
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