The Wretched of the Earth

"He considered himself Algerian. He was indeed originally from Martinique, but he spent his life in Algeria, with the exception of the time he was fighting the Nazis in France. He was a doctor and a psychiatrist, and he wrote about what the colonial system inflicts psychologically on the indigenous. He joined the independence movement in Algeria very early on. His book, The Wretched of the Earth , is extraordinarily important because he’s talking about the necessity of violence to assert one’s dignity after being humiliated for so long. He then raises the question of what we do with that violence. Do we consume ourselves with it? And eventually he acknowledges that that is not a viable option. It is perhaps a transition to assert oneself after being silenced for so long, but eventually one has to overcome that violence. This is highly relevant to understanding the colonial system. My father was a very quiet man, but he could burst with anger every now and then. He was very much a man of the 19th century. I’m not making any judgment about it, but I often link my father’s personality with this book by Frantz Fanon because I find the question of humiliation and assertion is important. There’s an ambivalence: on the one hand, you’re being silent. On the other, you’re bursting with anger. I grew up in France, in the suburbs of Caen, in a family of nine children. I was a child of the 80s. I was part of a generation of Black and North African people. We were not considered French—we were not allowed to enter a nightclub. It was segregated. Then we found ourselves in the 90s with happy globalization, and we were not given access to jobs. We were the children of migrants who had experienced colonization and colonial history directly and I wonder how much we have closed that chapter of colonial violence and exploitation and segregation. Yes. He was tortured during the war for independence in the most horrid way possible. He never talked about it until I was 18, when he tried to commit suicide. He failed, went into a coma, woke up in hospital, and only then told me what happened. It is really tragic. It explained all those outbursts of anger and all these moments where he couldn’t find words to express himself. He was a father who tortured himself with those memories."

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