The Rebel's Clinic by Adam Shatz

I had never heard of Frantz Fanon, who died of leukemia at the young age of 36, prior to reading this book. He was born on Martinique in 1925 and while he hated that his island was being governed by white men in Paris, he bought into the French ideology of liberty and equality. Educated and speaking better French than the French themselves, he fought for France against the Nazis and stayed in Paris after the war to make a life, marrying a white French woman. But while studying medicine in Lyon, he grasped that despite France's lip service to colorblind equality, he would inescapably be seen there not as an individual but as a Black man. And he opposed the idea of identifying by race. So he to moved to Algeria to run a clinic in 1953, and found himself joining forces with its National Liberation Front, or FLN, which was fighting to win Algeria's independence from France in a brutal struggle. He wasn't Algerian and couldn't speak Arabic, so he was never a leader or fighter. A brilliant sympathizer, he became a ruthlessly passionate advocate for the cause outside Algeria. This experience would lead Fanon to write his most famous work, "The Wretched Of The Earth," a poetically messianic volume whose publication has been called a historical event. His legacy is remembered to be that of a bloody revolutionary, but he also tried to explain why that is inevitably seen as the only solution to racist oppression. Ever since it first appeared in 1961, Fanon's book has inspired everyone from Latin American guerrillas and African revolutionaries to Palestinian militants and the Black Panthers. It's best known for its opening chapter, which champions the power of violence to liberate the oppressed both politically and psychologically--it is unpalatable, to be sure, but also may be impossible. Cultures do not shift seismically, but his work related to understanding the downtrodden has also been buried with him. I did not realize that the war for independence in Algeria was revving up at the same time that it was in Vietnam, and would love to read something equally cynical to this about the unraveling of colonial France.