Charlie Samuya Veric
In a novel combining fiction, biography, and memoir, John Edgar Wideman begins with a letter to Frantz Fanon. Holding a glass of red wine, the narrator sits in the garden of a small house in Brittany, addressing Fanon, who has been dead for almost half a century. The narrator calls it the Fanon project, a task that has been on his mind since he first read The Wretched of the Earth. Fanon, the narrator says, holds a powerful lesson as a witness of history. “Your witness,” the narrator says of the long dead figure, “of the separate domains of settler and native, black and white, your understanding of how the separation exploits the native, appropriates the native’s land, and stultifies the being of both settler and native, taught me how divided from myself and others I’ve become.” Why, the reader might ask, is Wideman’s narrator still using the seemingly quaint language of decolonization in the age of globalization? To such a question the narrator responds: I want to be free. If the narrator is correct, Fanon represents the possibility of radical freedom today. That is to say, the persistence of the Third World ideal in the age of globalization can be understood as the result of persistent unfreedom. Under siege in Fanon’s time and deemed to be so today, freedom, the narrator says, can only be secured “in the institutions of society, in the consciousness of individuals, and the spirit of culture.”