The Apostate Revolutionary
(this short creative essay is based on the book _Whither Fanon_ by David Marriott)
Frantz Omar Fanon. Tabula rasa. Fanonism. Time (is). Fanonology. Telology without telos. Fanon studies. History outside eschatology. Fanonian. How he the breaker of chains when the chain is tattooed on our souls? What does it mean to be an ex-slave? What is a postcolony and who done built one? In your dreams. Well, Joy James said we gotta make room for nightmares too. “Fanon himself first discusses racist culture as giving rise to an affective prelogic in which blacks appear as monstrous and terrifying, and intraracial dreams and desire reveal or manifest a sociogeny of lies and
fabulation: in the colony, where the real is the imaginary (arbitrary and cruel) and the imaginary is real (bewitching and terrifying), what appears is neither simply random or irrational, nor necessarily conscious or perceived– for the fetish or phantasm of power depends, at least in part, on a truth that is neither oppositional nor contradictory but (simultaneously) always both empty and full.” In other words, you’d better understand white folks fantasies today, because tomorrow they’ll be legislation (aye Jared can you please get some more talks up on youtube).
Alienation. Melancholia. Lack. Demand and desire. Neurosis. Perversion. Ego. I grab hold of sabil’s lullaby and ask the so-called scientists and thinkers, can we read the demand and refrain from reading desire? Ticktocker. What an untimely conversation; perhaps appropriate for such a monstrously unsightly matrix of concept.
Tell me readers of Fanon, what’s really so bad about nihilism? Are we really gone sit here and act like resistance makes us human? Resistance to what? Nonblacks been resisting the dance of social death for the longest, and ain’t no dialectic birthing some sort of dasein. Let me hold hatred as my most intimate possession. Fanon understood that we are always already split subjects; a focus on sanity and the pursuit of some sort of authentic coherence is doomed to fail (see: negritude). I don’t know about you, but I take the question of nigga authenticty quite seriously. If you try to reign blackness into the grips of narrative, whether tragic, or romantic, or dramatic, or dialectical, or existential, or whatever other designation those folks over in literature come up with, you’re in for a rude awakening. Or perhaps not, because to set the scene of blackness is to distort temporality itself. And you might end up letting that wave pass you on by.
Time and time again — wait, time out. Sekyi-Otu, Gordon, Scott, Mbembe, you are being called in by name. Now please listen. If liberation is a new beginning then “this beginning has two aspects: (1) the future is the future (and not just a future past) to the extent that it is radically unwriteable (erasable or even heterogeneous to the teleological work of time itself) and is therefore what appears (though never as such) in the arriving of any event whatsoever. (2) But in that arriving from the future (the structure of which implies that history is not just a weave of traces and memories outside of time, but also moments that materialize from out of their irremediable disappearance), the tabula rasa also opens in return a movement of temporalization that is never simply present, or timely.” Fanon, like Denise Ferreira da Silva, seeks to end time.
Now that’ll be the existential crisis hour. But what can end time? “Black violence is (Benjamin’s) messianic violence without a messiah and without a sovereign.” — Selamawit Terrefe. Wait what? Huh? Pause. Dawg. Come on. Does this help?
“Despite the influence of Sartre, Fanon’s notion of liberation is much more aporetic — and that is because the black subject is the thought of difference suspended between immanence and transcendence.” Ah ok. Mommy mommy! We just blew the lid off the unconscious and I’m feeling a bit numb.
