This essay marks the beginning of a new column for Adi Magazine called “Again.” This column is a space for policymakers, activists, and politically-engaged writers to reflect on a treasured text they return to again and again: for inspiration, for comfort, for the analytical rage and love that we sometimes need to keep going.
“Thought draws the imaginary of the past: a knowledge becoming. One cannot stop it to assess it nor isolate it to transmit it.” —Edouard Glissant
Frantz Fanon’s texts did not appear on any of the core syllabi in my political science graduate program.
Instead, in an early comparative politics class on insurgency we read a journal article entitled “Carrots and Sticks,” or somesuch, a study of how to instill “positive discipline” in the unruly native. Still trying to sit comfortably in this place of professed elevated education, I wondered if this work was satire but knew I couldn’t ask. It wasn’t my place.
A classmate, unencumbered by considerations of race or gender, interjected as the discussion began: “These people won’t respond to carrots, even money. There must be a stronger stick, like military force.” The statement tore at messy reparative sutures over inherited wounds (“grievances”) cut to fill with their theories. The ensuing silence settled into a sting.
I felt the fracture: when the desire to be seen as affirming humanity meets the gaze intent on denying it.
By then, I had spent my coursework summers with guerilla women in the Tamil separatist struggle in Sri Lanka. The figure of the fighter shaped my imagination. Did my classmate see her as one of those to be corralled into submission? Is this how he saw me?
Months later, when I first read Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth in a course outside my discipline, a comparative literature survey of revolutionary texts, it became clear that both the racially weighted question I was posing and the insurgent-infused response had been asked and answered well before I was born. The Empire repeats itself.
In 1961, French philosopher Jean Paul Sartre would preface Fanon’s book by mocking the folly of the colonizer, unveiling the intertwined arrogance and insecurity that carried across half a century into my classroom: “All we need to do is dangle a carrot in front of their eyes and they will come running.”
Until then, the pricey tomes of European theorists we were assigned felt like hard-bound private conversations. The curious were allowed to eavesdrop but full access was limited by jargon-y barriers. Instead of buying those texts, the few students of color in my cohort would share one between us or glean what we could from online excerpts.
But I bought The Wretched of the Earth for myself. I carried it with me. A talisman inside enemy territories.
An Opening
Fanon wrote The Wretched of the Earth shortly before his death in 1961. He drew upon his training as a psychiatrist to trace how the Empire’s insidious desire for dominance settles into a part of the brain that processes fear, noting how inferiority was internalized in the anatomical space slightly darker than its pinkish-beige surroundings. Since its publication, Fanon has been heralded for his foresight and The Wretched of the Earth itself has been described as a prophetic, even messianic, touchstone for resistance.
The Wretched of the Earth entered my life when I was exploring why Tamil women fought. It was also when Western governments were lecturing Tamil rebels to disavow militancy, all while ensuring the safe passage of multi-barrel rocket launchers to the advancing army. I was grappling with this lopsided legitimacy when I read the opening chapter, “On Violence.” Fanon wrote of Algerians specifically but also “that this struggle could have broken out anywhere.” It underlied every conversation I had with female fighters on the island: “The very same people who had it constantly drummed into them that the only language they understood was that of force, now decide to express themselves with force.”
The texts that attach themselves to you are most often those that reflect unseen parts of the self. In this one, the mirror bends light to create space. Twenty years ago, in The Wretched of the Earth, I sensed an opening.
To return to a text is to seek: comfort, a kindred anger, guidance. The lines we lift become a transfusion of revolutionary spirit. In Tamil, meelavum means again, but the kind of return imbued with a sense of continuity. There is violence again. There is pain again. Arcing across history and intersecting in the lifelines of the oppressed. A return to The Wretched of the Earth is a rejection of repetitive fate.
Fanon was part physician, part political visionary. In any assessment of sight, placement is crucial. He did not diagnose blind spots but excavated a new vantage point for all of us. An investment in being seen is one of the many pyramid schemes set up in service of the state. What is visible has power; what is not, does not. “Racism is not the whole but the most visible, the most day-to-day…the crudest element of a given structure,” he said in a 1956 speech.
An investment in being seen is one of the many pyramid schemes set up in service of the state.
Back then, during our genocide, Tamils believed that pulling mass graves into plain sight would stop the pain. In a single day I would appear at the United Nations, on CNN, and in humanitarian side-sessions, armed with information to incite consciousness. Then (and now) I hated being hyper-visible to these, the bluest eyes. Then (and now) I do it for the Tamil people.
Today we know that even the omnipresent reel of extermination merely reveals what Fanon already saw: the naked violence of the colonial machine.
Shadow and Light
When my intellectual inquiries on the guerilla women struggling to secure the homeland in Sri Lanka were subsumed under the complete blackout of the final war, I returned to Fanon’s polemic canvas. There, my own misplaced faith in our overlords’ empty promises was laid bare.
The Wretched of the Earth was prescient. Its lines have been superimposed onto newspaper headlines, severed to slot into virtual debates, dug out to plant party flags. Yet, what drew me to Fanon was not the hazy outline of a far-sighted lens, but his lucid perception of depth.
In his analysis, the empire as object establishes itself as the singular site for humanity to access the light, always repositioning itself as its subject acts to move out from its shadow. Throughout the book, Fanon feminizes an empire that sees itself through a perverse motherhood, expecting love while controlling and extracting from her subjects, blurring gendered lines around the capacity for violence.
In the months of appealing to the “mother countries,” this feminized empire stayed with me as I sat across from female Heads of Government, State Departments, and the United Nations: governing bodies whose privileged feminism gave them the choice to protect their power, not our women. As thousands of Tamils were massacred every day, Fanon’s insight had come half a century before the empire turned a (gender) blind eye.
Fanon said: “Let us not lose time in useless laments.”
She said (speaking through the human rights world): Your dead will be piled into the “Petrie Report” as evidence of the inevitable, the “systemic failure” of the United Nations to protect Tamil life.
Fanon said: “He loudly claims he has nothing to do with…these terrorists, these butchers. In the best of cases, he barricades himself in a no-man’s-land between the terrorists and the colonists and offers his services as “mediator.””
She said (speaking through her NGO fronts): Our silence on war crimes is in service of a higher cause. We choose “access” to ease the survivor suffering over “advocacy” to end the bloodshed.
Fanon said: “The intellectual who, for his part, has adopted the abstract, universal values of the colonizer is prepared to fight so that colonist and colonized can live in peace in a new world.”
She said (speaking through The New York Times): We will suffocate your quote with caveats (I “could never support the tactics” of the rebel movement). The lines of scholars willing to breathe the gospel of democracy will remain untouched.
Fanon said: “For the people, only fellow nationals are ever owed the truth. In answer to the lie of the colonial situation, the colonized subject responds with a lie.”
She said (speaking through the academy): Your movement has no internal reflection. Critique is political panacea itself.
I had nearly completed my doctorate when “safe zones” on the island were being shelled with brazen impunity. Around me, scholars were adorned with the accoutrements of revolutionary sensibility, twisted as carefully around them as their convoluted commitment to nonviolent resistance—a clear concession to the colonizers that they wielded as anti-colonialist credibility.
To highlight us as a machete-wielding threat, the most-oft cited line from The Wretched of the Earth is “decolonization is always a violent event.” Rarely do they quote, “Their preoccupation with objectivity constitutes the legitimate excuse for their failure to act.”
To highlight us as a machete-wielding threat, the most-oft cited line from The Wretched of the Earth is “decolonization is always a violent event.” Rarely do they quote, “Their preoccupation with objectivity constitutes the legitimate excuse for their failure to act.”
When the pall of genocide fell across the Tamil people, I found Fanon, again. He reminded us,“We must shake off the great mantle of night which has enveloped us.” I returned to these pages to hide: from the glare of the empire’s lens, her infiltration and incentives. Born into generational displacement, I found home in Fanon’s subterranean haven.
I return to Fanon not for prophecy but for positioning.
A Pinhole
A pinhole blocks peripheral, unfocused light.
I know that inside a space of “violence rippling under the skin,” The Wretched of the Earth constructed more precise dimensions than a simple opening. It was just wide enough for our spatial awareness of them yet carefully narrowed to circumscribe their view of us. The kind of window that Harriet Jacobs, hiding from her slave masters in a North Carolina attic, would rub her fingers raw with a gimlet to succeed “in making one hole one inch long and an inch broad.” After months of sitting in darkness as “the wretched may, when a tempest has passed over them,” she finally had light.
Earlier this year, in a small British town, I was sitting with Uncle. A lawyer, scholar, and philosopher, Uncle was a pioneer in media who was now unexpectedly and gracefully entering his mid-nineties. The sun streaked through his small flat, ricocheting across the brushstrokes of his wife’s paintings that framed the living room. A gallery in memoriam.
His was one of the earliest prototypes of an online resource for the Tamil liberation movement, established in 1998. He was born into a position that promised an easy existence in the upper echelons of Tamil society, and I was curious why he chose struggle. A few minutes into his response, I gently interrupted one of his stream-of-consciousness reflections. Why, I asked, were his musings so often woven around German philosophers or enlightened Indians? What of Fanon? Césaire? He grinned slowly, his reminder that he knew much more than me. “Your Fanon, you know, he was Tamil.”
I was speechless. He went on to tell me about the scraps of internet evidence pieced together that suggest Fanon’s father may have been partially descended from Indian Tamil indentured servants. Ever since the Tamil genocide slipped through the annals of history unnoticed, Tamils can locate each other in any line-up: from rolling film credits to a list of congressional staffers. How had we missed this?
In June of 2009, when the desire to extinguish the Tamils came into full view, Uncle returned to the same text, perhaps also seeking. He published an excerpt from The Wretched of the Earth, and ended his own blog entry with a line from Fanon’s speech to the Congress of Black Writers and Artists in 1959: “The most urgent thing today for the African intellectual is the building of his nation.”
The desire to claim Fanon as ours, as mine, was less a desire to deepen our imprint into indelible, and more an offering of reciprocity.
To see him from the location he saw us, in all our possibility.
Throughout The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon is steadfast in his gaze. The still-underground Tamil struggle would have been squarely in his line of sight. When he glances up, it is to ensure colonial administrators (in all their manifestations) are kept at a distance and to dismiss “sermonizers, counselors, and confusion-mongers” who believe they are vying for proximity to power.
Fanon surveilled power from below. The latitudinal location of his gaze could pierce through layers of the psyche and shiny narrative casings. He could pull the unconscious forth and ask fellow comrades, as Ruth Wilson Gilmore notes, to “look beneath the surface and ask what the possibility might be for cooptation.”
The longitudinal lines cut through bunkers in his hemisphere to the inner core of rebellious terrain. Where enlightenment, empiricism, and empire exist in an etymological lineage with hierarchical intent: in light, in experience, in power. Where evil’s root, its rot, and its spread have already been considered in germinating ideas of liberation.
It was inside these exact coordinates that I found others: where James Baldwin wrested back a region in his mind from colonial control; Sonia Ahsan sketched the pious peripheries traversed by the imaginings of Afghan women; Edward Said mapped worlds lost in the rift between humans forced out of place; Anjuli Raza Kolb traced the pathogen pathways of an epidemic empire; and Sivaram expanded the landscape of Tamil imaginaries.
Meelavum can also mean to retrieve, to come back from endangerment. A prolific Tamil analyst, Sivaram always kept an ear to the underground, resisting pressure from above. As the Tamil rebellion emerged in 1983, he brought Fanon in with it. He likened The Wretched of the Earth to the focused beam of a lighthouse, illuminating the path forward. When he came to meet me on campus he predicted his imminent assassination. Three weeks later, he was killed.
The Wretched of the Earth is a portal to a place that defies occupation.
A Projection
The image that enters a darkened dimension is an inverted version of the reality outside.
Twenty years after I first picked up The Wretched of the Earth, a group of Tamil women organized a gathering in a small office behind the temple in Jaffna. Fanon didn’t open a pathway for political action to women explicitly, nor did he segregate the colonizer’s impact; he appealed to the repressed consciousness of both men and women. Inclusion has never been a central concern for women fighters.
The happy chaos of community events had a soft soundscape: the shuffling of cords to connect the computer, crispy snacks set on gently clinking silver trays, plastic furniture scraping across linoleum. There was no stage and the chairs were for elders only. “Space is either given by the state or not. If it is not, we will take it,” an elderly auntie once told me.
Finally, the projection appeared against a stucco wall, still fuzzy at the edges. We were screening a 2014 documentary on Fanon, Concerning Violence.
Some of those gathered were the daughters of guerillas. The raw footage of Algerian rebels in the bush mapped onto the lives they imagined their mothers to have. Growing up on base camps, they know that political beings are formed through place. One, entering medical school herself, leaned over to ask, “Where can I get this book? How can I read Fanon?” Here, information incited consciousness.
From where I sat against the back wall, the new faces of resistance reflected the light from the film screen. As the image came into focus, it illuminated the room with imaginings of a colonial world “buried deep within the earth” or “banished” from our territory. One where moral clarity is the higher power. In an unspoken commitment to invisibility, there were no phones, no posts. Heads nodded and leaned together in soft whispers. Sivaram wrote in a local magazine, Kalam (battlefield), of The Wretched of the Earth, “In Fanon’s voice the third world sees themselves. Through that, they speak to each other.”
Safe in the refuge he created for us, we were all looking back at Fanon.
Join us for a discussion about The Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon on February 3rd, 2026. This inaugural session of the Again Book Club will feature a conversation with this essay’s author, Nimmi Gowrinathan.