Fanon’s Presence

John Edgar Wideman’s 2008 novel Fanon remains both under-read and under-examined. Fittingly, one of the few critical essays on the novel saw publication in College Literature in 2013. In “Masking Fanon” Angela Naimou reads Wideman’s short, challenging novel as the author’s attempt to register the troubling “dissonance between the legacy of Fanon’s vision of a liberatory future and Wideman’s neoliberal, neo-imperial present” (39). To Naimou, the novel’s constant meditation on the presence and absence, the readability and periodic unreadability of faces, including most importantly that of Fanon, which, the narrator tells us, occasioned the novel that we are reading, registers this dissonance in challenging the “human person as a cultural and juridical construct” that lies at the heart of contemporary human rights logic (39). For the sake of the brief contribution that my own essay seeks to make to the discussion of Fanon’s continued relevance in the present, we may read Wideman’s novel in a way that shares the basic assumptions with Naimou’s fine examination of the novel but that replaces the focus on the important instances of dissonance with a focus on the question of presence. In other words, while it is true, as Naimou suggests, that Fanon’s narrator struggles with the problem of how to conjure “Fanon’s presence and incorporate it in [the narrator’s] present . . . when the continuation of imperial wars, racial violence, and the disappointment in postcolonial regimes have led to a sense of melancholy in evaluating the legacies of anticolonial, antiracist revolutionary narratives” (39), there are also central aspects of the novel that suggest that one can read the same problem not as a matter of failure but instead as a clear indication of continued relevance. To find that too little has changed when comparing Wideman’s world to that of Fanon over forty years earlier, is in Wideman’s novel not principally a matter of a lost liberatory future at which Fanon’s writings were aimed but instead a sign of Fanon’s timeliness, of the importance and of the necessary presence that Fanon’s writings have in our moment. In what follows, I will suggest that we can read Wideman’s Fanon as a novel that forwards profoundly important, passionately developed, and politically and culturally urgent, answers to the question that drives this critical forum: how and why might we think about Fanon in the present? Why Fanon now?

At one point in the novel, the narrator’s brother wonders why it might be necessary to dedicate a writing project to Fanon. John’s response is unequivocal:

Why Fanon. I’m disappointed when my brother asks the question. The answer’s obvious, isn’t it. Given the facts of Fanon’s life, my brother’s life, my life, the decades in prison, the besieged lives of the people we love and who love us, the lives and deaths shared with them, why wouldn’t my brother, of all people, understand my need to write about Fanon.

(Wideman 2008, 94)

What we get here is a sense of Fanon’s presence and relevance in our time, one that is to John so logical that to question it seems tantamount to the inability to understand or to structurally examine and historicize one’s own existence in the present: “Why Fanon. C’mon, bro, I said to myself. Mize well ask, Why me. Why you” (95). But the account of Fanon’s continued relevance and presence that Wideman’s novel offers is about more than structural similarities that continue to bind Fanon’s historical context to our own. Instead, Wideman’s novel foregrounds particular aspects of Fanon’s thought that not only are still relevant but that may indeed be more significant in our time than forty years ago. Specifically, Wideman’s novel stresses the importance of Fanon’s work for our ability to think the relation between culture and the imagination on the one hand and the structures of material life and the constellations of power that mark our moment on the other. For Wideman, Fanon offers crucially important ways of thinking...