Customer Reviews

Fanon

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This book uses the idea of Frantz Fanon, and a few details of his life, as a device for meditating on Wideman's own life and our conflicted modern society. It is somewhat interesting as a work of literary art, in that it provides a fairly abstract stream of consciousness about identity and society. I suspect that it would have been particularly interesting if I were a slightly past middle aged African American male intellectual--which I am not.

Instead, I'm a reader interested in narrative and in Frantz Fanon. There is not much of either here. I read this book because it was in the NYTimes top 100 of the year, and got the impression it was a fictionalized narrative about pursuing Fanon's legacy. I suppose it is about that, but only in the most abstract sense. Mostly it is flitering thoughts about black power, intellectuals, prison, receiving heads in the mail, Pittsburgh, old age, colonialism, etc.. There does seem to be an element of self-indulgence in the writing here, but I was not completely put off by that: Wideman is clearly a brilliant man with interesting experiences and perspectives. So I did read the book with some appreciation for the thinking involved, and I suspect a specific type of reader might really enjoy this book. But ultimately I didn't get fully engaged, nor did I take much away beyond an abstract appreciation.

A realist novel about Fanon this is not: but it is a beautiful collage of Wideman's life work. Readers of Fanon's other texts, perhaps especially Brothers and Keepers, will recognize Wideman's prose style,narrative experiments, and concern with the matrix of relationships between kin at once trapped in the clock-time of our everyday life and the Great Time in which converge the temporalities of past, present, and future.

The scenes in which John Edgar Wideman (as narrator and counterpart to the persona of "Thomas") imagines his mother with Fanon as he lay dying in a Bethesda, MD hospital are exquisite the thoughtful. In an interview elsewhere, Wideman explains that his mother and Fanon represent for him exemplary and personal models of how to live ethically, in ordinary life and in the public history of political revolution, respectively.

Fanon has been the subject of a resurgent interest in post-colonial and radical anti-colonial Black theory--Wideman's novel bears the melancholy traces of a time (our time) when the hopes for anti-colonial revolutions have diminished even as the rights for which people fought continue to be ignored.

Last year, John Edgar Wideman published "Fanon; a Novel."

I'm struggling through it, not because it's such a very bad book, but because it deals with decolonization of his mind quite a bit more roughly than I'm ready for. The head in a box delivered by the UPS man is a strong, hopefully only literary image. Mr. Wideman writes to Fanon, not so much about him, except that knowledge of how Fanon inspired the oppressed to find liberation is very important. Mr. Wideman has some bones to pick, and the gumption to pick at them.

Decolonizing ones mind and spirit can be a very messy business. Other reviewers may have missed this point. Courage all!

P.S. I'm an older white man in a long term inter-racial marriage and late in life discovering how pervasive colonization has been.

At one point in this rambling, experimantal, or postmodern novel, the actual author's brother asks why write about Fanon. In fact, the question is a theme running throughout the work, and the answer is this: given Wideman's background and concerns, why not write about Fanon. The problem is that although Wideman writes beautifully at times, he is not a storyteller, and so Fanon seems like a device to hang words on.

This author does a lot of dithering about writing, about why write, about just who is writing about Fanon, about words, and about the impossibility of writing. The author starts out in first person, but immediately invents Thomas, a fiction, to write what we are reading for which Wideman is responsible. Does this give a taste of the style? Thomas slips in and out of the text along with Fanon, a severed head, Wideman's family, and Jean Luc Godard. It is hard to believe that Wideman actually thinks that he owes his readers, fellow travelers, much of anything even though he says he owes us an explanation and admits that we want to know what happens at the end, but when there is no story, how can there be an end.

Even if you stick with this book to the bitter end, you do not come away with much. The part where Wideman as Wideman visits his brother in prison almost seems inserted and could, however, make a good short story.

I got this rascal thinkin' it had something to do with Franz Fanon. Perchance a fictional novel or a factual musing of Fanon and his days in the wilds of Algeria. What I got was a 150 odd pages of poorly written jibber jabber what really had nothin' to do with Fanon at all. Don't buy this book what makes no dang sense. Spend your leafy, greeny money on somethin' else, like a bio on Fanon by Macey or Cherki.

I was startled that this book about a writer like John Edgar Wideman with a brother serving a lifelong prison sentence making a few stabs at imagining the life of Franz Fanon (1925-1961), the psychiatric theorist about the scars of colonialism on colonized and colonizer, made the New York Times list of 100 best books of 2008. I have to consider this an affirmative action pic, having epined that the book should not have been published in its turgid, massively self-indulgent and narcissistic form. (Established authors, not just black ones, publish books badly in need of firm editing, so I would not say that the publication is an instance of affirmative action.)

Wideman works in a severed head and fantasies that Jean-Luc Godard wants the narrator to write a screenplay for a Fanon biopic (as if Godard cared about screenplays... or Wideman! and Godard's "Le petit soldat" was made long, long ago).

Fanon did not live to see what the decolonized Algeria he strove for became. Wideman has, but avoids the question he raises about the price paid for independence, or how long Fanon would have lasted in the increasingly Islamist post-colonial despotism.

Anyone interested in Fanon (rather than Wideman) would do much better to read Fanon's own books or David Macey's Fanon biography on which Wideman draws what little biographical information he includes in his onanistic self-absorbed (albeit often self-flagellating) mess of a book.