Raffaello Palandri runs a Book of the Day series, and this morning he wrote about Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, published in 1961. I read it, and one question kept coming to mind: do you ever really recover from colonialism?
Fanon’s argument is that colonialism isn’t just a political arrangement. It’s an ontological regime. It reorganises what counts as human, partitions the world into human and non-human zones, and the people living in the non-human zones aren’t merely exploited. Their subjectivity is fractured. The damage isn’t incidental. It’s the point.
Colonialism and American slavery aren’t the same thing. However, as a Black American born in 1968, at the tail end of the Civil Rights Movement, I find the resemblance unmistakable. The denial of personhood encoded into law. The violence used to maintain submission. The systematic dismantling of culture, language, and family. The message delivered daily, across generations, until it begins to feel like nature: you are less than.
We are still feeling it. I know we are because I can feel it.
While reading Raffaello’s post I drifted back to 1998. A family reunion in Raleigh, North Carolina. There were children everywhere, the way there always are at family reunions, and I was listening to the adults talk. The talk was about white people, and it was bitter. Not irrationally bitter. The history was real, and the ongoing realities of racism were real, and the anger had been earned over generations. But it was being passed, casually, between the generations, like a dish at the table. And the children were soaking it up the way children soak everything up, which is to say completely, without filters, as foundational truth.
I remember thinking, ‘This is never going to change if this is how it gets passed on.’
I made a private vow that day not to bring my own kids to one of these reunions.
At the same reunion, something different happened. My grandmother took me on a walk. She showed me around the streets where she’d grown up. And as we walked, she pointed out the places. There’s the cinema. There’s the diner. There’s the park. And then: that’s where you wouldn’t have been allowed. That’s where you would have got into serious trouble for being there. Just matter-of-fact. Just: Here is what was true.
I was listening to a life shaped by that reality. She had lived inside all of it. The signs. The boundaries. The daily confirmation that the world had decided you occupied a lesser category of existence. She had navigated it in her body for decades, and she had come out the other side without bitterness. She was warm. She was kind. She spoke about people and the future with an openness that I found, standing there on those streets, almost astonishing.
She wasn’t pretending none of it had happened. She knew exactly what had happened, and she could name all of it. But she had found a way to hold the history without letting it become her centre of gravity. She kept it as memory, as witness, as something to pass on clearly, and she kept her orientation toward what was still possible. Separate containers, held steady.
That’s harder than it sounds. Most people can’t keep those from bleeding into each other. The anger collapses into the identity, or the identity forms in opposition to the thing that caused the damage. James Baldwin wrote about these issues with tremendous honesty. The hatred is legitimate. And it damages the one who carries it. Both things are true at the same time.
What my grandmother had, I don’t have a word that fits easily. The Greeks had megalopsychia, greatness of soul, not in the sense of grandeur but in the sense of a soul large enough to contain difficult things without being deformed by them. She had that.
The question Fanon raises, whether you ever really recover, I don’t think he meant it to have a simple answer. His own answer was closer to: you cannot restore what was destroyed. But you can constitute something new. Not recovery as return. Recovery as creation. Built from inside the wound, not before it.
What I saw in my grandmother was something like that. Not a return to an undamaged self. A self that had been forged in the full knowledge of the damage and had chosen, somewhere along the way, not to be defined by it.
I’m grateful to Raffaello for the book. I’m more grateful that it sent me back to that walk, to those streets, to her voice pointing things out with that particular combination of clarity and warmth. Some memories need a door opened for them.
That afternoon in 1998 is one I’ll keep