 Recorded Books Presents A Griot Audio Production Fanon by John Edgar Wideman This unabridged recording is narrated by Dion Graham and directed by Jenny Selig. This book is copyrighted 2008 by John Edgar Wideman. This recording is copyrighted 2008 by Recorded Books, producer and publisher of Griot Audio, celebrating the best in contemporary African American fiction and non-fiction. The author opens this book with a quote from France Fanon, speaking in 1956. The imaginary life cannot be isolated from real life. The concrete and the objective world constantly feed, permit, legitimate and found the imaginary. The imaginary consciousness is obviously unreal, but it feeds on the concrete world. The imagination and the imaginary are possible only to the extent that the real world belongs to us. And now, Fanon. Part 1 A Letter to France Fanon I'm sitting with the last of a glass of red wine in the small garden of a small house in Brittany. I spent the morning of this day as I've spent most mornings this summer trying to save a life, adding a few words, a few sentences to the long letter I'm addressing to you, France Fanon. Dead almost half a century before I begin writing to you. Writing just about every day. Outdoors when weather permits, sitting each morning in the garden of a house in France, the country you claimed Fanon, as your nation, fought in blood for, wounded near Lyon in 1944, and then fought against during the war for Algerian independence until you died of leukemia, they say, in 1961, in a hospital in America. The country I claim, as mine. France your country, French your language, though you were born in Martinique, a Caribbean island thousands of miles away from where I sit this evening thinking about you, Fanon. About your short, more than full life, about the fact that 65 years of my very full life have passed no less swiftly than the thought of them that just now pass through my mind. Though your story is extraordinary, it's also like mine, like anybody's. Just another story. But since I've chosen to tell it, or it's chosen me, for reasons I'm still attempting to figure out as I proceed, reasons that may be why I proceed, I know a life's at stake. Whose life, and why, are other things I'm trying to figure out. I intend to say more about this particular evening, Fanon. But first, I need to speak to you about the project that's been on my mind for many years. Forty years at least, ever since I read your final book, The Wretched of the Earth, for the first time. Although the worrisomeness I'm calling a Fanon project has assumed various forms, it began clearly enough as a determination to be like you. That is, to become a writer committed to telling the truth about color and oppression. A writer who exposes the lies of race and reveals how the concept of race is used as a weapon to destroy people. I wanted to be somebody. An unflinchingly honest, scary somebody like Franz Fanon, whose words and deeds just might ignite a revolution, just might help cleanse the world of the plague of racism. Over the years, I gradually resigned myself to the fact that I couldn't measure up to your example, and my Fanon project shifted to writing about disappointment with myself and my country, about shame and guilt and lost opportunities, about the price of not measuring up to announced ideals. Of course, my perceptions of you changed as I changed, and the world changed around me. My Fanon project continued to simmer, however, never forgotten, never achieved, often lamented, less a model for guiding my actions than a source of anxiety and unfulfilled ambition, deep dread that someday my nation and I must endure a shattering reckoning. I published numerous books during this period, always hoping they didn't dishonor Franz Fanon, nor compromise unforgivably my original project. Then about six years ago, the Fanon project took another turn. If I couldn't live Fanon's life, maybe I could write it. On Martinique, I encountered your stenciled spray-painted image, an image like my project, almost effaced.