In the Zone of Nonbeing

Frantz Fanon in his time—and in ours

BY KEN CHEN

DURING THE FIRST WEEKS OF ISRAEL’S BOMBARDMENT of Gaza, I biked through the streets of New York weeping. Once home, the hours I spent reading about Palestine slowly developed into an obsessive ritual. I took screenshots of each new outrage against humanity. I downloaded every video of this violence, which seemed both distant and immediate in its horror. My somewhat pointless acts of witnessing constituted a desperate attempt to archive an already historic present, to save its texts, jpegs, and avi files in the face of a world that was not concerned with saving Palestinian life. In my state of mourning, in which I did not quite know how to be a person, I also did something else: I read Frantz Fanon. Perhaps the most infamous postwar anticolonial intellectual, Fanon had…

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The Nation (Digital) - 1 Issue, June 2024

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