BOOKS
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mythology of his own. In the tradition of Robespierre and Rousseau, the
eulogy of the people and its unalterable will colored his more sober
evaluations of peasant activities. For Fanon, and, he believed, for Africa,
the Algerian Revolution came to symbolize the right of a people to
its
national existence. It inaugurated nothing less than the reign of justice
and the defeat of racism and the exploitation of man. With his discovery
of the rural masses of Algeria and Africa, Fanon found the agent
through which the new world would be born.
The essays collected in
Towards an African Revolution
were written
in the period between 1952 and 1961. By 1961 the cautious optimism
of earlier fears had given way to the searing anger expressed in
The
Wretched of the Earth.
Algeria was no longer the main focus of Fanon's
experience: his world had expanded to include Africa and the other
underdeveloped colonies in the throes of their struggles for liberation.
The necessity of violence appeared everywhere. But the ethics of vio–
lence was only one part of an elaborate description of the more banal if
no less dramatic struggle that marked the advancing phases of liberation.
In
The Wretched of the Earth,
Fanon unleashed his terrible anger at
the colonial world whose end he predicted. But he did not spare the
Kenneth Lamott's
novel
may well be a
prophecy of things to
come when the now
generation carries the
banner demanding:
"The central action couldn't be more timely: a
protest parade
in
San Francisco, thousands
of
young people marching against deceit, falsehood,
hypocrisy. 'Turn Off The Lie Machine' is the
lettering on the leading banner, and this mecha–
nized abstraction represents all the anguish about
civil rights, free speech, foreign wars and Christian
hatred that is corroding American society today."
-JAMES
R.
FRAKES,
N. Y . Times Book Review
DAVID McKAY COMPANY, INC. •
" As the story of some–
thing that 'could hap–
pen,' this is a
distw'b ..
ing book."
CHARLOTTE ARMSTRONG
L os Angeles Times
" ... tender and beau·
tifu!. The point that
Lamott seems most viv..
idly to have made
is
that life's highest sig–
nificance must
be
un–
derscored in hlood."
-Newsweek
H. • •
a perceptive and
stirring novel."
- W EB
LAWRENCE,
Cleveland Plain Dealer
$4.95
at
all bookstores
New
Yorl.------~
