Reading Group Week 32
Hi, this week we're continuing A Dying Colonialism with Chapter 3: "The Algerian Family".
If you haven't bought the book yet, you can buy it here. Purchases made through the Workshops4Gaza fundraiser give proceeds to The Sameer Project.
Schedule and format
We're reading a chapter of A Dying Colonialism every 2 weeks. Here's where we are now:
| Week | Date | Reading |
|---|---|---|
| Week 1 | July 14 | Introduction + Preface |
| Week 2 | July 28 | Chapter 1: "Algeria Unveiled" |
| Week 3 | August 11 | Chapter 2: "This is the Voice of Algeria" |
| Week 4 | August 25 | Chapter 3: "The Algerian Family" |
| Week 5 | September 8 | Chapter 4: "Medicine and Colonialism" |
| Week 6 | September 22 | Chapter 5: "Algeria's European Minority" + Conclusion |
There are a few ways to follow along:
- follow these emails (which I send on Mondays)
- signal group chat, where we'll share links and chat about the readings
- video calls (Saturdays at 12pm ET, with email and link a few hours in advance)
- discuss on social media (you can find me on bluesky, mastodon, and twitter/x)
Chapter 3: The Algerian Family
The colonized society perceived that in order to succeed in the gigantic undertaking into which it had flung itself, in order to defeat colonialism and in order to build the Algerian nation, it would have to make a vast effort of self-preparation, strain all its joints, renew its blood and its soul. (page 101)
Confronted by an adversary who has sworn to keep Algeria, even without the Algerians, it is difficult to remain oneself, to maintain preferences or values intact. (page 116)
Today there is not a dead person in Algeria who is not the victim of French colonialism. It is impossible for an Algerian civilian to remain untouched by the war of colonial re-conquest. More than this, there is not a death of an Algerian outside of Algeria which is not attributed to French colonialism. The Algerian people have thus decided that, until independence, French colonialism will be innocent of none of the wounds inflicted upon its body and its consciousness. (page 118)
A woman led away by soldiers who comes back a week later-it is unnecessary to question her to understand that she has been violated dozens of times. A husband taken away by the enemy who comes back with his body covered with contusions, more dead than alive, his mind stunned. Children scattered to the winds, innumerable orphans who roam about, haggard and famished. (page 119)
Reflections
This might be repetitive of me, but I continue to be fixated on the fact that this book represents much more of a time capsule, or a window into the aspirations of someone involved in a liberatory movement at the moment that he was writing this book, when victory was both inevitable but also very much not assured - and for that matter surviving this struggle to go on and help build a new nation, for many Algerians, was already a foregone conclusion. Fanon writes about how seniority among brothers has been cast aside in favor of the movement's chiefs, and part of me wants to point out that it's not just brothers, but sisters putting their lives on the line like this (and yet, I don't really have as vivid a sense of women's place in tactical and leadership decisions the way I have a picture of a woman's relationship with her father when she visits home on leave).
All this is really to say that while I wish he wrote more about women beyond marriage and divorce (or without the unspoken assumption of womens' subordination in the FLN)... I'm sure he wished to say more as well, and I have to remind myself that the circumstances of Fanon's death, to say nothing of his life, were very different from the lives and deaths of many writers who enjoyed long, predictable, comfortable lives.
... I'll digress. I think (with this book more than usual) I'm finding myself acutely reminded of the frustrations of looking at an artifact such as writing, and treating it as though every element of it was intentional and deliberate. Particularly as I reflect on my own writing in the haze, anger, depression, and desperation of watching this genocide of Palestine, and the Palestinian struggle against Israel.
Did I just lamp-shade the meandering quality of my reading group reflections? If so, I'm sorry about that.
I also felt surprised by this bit on page 118, that France was culpable for the deaths of every Algerian by virtue of the fact that France had mediated and controlled the livelihoods of Algerians from birth until their death - whether they were gunned down capriciously, or starved, or denied healthcare.
I don't know if it's necessary to point out, but in If I Must Die, we read numerous poems and essays illustrating these same kinds of circumstances - Alareer painted numerous pictures with words of young children whose cancer continued to spread and which ultimately killed them; or the people who were shot by Israelis, the people who were starved by Israel, the people whose homes were taken by Israel. Mohammed El-Kurd wrote in Perfect Victims about how Israel creates for itself this identity of "The Only Jewish State" (or whatever) behind which its settler-colonizer soldiers-turned-squatters stand. There is no getting away from the reality that for Palestinians it is Israel that stole their home; it was "The Only Jewish State" that killed their uncle or deprived them of getting medical care.
Afeef Nessouli and Steven Thrasher published an article in The Intercept in January ("Surviving War and HIV: Queer, HIV-Positive, and Running Out of Medication in Gaza") documenting a 27-year-old Palestinian man's struggle to stretch his dwindling supply of antiretroviral medication in Gaza. If you have time, I strongly recommend taking the time to read it (there's no paywall, but you might be asked to provide an email or something).
I reference it here because Israel has developed a finely tuned system of deciding absolutely who lives and dies every single day, and it's not just downrange of a sniper rifle as Israeli occupation forces are apparently so keen to demonstrate in Instagram stories. It's every single administrative decision in the operation of this apartheid state, this open-air prison in Gaza and the West Bank. It's every decision about where Palestinians can go (and not go), every decision about how much food Palestinians get to have access to, every decision about whether a Palestinian can even seek medical treatment, let alone travel for it, that has been going on for decades. Every single Palestinian death in the past 70+ years has been mediated to a decisive, consequential extent by Israel.
Israel beats, rapes, conducts medical experiments, extracts organs, murders, and ultimately buries men, women, and children in mass graves under their beaches and in unmarked piles of debris after bombing hospitals and schools repeatedly. But it's also unambiguously the case that Palestinians have died of famine, from drought, from exposure to the cold and the heat, from diseases, and in all of these cases those circumstances are tightly orchestrated by the apartheid state Israel has chosen to build and continues to operate - only now more tightly as they work to crush the spirit of Palestine.
Meanwhile, western powers do what they do best, which is empty, self-aggrandizing, hazardous spectacles in the form of air drops that crush refugees' tents and kill yet more Palestinians who are unable to escape in time. Or they'll operate elaborate "aid distribution points" with Israeli soldiers so that they can turn these sites into killing fields when the occupying forces get bored.
The depth and distance of the effort to destroy Palestine, spanning more than 70 years, is so hard to comprehend that I realize I often have to turn away from the magnitude of it and focus on such narrow, discrete components of it - like the software developed to monitor and target Palestinians, or the extortionate schemes to recruit sick Palestinians into being informants for medical care - and as a result of my decision to focus so closely on these areas, I can't focus my eyes on the sheer size of the monster.
Tell me your thoughts
... I really took this in a different direction, but I couldn't help but latch onto this idea that Fanon expressed. I know that some of my subscribers are Algerian, and I have lots of questions about some of the parts of this chapter and how you feel Fanon describes or envisions what for him would have been the future of Algeria.
Even if you're not Algerian, I'm interested to hear what you thought about any part of this chapter - marital relationships, sibling relationships, parental relationships, or literally anything. If something grabbed your attention, tell me about it.
If you want, the Signal group chat is a great place to chat about things. The group chat is also where we're discussing Capital: Volume 1 by Karl Marx more or less in parallel to A Dying Colonialism.
That's everything. Please try to be safe, and help one another.