The Wretched of the Earth

“He spent his life in Algeria, with the exception of the time he was fighting the Nazis in France. He was a doctor and a psychiatrist, and he wrote about what the colonial system inflicts psychologically on the indigenous. He joined the independence movement in Algeria very early on. His book, The Wretched of the Earth, is extraordinarily important because he’s talking about the necessity of violence to assert one’s dignity after being humiliated for so long. He then raises the question of what we do with that violence. Do we consume ourselves with it? And eventually he acknowledges that that is not a viable option. It is perhaps a transition to assert oneself after being silenced for so long, but eventually one has to overcome that violence.” Read more...

The best books on Algeria

Xavier Le Clerc, Novelist