Informant38

The Rise of Muqtada al-Sadr
Patrick Cockburn
extract from Muqtada al-Sadr and the fall of Iraq
via Fanonite
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Let it here be received recorded and recognized that the name "Fanon" rings for me whenever I see it because when I was 20 and in community college a poli-sci class I was taking was taught by a substitute teacher for a few days or a week or two, and he was a black man, from Ghana, very dark-skinned a native African, though far older than me at least in his mid-20's if not practically 30, new and uneasy in the US and especially Northern California 1969-70, facing a little pond of upturned white faces with all those cheap truncated expectations and dull blank comfortable spaces in their maps and worldviews, and he insisted against a rising tide of scornful dismissal from the stalwart heirs to the elect at their desks, that reading Fanon wasn't paying attention to the ravings of a bitter lunatic, but to the outrage of a fine and refined conscience so violated by what it saw that it could barely speak. Until it did.
The teacher's emotions were so powerfully held in check it was heartbreaking. Even to me, then. With a memory now so shot full of holes and lesions and elisions and lacunae and fabricated events and fear that I can barely remember the names of good friends from those days, I could still draw an accurate enough diagram of exactly where I was sitting in that classroom when that bitter grace broke through the clouds of lies and arrogance I'd spent my life under.
Where the windows were, where the teacher sat against the front edge of the desk, where the young Aryan prince was who forcefully spoke and stood against the destructive forces he glimpsed in Fanon's words coming toward him, and against the witness in the teacher's eyes and against the questioning sounds of my own beginnings toward wakefulness, seated next to and a row in back of him.
How can it be that the world is this way?
It is. And all most of us will ever have against that awful dark is testimony.