Fanon’s words can encapsulate a reader’s whole political lifetime

Evidence

I call to mind the quote “Don’t expect to see any explosion today. It’s too early … or too late”. feel that the span of my own life—the more than half a century of despair and delight that has passed between 1951, when I was born in Iran (two years before the CIA-engineered coup of 1953), and today, some years past the world-changing events of September 11, 2001—is summed up in those opening lines of Fanon’s. I grew up thinking it was too early for that explosion; I now live thinking it is too late. — Hamid Dabashi, Brown Skin, White Masks, 134

Categorization

• QUESTION: Dabashi’s compression of 1951-2001 into one Fanon quote is striking — worth chasing how the same lines aged across that span.