Frantz Fanon, poet: pleasure of the text, power of the text

Abstract

ABSTRACT Frantz Fanon’s writing represents a productive embrace of the political and the poetic. His ideas have had such a long afterlife, they live on in us, I submit, precisely because the language of their articulation, image-filled and rhythmic, is compelling. This article examines three elements of Fanonian poetics in Black Skin, White Masks: the use of metaphor and, in “By Way of Conclusion,” an ambiguous/multiple “I” as persona, and, finally, what Brent Edwards has called “anaphoric poetics,” the repetition of the same word or words at the beginning of successive phrases.