The Wretched of the Earth is a seminal work by the distinguished psychiatrist from Martinique, Frantz Fanon, who actively participated in the Algerian Nationalist Movement. This masterpiece is a brilliant analysis of the psychology of the colonized and their path to liberation.

Fanon provides singular insight into the rage and frustration experienced by colonized peoples, and examines the role of violence in effecting historical change. The book incisively critiques the twin perils of post-independence colonial politics: the disenfranchisement of the masses by the elites, and intertribal and interfaith animosities.

This work, a veritable handbook of social reorganization for leaders of emerging nations, reflects the corruption and violence plaguing present-day Africa. The Wretched of the Earth has significantly influenced civil rights, anticolonialism, and black consciousness movements worldwide, reaffirming its status as a landmark in revolutionary literature.

Somewhere in Della’s consumptive, industrial wasteland of a city, a bomb goes off. It is not the first, and will not be the last. Reactions to the attacks are polarized. Police activity intensifies. Della’s revolutionary parents welcome the upheaval but are trapped within their own insular beliefs.

Her activist restaurant co-workers, who would rather change their identities than the world around them, resume a shallow rebellion of hair-dye, sex parties, and self-absorption. As those bombs keep inching closer, thudding deep and real between the sounds of katydids fluttering in the still of the city night, the destruction begins to excite her.

What begins as terror threats called in to greasy bro-bars across the block boils over into a desperate plot, intoxicating and captivating Della and leaving her little chance for escape. Zazen unfolds as a search for clarity soured by irresolution and catastrophe, yet made vital by the thin, wild veins of imagination run through each escalating moment, tensing and relaxing, unfurling and ensnaring.

Vanessa Veselka renders Della and her world with beautiful, frightening, and phantasmagorically intelligent accuracy, crafting from their shattered constitutions a perversely perfect mirror for our own selves and state.