Fanon acknowledges the enormous significance of this phenomenological level of life when he opens his essay "On National Culture" with one of his most enigmatic and inspiring pronouncements: "Each generation must discover its mission, fulfill it or betray it, in relative opacity."68 I turn to that issue by first returning to my beginning: What forms of unhappy consciousness prevail among the colonized who feel threatened from all sides? How does the body speak in extremis, how does the mind withstand? "Colonialism forces the colonized to constantly ask the question: 'Who am I in reality?'"69
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