Fanon’s Prescription for the Postcolonial Soul by Anmol Sahni
POETRY
Unveil the Mask.
Look back at the gaze.
Then—
shatter the mirror.
Let light fracture
through splintered shards
of your divided self.
Your cancer is the Mask—
a miraged monstrosity,
a mocked mimicry,
X-rayed, exposed.
Chemo the thingification,
the ghost of imperialism
devouring your existence.
Twice daily,
drain the vanity
colonized deep in your veins.
Wash it clean
with the acid of revolt.
Angst,
anger—
expected.
Accept them.
Bared face,
burden unformed.
Slowly,
solely,
embrace the soul.
Seek—
yonder.
Wander,
but wither not—
lest the spirit
drown in solitary stagnation.
Disavow the myth
of the phobogenic man.
Let not their gaze define you.
Reclaim the doubleness
of your soul—
no longer a wound,
but a weapon.
Abjure fictions
fastening you to fear.
Feud falsities—
of empires
that engineered slavery,
that forged indentures,
that monetized humanity.
Estrange the noose
choking your thoughts,
alienating your senses,
drowning you in silence.
Reject Janus’ poise.
The past
cannot guide you
through the storm.
Instead,
imagine the now anew:
a future unshackled,
an era of Negritude.
See violent visions—
purple horizons,
scarlet skies,
smoke-drenched freedom unfurling.
Dream reality larger—
flags fluttering,
a war welcomed,
an army marching
on shifting ground.
Black skin,
white Masks.
Hollow humanism.
Colonial poisons
etched in apartheidic scars.
Rebel.
Battle their plunder.
Refuse surrender.
Pray:
O my body, always make me a man who questions!
Here—
is your prescription.
Here—
is revolution.
Into the fray,
the forever fight for freedom.
Anmol Sahni is a Laney Graduate Fellow and Ph.D. candidate in the Department of English at Emory University. His research focuses on Postcolonial Literature, World Literature, and Contemporary Global Anglophone Literatures, with a particular emphasis on marginalized literary traditions from South Asia and Eastern Africa. Anmol’s work examines the intersections of postcolonial theory, ecocriticism, and theories of the novel form and aesthetics, analyzing the literary representation of insurgencies, state violence, and the environmental toll of wars and civil strife. His scholarship has been featured or is forthcoming in the Journal of Global Postcolonial Studies, Ploughshares Journal, Another Word, and Indraprasth Journal.
