Ibrahim Fanon, 1961, Tristan da Cunha

I.F. South Atlantic. Argus. Archipelago

I.F IBRAHIM FANON

I.F. Bandung , Irian, a-bomb, immense fahrenheit, Wallace, intermittent fever

I.F. Mau Mau Kenya... Indonesia...

east of a dip in the Earth’s magnetic field called the Brazilian or South Atlantic Anomaly, where the magnetosphere was closer to the surface and thus encountered more air molecules. If Argus electrons hit the Brazilian Anomaly, they would be absorbed by air molecules, interfering with and possibly derailing the expected Argus effect. Detonating the atomic devices just east of the Anomaly, however, would give the Argus radiation belt—if it formed—time to expand, grow, and spread eastward around most of the planet before dissipating, allowing ample opportunity to detect and measure it. Also, it was imperative to observe the “magnetic conjugate point”—the area where the Argus effects were expected to be mirrored along the north-south direction in the magnetosphere. A detonation point in the South Atlantic near Tristan da Cunha and Gough Island placed the Argus conjugate point near the Azores in the North Atlantic, where naval ships could easily assemble and monitor the tests remotely—and without arousing any undue suspicions. But such a remote operational area as the South Atlantic also posed some serious problems. For one thing, if all went according to plan, it would be August when Argus was conducted, which meant it would be winter in the South Atlantic, with rain, snow, and freezing temperatures—challenging conditions for naval operations under normal circumstances, much less while trying to launch a nuclear missile from the deck of a ship, something that had never been attempted before. Such weather conditions would also complicate routine matters such as the task force ships finding and rendezvousing with one another, refueling and supply, even communications. It was not going to be a pleasure cruise by any means.

seismic data on underground nuclear explosions is based on two seismic “magnitudes” mb and Ms – the so-called body-wave magnitude and surface-wave magnitude respectively. The former is calculated from measurements of compressional seismic waves (P waves) in the body of the Earth and the latter from measurements of surface seismic waves (Rayleigh waves). The first step is to analyse the waveforms to obtain the seismic magnitude and to discriminate between an earthquake and a nuclear explosion, which is done on the basis of the source characteristics. In the case of an earthquake, the seismic source is two bodies sliding against each other deep inside the earth and, in the case of a nuclear explosion, it is a point source relatively close to the surface of the earth.

“The birth of a symmetriad comes like a sudden eruption. About an hour beforehand, an area of tens of square miles of ocean vitrifies and begins to shine. It remains fluid, and there is no alteration in the rhythm of the waves. Occasionally the phenomenon of vitrification occurs in the neighbourhood of the funnel left by an agilus. The gleaming sheath of the ocean heaves upwards to form a vast ball that reflects sky, sun, clouds and the entire horizon in a medley of changing, variegated images. Diffracted light creates a kaleidoscopic play of color. The effects of light on a symmetriad are especially striking during the blue day and the red sunset. The planet appears to be giving birth to a twin that increases in volume from one moment to the next. The immense flaming globe has scarcely reached its maximum expansion above the ocean when it bursts at the summit and cracks vertically. It is not breaking up; this is the second phase, which goes under the clumsy name of the ‘floral calyx phase’ and lasts only a few seconds. The membranous arches soaring into the sky now fold inwards and merge to produce a thick-“-set trunk enclosing a scene of teeming activity. At the center of the trunk, which was explored for the first time by the seventy-man Hamalei expedition, a process of polycrystallization on a giant scale erects an axis commonly referred to as the ‘backbone,’ a term which I consider ill-chosen. The mind-bending architecture of this central pillar is held in place by vertical shafts of a gelatinous, almost liquid consistency, constantly gushing upwards out of wide crevasses. Meanwhile, the entire trunk is surrounded by a belt of snow foam, seething with great bubbles of gas, and the whole process is accompanied by a perpetual dull roar of sound. From the center towards the periphery, powerful buttresses spin out and are coated with streams of ductile matter rising out of the ocean depths Simultaneously the gelatinous geysers are converted into mobile columns that proceed to extrude tendrils that reach out in clusters towards points rigorously predetermined by the over-all dynamics of the entire structure: they call to mind the gills of an embryo, except that they are revolving at fantastic speed and ooze trickles of pinkish ‘blood’ and a dark green secretion.

“The symmetriad now begins to display its most exotic characteristic—the property of ‘illustrating,’ sometimes contradicting, various laws of physics. (Bear in mind that no two symmetriads are alike, and that the geometry of each one is a unique ‘invention’ of the living ocean.) The interior of the symmetriad becomes a factory for the production of ‘monumental machines,’ as these constructs are sometimes called, although they resemble no machine which it is within the power of mankind to build: the designation is applied because all this activity has finite ends, and is therefore in some sense ‘mechanical.’When the geysers of oceanic matter have solidified into pillars or into three-dimensional networks of galleries and passages, and the ‘membranes’ are set into an inextricable pattern of storeys, panels and vaults, the symmetriad justifies its name, for the entire structure is divided into two segments, each mirroring the other to the most infinitesimal detail.”

Frantz Fanon’s legend in America starts with the story ofhis death in Washington on December 6, 1 96 1 . Despite his reluctance to be treated “in that country oflynchers”,1 Fanon was advised that his only chance ofsurvival lay in seeking the leukemia treatment available at the National Institutes ofHealth in Bethesda, Mary land. Accompanied by a CIA case officer provided by the American Embassy in Tunis, Fanon flew to Washington, changing planes in Rome, where he met Jean-Paul Sartre but was too enfeebled to utter a single word. A few days later, on October 3, Fanon was admitted to the hospital as Ibrahim Fanon, a suppos edly “Libyan” nom de guerre he had assumed to enter a hospital in Rome after being wounded in Morocco during a mission for the Algerian National Liberation Front.

At a fixed time and a fixed date men and women assemble in a given place, and under the sol emn gaze of the tribe launch themselves into a seemingly disar ticulated, but in fact extremely ritualized, pantomime where the exorcism, liberation, and expression of a community are gran diosely and spontaneously played out through shaking of the head, and back and forward thrusts of the body. Everything is permitted in the dance circle. The hillock, which has been climbed as if to get closer to the moon, the river bank, which has been descended whenever the dance symbolizes ablution, washing, and purification, are sacred places. Everything is per mitted, for in fact the sole purpose of the gathering is to let the supercharged libido and the stifled aggressiveness spew out vol canically. Symbolic killings, figurative cavalcades, and imagined multiple murders, everything has to come out. The ill humors seep out, tumultuous as lava flows.

One step further and we find ourselves in deep possession. In actual fact, these are organized seances ofpossession and dispos session: vampirism, possession by djinns, by zombies, and by Legba, the illustrious god of voodoo. Such a disintegration, dis solution or splitting of the personality, plays a key regulating role in ensuring the stability ofthe colonized world. On the way there these men and women were stamping impatiently, their nerves “on edge.” On the way back, the village returns to serenity, peace, and stillness. Independence has certainly brought the colonized peoples moral reparation and recognized their dignity. But they have not yet had time to elaborate a society or build and ascertain values. The glowing focal point where the citizen and indi vidual develop and mature in a growing number of areas does not yet exist. Situated in a kind of indeterminate state they have fairly quickly convinced themselves that everything is decided elsewhere for everyone at the same time. As for the leaders, when confronted with such a situation, they hesitate and choose a policy of neutrality.

In consider- ing what the archipelago of tiny islands could mean to the continental mass of North and South America, Glissant calls the Caribbean sea the estuary of the Americas (p. 249), a zone where the richest possibilities of the New World are deposited; their exposed nature and the intensity of the process of hybridi- zation make the Caribbean, in Glissant’s view, Tavancee de PAmerique. Ce qui echappa a la masse du continent et pour- tant participe de son poids’ (‘the vanguard of America. That which escapes the mass of the continent and yet forms part of its weight’, p. 230).

In a sense all theory is driven to poetic excess. A poetics then becomes the only possible theoretical response to the turbulence of the modern world.The theory of relation is the main thrust of this book of essays. It takes notions of errance, metissage and creolisation to a new global level. Within this vision of widespread cultural encoun- ter, whole cultures become fragmented into archipelagos of cultural units. In a world of several Africas, several Europes and so on, an extreme multilingualism is the inevitable destiny of all countries. Modern communication further exacerbates contact and diversity. What Glissant envisages is a new tower of Babel (p. 117). The major consequence of such dynamic linguistic diversity is the need to redefine old notions of identity. The old mechanisms of identity, the traditional process of recognition and delimitation, can no longer be maintained in a situation of cultural chaos. Identity is no longer stable and becomes threatened by otherness.

proliferation…archipelago Shimmer of material…. Afterwinds…. Chinese atom bomb explosed underwater West Irian

All the zones shearing apart… Crumpled under the Wallace line, fires raging, infernial heat, jungline soulsmatters, the Soviet rig arrives, with his frogman heart tied to the rudder.. Operation Dominic Video… You have it play… 30 minutes… But intercut with flashbacks…. Suharto speech. Etc etc… Its an involution…. A rupture…. That draws in all seismata of the world…. 1962… The bombs… are playing out in someone’s eyeballs…. Think Philip K Dick…. precogs… My nervous illness quote…. ‘Seeing a film reversed, one that records the putting-together of reality from infancy onwards. Step by step, the ordinary growing child puts together time and space and identity. Schreber deconstructs them. (Rosemary Dinnage) Its a psychological content, the torturous interiority… a confessional narrative tone…. Is it a dark room, watching the replay… the nuclear sunsets…. Siniy goluboy, beckett, a future philip k dick world…. Where Bri is smoldered…. Where interplanetary life is normal…. moon…. PANSPERMIA… I.F. | see Francis Crick Paper.. (infective) NOTATIONAL HIEROGLYPHIC SYSTEM…. A visual, temporal, linguistic opening…. A new language…. The way JRR Tolkien created one… PEKING JAKARTA AXIS Nuclear ambitions…. Satellite ambitions…. Bandung Institute of Technology… Internal forces… Lop Nur. 1964… afterwinds blowing… history distilled to an interference pattern…. writing blown outward…shards…

THE PEOPLE’S COMMAND, GIVEN BY THE PRESIDENT/SUPREME COMMANDER OF THE ARMED FORCES OF THE REPUBLIC OF INDONESIA, COMMANDER IN CHIEF OF THE SUPREME COMMAND FOR THE LIBERATION OF WEST IRIAN AT A MASS MEETING IN JOGJAKARTA, ON 19th DECEMBER 1961.

friends, what is it that is called Indonesia? What is called Indanesia is the entire archipelago between Sabang and Merauke. What is called Indonesia is what was formerly referred to as the Dutch East Indies. What is meant by Indonesia is what the Dutch called Nederlands Indië, that entire archipelago between Sabang and Merauke which is composed of thousands of islands. That is what is called Indonesia. And, at the Round Table Conference, the Dutch undertook to recognise sovereignty, independence, over the whole of that Indonesia, ‘Irrevocable” and “unconditional”. But what happened, Friends ? Even though the promise was made at the Round Table Conference that the question of West Irian would be settled within a period of one year, the one year passed and West Irian had still not been returned to us. This was a huge lie, a great deception which was played by the Dutch. In fact. we should have understood beforehand that imperialism is always lying, always dishonest, always playing tricks. Where was Diponegoro arrested years ago ? In Magelang, 46 kilometres from here. How was it that the Dutch could arrest Diponegoro ? They lied to him first, they deceived him first : they said they were inviting him to hold talks, to negotiate. But it appeared it was not to hold talks, not to negotiate, but to be arrested. The greatest possible lies, tricks, dishonesty.

“China may once have been another Planet,” Capt. Zhang is now speculating, “embedded into the Earth thro’ some very slow collision,— long ago, all populated, with its Language and Customs, arriving from the East Northeast, aiming for the Pacific,— over-shoots, plows into Asia, pushes up the Himalaya Range,— comes to rest intact, which is how, until the first Christian Travelers, it remains,— Taking this courteously if not perhaps seriously, Dixon replies, “Yet, from all we know, from Newton onward, how could the mechanism of its approach have been other than swift and Cataclysmick?” “Why, if, within the last few miles of mutual approach, a Repulsive Force were to come into play, between the Earth and the Chinese Planet, acting counter to, and thus slowing, the Collision,— by analogy, of course, to Father Boscovich’s Theory of Repulsion, at very close distance, among the primordial Atoms of Nature.”

“IF WE LOOK AT A GLOBE OR a map of the Eastern hemisphere, we shall perceive between Asia and Australia a number of large and small islands, forming a connected group distinct from those great masses of land, and having little connection with either of them. Situated upon the Equator, and bathed by the tepid water of the great tropical oceans, this region enjoys a climate more uniformly hot and moist than almost any other part of the globe, and teems with natural productions which are elsewhere unknown. The richest of fruits and the most precious of spices are here indigenous. It produces the giant flowers of the Rafflesia, the great green-winged Ornithoptera (princes among the butterfly tribes), the man-like Orangutan, and the gorgeous Birds of Paradise. It is inhabited by a peculiar and interesting race of mankind—the Malay, found nowhere beyond the limits of this insular tract, which has hence been named the Malay Archipelago. To the ordinary Englishman this is perhaps the least known part of the globe. Our possessions in it are few and scanty; scarcely any of our travellers go to explore it; and in many collections of maps it is almost ignored, being divided between Asia and the Pacific Islands.1 It thus happens that few persons realize that, as a whole, it is comparable with the primary divisions of the globe, and that some of its separate islands are larger than France or the Austrian empire. The traveller, however, soon acquires different ideas. He sails for days, or even for weeks, along the shores of one of these great islands, often so great that its inhabitants believe it to be a vast continent. He finds that voyages among these islands are commonly reckoned by weeks and months, and that their several inhabitants are often as little known to each other as are the native races of the northern to those of the southern continent of America. He soon comes to look upon this region as one apart from the rest of the world with its own races of men and its own aspects of nature; with its own ideas, feelings, customs, and modes of speech, and with a climate, vegetation, and animated life altogether peculiar to itself.”

The Malay Archipelago extends for more than 4,000 miles in length from east to west, and is about 1,300 in breadth from north to south. It would stretch over an expanse equal to that of all Europe from the extreme west far into Central Asia, or would cover the widest parts of South America, and extend far beyond the land into the Pacific and Atlantic oceans. It includes three islands larger than Great Britain; and in one of them, Borneo, the whole of the British Isles might be set down, and would be surrounded by a sea of forests. New Guinea, though less compact in shape, is probably larger than Borneo. Sumatra is about equal in extent to Great Britain; Java, Luzon, and Sulawesi are each about the size of Ireland. Eighteen more islands are, on the average, as large as Jamaica; more than a hundred are as large as the Isle of Wight; while the isles and islets of smaller size are innumerable.”

If Europeans thought the Commission had settled the land question once and for all, for Kikuyu the real struggle over land had only just begun. Militant nationalism was conceived in Kikuyu reaction to the report of the Kenya Land Commission, and the embryo of rebellion then nurtured in the challenges mounted against every attempt by the colonial government to implement decisions contingent on the report.

How do people get to this clandestine Archipelago? Hour by hour planes fly there, ships steer their course there, and trains thunder off to it-but all with nary a mark on them to tell of their destination. And at ticket windows or at travel bureaus for Soviet or foreign tourists the employees would be astounded if you were to ask for a ticket to go there. They know nothing and they’ve never heard of the Archipelago as a whole or of anyone of its innumerable islands.
Those who go to the Archipelago to administer it get there via the training schools of the Ministry of Internal Affairs.

Those who go there to be guards are conscripted via the military conscription centers. And those who, like you and me, dear reader, go there to die, must get there solely and compulsorily via arrest. Arrest! Need it be said that it is a breaking point in your life, a bolt of lightning which has scored a direct hit on you? That it is an unassimilable spiritual earthquake not every person can cope with, as a result of which people often slip into insanity? The Universe has as many different centers as there are living beings in it. Each of us is a center of the Universe, and that Universe is shattered when they hiss at you: “You are under arrest.” If you are arrested, can anything else remain unshattered by this cataclysm? But the darkened mind is incapable of embracing these dis- placements in our universe, and both·the most sophisticated and the veriest simpleton among us, drawing on all life’s experience, can gasp out only: “Me? What for?” And this is a question which, though repeated millions and millions of times before, has yet to r~ceive an answer. Arrest is an instantaneous, shattering thrust, expulsion, somer- sault from one state into another. Imprisonment and Colonialism in Kenya, c.1930-1952: Escaping the Carceral Archipelago Joseph Needham Physics CHINA 1960s gravity If sphera why sever… Archipelago . Light. A broadcast from 1962… An inter-ference of light

One May morning in 1922 (meaning nearly winter here in the Warmbad district) a young engineering student named Kurt Mondaugen, late of the Technical University in Munich, arrived at a white outpost near the village of Kalkfontein South. More voluptuous than fat, with fair hair, long eyelashes and a shy smile that enchanted older women, Mondaugen sat in an aged Cape cart idly picking his nose, waiting for the sun to come up and contemplating the pontok or grass hut of Willem van Wijk, a minor extremity of the Administration in Windhoek. His horse drowsed and collected dew while Mondaugen squirmed on the seat, trying to control anger, confusion, petulance; and below the farthest verge of the Kalahari, that vast death, the tardy sun mocked him.Originally a native of Leipzig, Mondaugen exhibited at least two aberrations peculiar to the region. One (minor), he had the Saxon habit of attaching diminutive endings to nouns, animate or inanimate, at apparent random. Two (major), he shared with his fellow-citizen Karl Baedeker a basic distrust of the South, however relative a region that might be. Imagine then the irony with which he viewed his present condition, and the horrid perversity he fancied had driven him first to Munich for advanced study, then (as if, like melancholy, this southsickness were progressive and incurable) finally to leave depression-time in Munich, journey into this other hemisphere, and enter mirror-time in the South-West Protectorate.

Mondaugen was here as part of a program having to do with atmospheric radio disturbances: sferics for short. During the Great War one H. Barkhausen, listening in on telephone messages among the Allied forces, heard a series of falling tones, much like a slide whistle descending in pitch. Each of these “whistlers” (as Barkhausen named them) lasted only about a second and seemed to be in the low or audio-frequency range. As it turned out, the whistler was only the first of a family of sferics whose taxonomy was to include clicks, hooks, risers, nose-whistlers and one like a warbling of birds called the dawn chorus. No one knew exactly what caused any of them. Some said sunspots, others lightning bursts; but everyone agreed that in there someplace was the earth’s magnetic field, so a plan evolved to keep a record of sferics received at different latitudes. Mondaugen, near the bottom of the list, drew South-West Africa, and was ordered to set up his equipment as close to 28 degrees S. as he conveniently could. He plodded up to his turret room with its ludicrous circular bed and found that a typhoon of sferics had been bombarding the earth. He fell asleep and dreamed, for the first time since he’d left it, of Munich.