The struggle for freedom against discrimination, exploitation and imperialist legacy is at the heart of the French-Algerian novelist Xavier Le Clerc’s writing. He chooses five masterpieces by freedom fighters which move readers to the core.
The Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon
Fanon was a psychotherapist who exposed the devastating consequences of imperialism on the natives both economically and psychologically.
Orientalism by Edward W Said
A brilliant study on this ideological movement which combines colonial fantasies and cultural prejudices towards the East, creating an ‘otherness’.
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Notes of a Native Son by James Baldwin
One of the most powerful and heart-aching voice for freedom, from a dormitory for Algerian immigrants in Paris to the civil rights movement in the US.
I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
In the American south of the 1930s, Angelou grew up with her grandmother. This is a very moving and autobiographical novel on racism and poverty.
The Stranger by Albert Camus
Meursault is a French settler who kills a native so-called Arab on a beach of Algiers. His strange indifference to both his crime and the recent loss of his mother will lead him to be sentenced to death. This detachment could be an allegory of the colonial system, which remained indifferent to the fate of Indigenous people.
