after all why shouldn't i try to read it in the original french? i'm sure the broken quebecois that i haven't practiced in a few decades will be serviceable. (i'm relying heavily on translation help for this, it was not at all serviceable)

Mais la guerre continue. Et nous aurons à panser des années encore les plaies multiples et quelquefois indélébiles faites à nos peuples par le déferlement colonialiste.

but the war goes on. and we will have to bandage/heal for years to come the wounds, many and sometimes indelible [unable to be washed away], inflicted on our people by the colonialist déferlement.

déferlement is an interesting word to use here. i see it being translated as "onslaught", a word closely related to "slaughter" implying a deliberate attack. but déferlement is more literally an unfurling, something unfolding in the wind or the breaking of waves in a surging tide. fanon is talking about colonialism here almost as a force of nature, which i think is interesting in the context of both the first chapter where he talks about colonialist and colonized as separate species, and later in this chapter:

The Algerians, the veiled women, the palm trees and the camels make up the landscape, the natural background to the human presence of the French. Hostile nature, obstinate and fundamentally rebellious, is in fact represented in the colonies by the bush by mosquitoes, natives, and fever, and colonization is a success when all this indocile nature has finally been tamed. Railways across the bush, the draining of swamps and a native population which is non-existent politically and economically are in fact one and the same thing.

the colonized and colonizer occupy entirely separate social environments [milieu, in the middle of a place].

L'impérialisme, qui aujourd'hui se bat contre une authentique libération des hommes, abandonne çà et là des germes de pourriture qu'il nous faut implacablement détecter et extirper de nos terres et de nos cerveaux.

imperialism, which today battles against an authentic liberation of humanity, spreads here and there the seeds of putrescence which we must implacably find and remove by the roots from our land and from our minds.

combat liberalism. destroy the imperialist in your own mind.

fun fact: pourriture is closely related to potpourri, literally "rotten pot".

Nous abordons ici le problème des troubles mentaux nés de la guerre de libération nationale que mène le peuple algérien.

we address here the problem of mental troubles born of the war of national liberation led by the algerian people.

fanon keeps using "we", i assume it's a kind of formal style that he's adopting. i'm curious if anyone knows any more about this.

On trouvera peut-être inopportunes et singulièrement déplacées dans un tel livre ces notes de psychiatrie. Nous n'y pouvons strictement rien.

one will find it perhaps inopportune and singularly out-of-place in such a book these notes of psychiatry. we can do strictly nothing [about that].

i'm not quite sure why but this made me laugh. yeah, sorry-not-sorry we can't do anything about that, deal with it. this war and french imperialism caused this crisis of mental health that we're dealing with, i didn't want to have to deal with this, but i had no choice and so neither do you.

more later