I spent the morning of this day as I've spent most mornings this summer, trying to save a life, adding a few words, a few sentences to the long letter I'm addressing to you, Frantz Fanon, dead almost half a century before I begin writing to you, writing just about every day, outdoors when weather permits, sitting each morning in the garden of a house in France, the country you claimed, Fanon, as your nation, fought and bled for, wounded near Lyon in 1944, and then fought against during the war for Algerian independence until you died of leukemia, they say, in 1961, in a hospital in America, the country I claim as mine. France your country, French your language, though you were born in Martinique, a Caribbean island thousands of miles away from where I sit this evening thinking about you, Fanon, about your short, more than full life, about the fact that sixty-five years of my very full life have passed no less swiftly than the thought of them that just now passed through my mind. Though your story's extraordinary, it's also like mine, like anybody's, just another story, but since I've chosen to tell it or it's chosen me, for reasons I'm still attempting to figure out as I proceed, reasons that may be why I proceed, I know a life's at stake.
