Frantz Fanon Documentary - Black Skin, White Mask - 1/5
Explores the life and work of the psychoanalytic theorist and activist Frantz Fanon who was born in Martinique, educated in Paris and worked in ...
Frantz Fanon Documentary - Black Skin, White Mask - 3/5
Explores the life and work of the psychoanalytic theorist and activist Frantz Fanon who was born in Martinique, educated in Paris and worked in ...
Frantz Fanon Documentary - Black Skin, White Mask - 5/5
Explores the life and work of the psychoanalytic theorist and activist Frantz Fanon who was born in Martinique, educated in Paris and worked in ...
Iggy, the Kid and the grey area
EILEEN BATTERSBY
Lost Memory of Skin By Russell Banks Clerkenwell Press, 416pp. £12.99
LIFE NEVER PROMISED the Kid anything; his mother did not so much raise him as share living space between enacting various dramas with her many boyfriends. He was small for his age and not so lucky with friends; as for girls, his most intense experience of them, aside from watching his favourite porn queen pole-dance, was courtesy of internet pornography. Nothing went well, not even his stint in the army, which ended when he was caught selling pornographic movies to his fellow soldiers. All the Kid ever had was his pet iguana, Iggy. At 21, the Kid is both invisible and all too visible, “not quite dead but not alive either”.
Russell Banks, whose work includes Affliction (1989); The Sweet Hereafter (1991); a superb short-fiction collection, The Angel on the Roof (2000); and The Darling (2005), a political thriller set partly in Liberia, is one of the United States’ bravest, most daring writers. In Lost Memory of Skin he again explores the world of the marginalised; it is his novel Rule of the Bone (1995) brought graphically up to date.
