The Wretched of the Earth in Around the World in 80 Books

Mar 16, 2013 Lindsey Z rated it liked it

I have a love/hate relationship with Fanon. I absolutely love what he does in Black Skin, White Masks, but I think it doesn't get the play in scholarship that The Wretched of the Earth does. This baffles me, because Wretched seems more experimental, less concise, not as cogent. With that said, there is much to take away from Wretched that is immensely helpful in thinking about the decolonization process and how authors represent it in literature. While I find myself leaning more and more Marxist I have a love/hate relationship with Fanon. I absolutely love what he does in Black Skin, White Masks, but I think it doesn't get the play in scholarship that The Wretched of the Earth does. This baffles me, because Wretched seems more experimental, less concise, not as cogent. With that said, there is much to take away from Wretched that is immensely helpful in thinking about the decolonization process and how authors represent it in literature. While I find myself leaning more and more Marxist (although always a feminist first and foremost) the more I read and the older I get, some of Fanon's extensive use of Marx and Marxist terms was off putting. If I had to read about the lumpen proletariat one more time, I was going to just start skipping sections of the book. Fanon's conclusion are foundational to the field of postcolonial studies: decolonization is inherently violent, the new and emergent African national bourgeoisie is a false, dictatorial replica of its colonizer mother, ruling the masses with a single national party is detrimental to African unity, and the psychological toll colonization has on both the colonizer and the colonized is, in a way, immeasurable. His solutions are likewise admirable: politically educating the masses, redistributing wealth to include the "poor" regions of the country, and dismantling the new national bourgeoisie in the process. The ideas are there, but they get bogged down in the thinking through of them. His position as a psychoanalyst becomes clear in the last section of the text in which he goes through individual case files of those mentally effected by colonization. I think Sartre, as much as I love what he has to say about colonization and his scathing critique that it was Europe's demise, misleads readers in his preface to Wretched, which is why I think most people read it as a text solely about how natives turn on one another in the process of decolonization. Yes, Fanon says this, and it is certainly true (he blames the colonial creation of regionalism for this internal violence), but he is saying so much more. Perhaps because that so much more is buried in a lot of Marxist terminology and too specific for my taste musings about Algerian independence, it's lost on some, or, rather, ignored by many. This work is seminal and, like Sartre suggests, everyone should read it. I didn't find it as life changing as I had wanted to, but that doesn't mean I don't think everyone who studies literature or history in a colonial/postcolonial context shouldn't read it, because I do. ...more

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