The Wretched of the Earth

by Frantz Fanon

Its definition can, if we want to describe it accurately, be summed up in the well-known words: ‘The last shall be first.’

For a colonized people, the most essential value, because it is the most meaningful, is first and foremost the land: the land, which must provide bread and, naturally, dignity. But this dignity has nothing to do with “human” dignity.

The intellectual who, for his part, has adopted the abstract, universal values of the colonizer is prepared to fight so that colonist and colonized can live in peace in a new world. But what he does not see, because precisely colonialism and all its modes of thought have seeped into him, is that the colonist is no longer interested in staying on and coexisting once the colonial context has disappeared.

Let us be honest, the colonist knows perfectly well that no jargon is a substitute for reality.

in fact, my life is worth as much as the colonist’s, his look can no longer strike fear into me or nail me to the spot and his voice can no longer petrify me. I am no longer uneasy in his presence. In reality, to hell with him. Not only does his presence no longer bother me, but I am already preparing to waylay him in such a way that soon he will have no other solution but to flee.

This is apparent in the colonized intellectual’s inaptitude to engage in dialogue. For he is unable to make himself inessential when confronted with a purpose or idea.

The people, on the other hand, take a global stance from the very start. “Bread and land: how do we go about getting bread and land?” And this stubborn, apparently limited, narrow-minded aspect of the people is finally the most rewarding and effective working model.

Zombies, believe me, are more terrifying than colonists.

Everything is permitted, for in fact the sole purpose of the gathering is to let the supercharged libido and the stifled aggressiveness spew out volcanically. Symbolic killings, figurative cavalcades, and imagined multiple murders, everything has to come out. The ill humors seep out, tumultuous as lava flows.

They are violent in their words and reformist in their attitudes.

Yes, instruments are important in the field of violence since in the end everything is based on the allocation of these instruments of force.

it is reinforced by the bloodbath in the colonies which signifies that between oppressors and oppressed, force is the only solution.