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Frantz Fanon’s legend in America starts with the story of his death in Washington on December 6, 1961. Despite his reluctance to be treated “in that country of lynchers”,14 Fanon was advised that his only chance of survival lay in seeking the leukemia treatment available at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland.
Although times have changed, and history never appears twice in the emperor’s new clothes, mais plus ça change. . . . New global empires rise to enforce their own civilizing missions in the name of democracy and free markets where once progress and development were seen as the shibboleths of a modernized, westernized salvation.
parallels would be pushing the analogy—when decolonization had the dream of a “Third World” of free, postcolonial nations firmly on its horizon, whereas globalization gazes at the nation through the back mirror, as it speeds toward the strategic denationalization of state sovereignty. The global aspirations of Third World “national” thinking belonged to the internationalist traditions of socialism, Marxism, and humanism, whereas the dominant forces of contemporary globalization tend to subscribe to free-market ideas that enshrine ideologies of neoliberal technocractic elitism. And finally,
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this end, there is an immediate argument to be made that suggests that the economic “solutions” to inequality and poverty subscribed to by the IMF and the World Bank, for instance, have “the feel of the colonial ruler,” according to Joseph Stiglitz, once senior vice president and chief economist of the World Bank.
no nation is simply young or old, new or ancient, despite the date of its independence. “New” national, international, or global emergences create an unsettling sense of transition, as if history is at a turning point; and it is in such incubational moments—Antonio Gramsci’s word for the perceived “newness” of change—that we experience the palimpsestical imprints of past, present, and future in peculiarly contemporary figures of time and meaning.
What matters today, the issue which blocks the horizon, is the need for a redistribution of wealth. Humanity will have to address this question, no matter how devastating the consequences may be.
On the one hand, France is the supreme bearer of universal Rights and Reason—“bearer even of a new category of time for the indigenous populations”;54 on the other, its various administrative avatars—assimilation, association, integration—deny those same populations the right to emerge as “French citizens” in a public sphere of their own ethical and cultural making. The principle of citizenship is held out; the poesis of free cultural choice and communal participation is withheld.
Between 1865 and 1936, fewer than three thousand Algerian Muslims had availed themselves of Napoleon’s senatus consulte, which extended French citizenship to those Muslims who agreed to divest themselves of civil status under Islamic law.55 Again, the Algerian statute of 1947 made a “grand” gesture, which was no more than a sleight of hand. The electoral system was divided into two colleges: one for Europeans and a small number of Muslims who were granted full political rights, the other for the majority of the Muslim population. Fearful of the increase in the Muslim vote, the statute allotted
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Much of the book is devoted to exploring the processes by which decolonization turns into the project of nation building; and by delving into the “bubbling trepidation”66 that exists in the moment of transition,
the anticolonial movement aims at establishing national sovereignty and cultural independence, the visionary goal of decolonization is to dismantle the “either-or” of the cold war that dictates ideological options and economic choices to Third World nations as an integral part of the supranational, xenophobic struggle for world supremacy.
In a prison cell in the notorious H-Block of Belfast prison, sometime after 1973, a young apprentice coach builder and member of the Irish Republican Army, Bobby Sands, first read Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, of which there were multiple copies on the H-Block shelves. A historian of the IRA77 suggests that Fanon’s incendiary spirit may have set alight IRA passions
The Shiite revival of the 1960s and 1970s, which developed into the Iranian revolution led by Ayatollah Khomeini, was based on a revision of Shiite doctrine influenced by Marxism and committed to the ideology of Third World liberation.
Those who claim to follow in Fanon’s footsteps, it is often said, only absorb his abstract arguments and stirring sentiments; they fail to understand his selfless engagement with the Algerian War of Independence and turn a blind eye to his failure to consider the possibility that a state built on the revolutionary violence of the FLN could slide more easily into state terror and religious fanaticism.
The years leading up to the composition of The Wretched of the Earth in 1961 were fraught with the violence and uncertainty of the Algerian War of Independence, which the French state pursued as if it were no more than the “pacification” of a civil uprising.
During a particularly brutal offensive in July 1959 named Operation Binoculars, General René Challe’s troops sought to root out the insurgents of the Armée de Libération Nationale (ALN) hiding in the high Kabylia mountains by annihilating local villages that offered support to the nationalists. The policy of regroupement, or resettlement, moved the rural population to barbed-wire compounds resembling concentration camps —fifteen thousand people sequestered in a space meant for three thousand and surrounded by bleak torched fields “without water, without sewage or sanitation of any kind,
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everyday interactions were turned into exigent events of life and death—incendiary relations between colonizer and colonized, internecine feuds between revolutionary brotherhoods,95 terrorist attacks in Paris and Algiers by the ultra right-wing OAS (Organisation Armée Secrète) and their pieds noirs supporters (European settlers in Algeria).
For Arendt, Fanon’s violence leads to the death of politics; for Sartre, it draws the fiery, first breath of human freedom. I propose a different reading. Fanonian violence, in my view, is part of a struggle for psycho-affective survival and a search for human agency in the midst of the agony of oppression.
The colonized subject is always on his guard: confused by the myriad signs of the colonial world he never knows whether he is out of line. Confronted with a world configured, the colonized subject is always presumed guilty. The colonized does not accept his guilt, but rather considers it a kind of curse, a sword of Damocles.
Preface by Jean-Paul Sartre Not so long ago the Earth numbered 2 billion inhabitants, i.e., 500 million men and 1.5 billion “natives.”
It was a golden age. Then it was over: the mouths opened of their own accord; the black and yellow voices still talked of our humanism, but it was to blame us for our inhumanity. We quite happily listened to these polite displays of bitterness. At first we were amazed and proud: “What? They can chat away all on their own?
Its writers and poets took enormous pains to explain to us that our values poorly matched the reality of their lives and that they could neither quite reject them nor integrate them.
If, the experts told us, there were the slightest hint of a demand in their lamentations, it would be for integration. Consenting to it, of course, would be out of the question: we would ruin the system, which, as you know, relies on gross exploitation. All we need do is dangle a carrot in front of their eyes and they will come running. As for anything like a revolt, we had absolutely nothing to worry about: what lucid “native” would set about massacring the dashing sons of Europe with the sole intention of becoming Europeans like them?
When Fanon, on the contrary, says that Europe is heading for ruin, far from uttering a cry of alarm, he is offering a diagnostic. Dr. Fanon claims he neither considers it to be a hopeless case—miracles have been known to exist—nor is he offering to cure it. He is stating the fact that it is in its death throes.
Whether it survives or perishes, that’s not his problem. For this reason his book is scandalous. And if you mumble, sniggering awkwardly: “He’s really got it in for us!” you have missed the true nature of the scandal, for Fanon has got nothing “in for you” at all; his book, which is such a hot issue for others, leaves you out in the cold. It often talks about you, but never to you.
In some places the metropolis makes do with paying a clique of feudal overlords; in others, it has fabricated a fake bourgeoisie of colonized subjects in a system of divide and rule; elsewhere, it has killed two birds with one stone: the colony is both settlement and exploitation.
In that case, you say, let’s throw this book out of the window. Why bother to read it since it is not meant for us? For two reasons: first, because Fanon analyzes you for his brothers and demolishes for them the mechanism of our alienations. Take advantage of it to discover your true self as an object. Our victims know us by their wounds and shackles: that is what makes their testimony irrefutable.
It’s true, you are not colonists, but you are not much better. They were your pioneers, you sent them overseas, they made you rich. You warned them: if they shed too much blood you would pretend to disown them; the same way a State—no matter which one—maintains a mob of agitators, provocateurs, and spies abroad whom it disowns once they are caught. You who are so liberal, so humane, who take the love of culture to the point of affectation, you pretend to forget that you have colonies where massacres are committed in your name.
Colonial violence not only aims at keeping these enslaved men at a respectful distance, it also seeks to dehumanize them. No effort is spared to demolish their traditions, to substitute our language for theirs, and to destroy their culture without giving them ours. We exhaust them into a mindless state. Ill fed and sick, if they resist, fear will finish the job:
Demanding yet denying the human condition makes for an explosive contradiction. And explode it does, as you and I know. And we live in an age of conflagration: it only needs the rising birth rate to worsen the food shortage, it only needs the newly born to fear living a little more than dying, and for the torrent of violence to sweep away all the barriers. In Algeria and Angola, Europeans are massacred on sight.
The “liberals” remain stunned: they admit we had not been polite enough to the “natives,” that it would have been wiser and fairer to grant them certain rights, wherever possible; they would have been only too happy to admit them in batches without a sponsor to that exclusive club—the human species; and now this barbaric explosion of madness is putting them in the same boat as the wretched colonists. The metropolitan Left is in a quandary: it is well aware of the true fate of the “natives,” the pitiless oppression they are subjected to, and does not condemn their revolt, knowing that we did
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This new man knows that his life as a man begins with death; he considers himself a potential candidate for death. He will be killed: it is not just that he accepts the risk of being killed, he is certain of it. This walking dead man has lost his wife and his sons; he has seen so much agony he prefers victory to survival; others will profit from the victory, not him; he is too weary. But this weariness of heart is the reason behind his incredible courage. We find our humanity this side of death and despair; he finds it on the other side of torture and death. We have sown the wind; he is the
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It is not right, my fellow countrymen, you who know all the crimes committed in our name, it is really not right not to breathe a word about them to anybody, not even to your own soul, for fear of having to pass judgment on yourselves. At first you had no idea, I am prepared to believe it, then you suspected, and now you know, but you still keep silent.
Decolonization is truly the creation of new men. But such a creation cannot be attributed to a supernatural power: the “thing” colonized becomes a man through the very process of liberation.
You do not disorganize a society, however primitive it may be, with such an agenda if you are not determined from the very start to smash every obstacle encountered.
The “native” sector is not complementary to the European sector. The two confront each other, but not in the service of a higher unity. Governed by a purely Aristotelian logic, they follow the dictates of mutual exclusion: there is no conciliation possible, one of them is superfluous. The colonist’s sector is a sector built to last, all stone and steel. It’s a sector of lights and paved roads, where the trash cans constantly overflow with strange and wonderful garbage, undreamed-of leftovers.
The colonist’s sector is a sated, sluggish sector, its belly is permanently full of good things. The colonist’s sector is a white folks’ sector, a sector of foreigners. The colonized’s sector, or at least the “native” quarters, the shanty town, the Medina, the reservation, is a disreputable place inhabited by disreputable people. You are born anywhere, anyhow. You die anywhere, from anything. It’s a world with no space, people are piled one on top of the other, the shacks squeezed tightly together. The colonized’s sector is a famished sector, hungry for bread, meat, shoes, coal, and light. The
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To blow the colonial world to smithereens is henceforth a clear image within the grasp and imagination of every colonized subject. To dislocate the colonial world does not mean that once the borders have been eliminated there will be a right of way between the two sectors. To destroy the colonial world means nothing less than demolishing the colonist’s sector, burying it deep within the earth or banishing it from the territory.
The Church in the colonies is a white man’s Church, a foreigners’ Church. It does not call the colonized to the ways of God, but to the ways of the white man, to the ways of the master, the ways of the oppressor.
But every time the issue of Western values crops up, the colonized grow tense and their muscles seize up. During the period of decolonization the colonized are called upon to be reasonable. They are offered rock-solid values, they are told in great detail that decolonization should not mean regression, and that they must rely on values which have proved to be reliable and worthwhile. Now it so happens that when the colonized hear a speech on Western culture they draw their machetes or at least check to see they are close to hand. The supremacy of white values is stated with such violence, the
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The colonist makes history. His life is an epic, an odyssey. He is invested with the very beginning: “We made this land.” He is the guarantor for its existence: “If we leave, all will be lost, and this land will return to the Dark Ages.” Opposite him, listless beings wasted away by fevers and consumed by “ancestral customs” compose a virtually petrified background to the innovative dynamism of colonial mercantilism. The colonist makes history and he knows it. And because he refers constantly to the history of his metropolis, he plainly indicates that here he is the extension of this
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The colonist’s world is a hostile world, a world which excludes yet at the same time incites envy. We have seen how the colonized always dream of taking the colonist’s place. Not of becoming a colonist, but of replacing him. This hostile, oppressive and aggressive world, bulldozing the colonized masses, represents not only the hell they would like to escape as quickly as possible but a paradise within arm’s reach guarded by ferocious watchdogs.
The colonized subject is constantly on his guard: Confused by the myriad signs of the colonial world he never knows whether he is out of line. Confronted with a world configured by the colonizer, the colonized subject is always presumed guilty. The colonized does not accept his guilt, but rather considers it a kind of curse, a sword of Damocles. But deep down the colonized subject acknowledges no authority. He is dominated but not domesticated. He is made to feel inferior, but by no means convinced of his inferiority. He patiently waits for the colonist to let his guard down and then jumps on
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The colonist keeps the colonized in a state of rage, which he prevents from boiling over. The colonized are caught in the tightly knit web of colonialism. But we have seen how on the inside the colonist achieves only a pseudo-petrification. The muscular tension of the colonized periodically erupts into bloody fighting between tribes, clans, and individuals.
The colonized subject also manages to lose sight of the colonist through religion. Fatalism relieves the oppressor of all responsibility since the cause of wrong-doing, poverty, and the inevitable can be attributed to God. The individual thus accepts the devastation decreed by God, grovels in front of the colonist, bows to the hand of fate, and
The peasantry is systematically left out of most of the nationalist parties’ propaganda. But it is obvious that in colonial countries only the peasantry is revolutionary. It has nothing to lose and everything to gain. The underprivileged and starving peasant is the exploited who very soon discovers that only violence pays. For him there is no compromise, no possibility of concession.
Thus the rear guard of the national struggle, that section of the people who have always been on the other side, now find themselves catapulted to the forefront of negotiations and compromise—precisely because they have always been careful not to break ties with colonialism. Before holding negotiations, most of the nationalist parties are content in the best of cases to explain and excuse this “savagery.” They distance themselves from the people’s struggle and can often be heard in private condemning those spectacular acts that have been decreed heinous by the metropolitan press and public
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Another thing is that they are convinced violent methods are ineffective. For them, there can be no doubt, any attempt to smash colonial oppression by force is an act of despair, a suicidal act. Because the colonizer’s tanks and fighter planes are constantly on their minds. When they are told we must act, they imagine bombs being dropped, armored cars rumbling through the streets, a hail of bullets, the police—and they stay put. They are losers from the start. Their incapacity to triumph by violence needs no demonstration;
In fact the reformist leaders say the same thing: “What do you expect to fight the colonists with? With your knives? With your shotguns?”
Capitalism, in its expansionist phase, regarded the colonies as a source of raw materials which once processed could be unloaded on the European market. After a phase of capital accumulation, capitalism has now modified its notion of profitability. The colonies have become a market. The colonial population is a consumer market. Consequently, if the colony has to be constantly garrisoned, if trade slumps, in other words if manufactured and industrial goods can no longer be exported, this is proof that the military solution must be ruled out. A blind domination on the model of slavery is not
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The Conference of Berlin was able to carve up a mutilated Africa among three or four European flags. Currently, the issue is not whether an African region is under French or Belgian sovereignty but whether the economic zones are safeguarded. Artillery shelling and scorched earth policy have been replaced by an economic dependency.
