by Frantz Fanon
Fanon was committed to creating a world-system of Third World nations that fostered a postcolonial consciousness based on a “dual emergence” of national sovereignty and international solidarity, for “it is at the heart of national consciousness that international consciousness establishes itself and thrives.”56 The hopeful symmetry of Fanon’s dual emergence was based not on a “metaphysical principle” of cultural authenticity or geopolitical exceptionalism (the African “tradition,” the Asian “temperament,” the Latin American “spirit”) but on the political and ethical principles of independence and security—a regional solidarity extended to any nation that seems to be internally vulnerable to antidemocratic governance or externally threatened by hegemonic, quasi-colonial powers.57 In many ways, Fanon’s cherished ideals of regional integration and economic collaboration on broad socialist principles of urban and agrarian development were sullied by the corrupt and nepotistic practices of the colonial bourgeoisie that he despised for its hedonistic appropriation of the role of the settler, its small-time racketeering, its lack of the “pioneering aspect, the inventive, discoverer-of-new-worlds aspect” of a progressive national bourgeoisie. (According to a World Bank Working Report, almost 40 percent of South African private wealth is held outside the country.)58 But Fanon’s belief in the critical importance of economic and technological support for “underdeveloped regions”—“the fate of the world depends on the response given to this question” —is a troubling issue that returns each time a new famine occurs, or a developing country is shackled by unredeemable debt, and these problems have had no satisfactory solution across the half century from his day to ours.
With a few exceptions, the cartography of the global south follows the contours of the Third World. The unanswered call for “development as freedom,”59 to use Amartya Sen’s excellent phrase, has a long history of failure (for which national governments must share responsibility with the international community). However, Fanon’s proleptic proposal that the postcolonial narrative of independent nation building could enter its international phase only after the end of the Cold War telescopes that long history of neglect into our times, whence it reveals the poignant proximity of the incomplete project of decolonization to the dispossessed subjects of globalization. Caught up in this spiral of history, the wretched of the earth, in our time and Fanon’s, enter the zone of psycho-affectivity and echo the horrifying call to violence. Fanon for our times.
And Fanon for other times and places . . .
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In 1966, Bobby Seale and Huey Newton read The Wretched of the Earth in a house in Oakland, and—so the story goes60—when they were arrested some months later for “blocking the sidewalk,” the text provided foundational perspectives on neocolonialism and nationalism that inspired the founding of the Black Nationalist Party. In A Panther Is a Black Cat, written in 1971, Reginald Major (Kelley) acknowledges Fanon’s influence on the Panthers. With a sexist swagger that was part of the macho style of the times, Major praises Fanon’s analysis of the colonial mentality in understanding the yardstick of “whiteness” that devalues black consciousness and results in a “cultural and psychic genocide”61 that leads to the inadequacy of black manhood. Gillo Pontecorvo’s Battle of Algiers became a cult film among the Bay Area Panthers because it was “Fanon-linked,” and young revolutionaries attentively watched its depiction of terrorist acts and the organization of covert cells. “They found satisfaction in the flick. The natives won.”62
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In the early seventies, Steve Biko’s room in the student residence at the University of Natal became the meeting place for members of the South African Students Association; it was also the intellectual center of the black consciousness movement. That dorm room in Durban was the place where Biko, “the person who brought ideas,”63 first circulated The Wretched of the Earth to his friends and comrades—writers, activists, community workers, actors, students—who were also conversant with the poetry and the politics of the Black Panther movement. Fanon’s singular contribution to the theoretical understanding of the black consciousness movement lay in his extension of the economistic theories of Marxism toward a greater emphasis on the importance of psychological and cultural liberation —the psycho-affective realm of revolutionary activism and emancipation.
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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 IRA64 suggests that Fanon’s incendiary spirit may have set alight IRA passions because of passages like this:
“The last shall be first and the first last.” Decolonisation is the putting into practice of this sentence. . . . For if the last shall be first, this will only come to pass after a murderous and decisive struggle between the two protagonists. That affirmed intention to place the last at the head of things . . . can only triumph if we use all means to turn the scale, including, of course, that of violence.
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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.65 No scholar or intellectual was more respected among the student militants who followed the People’s Mujahideen than Ali Shariati, who had read Fanon during his student days in Paris and translated The Wretched of the Earth into Persian. According to Giles Keppel, a historian of political Islam, “Shariati rendered the difference between ‘oppressors’ and ‘oppressed’ with the Koranic terms mostakbirnie (the arrogant) and mostadafine (the weakened or disinherited), thus transposing the theory of class struggle into the terminology of Islam.”66 This “translated,” hybrid term crept into Khomeini’s political rhetoric—via Shariati’s translation of Fanon—after 1978, in his attempt to broaden the appeal of his message and address a more diverse audience.
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Finally, on September 19, 2001, Richard Perle, former U.S. assistant secretary of defense (1981-87), wrote the following three passages:
There is an air of Vichyite defeatism about some of the commentary on the current war on terrorism.
We constantly hear the reiteration of such themes as “We don’t know who the enemy is,” “We don’t know where to strike them” . . . and that the “Wretched of the Earth” (to use the title of Frantz Fanon’s famous anti-colonial tract) are so desperate that they would not fear honorable death at the hands of what they see as the Great Satan.
The U.S. Defense Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld . . . [is] quite right to say that it is a totally new kind of war which the Free World now faces.67
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Fanon acknowledges the enormous significance of this phenomenological level of life when he opens his essay “On National Culture” with one of his most enigmatic and inspiring pronouncements: “Each generation must discover its mission, fulfill it or betray it, in relative opacity.”68 I turn to that issue by first returning to my beginning: What forms of unhappy consciousness prevail among the colonized who feel threatened from all sides? How does the body speak in extremis, how does the mind withstand? “Colonialism forces the colonized to constantly ask the question: ‘Who am I in reality?’”69 Fanon writes in The Wretched of the Earth. From where does the spirit of revolt arise in the midst of the confusion of “myriad signs of the colonial world”?70 How do the oppressed discover the enduring strength to found a free and just society, a national consciousness, if they are continuously aware of their own anxiety and fragility?
The Wretched of the Earth emerges, year after year, in Oakland, Natal, Belfast, Tehran, Washington, Paris, to say nothing of Bombay, where I first read it, or wherever you may be today as this book falls into your hands. Fanon is invoked repeatedly by liberal students, radical activists, human rights workers, cultural historians, literary scholars, jou
rnalists, even a former U.S. assistant defense secretary. It could be said that Fanon’s street fighting days came to an end in the 1970s and 1980s, and that he now takes his place on the bookshelves alongside CLR James, Sartre, Memmi, Marcuse, Guevara, Angela Davis. . . . 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. Marxists have traditionally distanced themselves from Fanon’s emphasis on psycho-affective factors in political reasoning while criticizing his refusal to prioritize the role of the organized proletariat in the anticolonial revolution.
The insurgent energies of the Algerian peasantry and lumpenproletariat, Fanon believed, would guard against the corruption and cooptation of “westernized” nationalist parties led by urban elites. But in the opinion of some of his FLN comrades, Fanon displayed a naive nostalgie de la boue in championing a peasantry that had become fragmented and displaced through the 1950s, some of them confined to refugee or resettlement camps in Tunisia and Morocco, others having migrated to cities in Algeria or France.71 It was in the late 1950s that Fanon’s commitment to the Algerian cause seemed to turn from a political commitment into a more inward identification, a consummate self-fashioning of himself as an Algerian. This radical indigenization of identity, like his overestimation of the peasantry, could be seen as his avoidance or enhancement of his own natal and psychic reality—a compensatory family romance that would disavow his Martinican origins,72 through a phantasmatic denial of the “unheroic assimilation” of the Antillean heritage in favor of the “virile and decolonised fraternity” of the FLN.73 Simone de Beauvoir’s memories of her conversations with Fanon flesh out this poignant and problematic predicament. “Above all I don’t want to become a professional revolutionary,”74 Fanon anxiously observed of himself, as he lamented his exilic existence as an Antillean fighting for Algerian independence.
Fanon’s involvement in the Algerian revolution was primarily as witness, doctor, diplomat, writer—or as he was once known in Tunisia, “the pamphleteer from Martinique.” (This moniker refers to his frequent contributions to El Mujahid, the Algerian nationalist newspaper, after he took up residence in Tunis, having been expelled from Algeria by the French administration in 1957.) During his tenure at the psychiatric hospital at Blida (1953—56), there were occasions on which he covertly trained the fidayine (village militias) to cope with their own attacks of terror and anxiety while they were carrying out assassination attempts; he also taught them psychological ways and physiological means of withstanding torture and resisting interrogation.75 In 1960, Fanon was involved in exploring the possibility of establishing a Saharan front in southern Algeria, to be accessed from Mali, which could provide a line of supply and support for FLN forces.76
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. French left-wing intellectuals came together under the banner of the “Manifesto of the 121” to support the Algerian nationalists, and compared the French military presence in Algeria to the “Hitlerite order”: “Does it have to be recalled that fifteen years after the destruction of the Hitlerite order, French militarism has, because of the demands of a war of this kind, succeeded in reintroducing torture and has once more institutionalised it in Europe?”77
Simone de Beauvoir, one of the staunchest supporters of the Manifesto, expressed a shared sense of disgust and despair: “Ten thousand Algerians had been herded into the Vel’s d’Hiv’ like the Jews at Drancy once before. Again I loathed it all—this country, myself, the whole world.”78 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 Liberation 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, without land to cultivate and for the most part without work. . . .”79 A couple of years earlier, in 1957, the southern edge of the Kabylia had been the site of the appalling massacre of Melouza. The rivalry between the FLN and the MNA (Mouvement Nationaliste Algérienne), which had centered on territorial control and tribal affiliation, exploded into a bloodbath when the FLN leadership ordered its operatives to “exterminate this vermin”80—a chilling, uncanny echo, half a century later, of Kurtz’s command, “Exterminate the brutes,” in Joseph Conrad’s classic tale of colonial turpitude in the Belgian Congo, Heart of Darkness. The FLN herded all males above the age of fifteen, Alistair Horne writes, “into houses and into the mosque and slaughtered them with rifles, pick-axes and knives: a total of 301.”81
Fanon forged his thinking on violence and counterviolence in these conditions of dire extremity, when everyday interactions were turned into exigent events of life and death —incendiary relations between colonizer and colonized, internecine feuds between revolutionary brotherhoods,82 terrorist attacks in Paris and Algiers by the ultra right-wing OAS (Organisation Armée Secrete) and their pieds noirs supporters (European settlers in Algeria). As a locus classicus of political resistance and the rhetoric of retributive violence, The Wretched of the Earth captures the tone of those apocalyptic times:
The colonized subject discovers reality and transforms it through his praxis, his deployment of violence and his agenda for liberation.83
But how do we get from violence to setting violence in motion? What blows the lid?84
When the Algerians reject any method which does not include violence . . . they know that such madness alone can deliver them from colonial oppression. A new type of relationship is established in the world. The peoples of the Third World are in the process of shattering their chains, and what is extraordinary is that they succeed.85
Hannah Arendt’s objection to The Wretched of the Earth has less to do with the occurrence of violence than with Fanon’s teleological belief that the whole process would end in a new humanism, a new planetary relation to freedom defined by the Third World. Collective violence engenders close political kinships like suicide squads and revolutionary brotherhoods, she wrote, but “No body politic I know was ever founded on equality before death and its actualisation in violence.”86 Arendt is, at best, only half right in her reading of Fanon. He is cautious about the celebration of spontaneous violence—“where my blood calls for the blood of the other”—because “hatred is not an agenda” capable of maintaining the unity of party organization once violent revolt breaks down into the difficult day-to-day strategy of fighting a war of independence.87 On the other hand, Sartre’s preface to The Wretched of the Earth (the nub of Arendt’s attack on Fanon’s ideas) is committed to bringing the colonial dialectic to its conclusion by carrying home— to metropolitan France — the lessons and the lesions of anticolonial violence.88 Those who adhere to principles of nonviolence in the face of colonial oppression are taunted with the ethical impossibility of their positions— “even your non-violent thoughts are a condition born of an age-old oppression. . . .”89 Sartre pares away the pieties and vanities of Enlightenment universalism to reveal its tolerance of racist ideas and practices. He confronts his compatriots with a spectacular “striptease of our humanism”90 while justifying the uses of violence to recover an ontological claim to humanity for those who have been treated as subhuman: “Sons of violence, at every instant they draw their humanity from it: we were human beings at their expense, they are making themsel
ves human beings at ours.”91
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. It does not offer a clear choice between life and death or slavery and freedom, because it confronts the colonial condition of life-in-death. Fanon’s phenomenology of violence conceives of the colonized —body, soul, culture, community, history—in a process of “continued agony [rather] than a total disappearance.”92 He describes this state of political consciousness and psychic being with a harrowing accuracy:
Exploitation, tortures, raids, racism, collective liquidations. . . [all] make of the native an object in the hands of the occupying nation. This object man, without means of existing, without a raison d’etre, is broken in the very depth of his substance. The desire to live, to continue, becomes more and more indecisive, more and more phantom-like. It is at this stage that the well-known guilt complex appears.93
