The Wretched of The Earth

by Frantz Fanon

  In his Preface to the first edition of Peau noire, masques blancs Francis Jeanson tells how one day he wrote to Fanon asking for clarification of a particularly obscure passage in the book. An answer was duly furnished and Fanon added: “This passage is inexplicable. When I write such things I seek to touch my reader in his emotions, i.e., irrationally, almost sensually.”

  Further on in his letter Fanon goes on to confess how he is drawn to the magic of words and that for him language is the ultimate refuge, once it is freed from conventions, from its voice of reason and the terror of coming face-to-face with oneself. “Words for me have a powerful effect. I feel it impossible to escape from the sting of a word or the vertigo of a question mark.” He went on to say that, like Césaire, he wanted to sink beneath the stupefying lava of words that have the color of quivering flesh.

  When it came to translating Fanon I was constantly aware of the man as a doctor, as a humanist and an intellectual from the Third World. He would never let me forget it. His use of the human anatomy to illustrate the colonized’s behavior can be seen throughout his work.

  I now had to develop a strategy for my own translation. I had a choice of keeping the rather heavy, pompous style and language of the 1950s or deciding to update and modernize it without losing Fanon’s voice. I had in mind a young reader who would be swept along by Fanon’s thoughts in the language of the twenty-first century. Without betraying Fanon I decided to tighten up the text, update the vocabulary, and retrieve his lost voice.

  One of the translation problems I had to settle, which came up time amd time again throughout the text, was the translation of “colon,” the European inhabitant of a colony once the colonization process has got under way. I was tempted to use the word colonizer since it sounded right pitted against the word colonized. But a colonizer composes the original force that colonized the country and does not convey the meaning of the European who settled, lived, worked, and was born in the colony. Colonial has two different associations, one for the English, especially in East Africa, and one for the Americans, pertaining to the thirteen British colonies that became the United States of America or to that period; settler was being used by the media in the Mideast crisis to refer to the Jewish settlers and would be the immediate reference for a reader. I first decided on a compromise between the French word colon and the English colonist and coined “colonist.” My editor, however, decided otherwise, and we kept the word colonist. I felt that by keeping the word colon the term not only spoke to the English-speaking reader but also remained faithful to Fanon, for whom Algeria was the constant point of reference. Colon, gendarme, metropole, maquis, indigene; the Arabic terms of çof, zar, djebel, donar, Roumi, razzia, fellah and djemaa. All words from a French colonial context, all terms from an Algerian context which, however hard Fanon tries to universalize, bring us back to his country of origin and his country of adoption.

  And finally there is that word dreaded by all translators of French Caribbean texts: negre. Constance Farrington did not deal with the problem or perhaps she didn’t have to at the time: she merely translated negre and noir by the word Negro, which was accepted usage in the 1950s and ’60s, and in the process lost a subtle difference. But if the translator decides to update and modernize his vocabulary, then he is faced with a sticky issue. In Randall Kennedy’s fascinating book Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word (New York: Pantheon Books, 2002) he cites Professor Clarence Major as saying that when it is used by black people among themselves it is a racial term with undertones of warmth and goodwill . . . reflecting a tragicomic sensibility that is aware of black history. It is also “the filthiest, dirtiest, nastiest in the English language.” The word negre would have been used in the same way by Fanon, the Martinican, whether referring to the black man in general or putting it in the mouth of the oppressor as an insult. It was a word rehabilitated by the black intelligentsia of the time and thrown back at the European as the supreme weapon. One of the great achievements of Césaire’s epic poem “Notebook of a Return to My Native Land” is to reappropriate the negative term and give it a positive meaning. In Pour la revolution africaine (Toward the African Revolution), in the chapter “Antillais et Africains” Fanon describes how the word nègre was used for the Africans by both Europeans and French Caribbeans alike. He quotes the example of a boss in Martinique demanding too much from his employee and getting the response: “Si vous voulez un nègre, allez le chercher en Afrique” (“If you’re looking for a nigger, go and find him in Africa”). To quote a more modern example of this, we only have to look at the opening lines of Chris Rock’s signature skit: “I love black people, but I hate niggers. . . . Every time black people want to have a good time, niggers mess it up.” It wasn’t until Césaire came along that “for the first time, we saw a lycée teacher, and therefore an apparently worthy man, simply tell West Indian society that it is ‘good and well to be a nigger.’ Of course it was a scandal.” And Fanon ends his chapter on national culture with the words: “There can be no such thing as rigorously identical cultures. To believe one can create a black culture is to forget oddly enough that ‘Negroes’ are in the process of disappearing, since those who created them are witnessing the demise of their economic and cultural supremacy.” Now that the vocabulary has evolved it places the translator in a twenty-first-century predicament. I have updated the word Negro, when he refers to the peoples of Africa or the diaspora, to black, and used nigger when it is the colonizer referring to the same. In some cases, I have left Negro in its historical context. But I have lost something in the translation of the word nègre, for it has both a sting and an embrace, and that is irretrievable. I have modernized the word indigène to colonized or colonized subject, ridding it of today’s pejorative sense of native although Fanon, in keeping with the colonial vocabulary of his time, uses both terms indifferently in the very same paragraph.

  So how relevant is Fanon today? I can remember going into the FNAC bookstore in Paris last year to buy an edition of Les Damnés de la Terre and being asked: Fanon? How do you spell it? Oh yes, here we are, as the girl consulted her computer, Les dames de la terre! Fanon obviously hasn’t left his mark here, I thought, and moved on. But how far can we move on and forget him? We cannot forget the martyrdom of the Palestinians when we read in Fanon’s chapter “On Violence”: “At the individual level, violence is a cleansing force. It rids the colonized of their inferiority complex, of their passive and despairing attitude. It emboldens them and restores their self-confidence.” We cannot forget the lumpenproletariat, the wretched of the earth, who still stream to Europe from Africa, Iraq, Afghanistan, and the countries of the former Eastern bloc, living on the periphery in their shantytowns and refugee centers, waiting for a better life. The bourgeoisie in Africa still unreservedly and enthusiastically adopt the thinking mechanisms characteristic of the West, still has alienated to perfection its own thoughts and grounded its consciousness in typically foreign notions, still turns its back on the majority of its population, vacationing on the French Riviera and building colossal palaces for prestige sake, joining hands in “this huge caravan of corruption” and becoming, as Fanon says: “a bourgeois bourgeoisie that is dismally, inanely, and cynically bourgeois.” And his thoughts on culture differentiating Africa from the Americas, visioning the disappearance of black culture in favor of national cultures, regarding traditions basically stifling whereas a culture is constantly changing, modernizing, and penetrated by other influences. He was wrong of course on many points, especially pan-Africanism, the role of the peasantry in leading a revolution, and the fate of Algeria. But at the time, his analyses of alienation and decolonization were extraordinary eye-openers, not only for a complacent Europe but for his fellow islanders, blinded to reality. It is his anger, conviction, and humanism that will always remain with us.

  So this has been my fourth encounter with Fanon, and perhaps the most intimate. The other three were encounters with the others, the colonized, the colonial subjects. This tim
e I had come face-to-face with the man himself and had to take on the extraordinary task of gaining access to the author’s voice and meaning, and initiating communication with the target audience. The very fact that I had lived in Africa, France, and the French Caribbean helped enormously in understanding the society and culture that had shaped and influenced Fanon. But I no longer had the good fortune to be able to pop into the next room and ask him what exactly he meant in such and such a paragraph as I can when translating Maryse Conde. I had accompanied him on his life’s journey, but the closest I could get to the man himself was being in the company of Bertene Juminer, Assia Djebar, Roland Thesauros, Edouard Glissant, Mme Christiane Diop of Présence Africaine, and Aimé Césaire, all of whom had crossed his path. You might think that translating the dead gives you a whole lot of freedom —there’s nobody there looking over your shoulder or making rude comments. But in fact there are crowds of people looking over your shoulder—from the readers of the original translation to the postcolonial scholars who have staked their reputation on Fanon’s ideas. Translating a dead man means stepping very warily through a minefield littered with the debris of another time and another translation. But the very fact of looking back was a driving force to modernize the text and look ahead. In Fanon’s case, translating the dead was a case of translating life itself. I felt I had to bring a dead translation back to life. To quote John Felstiner on Celan, he hoped that in translating Celan’s poems he felt something akin to what Celan felt writing them. Retranslating Fanon, rewriting Fanon almost gives me the same kick. As if I am the one writing down his thoughts in English for the first time.

  And then there is that secret feeling that married to a writer from Guadeloupe, from the French Caribbean, I have always known Fanon and understood his dilemma and ambition as a Martinican. No one sums up this personality of the French Caribbean better than Aimé Césaire in “Hommages à Frantz Fanon” published in Presence Africaine in 1962:

  Perhaps Fanon reached such heights and his vision was so broad because he was a French Caribbean, in other words he had started off so far down and from such a narrow base. Perhaps only a French Caribbean, in other words one so destitute, so depersonalized could have set off with such determination to conquer himself and plenitude; only a French Caribbean, in other words one so mystified to start off with, could manage to dismantle with such skill the most elusive mechanisms of mystification; only a French Caribbean, finally, could want so desperately to escape powerlessness through action and solitude through fraternity.

  — Richard Philcox

  1 Simone de Beauvoir, The Force of Circumstance, Vol. II: The Autobiography of Simone de Beauvoir, trans. Peter Green (New York: Paragon House, 1992), 317.

  2 Claude Lanzmann, as cited by David Macey in Frantz Fanon: A Life (London: Granta Books, 2000), 489-90. Much of the biographical detail and personal incident comes from Simone de Beauvoir’s account of Fanon in The Force of Circumstance, and from David Macey’s remarkably informed biography.

  3 Joseph Alsop, “Passing of New Left’s Hero an Odd Facet of U.S. History,” in Washington Post, February 21, 1969, A21.

  4 Macey, 489.

  5 Ibid.

  6 de Beauvoir, 329.

  7 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (WE), 238.

  8 WE, 2, 50.

  9 WE, 84.

  10 WE, 14.

  11 WE, 141.

  12 Assia Djebar, Le blanc de I’Algérie (Paris: Albin Michel, 1995), 106-7, cited in Macey, 506.

  13 Macey, 503.

  14 WE, 40.

  15 Joseph E. Stiglitz, Globalization and Its Discontents (New York: W. W. Norton, 2003), 40.

  16 Anil K. Rajvanshi, “Key Issues in Rural Electrification,” published in Projects Monitor, 16 October 2003, http://pune.sancharnet.in/nariphaltan/ruralelec.htm.

  17 WE, 3.

  18 WE, 5.

  19 Ibid.

  20 WE, 56.

  21 WE, 55.

  22 WE, 97.

  23 WE, 144.

  24 Interview with Stuart Hall in Frantz Fanon: Black Skin, White Masks. dir. Isaac Julien (UK: Arts Council of England, 1996).

  25 Macey, 469.

  26 WE, 90.

  27 WE, 236.

  28 WE, 55.

  29 WE, 40.

  30 WE, 40.

  31 Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (New York: Grove Press), 116.

  32 Ibid.

  33 WE, 5.

  34 WE, 7.

  35 WE, 6.

  36 Jean-Paul Sartre, Colonialism and Neocolonisalism, trans. Haddour, Brewer, and McWilliams (London: Routledge, 2001), 149.

  37 Ibid., 158.

  38 Robert J. C. Young, Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction (Oxford: Blackwells, 2001), 274. Young provides a most cogent and clarifying introductory account of Fanon’s life and work.

  39 WE, 40.

  40 Albert Memmi, The Coloniser and the Colonised (Boston: Beacon Press, 1967) 120.

  41 James D. LeSueur, Uncivil War: Intellectuals and Identity Politics During the Decolonization of Algeria (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), 22.

  42 Ibid., 20. I am indebted to this excellent work for historical information on the civilizing mission.

  43 Paul Clay Sorum, Intellectuals and Decolonization in France (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1977), 60.

  44 Hussein Abdilahi Bulhan, “Revolutionary Psychiatry of Fanon,” in Rethinking Fanon: The Continuing Dialogue, ed. Nigel Gibson (Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 1999), 155.

  45 LeSueur, 23-27.

  46 WE, 149.

  47 Sartre, 45.

  48 Macey, 159.

  49 WE, 6.

  50 WE, 19.

  51 Bulhan, in Gibson, 155.

  52 WE, 81.

  53 WE, 161.

  54 WE, 148.

  55 WE, 61.

  56 WE, 180.

  57 WE, 179.

  58 Paul Collier, Anke Hoeffler, and Catherine Pattillo, “Flight Capital as a Portfolio Choice,” World Bank Policy Research Working Paper no. 2066 (February 1999).

  59 See Amartya Sen, Development as Freedom (New York: Anchor Books), (see Oxford UP, 1999).

  60 Sandra Adell, ed., African American Culture (Detroit, MI: Gale Research, 1996), 50-51.

  61 Reginold Major, A Panther Is a Black Cat (New York: William Morrow, 1971), 138-39.

  62 Ibid.

  63 N. Barney Pityana, M. Ramphele, M. Mpumiwana, and L. Wilson, eds., Bounds of Possibility: The Legacy of Steve Biko and Black Consciousness (Cape Town, South Africa: David Phillip, 1991), 28-29, 109, 147.

  64 Richard English, Armed Struggle: The History of the IRA (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 197-99, 234-35.

  65 Gilles Keppel, Jihad: The Trail of Political Islam, trans. Anthony F. Roberts (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002). My account derives from this book.

  66 Ibid.

  67 Richard Perle, “Get Governments out of Terrorism Business,” National Post, September 19, 2001, A16.

  68 WE, 145.

  69 WE, 182.

  70 WE, 16.

  71 Mohamed Harbi, quoted in Macey, 481.

  72 See Albert Memmi’s remarkable essay, “The Impossible Life of Frantz Fanon,” in Massachusetts Review (Winter 1973), 9-39, and Dominated Man: Notes Toward a Portrait (New York: Orion Press. 1968).

  73 François Verges, Monsters and Revolutionaries: Colonial Family Romances and Métissage (Durham: Duke University Press), 211.

  74 de Beauvoir, 317.

  75 de Beauvoir, 315.

  76 Macey, 437-44. Once again, Macey provides the definitive account of the Mali expedition.

  77 Manifesto, quoted in Macey, 449.