* Please note this is an adapted version of a piece originally featured at New Politics
Re: The Wretched of the Earth
Dr. Fanon,
I am writing you in regards
to your book The Wretched of the Earth. Before
discussing your book in detail, I would like to thank you for writing it. Evidently
it was written with passion. This letter serves as a means to recognize the
continued resonance your work holds amidst our ever-changing geopolitical
realities. Moreover your work, particularly its emphases on structures of power
as well as experiential learning has had a direct impact on me. Increasing my understanding
of my position in this world, The Wretched
of the Earth has influenced my decision to relocate to South Africa as a
volunteer with the Rural Women’s Movement. I anticipate the perspective gained
from this experience will be incalculable.
To begin I would like to
offer a modest summary of your work, followed by a brief critique of your
discourse vis-à-vis the lumpen proletariat, and contemporary color-blindness or
the postracial paradigm about which your work has proven prescient. I would also
like to address the reflexive nature of your work, the romantic tendencies of The Wretched of the Earth, while placing
you in dialogue with figures both present and past such as Arendt, Gelderloos
and Wright.
The Wretched of the Earth is sweeping in
its analysis of both the un/making of the colonial condition, claiming that a
system created by violence can only be destroyed through violence. However, you
certainly lay out the shortfalls of violence insofar as its destructive impact
on those responsible for rebirthing the nation as well as the need to maintain
discipline; unfettered or completely spontaneous violence is doomed to lead to
a short-lived liberation struggle. Key to this is the necessity for the
intellectual to provide a political education to the masses, himself undergoing
revitalization during the experience. Perhaps most poignantly, you note the
necessity to continue the struggle post-liberation, as white supremacy may take
a new shape in an elite-led postcolonial order.
I find the text’s discourse
on the lumpen proletariat or unemployed urbanites problematic insofar as your claim
of this group’s likelihood to become turncoats in the liberation struggle. If
they are some of the most alienated or dehumanized of the colonized, and if
violence is as cleansing as you claim, then would they not be some of the first
and most eager to heed the liberation’s call to arms? Would the liberation not
provide the most relief to these individuals, as they would experience the
greatest reinvigoration of self?
One of my favorite passages
from your book reads, “…for the colonized subject, objectivity is always
directed against him.” As I read this, I could
not help but think of how relevant that sentiment is today – one could
substitute the colonized for any marginalized group. I realized that your
statement forms the basis for oppositional arguments to so-called postracial or
color-blind policies, policies that privilege and view formal equality as both
fair and the solution to
racism. Essentially, postracialism posits racism simply as a legal constraint
thus when it is made formally illegal, such as with the end of legal
segregation in America, no further action is needed; the problem disappears. Postracialism serves to
problematize injustices, leading to a line of thought that ignores structural
imperatives; imagining that once racist law is declared illegitimate
politically, culturally or legally, racism will end. Similarly, once colonial
powers withdraw, foreign exploitation will end.
Ideologies of color-blindness
are inherently flawed as they fail to address various historical inequalities
and privileges. Perhaps the greatest contemporary manifestation of color-blindness
or postracialism and its inherent maniacal emphasis on the present is the rise
of the model-minority phenomena; used to frame initiatives such as affirmative
action not as historical correctives, but rather as special treatment at the
expense of members of more meritorious communities. The model-minority argument
posits a zero sum situation wherein groups such as South and East Asian
communities succeed due to thrift and hard work; while African-Americans
stagnate due to laziness, single parent homes and so on, thus policies that
provide resources to African-American communities deprive more deserving
Asian-American communities. Essentially a strong work ethic and fiscal
responsibility are highlighted as the exclusive reasons for success while
ignoring historical circumstances that inform the context in which communities
operate. Author Vijay Prashad notes that these respective narratives or categorizations
are superimposed onto a global context such as economic power-horse East Asia
and debt-ridden Africa.
Color-blind positions
assume that all individuals are beginning with the same resources, with the
same opportunities. This is of course not true as Mae Ngai notes that 48% of
South Asian community in the United States belongs to the professional or
business class. This is a result not of a stronger work ethic or thrift but rather
American immigration policies that favored skilled immigrants and their
relatives. Perhaps this social
amnesia evinced by the viewing of formal equality as a fresh start or an
erasure of history is a product of capitalism’s ability to renew itself and
reform our social relations. In some respects this is a domestic, metropolitan
parallel to your concerns over the role of former African liberation leaders
turned post-colonial politicians and their participation in the neo-colonial
order. Instead of erasing the past to further exploitation, the past is hailed
to justify contemporary conditions. In both situations
historical narratives are manipulated or erased to foster continued
inequalities.
Your insight
into the intellectuals on the fringes of (and later expelled from) the
nationalist parties was particularly important. These intellectuals gain much
by living amongst and interacting with the peasantry; the nation’s repository
of spontaneity, sacrifice and vitality. Throughout this process the
intellectual undergoes a psychological emancipation or a vitalization of
consciousness in a Hegelian sense. It is through these
interactions brought on by common cause of national liberation that the colonized
intellectual frees him or herself intellectually, shedding the chains of
colonial thought such as individualism. One can easily see how you
had grown intellectually from a young man in Martinique to embody these changes
as a freedom fighter in Algeria, most notably by your repeated call “…that the
last become the first.” This specific, empathic
sentiment is beautiful in its timeless social (and could be expanded to ecological)
nature. Moreover, this ethic’s continued demand to raise those at the bottom is
dynamic and adaptive insofar as a counter to the destructive ability of
capitalism to regenerate itself and reform our social relations; as new faces
and spaces are designated as disposable by the logic of capital, so too does
this tenet define a new front for liberation and uplift.
As you note,
these intellectuals are necessary to train, politically educate, and discipline
the peasantry in order to prevent “total brutality” from laying ruins to any
hope for a successful liberation struggle and also to provide the intellectual
framework needed for a true liberation in the postcolonial age. While I admire the
concept of the mutually beneficial elite-peasantry exchange, this analysis
suffers from the absence of your own position in this affair; there is no guise
of objectivity insofar as you are one of the progressive self-conscious elites
that you describe and highlight the importance of. The argument would have been
stronger had you placed yourself into it, or at least formally acknowledged
your position. You essentially spoke to the importance of yourself and your
colleagues; you are the intellectual who after “bunker[ing] down with the
people…discover[ed] the falsity” of much of Western discourse. Your mind was emancipated
from this experience as you were forced to reexamine and reconsider Western
culture and your relationship to it. Due to this challenging of hegemonic
intellectualism, your work gained credibility with readers sharing your space
and epoch but also with readers elsewhere and beyond your time.
However, your
work’s lack of personal reflexivity is all the more striking as through its
rigorous analysis of class, race and coloniality, your work has informed an
intellectual breakthrough in terms of positionality. Today it is hard to find
both a scholar or even lay person who does not try to locate themselves in
their writing; paradoxically you neglect to do so in your work. This is perhaps
all the more notable as you emphasize the power and responsibility wielded by
intellectuals; by writing this book, implicitly you recognize yourself as one.
Just a quick
note, I do think it worthwhile to put your ideas about individuals such as
yourself or conscious intellectuals into a historical context. It is very easy
to draw parallels to the vanguard expounded by
Lenin or even the notion of the
Talented Tenth put forward by
Du Bois,
especially given that all of you were members of the elite yourself. Although,
one key contrast between yourself and Lenin with early Du Bois is that rather
than challenging capitalism, Du Bois pushed for inclusion within the capitalist
framework.
Working within the capitalist structure arose from early Du Bois partially
because he was, uniquely, working as a racialized colonial citizen
(paradoxical, right?) in a metropolitan context; this
fundamentally alters one’s understanding of the possible and thus one’s aims.
Perhaps this is similar to your less (albeit still very) radical work Black Skin, White Masks written while
you were still in France.
Dr. Fanon, you
are fundamentally a romantic. In your call for a rethinking of the Third World
and well, frankly everything,
you
propagate a paradigm shift towards “negation and transformation” such as exists
in the Marxist tradition. You are echoing calls not
to settle, but rather to struggle until a new dispensation is constructed. This
is perhaps best articulated in your belief that for colonized peoples liberation
is achievable through violence, as that is how their condition was established;
systems and peoples made through violence must be remade through violence.
However, this is not on an individual level, as you note the “militant…fully
realized the price he had had to pay in his person for national independence.” Effectively, this
reclamation of their futures and their world, by the people Alain Badiou frames
as the “inexistent” or those in but not of the global order, is achieved at great cost.
Your book’s
chapter Colonial Wars and Mental
Disorders effectively demonstrates the personal ruin and sacrifice of a
generation due to the liberation struggle. This should be taken to mean that
the brutality experienced by individual martyrdom exists as part of a project
to recreate humanity by
re-instilling collective dignity. Herein lies your
conception of history, as something progressively made by and through struggle.
Colonial Wars and Mental Disorders also serves to
refute many critiques against your work including the claim by Hannah Arendt
that your work is riddled with “rhetorical excesses,” such as “hunger with
dignity is preferable to bread eaten in slavery.” Firstly, Arendt is
missing the aim of your text: Wretched
of the Earth acts as a commentary or analysis on both colonialism and the
condition of coloniality. While rhetorical or colorful writing is key, Arendt
responds to your work as if it is strictly a manifesto. More importantly, had
she read or given more weight to your final chapter she would have understood
this quote better – individual sacrifice in the act of revolution is better
than mild comfort in collective bondage.
Arendt’s observation
that nonpacifism (as meaning the inclusion, or at least lack of rejection of
violent tactics), progressed from philosophy and rhetoric to practice with the
arrival of Black power on American college campuses perhaps shows two things.
Firstly, an affirmation that simple (exclusive) compromise fails to shake
exploitive systems such as shown in your discussion of the attempts by the
national bourgeoisie to maintain their positions. Secondly, that how we
remember (non)violence is often mired in racism. For Arendt, many of the “Negro
demands [were]… silly and outrageous,” part of efforts to “lower academic standards”
and at times acceded due to white guilt. Perhaps concessions were
made (albeit incomplete) as Black Power represented an actual threat to white
supremacy.
Peter Gelderloos
notes that the ethic of nonviolence often serves to sanitize historical
narratives of struggle, pointing to the coopting of Dr. Martin Luther King’s
memory and the consistent neglect of his support for the anti-imperial
Vietnamese struggle as well as the anti-capitalist sentiments he espoused or
the censorship of the March on Washington. By selecting pacified, “feel-good”
segments from King, white anti-racists are able to stake their place in
activist society without having to reconcile their own privilege. Arguably, Arendt does
this in her presentation of Civil Rights era successes being attributed to
nonviolent politics.
I would like to note one more issue with nonviolence,
which you initially highlighted and Gelderloos has brought into contemporary
terms. Much as you point out that the colonialist bourgeoisie propagation of
nonviolence is based on their established comfort with colonialism and not with
the masses,
contemporary proponents of nonviolence rely on the violence of the state for
protection. This reliance is an implicit acceptance of state violence thereby
undermining the pacifist ethic, while leaving themselves helpless to state
endorsed or accepted violence such as at the 1979 Greensboro Massacre.
Perhaps what is most important about nonviolence then and now, is that it both relies on and derives from, the power of the
(colonial) state and thus the powerlessness of the marginalized.
Gelderloos also notes that in Wretched of the Earth’s final chapter Colonial Wars and Mental Disorders, the costs of violent revolution are made clear; however he asks
if pacifists are aware of the personal costs of their tactics. Noting that
nonpacifist groups are often more effective because the cost of intimidating
them is high, nonviolent activists make for easy prey for authorities. How do
experiences with the security apparatuses of the state affect those who adhere
to nonviolence?
One of my favorite arguments you make is that,
“Europe is literally the creation of the Third World.” This has a few important
implications: firstly as you note it makes altering the international order a
priority; reparations and the like is not simply charity but rather a
historical corrective (in many respects this argument is similar to the
discussion on model-minorities but internationalized). Vitally, you note this
requires a change in consciousness both for the colonizers and the colonized.
Intellectually, the realization of Europe’s
reliance both materially and conceptually on the rest of the world has profound
consequences. Evidently, we must reexamine and challenge existing historical,
sociological and anthropological (among other) narratives to deconstruct the
inherent binaries present. Moreover we need to retrieve lost stories, memories
and histories previously discarded in order to further our collective
understanding of humanity. Essentially, we need to look into what we previously
have emphasized and why. For instance, The Universal Declaration for Human
Rights is a direct product of the horrors of World War Two. Césaire notes that Nazism was not new to Europe, it had just not been
practiced in Europe; Nazism was colonialism returning home.
You correctly add “…Nazism transformed the whole of Europe into a genuine
colony.” If the horrors of colonialism in Europe (yet
ignored elsewhere) were strong enough to generate an entirely new field (Human
Rights), is this discipline inherently Eurocentric at best, neocolonial or
racist at worst? Moreover, what are the political implications of recovering
colonial histories from the colonized? Lastly, if we view Nazism as an
extension of colonialism making it a global phenomenon, what are the
implications for global capitalism and other structures that are seemingly
transcendent in nature?
Dr. Fanon, I think in many ways your analysis
and passion matured between Black
Skin, White Masks and Wretched of the Earth, in a somewhat similar way to the personal
trajectory of the protagonist in Richard Wright’s autobiographical text Black Boy. In your earlier work, your focus is on the
colonial condition, evinced by analyses such as that of Europeanized black man
who cannot escape his race.
In some respects this mirrors Wright’s frustration at having “…to feel that
there were feelings denied me, that the very breath of life itself was beyond
my reach.”
Just as Jean Veneuse is rejected by both white and black society,
Wright speaks of the “stunted way of life” that is “mapped out” by white
supremacy for black males and the internalization of these norms by his black
contemporaries, creating a double alienation of sorts. Together
these works serve to articulate the both the emotive and sociological
structures of racism in their respective eras and geographies.
Conversely, your final work, written in the
context of the Algerian War for Independence, emerges as a commentary threaded
with fiery confidence. For instance, though you expect the complicity of the
local elite in the neocolonial order, you do not fear this as you have greater
faith in the masses. The change in your passion and your increased confidence is
perhaps due to your change in location to Algeria but also the international
geopolitical realities of the time, wherein the global maturation of capitalism
had created a historical moment insofar as the colonized became “acutely aware
of everything he does not possess” serving as the stimulus for the colonized
individual to shift from an object acted upon to an agent.
As to
your claim that “[t]he colonized, underdeveloped man is today a political
creature in the most global sense of the term,”this is affirmed by Wright’s Hegelian
informed coming-of-age realization that “the whites… [are] as miserable as
their black victims.” A shared global passion for and belief in revolution is
also evinced in Black
Boy’s final phrase
“I would hurl words into this darkness and wait for an echo, and if an echo
sounded, no matter how faintly, I would send other words to tell, to march, to
fight, to create a sense of the hunger for life that gnaws in us all, to keep
alive in our hearts a sense of the inexpressibly human.”
This metaphysical humanity conveyed is expressed in On Violence, is worth the Colonial Disorders, and as such is justified by any means necessary.
In Richard Wright’s most famous work, Native Son, following the discovery of
the bones of the murdered Mary Dalton, the protagonist, Bigger Thomas, assuming
that white society will accuse him of raping the victim, claims a greater
predation by white supremacy against him. He describes himself as “…a long,
taut piece of rubber which a thousand hands had stretched to the snapping
point, and when he [Bigger] snapped it was rape.” The
all-consuming pressure described by Bigger is perhaps mirrored in your
description of the colonial project’s attempt to alienate the colonized from
themselves in order to build a dependency relationship - lest the colonized revert
to their natural barbarism. This
attempt to devise self-hatred and a loss of a sense of self constitutes the
greatest violation of one’s dignity as recognized in your work.
Dr. Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth has become a seminal text in my personal library.
Not only has it altered my perception of present as well as historical events,
but more so my understanding of human nature. For instance, as I read Primo
Levi describe the amorality of the conniving Jewish Prominents or turncoats in
Auschwitz, your conception of the collaboration and the loss of self experienced
by the colonized intellectual came to the fore.
This may be counterpoised with the intellectual who finds him/herself through
exposure to the ostensible other,
which has informed my decision to relocate to KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa.
Though inequities of power persist, the flow of knowledge and perspective
remains multidirectional potentially serving as liberating and revolutionary
forces for social justice; an unalterable truth both in your time and ours.
Richard Raber
Works Cited:
Arendt, Hannah. On Violence. Orlando, FL:
Harcourt Brace & Company, 1970.
Badiou, Alain. The Rebirth of History: Times of
Riots and Uprisings. Translated
by
Gregory Elliott. NY, NY: Verso, 2012.
Césaire, Aimé. Discourse on Colonialism.
Translated by Joan Pinkham. 2000 ed.
New
York, NY: Monthly Review Press, 2000.
Du Bois, W.E.B. The Souls of Black Folk. New
York, NY: Dover Publications, 1994.
Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks.
Translated by Richard Philcox. 2008 ed.
New
York, NY: Grove Press, 2008.
Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth.
Translated by Richard Philcox.
New
York, NY: Grove Press, 2004.
Gelderloos, Peter. How Nonviolence Protects the
State. Cambridge, MA: South End
Press,
2007.
Hegel, G.W.F. Phenomenology of Spirit.
Translated by A.V. Miller. New York, NY:
Oxford
University Press, 1977.
Lenin, V. I. Little Lenin Library. Vol. 14
of State and Revolution. New York,
NY:
International Publishers, 1932.
Levi, Primo. If This is a Man. Translated by
Stuart Woolf. 2000 ed. London, UK:
The
Folio Society, 2000.
Ngai, Mae. Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens
and the Making of Modern America.
2014
ed. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014.
Prashad, Vijay. Everybody Was Kung Fu Fighting:
Afro-Asian Connections and the
Myth
of Cultural Purity. Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2001.
United Nations. "The Universal Declaration of
Human Rights: History of the
Document."
un.org. Accessed April 4, 2015. http://www.un.org/en/documents/
udhr/history.shtml.
West, Cornel. Prophesy Deliverance! An
Afro-American Revolutionary Christianity.
Philadelphia,
PA: The Westminster Press, 1982.
Wright, Richard. Black Boy. 2005 ed. Modern
Classics. New York, NY:
HarperCollins
Publishers, 2005.
Wright, Richard. Native Son. 1998 ed. New
York, NY: Perennial Classics,
1998.
Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the
Earth, trans. Richard Philcox (New York, NY: Grove Press, 2004), 37.
Vijay Prashad, Everybody
Was Kung Fu Fighting: Afro-Asian Connections and the Myth of Cultural Purity
(Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2001), 41.
Fanon, The
Wretched of the Earth, 112.
Prashad, Everybody Was Kung Fu
Fighting, 40-46.
Mae Ngai, Impossible
Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America, 2014 ed.
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014), 262.
Fanon, The
Wretched of the Earth, 110-14.
V. I. Lenin, Little
Lenin Library, vol. 14, State and Revolution (New York, NY:
International Publishers, 1932), 28-29, 18.
W.E.B. Du Bois, The
Souls of Black Folk (New York, NY: Dover Publications, 1994), 65.
Cornel West, Prophesy Deliverance!
An Afro-American Revolutionary Christianity (Philadelphia, PA: The
Westminster Press, 1982), 37-40.
Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth,
55-56.
West, Prophesy Deliverance! An
Afro-American, 19.
Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth,
44, 42, 185.
Alain Badiou, The Rebirth of
History: Times of Riots and Uprisings, trans. Gregory Elliott (NY, NY:
Verso, 2012), 56.
Hannah Arendt, On Violence
(Orlando, FL: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1970), 20.
Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth,
24.
These comments reflect a flaw previously
alluded to in liberalism; that as independent agents, all have the same
opportunities. Rather than an effort to decrease academic standards,
affirmative action was designed to provide opportunities for success for capable
individuals belonging to previously excluded groups. Please see Arendt, On Violence, 18-19.
Peter Gelderloos, How Nonviolence
Protects the State (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2007), 25-27.
Gelderloos, How Nonviolence
Protects the State, 50-52.
Aimé Césaire, Discourse
on Colonialism, trans. Joan Pinkham, 2000 ed. (New York, NY: Monthly Review
Press, 2000), 36.
Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Richard
Philcox, 2008 ed. (New York, NY: Grove Press, 2008), 46-48.
Richard Wright, Black
Boy, 2005 ed., Modern Classics (New York, NY: HarperCollins Publishers,
2005), 250.
Fanon, Black
Skin, White Masks, 49.
Wright, Black
Boy, 196-97.
Richard Wright, Native Son,
1998 ed. (New York, NY: Perennial Classics, 1998), 228.
Primo Levi, If This is a Man,
trans. Stuart Woolf, 2000 ed. (London, UK: The Folio Society, 2000), 116-17.
