Thoughts on Frantz Fanon

I have been putting off writing this for quite some time just because I am afraid I will not truly do it justice. But the more I read, the more I felt the need to talk about it.

So here are some scattered ideas (at best) about the first chapter of Frantz Fanon’s “Wretched of the Earth”. 

 A passionate writer, an incredible thinker, Fanon writes about colonialism. As a psychologist, he offers some valuable insight into the psychological impact of oppression on the colonised but also as someone who joined the fight for Algeria’s independence, he is able to understand and talk about decolonization and revolution. As he wrote this, he was suffering from leukemia, but he manages to squeeze a lot of powerful ideas in this book. So, without further ado, let’s get into it.

“Decolonization is always a violent phenomenon”. That is the first thing Fanon says to us.

And this is one of the main questions he raises in this book: how necessary is violence in the fight for decolonization? He does not offer a moral justification for violence. In fact, working himself as a psychiatrist in Algeria during the war, he has seen firsthand how severely violence can affect one’s mental-health and well-being (chapter 5 is a real case-by-case description of this).

But, he argues that colonization in itself is a violent and dehumanizing process. He makes an interesting, and true, distinction that:

“In the colonial countries,.. the policeman and the soldier..maintain contact with the native and advise him by means of rifle butts and napalm not to budge.” 

The policeman and soldier, Fanon says, are the intermediaries and spokesmen for the settlers and “speak the language of pure force”, meaning colonisation can not work or be maintained without violence. (In western countries the ‘policing’ of the exploited person he says is done more through “an atmosphere of submission and inhibition.”) 

And this is where his argument becomes clearer: that the coloniser is “the bringer of violence into the home and into the mind of the native” (who came first the chicken or the egg?).

But colonisation is not just violent, it is cruel. It dehumanises the native, and divides the world into two different “species”. Fanon, beautifully puts it in this quote:

“They (the natives) are born there, it matters little where or how; they die there, it matters not where, nor how.”

The life of the colonised is one of hunger, poverty, pain and humiliation and so,  “the colonized man is an envious man” when he looks at how the coloniser lives. But he is only able to regain his humanity through liberation.

Decolonization, Fanon says, is “the veritable creation of new men”.

Another one of Fanon’s metaphors, also explored in his book ‘Black Skin, White Masks’, is that “the colonial world is a Manichean world”: it is black or white, one or the other.

The colonised and coloniser can never reconcile, and decolonization is “the meeting of two forces, opposed to each other by their very nature” so that liberation for one must mean the complete destruction, “burial in the depths of the earth or its expulsion from the country.” For some, this is a controversial assertion by Fanon that quite simply reconciliation is and ought to be impossible and peaceful co-existence cannot occur.

He talks in particular about a common theme to the narrative of colonisation, which is the civilizing mission. The colonizer declares the native to be “the enemy of values”, “absolute evil”, the barbarian, the uncivilised that must be civilised, the animal that must be tamed. “It is not enough for the settler to delimit physically the place of the native”, what is required is a complete replacement of the native with the colonizers’ values. Values that the “colonized masses mock, insult them, and vomit them up.” 

So the native, knowing that “he is not an animal…it is precisely at the moment he realizes his humanity that he begins to sharpen the weapons with which he will secure its victory” (p.g 43), bringing us back to Fanon's point on violence.

Now this resonates particularly in the contemporary world in the way that the civilising mission continuese to be perpetrated. Albeit more subtle, it hides behind the mask of racism in all its forms. But Fanon also makes a crucial point about culture. Colonisation does not just colonise the land, the wealth, the people. It aims to eradicate the culture and the mind and that makes it dangerously powerful.