The Wretched of The Earth Read online

  The Wretched of the Earth

  OTHER WORKS BY FRANTZ FANON

  PUBLISHED BY GROVE PRESS:

  Black Skin, White Masks

  A Dying Colonialism

  Toward the African Revolution

  THE WRETCHED

  OF THE EARTH

  Frantz Fanon

  Translated from the French

  by Richard Philcox

  with commentary by

  Jean-Paul Sartre

  and

  Homi K. Bhabha

  Copyright © 1963 by Présence Africaine

  English translation copyright © 2004 by Richard Philcox

  Foreword copyright © 2004 by Homi K. Bhabha

  Preface copyright © 1961 by Jean-Paul Sartre

  Originally published in the French language by Francois Maspero éditeur, Paris, France, under the title Les damnés de la terre, copyright © 1961 by Francois Maspero éditeur S.A.R.L.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, or the facilitation thereof, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Any members of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or publishers who would like to obtain permission to include the work in an anthology, should send their inquiries to Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 841 Broadway, New York, NY 10003.

  Published simultaneously in Canada

  Printed in the United States of America

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Fanon, Frantz, 1925-1961.

  [Damnés de la terre. English]

  The wretched of the earth / Frantz Fanon ; translated from the French by Richard

  Philcox ; introductions by Jean-Paul Sartre and Homi K. Bhabha.

  p. cm.

  Originally published: Damnés de la terre. Paris : F. Maspero, 1961.

  ISBN-10: 0-8021-4132-3

  ISBN-13: 978-0-8021-4132-3

  1. France—Colonies—Africa. 2. Algeria—History—1945-1962. I. Philcox,

  Richard. II. Title.

  DT33.F313 2004

  960’.097 1244—dc22 2004042476

  Grove Press

  an imprint of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

  841 Broadway

  New York, NY 10003

  Distributed by Publishers Group West

  www.groveatlantic.com

  09 10 11 9 8 7

  Contents

  Foreword: Framing Fanon, by Homi K. Bhabha

  Preface, by Jean-Paul Sartre

  I. On Violence

  On Violence in the International Context

  II. Grandeur and Weakness of Spontaneity

  III. The Trials and Tribulations

  of National Consciousness

  IV. On National Culture

  Mutual Foundations for National Culture

  and Liberation Struggles

  V. Colonial War and Mental Disorders

  Series A

  Series B

  Series C

  Series D

  From the North Africans Criminal

  Impulsiveness to the War of National Liberation

  Conclusion

  On Retranslating Fanon, Retrieving a Lost Voice

  Foreword: Framing Fanon

  by Homi K. Bhabha

  The colonized, underdeveloped man is a political creature in the most global sense of the term.

  Frantz Fanon: The Wretched of the Earth

  And once, when Sartre had made some comment, he [Fanon] gave an explanation of his egocentricity: a member of a colonised people must be constantly aware of his position, his image; he is being threatened from all sides; impossible to forget for an instant the need to keep up one’s defences.

  Simone de Beauvoir, The Force of Circumstance

  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”,1 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. Accompanied by a CIA case officer provided by the American Embassy in Tunis, Fanon flew to Washington, changing planes in Rome, where he met Jean-Paul Sartre but was too enfeebled to utter a single word. A few days later, on October 3, Fanon was admitted to the hospital as Ibrahim Fanon, a supposedly “Libyan” nom de guerre he had assumed to enter a hospital in Rome after being wounded in Morocco during a mission for the Algerian National Liberation Front.

  For my brother Sorab: doctor of my soul; healer of my mind. —HKB

  His body was stricken, but his fighting days were not quite over; he resisted his death “minute by minute,” a friend reported from his bedside, as his political opinions and beliefs turned into the delirious fantasies of a mind raging against the dying of the light. His hatred of racist Americans now turned into a distrust of the nursing staff, and he awoke on his last morning, having probably had a blood transfusion through the night, obsessed with the idea that “they put me through the washing machine last night.”2 His death was inevitable. “We did everything we could,” his doctor reported later, “but in 1961 there wasn’t much you could do . . . especially when he came to us so late.”3 Perhaps it was the writing of The Wretched of the Earth in a feverish spurt between April and July of 1961 that contributed to this fatal delay; when his wife, Josie Fanon, read him the enthusiastic early reviews of the book, he could only say, “That won’t give me back my bone marrow.”4 On the day of his death, the French police seized copies of The Wretched of the Earth from the Paris bookshops.5 After his death, Simone de Beauvoir remembered seeing Fanon’s photograph all over Paris for a couple of weeks, “on the cover of Jeune Afrique, in the window of the Maspero bookstore, younger, calmer than I had ever seen him, and very handsome.”6

  A colonized person must constantly be aware of his image, jealously protect his position, Fanon said to Sartre. The defenses of the colonized are tuned like anxious antennae waiting to pick up the hostile signals of a racially divided world. In the process, the colonized acquire a peculiar visceral intelligence dedicated to the survival of body and spirit. Fanon’s two most influential texts, Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth, evoke the concrete and contrasting worlds of colonial racism as experienced in metropolitan France in the 1950s and during the anticolonial Algerian war of liberation a decade later. Is his work lost in a time warp? Is his impassioned plea that “the Third World must start over a new history of man”7 merely a vain hope? Does such a lofty ideal represent anything more than the lost rhetorical baggage of that daunting quest for a nonaligned postcolonial world inaugurated at the Bandung Conference in 1955. Who can claim that dream now? Who still waits in the antechamber of history? Did Fanon’s ideas die with the decline and dissolution of the black power movement in America, buried with Steve Biko in South Africa, or were they born again when the Berlin Wall was dismembered and a new South Africa took its place on the world’s stage? Questions, questions. . . .

  As we catch the religiosity in Fanon’s language of revolutionary wrath—“the last shall be the first,” “the almighty body of violence rearing up . . .”8 — and run it together with his description of the widening circle of national unity as reaching the “boiling point” in a way that “is reminiscent of a religious brotherhood, a church or a mystical doctrine,”9 we find ourselves both forewarned and wary of the ethnonationalist religious conflicts of our own times. When we hear Fanon say that “for the people only fellow nationals are ever owed the truth,”10 we furiously object to such a narrow and dangerous definition of “the
people” and “the truth.” To have Fanon uphold the view that the building of national consciousness demands cultural homogeneity and the disappearance or dissolution of differences is deeply troubling. Is he not dangerously outdated? Fanon’s best hopes for the Algerian revolution were taken hostage and summarily executed, first by a bureaucratized military rule that violated his belief “that an army is never a school for war, but a school for civics. . . ,”11 and then by the rise of fundamentalist groups like the Islamic Salvation Front. Josie Fanon looked out of her window in the El Biar district of Algiers in October 1988 only to find scenes of carnage. In violently quelling a demonstration in the street below, the army had enflamed the passions of Algerian youths, who responded by torching police cars before they were felled by a barrage of bullets. Speaking to her friend the Algerian writer Assia Djebar on the telephone, Josie sighed: “Oh Frantz, the wretched of the earth again.”12 The legacy of Fanon leaves us with questions; his virtual, verbal presence among us only provokes more questions. And that is as it should be. “O my body, make of me always a man who questions!” was Fanon’s final, unfinished prayer at the end of Black Skin, White Masks.

  The time is right to reread Fanon, according to David Macey, his most brilliant biographer, because “Fanon was angry,” and without the basic political instinct of anger there can be no hope for “the wretched of the earth [who] are still with us.”13 What hope does Fanon’s anger hold for us today? Although times have changed, and history never appears twice in the emperor’s new clothes, mais plus çα 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. As if such civic, public goods were exportable commodities; as if these “other” countries and cultures were innocent of the leavening spirit of freedom; as if the deplorable tyrannies and dictatorships of our day, which must be destroyed, were not themselves part of the intricate negotiations, and internecine histories, of world powers and their political interests; as if any civilizing mission, despite its avowed aims, had ever been free of psychological terror, cultural arrogance, and even physical torture. “The colonized, underdeveloped man is today a political creature in the most global sense of the term,”14 Fanon writes in The Wretched of the Earth, and it is my purpose, almost half a century later, to ask what might be saved from Fanon’s ethics and politics of decolonization to help us reflect on globalization in our sense of the term.

  It must seem ironic, even absurd at first, to search for associations and intersections between decolonization and globalization— 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, while it was the primary purpose of decolonization to repossess land and territoriality in order to ensure the security of national polity and global equity, globalization propagates a world made up of virtual transnational domains and wired communities that live vividly through webs and connectivities “on line.” In what way, then, can the once colonized woman or man become figures of instruction for our global century?

  To 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. “They help to create a dual economy in which there are pockets of wealth.. . . But a dual economy is not a developed economy.”15 It is the reproduction of dual, unequal economies as effects of globalization that render poorer societies more vulnerable to the “culture of conditionality,” through which what is purportedly the granting of loans turns, at times, into the peremptory enforcement of policy. These dual economies claim to sustain diverse worlds of opportunity, consisting of global villages, silicon valleys, and oases of outsourcing dotted across the North and the South. The landscape of opportunity and “choice” has certainly widened in scope, but the colonial shadow falls across the successes of globalization. Dual economies create divided worlds in which uneven and unequal conditions of development can often mask the ubiquitous, underlying factors of persistent poverty and malnutrition, caste and racial injustice, the hidden injuries of class, the exploitation of women’s labor, and the victimization of minorities and refugees. For instance, “India shining,” the 2004 election slogan of the “high tech” Hindu nationalist BJP government, failed to mention the darker, daily reality of the 63 percent of rural households that do not have electricity and the ten to fifteen hours of blackouts and brownouts that afflict those that do on any given day.16

  Global duality should be put in the historical context of Fanon’s founding insight into the “geographical configuration” of colonial governance,17 his celebrated description of the Manichaean or compartmentalized structure of colonial society. The generic duality that spans the global world of colonized societies is “a world divided in two . . . inhabited by different species.”18 Spatial compartmentalization, Macey acutely argues, is typical of the social structure of settler societies like Algeria, but demographic duality is also found in other colonial societies that were divided between the club and the bazaar or the cantonment and the civil lines. Fanon’s emphasis on the racialization of inequality does not, of course, apply uniformly to the inequities of contemporary global underdevelopment. However, the racial optic —if seen as a symbolic stand-in for other forms of social difference and discrimination —does clarify the role played by the obscuring and normalizing discourses of progress and civility, in both East and West, that only “tolerate” differences they are able to culturally assimilate into their own singular terms, or appropriate within their own untranslated traditions. As Fanon puts it in what is perhaps the most quoted (and quarreled over) passage in The Wretched of the Earth:

  The singularity of the colonial context lies in the fact that economic reality, inequality, and enormous disparities in lifestyles never manage to mask the human reality. Looking at the immediacies of the colonial context, it is clear that what divides this world is first and foremost what species, what race one belongs to. In the colonies the economic infrastructure is also a superstructure.19

  In my view, The Wretched of the Earth does indeed allow us to look well beyond the immediacies of its anticolonial context—the Algerian war of independence and the African continent—toward a critique of the configurations of contemporary globalization.

  This is not because the text prophetically transcends its own time, but because of the peculiarly grounded, historical stance it takes toward the future. The critical language of duality—whether colonial or global —is part of the spatial imagination that seems to come so naturally to geopolitical thinking of a progressive, postcolonial cast of mind: margin and metropole, center and periphery, the global and the local, the nation and the world. Fanon’s famous trope of colonial compartmentalization, or Manichaeanism, is firmly rooted within this anticolonial spatial tradition. But there is another time frame at work in the narrative of The Wretched of the Earth that introduces a temporal dimension into the discourse of decolonization. It suggests that the future of the decolonized world—“The Third World must start over a new history of Man . . .”—is imaginable, or achievable, only in the process of resisting the peremptory and polarizing choices that the superpowers impose on their “client” states. Decolonization can truly be achieved only with the destruction of the Manichaeanism of the cold war; and it is this belief that enables the insights of The W
retched of the Earth to be effective beyond its publication in 1961 (and the death of its author in that year), and to provide us with salient and suggestive perspectives on the state of the decompartmentalized world after the dismemberment of the Berlin Wall in 1989.

  Fanon is resolute that the Third World should follow the socialist path, “based on the principle that man is the most precious asset.”20 But he is equally insistent that the Third World “must not be content to define itself in relation to values which preceded it. . . . The basic issue with which we are faced is not the unequivocal choice between socialism and capitalism such as they have been defined by men from different continents and different periods of time” (my emphasis).21 If decolonization can be achieved only through the destruction of the “compartmentalized” colonial system, then the “new humanism” of the Third World cannot properly emerge until the bipolar tensions, contradictions, and dependencies of the cold war are brought to an end. There are two histories at work in The Wretched of the Earth: the Manichaean history of colonialism and decolonization embedded in text and context, against which the book mounts a major political and ethical offensive; and a history of the coercive “univocal choices” imposed by the cold warriors on the rest of the world, which constitute the ideological conditions of its writing. In attempting to think proleptically of questions of freedom and fairness beyond the cold war, Fanon intriguingly projects unfinished business and unanswered questions related to the mid-twentieth century and the “end” of empire into the uncertain futures of the fin de siècle and the end of the cold war. It is in this sense that his work provides a genealogy for globalization that reaches back to the complex problems of decolonization (rather than the simpler story of the death of communism and the triumph of free-market neoliberalism), and it could be said, both factually and figuratively, that The Wretched of the Earth takes us back to the future. Reflect, for instance, on Fanon’s far-reaching wariness about the national consciousness of “young” nations, then absent it from his wider critique of the “underdeveloped” nationalist bourgeoisie of postcolonial countries and listen to his statement as a weather report on our own day: