The Wretched of The Earth Read online

  Does the “guilt complex” lie at the very origins of violence, or does the struggle for liberation have to violently free itself of guilt in order to be effective? The double-edged nature of this question — guilt as a stimulant, or an obstacle to freedom, or possibly both—fulfills Fanon’s wish (expressed to Sartre and Beauvoir) that “all political leaders should be psychiatrists as well.”94 Fanon’s style of thinking and writing operates by creating repeated disjunctions—followed by proximate juxtapositions —between the will of the political agent and the desire of the psycho-affective subject. His discourse does not privilege the subjective over the objective, or vice versa, nor does his argument prescribe a hierarchy of relations between material reality and mental or corporeal experience. The double figure of the politician-psychiatrist, someone like Frantz Fanon himself, attempts to decipher the changing scale (measure, judgment) of a problem, event, identity, or action as it comes to be represented or framed in the shifting ratios and relations that exist between the realms of political and psycho-affective experience.

  The connections between guilt and violence are part of such a delicate balance:

  The colonized subject is always on his guard: confused by the myriad signs of the colonial world he never knows whether he is out of line. Confronted with a world configured, the colonized subject is always presumed guilty. The colonized does not accept his guilt, but rather considers it a kind of curse, a sword of Damocles. But deep down the colonized subject knows no authority. He is dominated but not domesticated. He is made to feel inferior, but by no means convinced of his inferiority. He patiently waits for the colonist to let down his guard and then jumps on him. The muscles of the colonized are always tensed. . . . The symbols of society such as the police force, bugle calls in the barracks, military parades, and the flag flying aloft, serve not only as inhibitors but also stimulants. They do not signify: “Stay where you are.” But rather “Get ready to do the right thing.” . . . This impulse to take the colonist’s place maintains a constant muscular tonus. It is a known fact that under certain emotional circumstances an obstacle usually escalates action (my emphasis).95

  It seems, at first, that this is a straightforward spectacle of Fanonian retributive violence. The origins of violence lie in a presumptive “false guilt,” which the colonized has to assume because of his powerless position; but it is a guilt that he does not accept or interiorize—“He is made to feel inferior, but by no means convinced of his inferiority.” The eruption of violence is a manifestation of this anxious act of masking, from which the colonized emerges as a guerrilla in camouflage waiting for the colonist to let down his guard so that he might jump; each obstacle encountered is a stimulant to action and a shield to hide the insurgent’s intention to take the colonist’s place. Because he is dominated by military power and yet not fully domesticated by the hegemonic persuasions of assimilation and the civilizing mission, the anticolonial nationalist is able to decipher the double and opposed meanings emitted by the sounding symbols of society, the bugle calls or police sirens: “They do not signify: ‘Stay where you are.’ But rather “Get ready to do the right thing.” From the torqued mind and muscle of the colonized subject “on guard” emerges the nationalist agent as mujahid (FLN soldier) or fidayine (FLN guerrilla).

  There is, however, another scenario that runs through this narrative of violence and is somewhat unsettling to its progress, although not unraveled by it. Here the psycho-affective imagination of violence is a desperate act of survival on the part of the “object man,” a struggle to keep alive. The “false” or masked guilt complex (as I have called it) emerges, Fanon tells us in the preceding quotation, when the very desire to live becomes faint and attenuated, “more and more indecisive, more and more phantom-like.”96 At this point, the splitting, or disjunction, between being dominated and being domesticated—the irresolvable tension between the colonized as both subject and citizen from which anticolonial violence emerges —is experienced as a psychic and affective curse rather than, primarily, as a political “cause” (in both senses of the term). The native may not accept the authority of the colonizer, but his complex and contradictory fate—where rejected guilt begins to feel like shame —hangs over him like a Damoclean sword; it threatens him with an imminent disaster that may collapse both the internal life and the external world. At this moment, the political agent may be shadowed —rather than stimulated —by the psycho-affective subject who also inhabits his bodily space. The colonizer’s constant muscular tension may turn into a hysterical rigid limb, just as Fanon observes that “the colonist is an exhibitionist.”97 The mujahid may hear the double call of siren and bugle and yet be caught “in the tightly-knit web of colonialism,”98 psychically split and politically paralyzed between the command to “Stay where you are” and the desire to “Get ready to do the right thing.” There is every possibility, as Fanon writes, “that the colonist keeps the colonized in a state of rage, which he prevents from boiling over . . . [and this] periodically erupts into bloody fighting between tribes, clans, and individuals.”99 The aspiration to do the right thing might be felled by the fragility of the individual, by atavistic animosities, by the iron hand of history, or by indecision and uncertainty, but these failures do not devalue the ethical and imaginative act of reaching out toward rights and freedoms.

  Fanon, the phantom of terror, might be only the most intimate, if intimidating, poet of the vicissitudes of violence. But poetic justice can be questionable even when it is exercised on behalf of the wretched of the earth. And if, as I have argued, the lesson of Fanon lies in his fine adjustment of the balance between the politician and the psychiatrist, his skill in altering the “scale” between the social dimension and the psycho-affective relation, then we have to admit that he is in danger of losing his balance when, for instance, he writes: “Violence can thus be understood to be the perfect mediation. The colonized man liberates himself in and through violence. The praxis enlightens the militant because it shows him the means and the end.”100 Knowing what we now know about the double destiny of violence, must we not ask: Is violence ever a perfect mediation? Is it not simply rhetorical bravura to assert that any form of secular, material mediation can provide a transparency of political action (or ethical judgment) that reveals “the means and the end”? Is the clear mirror of violence not something of a mirage in which the dispossessed see their reflections but from which they cannot slake their thirst?

  Fanon has a rich variety of readers who do not come to his work to seek the “perfect mediation” of violence. They turn to The Wretched of the Earth, generation after generation, for a more obscure reason, armed only with an imperfect sense of obligation toward the ideals they want to serve and the values they seek to preserve. The message they take away from Fanon’s book is a quieter, more contemplative one: “Each generation must discover its mission, fulfill it or betray it, in relative opacity.”101

  According to his friends, Fanon was somewhat opaque in person. There was a dark and hesitant air about him that infused his speech and writing with “an enigmatic quality, as though they contained obscure, disturbing prophecies.”102 His publisher, Francis Jeanson, called it the “bodily aspect of his intellectual approach.”103 Jean Daniel, the editor of Le Nouvel Observateur, remembers that the handshake of the dying Fanon became “more urgent and always seemed to have a message.”104 The deeper messages of poet-politicians are never as easy to decipher as the myths offered up in their names. It is for this reason that I have tried, in this essay, to trace the prophecies of Fanon’s living hand as it rises again to beckon enigmatically toward our own times, in this new translation of The Wretched of the Earth.

  Each age has its peculiar opacities and its urgent missions. The parts we play in the design and direction of historical transformations are shadowed by the contingency of events and the quality of our characters. Sometimes we break the mold; at others, our will is broken. What enables us to aspire to the fraught and fervent desire for freedom is t
he belief that human beings are capable of imagining what Fanon once described as a “time [that] must no longer be that of the moment or the next harvest but rather of the rest of the world.”105

  I would like to thank Mark Jerng and David Mulrooney for invaluable assistance with this essay, and Lia Brozgal for her excellent translations.

  Preface

  by Jean-Paul Sartre

  Not so long ago the Earth numbered 2 billion inhabitants, i.e., 500 million men and 1.5 billion “natives.” The first possessed the Word, the others borrowed it. In between, an array of corrupt petty kings, feudal lords, and a fake, fabricated bourgeoisie served as go-betweens. In the colonies, truth displayed its nakedness; the metropolises preferred it clothed; they had to get the “natives” to love them. Like mothers, of sorts. The European elite decided to fabricate a native elite; they selected adolescents, branded the principles of Western culture on their foreheads with a red-hot iron, and gagged their mouths with sounds, pompous awkward words that twisted their tongues. After a short stay in the metropolis they were sent home, fully doctored. These walking lies had nothing more to say to their brothers; from Paris, London, and Amsterdam we yelled, “Parthenon! Fraternity!” and somewhere in Africa and Asia mouths echoed “. . . thenon! . . . nity!” It was a golden age.

  Then it was over: the mouths opened of their own accord; the black and yellow voices still talked of our humanism, but it was to blame us for our inhumanity. We quite happily listened to these polite displays of bitterness. At first we were amazed and proud: “What? They can chat away all on their own? Look what we did with them!” There was no doubt in our minds they accepted our ideal since they were accusing us of not respecting it. Europe then really believed in its mission: it had Hellenized the Asians and created this new species, the Greco-Roman blacks. Pragmatic as ever, we added, quite among ourselves, “Oh let them shout, it will get it out of their system; their bark is worse than their bite.”

  Then came another generation, which shifted the question. Its writers and poets took enormous pains to explain to us that our values poorly matched the reality of their lives and that they could neither quite reject them nor integrate them. Roughly, this meant: You are making monsters out of us; your humanism wants us to be universal and your racist practices are differentiating us. We listened to them, very nonchalantly. Colonial administrators are not paid to read Hegel, so he’s seldom on their reading list, but they don’t need this philosopher to tell them that unhappy consciences get tangled up in their contradictions. Ultimate end result: nil. So let us perpetuate their misfortune; nothing will come out of it but hot air. If, the experts told us, there were the slightest hint of a demand in their lamentations, it would be for integration. Consenting to it, of course, would be out of the question: we would ruin the system, which, as you know, relies on gross exploitation. All we need do is dangle a carrot in front of their eyes and they will come running. As for anything like a revolt, we had absolutely nothing to worry about: what lucid “native” would set about massacring the dashing sons of Europe with the sole intention of becoming Europeans like them? In short, we encouraged their melancholic moods, and we thought it would not be bad, for once, to award the Goncourt Prize to a black. That was before 1939.

  1961. Listen: “Let us not lose time in useless laments and sickening mimicry. Let us leave this Europe which never stops talking of man yet massacres him at every one of its street corners, at every corner of the world. For centuries it has stifled virtually the whole of humanity in the name of a so-called ‘spiritual adventure.’” The tone is new. Who dares voice it? An African, a man from the Third World, a former colonized subject. “Europe,” he adds, “has gained such a mad and reckless momentum . . . that it is heading toward the brink from which we would be advised to remove ourselves.” In other words, Europe is done for. A truth that is hard to swallow, but of which all of us are—are we not, fellow Europeans? —convinced deep down.

  We must make one reservation, however. When one Frenchman, for example, says to another: “We’re done for!”—which, to my knowledge, has happened practically every day since 1930 —it’s a passionate discourse, burning with rage and love, where the speaker puts himself in the same boat as his fellow countrymen. And then as a rule he adds: “Unless. . .” Everyone gets the message: one cannot afford to make a single mistake. If his recommendations are not followed to the letter, then and only then will the country be done for. In short, it’s a threat, followed by a piece of advice, and such remarks shock even less because they spring from a national intersubjectivity. When Fanon, on the contrary, says that Europe is heading for ruin, far from uttering a cry of alarm, he is offering a diagnostic. Dr. Fanon claims he neither considers it to be a hopeless case —miracles have been known to exist—nor is he offering to cure it. He is stating the fact that it is in its death throes. As an outsider, he bases his diagnostic on the symptoms he has observed. As for treating it, no: he has other things to worry about. Whether it survives or perishes, that’s not his problem. For this reason his book is scandalous. And if you mumble, sniggering awkwardly: “He’s really got it in for us!” you have missed the true nature of the scandal, for Fanon has got nothing “in for you” at all; his book, which is such a hot issue for others, leaves you out in the cold. It often talks about you, but never to you. Gone are the black Goncourts and the yellow Nobels: the days of the colonized prizewinners are over. A “French-speaking” ex-native bends the language to new requirements, fashions it for his own use, and speaks to the colonized alone: “Natives of all the underdeveloped countries unite!” What a downfall. For the fathers, we were the only interlocutors; for the sons, we no longer count: we are the object of their discourse. Of course, Fanon mentions in passing our infamous crimes at Sétif, Hanoi, and Madagascar, but he does not waste time condemning them: he makes use of them. He demolishes the tactics of colonialism, the complex play of relations uniting and opposing the colonists and the “metropolitans.” For the sake of his brothers, his aim is to teach them how to outwit us.

  In short, the Third World discovers itself and speaks to itself through this voice. We know it is not a uniform world, and it still contains subjected peoples, some of whom have acquired a false independence, others who are fighting to conquer their sovereignty, and yet others who have won their freedom, but who live under the constant threat of imperialist aggression. These differences are born out of colonial history, in other words, oppression. In some places the metropolis makes do with paying a clique of feudal overlords; in others, it has fabricated a fake bourgeoisie of colonized subjects in a system of divide and rule; elsewhere, it has killed two birds with one stone: the colony is both settlement and exploitation. Europe, therefore, has hardened the divisions and conflicts, forged classes, and in some cases, racism, and endeavored by every means to generate and deepen the stratification of colonized societies. Fanon hides nothing. In order to wage the struggle against us, the former colony must wage a struggle against itself. Or rather it is one and the same thing. In the heat of combat, all domestic barriers must be torn down, the powerless bourgeoisie of racketeers and compradores, the still privileged urban proletariat and the lumpenproletariat of the shanty towns, must all align with the positions of the rural masses, the true reservoir for the national and revolutionary army. In countries where colonialism has deliberately halted development, the peasantry, when it decides to revolt, very quickly emerges as the radical class. It is all too familiar with naked oppression, suffers far worse than the urban workers, and to prevent it from dying of hunger, nothing less will do than the demolition of every existing structure. If it triumphs, the national revolution will be socialist; if it is stopped in its momentum, if the colonized bourgeoisie takes over power, the new state, despite its official sovereignty, will remain in the hands of the imperialists. The case of Katanga illustrates this fairly well. The unity of the Third World, therefore, is not complete: it is a work in progress that begins with all the colonized in every pre- or post-i
ndependent country, united under the leadership of the peasant class. This is what Fanon explains to his brothers in Africa, Asia, and Latin America: we shall achieve revolutionary socialism everywhere and all together or we shall be beaten one by one by our former tyrants. He hides nothing: neither the weaknesses nor the disagreements nor the mystification. In some places the government gets off to a bad start; in others, after a stunning success, it loses momentum; elsewhere, it has come to a halt. In order to revive it the peasants must drive their bourgeoisie into the ocean. The reader is sharply warned of the most dangerous types of alienation: the leader, the personality cult, Western culture, and equally so, the revival of African culture from a distant past. The true culture is the revolution, meaning it is forged while the iron is hot. Fanon speaks out loud and clear. We Europeans, we can hear him. The proof is you are holding this book. Isn’t he afraid that the colonial powers will take advantage of his sincerity?

  No. He is not afraid of anything. Our methods are outdated: they can sometimes delay emancipation, but they can’t stop it. And don’t believe we can readjust our methods: neocolonialism, that lazy dream of the metropolises, is a lot of hot air; the “Third Force” does not exist or if it does it is the phony bourgeoisie to which colonialism has already handed over power. Our Machiavellianism has little hold on this world, which is wide awake and hot on the trail of every one of our lies. The colonist has but one recourse: force or whatever is left of it. The “native” has but one choice: servitude or sovereignty. What does Fanon care if you read or don’t read his book? It is for his brothers he denounces our old box of mischief, positive we don’t have anything else up our sleeve. It is to them he says: Europe has got its claws on our continents, they must be severed until she releases them. The moment is right for us. Nothing can happen in Bizerta, Elizabethville, or the Algerian bled without the whole world knowing about it. The rival blocs take up opposite sides, they keep each other at bay, let us take advantage of this paralysis, let us enter history, and as we burst in let us make it universal for the first time. Let us fight. Failing other weapons, the patience of the knife will suffice.