The Wretched of The Earth

by Frantz Fanon

  National consciousness is nothing but a crude, empty fragile shell. The cracks in it explain how easy it is for young independent countries to switch back from nation to ethnic group and from state to tribe —a regression which is so terribly detrimental and prejudicial to the development of the nation and national unity.”22

  It is, of course, one of the most significant lessons of the postcolonial experience that no nation is simply young or old, new or ancient, despite the date of its independence. “New” national, international, or global emergences create an unsettling sense of transition, as if history is at a turning point; and it is in such incubational moments—Antonio Gramsci’s word for the perceived “newness” of change—that we experience the palimpsestical imprints of past, present, and future in peculiarly contemporary figures of time and meaning. Fanon’s description of the “crude, empty fragile shell” of emergent national histories quickens the long shadows cast by the ethnonationalist “switchbacks” of our own times, the charnel houses of ethnic cleansing: Bosnia, Rwanda, Kosovo, Gujarat, Sudan. Less spectacular, but no less tragic, are the regressions that lead to the “tribalisms” of religious fundamentalism. And then there are those deeply disabling theses of “the clash of civilizations” once turned against Islam and now targeting migrants, refugees, and minorities more generally.

  Fanon’s vision of the global future, post colonialism and after decolonization, is an ethical and political project— yes, a plan of action as well as a projected aspiration—that must go beyond “narrow-minded nationalism” or bourgeois nationalist formalism because “if nationalism is not explained, enriched, and deepened, if it does not very quickly turn into a social and political consciousness, into humanism, then it leads to a dead-end.”23 Now many readers have held that The Wretched of the Earth is long on prophecy and polemics and short on policy and planning—a deliberately universalized level of analysis that has led The Wretched of the Earth to become, as Stuart Hall has remarked, the “Bible of decolonisation.”24 It has also been justly argued that Fanon’s Third World is an iconic evocation of Africa, a symbol of Pan-African solidarity composed of his syncretic experiences of the Maghreb, West Africa, South Africa, and the Antilles, with scant awareness of Latin America (with the exception of Cuba), Asia, or the Middle East.25

  These fine historical readings have greatly enhanced our understanding of the universalizing, generalizing tendency in Fanon’s writings. There is more to be said, however, about Fanon’s universalism if it is read, as I have proposed, in relation to a concept of the Third World as a project marked by a double temporality. Decolonization demands a sustained, quotidian commitment to the struggle for national liberation, for when the high, heady wind of revolution loses its velocity, there is no “question of bridging the gap in one giant stride. The epic is played out on a difficult day to day basis and the suffering endured far exceeds that of the colonial period.”26 But the coming into being of the Third World is also a project of futurity conditional upon being freed from the “univocal choice” presented by the cold war. Fanon’s invocation of a new humanism—“Let us endeavour to invent a man in full, something which Europe has been incapable of achieving”27 —is certainly grounded in a universalist ontology that informs both its attitude to human consciousness and social reality. The historical agency of the discourse of Third Worldism, however, with its critical, political stance against the imposed univocal choice of “capitalism vs. socialism,” makes it less universalist in temper and more strategic, activist, and aspirational in character:

  The basic confrontation which seemed to be colonialism versus anticolonialism, indeed capitalism versus socialism, is already losing its importance. What matters today, the issue which blocks the horizon, is the need for a redistribution of wealth. Humanity will have to address this question, no matter how devastating the consequences may be.28

  Fanon’s call for a redistribution of wealth and technology beyond the rhetorical pieties of “moral reparation”29 is a timely reminder of the need for something like a “right” to equitable development (controversial though it may be) at a time when dual economies are celebrated as if they were global economies. And coming to us from the distances of midcentury decolonization, Fanon’s demand for a fair distribution of rights and resources makes a timely intervention in a decade-long debate on social equity that has focused perhaps too exclusively on the culture wars, the politics of identity, and the politics of recognition. Fanon’s call has certainly been heard by popular movements and social institutions committed to debt relief or forgiveness; it has led to health initiatives that see the availability of generic drugs for HIV-AIDS as an economic necessity for the “right” to life and human capability; and his influence is felt amongst reformist bodies that seek to restructure international trade and tariffs, and democratize the governance of global financial institutions, in favor of equitable assistance and redistribution.

  The actors and agents of these global initiatives of an international civil society in the making, whether they are NGOs, human rights organizations, international legal or educational bodies, or national and transnational popular movements, have done their.best to resist the coercive cultures of univocal choice. Sometimes they succeed; often they fail; most likely they survive uncertainly between success and failure. By seeing the need for equitable distribution as part of a humanistic project, Fanon transforms its economic terms of reference; he places the problem of development in the context of those forceful and fragile “psycho-affective” motivations and mutilations that drive our collective instinct for survival, nurture our ethical affiliations and ambivalences, and nourish our political desire for freedom.

  I want to turn now to Fanon’s exploration of the psycho-affective realm, which is neither subjective nor objective, but a place of social and psychic mediation, and—if I may quote Fanon out of context—“the glowing focal point where citizen and individual develop and grow. . . .”30 It is Fanon’s great contribution to our understanding of ethical judgment and political experience to insistently frame his reflections on violence, decolonization, national consciousness, and humanism in terms of the psycho-affective realm—the body, dreams, psychic inversions and displacements, phantasmatic political identifications. A psycho-affective relation or response has the semblance of universality and timelessness because it involves the emotions, the imagination or psychic life, but it is only ever mobilized into social meaning and historical effect through an embodied and embedded action, an engagement with (or resistance to) a given reality, or a performance of agency in the present tense.

  The nervous conditions and political agitations of psycho-affectivity compose and decompose the compartmentalized worlds of colonialism and metropolitan racism. In Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon dramatically explores the psycho-affective predicament of the Antillean Negro as he is assailed by the depersonalizing, discriminatory gaze of racist recognition: “Look, a Negro. . . !” The black person, a free French citizen from an overseas department of the republic, is assailed on a public thoroughfare in Lyon or Paris. He is forced to inhabit an alienating and fragmented reality as soon as “the white man’s eyes” calls forth this “other” being who is “battered down by tom-toms, cannibalism, intellectual deficiency, fetichism, racial defects. . . .”31 Black citizens are fixed as dyes in the personae of stereotypes whose persecutory force creates a sense of social death; or they are vaporized into a more general “climate of opinion” where the racialized person is seen as a threat, an infection, a symptom of social decline: “overdetermined from without . . . dissected under white eyes . . . I am fixed . . . and my long antennae pick up the catch phrases strewn over the surface of things. . . .”32 It is the peculiarity of regimes of racial oppression that they make immediately visible and vivid the more mediated and abstract practices of power such as class division, the exploitation of labor, and social hierarchies of status. “Looking at the immediacies of the colonial context,” Fanon writes, “it becomes clear that what divide
s this world is first and foremost what species, what race one belongs to. In the colonies the economic infrastructure is also a superstructure. The cause is effect: you are rich because you are white, you are white because you are rich.”33

  It is the Manichaean mentality that goes with such racial-cultural discriminations, and the economic divisions set up to accommodate and authorize them, that create the violent psycho-affective conditions that Fanon describes in The Wretched of the Earth. The colonial vocabulary is shot through with arrogance, antagonism, and anxiety: those hysterical masses; their blank faces; this vegetative existence.34 The colonized, who are often devoid of a public voice, resort to dreaming, imagining, acting out, embedding the reactive vocabulary of violence and retributive justice in their bodies, their psyches: “To blow the colonial world to smithereens is henceforth a clear image within the grasp and imagination of every colonized subject. To dislocate the colonial world. . . . To destroy the colonist’s sector. . . . Challenging the colonial world is not a rational confrontation of viewpoints. It is not a discourse on the universal, but the impassioned claim by the colonized that their world is fundamentally different.”35

  There is more to the psycho-affective realm than the subject of violence, which has become the cause célèebre of the first chapter of The Wretched of the Earth, “On Violence.” Hannah Arendt’s assault on the book in the late sixties was an attempt at staunching the wildfire it spread across university campuses, while she readily acknowledged that it was really Sartre’s preface that glorified violence beyond Fanon’s words or wishes. Sartre fanned the flames— “We have certainly sown the wind; they are the whirlwind. Sons of violence, at every instant they draw their humanity from it”36—while arguing that despite the doctrine of liberatory violence, Fanon, “the man, deep down hated it.”37 It is difficult to do justice to Fanon’s views on violence, or to appreciate his passionate approach to the phenomenology of decolonization, without acknowledging a profound internal dissonance, in French colonial thought, between the free standing of the citizen and the segregated status of the subject—the double political destiny of the same colonized person. Indeed, I want to argue that the troubled traffic between the psychic body and the body politic—the subjective experience of objective reality38 so typical of Fanon’s style —suggests that the psycho-affective relation is also “the glowing focal point where citizen and individual develop and grow. . . .”39 When Fanon insists that the colonized’s impassioned claim to difference is a challenge to the discourse of rational confrontation and universality, he is both using and opposing the very words and values —rationality, universalism — upon which the French mission civilisatrice founded its governmental practices of colonial assimilation, associationism, and integration.

  The originality of the French phenomenological approach to colonialism and decolonization lies in its awareness of the abiding instability of the system, however stable its institutions may appear. “If one chooses to understand the colonial system,” Albert Memmi writes in The Coloniser and the Colonized, “he must admit that it is unstable and its equilibrium constantly threatened.”40 The civilizing mission is grounded in a profound sense of instability—not a surmountable or sublatable “contradiction”—as the French Republic gazes anxiously upon its own mirror image as a world power. On the one hand, France is the supreme bearer of universal Rights and Reason—“bearer even of a new category of time for the indigenous populations”;41 on the other, its various administrative avatars—assimilation, association, integration—deny those same populations the right to emerge as “French citizens” in a public sphere of their own ethical and cultural making. The principle of citizenship is held out; the poesis of free cultural choice and communal participation is withheld.

  The fear of instability and disequilibrium between freedom and fealty, as I have described it, is evident in the history of colonial Algeria. Citizenship becomes the unstable, unsustainable psycho-affective site in the conflict between political and legal assimilation, and the respect for, and recognition of, Muslim ethical and cultural affiliations. Between 1865 and 1936, fewer than three thousand Algerian Muslims had availed themselves of Napoleon’s senatus consulte, which extended French citizenship to those Muslims who agreed to divest themselves of civil status under Islamic law.42 Again, the Algerian statute of 1947 made a “grand” gesture, which was no more than a sleight of hand. The electoral system was divided into two colleges: one for Europeans and a small number of Muslims who were granted full political rights, the other for the majority of the Muslim population. Fearful of the increase in the Muslim vote, the statute allotted half the seats in the Algerian assembly to the first college, and in 1948 and subsequent years, the colonial administration rigged the ballots to prevent further Muslim participation.43 Such widespread disenfranchisement bred a deep distrust in the Muslim population, leading a number of dissident groups to amalgamate in 1954 to form the Front de Liberation Nationale (FLN). Hussein Bulhan describes the process: “Gradually those who for decades sought assimilation into French society and the traditional nationalists joined forces in the FLN.”44 When “integration” was proposed by the last governor-general, Jacques Soustelle (after the Algerian War of Independence began in 1954), the “Algerian fact” of diverse regional cultures, languages, and ethnicities was recognized, so long as these “provincial”—provisional?—French citizens could be kept “secure” under the surveillant eye of the paternalistic colonial power that deeply distrusted what it saw as the regressive zealotry of Islam.45 Such a threatened equilibrium leads to a phenomenological condition of nervous adjustment, narcissistic justification, and vain, even vainglorious, proclamations of progressive principles on the part of the colonial state; and it is these very psycho-affective symptoms that reveal the injustices and disequilibrium that haunts the colonial historical record. Fanon was quick to grasp the psycho-affective implications of a subtly punishing and disabling paternalistic power:

  At the level of the unconscious, therefore, colonialism was not seeking to be perceived as a sweet, kind-hearted mother who protects her child from a hostile environment, but rather a mother who constantly prevents her basically perverse child from committing suicide or giving free rein to its malevolent instincts. The colonial mother is protecting the child from itself, from its ego, its physiology, its biology, and its ontological misfortune.46

  French colonial policy acknowledges the naked right of the colonized as individual— divested of cultural differences—to be identified as a citizen of the republic. But there exists, at the same time, a discriminatory denial or disavowal of the colonized citizen’s right to be represented and recognized as a culturally clothed subject who may not conform to the norms and practices of French civil society. Without the rights of representation and participation, in the public sphere, can the subject ever be a citizen in the true sense of the term? If the colonized citizen is prevented from exercising his or her collective and communal agency as a full and equal member of civil society, what kind of shadow does that throw on the public virtue of the French republic? This does not merely make an ass of the law of assimilationist colonialism; it creates profound ethical and phenomenological problems of racial injustice at the heart of the psycho-affective realm of the colonial relation. As Sartre perceived the problem, “One of the functions of racism is to compensate the latent universalism of bourgeois liberalism: since all human beings have the same rights, the Algerian will be made a subhuman.”47 It is this anomalous and ambivalent situation of universality-with-racism, and formal citizenship-without-equality, that is an unresolvable embarrassment within the ideals and ideologies of the civilizing mission. I use the word embarrassment advisedly, to return to the question of colonial “instability” and my discussion of the psycho-affective sphere in The Wretched of the Earth.

  “On Violence” describes the struggle between brute realities and resistant bodies in a prose that rises off the page to take you by the hand, “to touch my reader affectively, or i
n other words irrationally or sensually. For me words have a charge. I find myself incapable of escaping the bite of a word, the vertigo of a question-mark.”48 The colonialist declares the native to be “a corrosive element . . . distorting everything which involves aesthetics or morals . . . an unconscious and incurable instrument of blind forces.”49 Such an ontological obliteration of the “other” results in “the colonised’s affectivity [being put] on edge like a running sore flinching from a caustic agent,”50 as the psyche retreats into muscular spasms and hysterical symptoms. Treating the natives as something less than human—settler vigilante groups called their wanton killing of Muslim Algerians “rathunts”51—results in a process of depersonalization that creates a sense of bodily memory and a violent corporeal agency: “The shanty-town is the consecration of the colonised’s biological decision to invade the enemy citadel at all costs, and if need be, by the most underground channels” (my emphasis).52 These violent aspects of the realm of psycho-affective conflict and defense do not, however, tell the whole story to be found in The Wretched of the Earth.

  Much of the book is devoted to exploring the processes by which decolonization turns into the project of nation building; and by delving into the “bubbling trepidation”53 that exists in the moment of transition, The Wretched of the Earth opens up possibilities for positive and productive psycho-affective relations. “Reclaiming the past does not only rehabilitate or justify the promise of a national culture,” Fanon writes, “it triggers a change of fundamental importance in the colonised’s psycho-affective equilibrium.”54 The psycho-affective equilibrium achieved through the creation of a national culture passes through a “national stage” on its way to constructing a world-system based on the ideals of global equity. “This cold war . . . gets us nowhere,” Fanon argues repeatedly. “The nuclear arms race must be stopped and the underdeveloped regions must receive generous investments and technical aid. The fate of the world depends on the response given to this question.”55 If the anticolonial movement aims at establishing national sovereignty and cultural independence, the visionary goal of decolonization is to dismantle the “either-or” of the cold war that dictates ideological options and economic choices to Third World nations as an integral part of the supranational, xenophobic struggle for world supremacy. Cold war internationalism, with its dependent states and its division of the spoils, repeats the Manichaean structure of possession and dispossession experienced in the colonial world. The unraveling of the Soviet system saw the rapid emergence of ethnoregional patriotisms and nationalisms of a fissionary kind that destroyed the existence of the very possibility of civil society in the midst of civil war and ethnic cleansing.