The Wretched of The Earth

by Frantz Fanon

  The criminality of the Algerian, his impulsiveness, the savagery of his murders are not, therefore, the consequence of how his nervous system is organized or specific character traits, but the direct result of the colonial situation. The fact that the Algerian patriots discussed this issue, that they were not afraid to challenge the beliefs inculcated in them by colonialism, that they understood each was a screen for the other and in reality they were committing suicide by pitting themselves against their neighbor, was to have an immense impact on the revolutionary consciousness. Once again, the colonized subject fights in order to put an end to domination. But he must also ensure that all the untruths planted within him by the oppressor are eliminated. In a colonial regime such as the one in Algeria the ideas taught by colonialism impacted not only the European minority but also the Algerian. Total liberation involves every facet of the personality. The ambush or the skirmish, the torture or the massacre of one’s comrades entrenches the determination to win, revives the unconscious and nurtures the imagination. When the nation in its totality is set in motion, the new man is not an a posteriori creation of this nation, but coexists with it, matures with it, and triumphs with it. This dialectical prerequisite explains the resistance to accommodating forms of colonization or window dressing. Independence is not a magic ritual but an indispensable condition for men and women to exist in true liberation, in other words to master all the material resources necessary for a radical transformation of society.

  Conclusion

  Now, comrades, now is the time to decide to change sides. We must shake off the great mantle of night which has enveloped us, and reach for the light. The new day which is dawning must find us determined, enlightened and resolute.

  We must abandon our dreams and say farewell to our old beliefs and former friendships. Let us not lose time in useless laments or 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 Europe has brought the progress of other men to a halt and enslaved them for its own purposes and glory; for centuries it has stifled virtually the whole of humanity in the name of a so-called “spiritual adventure.” Look at it now teetering between atomic destruction and spiritual disintegration.

  And yet nobody can deny its achievements at home have not been crowned with success.

  Europe has taken over leadership of the world with fervor, cynicism, and violence. And look how the shadow of its monuments spreads and multiplies. Every movement Europe makes bursts the boundaries of space and thought. Europe has denied itself not only humility and modesty but also solicitude and tenderness.

  Its only show of miserliness has been toward man, only toward man has it shown itself to be niggardly and murderously carnivorous.

  So, my brothers, how could we fail to understand that we have better things to do than follow in that Europe’s footsteps?

  This Europe, which never stopped talking of man, which never stopped proclaiming its sole concern was man, we now know the price of suffering humanity has paid for every one of its spiritual victories.

  Come, comrades, the European game is finally over, we must look for something else. We can do anything today provided we do not ape Europe, provided we are not obsessed with catching up with Europe.

  Europe has gained such a mad and reckless momentum that it has lost control and reason and is heading at dizzying speed towards the brink from which we would be advised to remove ourselves as quickly as possible.

  It is all too true, however, that we need a model, schemas and examples. For many of us the European model is the most elating. But we have seen in the preceding pages how misleading such an imitation can be. European achievements, European technology and European lifestyles must stop tempting us and leading us astray.

  When I look for man in European lifestyles and technology I see a constant denial of man, an avalanche of murders.

  Man’s condition, his projects and collaboration with others on tasks that strengthen man’s totality, are new issues which require genuine inspiration.

  Let us decide not to imitate Europe and let us tense our muscles and our brains in a new direction. Let us endeavor to invent a man in full, something which Europe has been incapable of achieving.

  Two centuries ago, a former European colony took it into its head to catch up with Europe. It has been so successful that the United States of America has become a monster where the flaws, sickness, and inhumanity of Europe have reached frightening proportions.

  Comrades, have we nothing else to do but create a third Europe? The West saw itself on a spiritual adventure. It is in the name of the Spirit, meaning the spirit of Europe, that Europe justified its crimes and legitimized the slavery in which it held four fifths of humanity.

  Yes, the European spirit is built on strange foundations. The whole of European thought developed in places that were increasingly arid and increasingly inaccessible. Consequently, it was natural that the chances of encountering man became less and less frequent.

  A permanent dialogue with itself, an increasingly obnoxious narcissism inevitably paved the way for a virtual delirium where intellectual thought turns into agony since the reality of man as a living, working, self-made being is replaced by words, an assemblage of words and the tensions generated by their meanings. There were Europeans, however, who urged the European workers to smash this narcissism and break with this denial of reality.

  Generally speaking, the European workers did not respond to the call. The fact was that the workers believed they too were part of the prodigious adventure of the European Spirit.

  All the elements for a solution to the major problems of humanity existed at one time or another in European thought. But the Europeans did not act on the mission that was designated them and which consisted of virulently pondering these elements, modifying their configuration, their being, of changing them and finally taking the problem of man to an infinitely higher plane.

  Today we are witnessing a stasis of Europe. Comrades, let us flee this stagnation where dialectics has gradually turned into a logic of the status quo. Let us reexamine the question of man. Let us reexamine the question of cerebral reality, the brain mass of humanity in its entirety whose affinities must be increased, whose connections must be diversified and whose communications must be humanized again.

  Come brothers, we have far too much work on our hands to revel in outmoded games. Europe has done what it had to do and all things considered, it has done a good job; let us stop accusing it, but let us say to it firmly it must stop putting on such a show. We no longer have reason to fear it, let us stop then envying it.

  The Third World is today facing Europe as one colossal mass whose project must be to try and solve the problems this Europe was incapable of finding the answers to.

  But what matters now is not a question of profitability, not a question of increased productivity, not a question of production rates. No, it is not a question of back to nature. It is the very basic question of not dragging man in directions which mutilate him, of not imposing on his brain tempos that rapidly obliterate and unhinge it. The notion of catching up must not be used as a pretext to brutalize man, to tear him from himself and his inner consciousness, to break him, to kill him.

  No, we do not want to catch up with anyone. But what we want is to walk in the company of man, every man, night and day, for all times. It is not a question of stringing the caravan out where groups are spaced so far apart they cannot see the one in front, and men who no longer recognize each other, meet less and less and talk to each other less and less.

  The Third World must start over a new history of man which takes account of not only the occasional prodigious theses maintained by Europe but also its crimes, the most heinous of which have been committed at the very heart of man, the pathological dismembering of his functions and the erosion of his unity, and in the context of the community, the fracture, the stratification and
the bloody tensions fed by class, and finally, on the immense scale of humanity, the racial hatred, slavery, exploitation and, above all, the bloodless genocide whereby one and a half billion men have been written off.

  So comrades, let us not pay tribute to Europe by creating states, institutions, and societies that draw their inspiration from it.

  Humanity expects other things from us than this grotesque and generally obscene emulation.

  If we want to transform Africa into a new Europe, America into a new Europe, then let us entrust the destinies of our countries to the Europeans. They will do a better job than the best of us.

  But if we want humanity to take one step forward, if we want to take it to another level than the one where Europe has placed it, then we must innovate, we must be pioneers.

  If we want to respond to the expectations of our peoples, we must look elsewhere besides Europe.

  Moreover, if we want to respond to the expectations of the Europeans we must not send them back a reflection, however ideal, of their society and their thought that periodically sickens even them.

  For Europe, for ourselves and for humanity, comrades, we must make a new start, develop a new way of thinking, and endeavor to create a new man.

  On Retranslating Fanon, Retrieving a Lost Voice

  I suppose I first met Frantz Fanon when I went to Africa, to Senegal in 1968 as an English teacher. At the age of twenty-three I was a naive young Englishman leading a sheltered life who was about to discover the meaning of underdevelopment and colonization. My vision of Africa was nil and I had as much insight into Senegalese society as a brochure at a travel agent. Rereading some of the notes I made at the time I appeared to be more interested in finding a fan, buying a moped and renting an apartment than what was going on around me. The fact that the school textbooks I had to use talked about daffodils and snow or that half of my forty pupils to a class fell asleep at three in the afternoon when the thermometer reached forty degrees Celsius seemed odd but it took me two years of teaching to put two and two together and confront the issues of underdevelopment and colonization. My political consciousness was aroused and I returned home with more questions than answers: one of them being, What on earth am I doing here? to paraphrase Bruce Chatwin. Eight years after independence Senegal still had all the trappings of a French colony and Dakar was a compartmentalized world, which Fanon described so vividly in the opening chapter on violence in The Wretched of the Earth.

  This was the world I was destined to work in, live in, and play in, and the other sector, the “native” sector, could only be glimpsed through the windows of the embassy’s chauffeur-driven car or perhaps when we strayed on our mopeds into areas where friends working for the American Peace Corps used to live. And when at embassy receptions or dinner parties the conversation would inevitably revolve around “them,” the others, it was, as Fanon says, often couched in zoological terms, referring to the odors, the stink, the hordes, the swarming, seething, sprawling population vegetating under the sun.

  The year was 1968 and, true to the assimilation of a French colony, Senegal mimicked the events of May 1968 in France. Except they lasted for an entire year and both school pupils and university students deserted their classrooms in a vague attempt to change the order of their world and forge ahead with a genuine decolonization. But this was no revolution in the Fanonian sense and the students were content merely to sit and wait, instead of “blowing the colonial world to smithereens” and creating an agenda for total disorder. Just south of Senegal’s border, in Guinea, Sékou Touré’s resounding “No” to France, which met with admiration and applause from Third World revolutionaries, evidently had little chance of repeating itself in Senghor’s Senegal.

  My second encounter with Fanon must have been on my return to France in 1971. One year before Britain joined the Common Market I was not only forced to apply for a work permit, but also undergo a series of medicals, mandatory for immigrants from nonmember European Union countries. Most of the immigrants, of course, were from North Africa, and Algeria in particular. And it was here I witnessed that very special relationship, based on humiliation and contempt, that exists between the French and the Algerians. We were all made to line up in front of a nondescript building near the boulevard périphérique and once inside, submitted to a series of humiliating medical examinations that would allow us to apply for a work permit at another line at the Paris Préfecture. It was obvious that all the clichés about the Algerian’s criminal impulsiveness, his indolence, his thefts, his lies and rapes, which had been inculcated into the French bureaucrats’ minds before, during, and after the Algerian war, rose to the surface and treatment was dealt out accordingly. There was a long way to go before that colossal task, described by Fanon, of rein-troducing man into the world, a man in full, could be achieved with the crucial help of the European masses who still rallied behind the position of their governments and media on colonial issues.

  My third encounter with Fanon came with my many visits to Martinique and Guadeloupe, the island contexts that were to shape and mold the young Fanon. The sheer assimilation to France’s cultural, educational, and political penetration not only turned him into a French intellectual (The New York Review of Books in 1966 described him as a “Black Rousseau . . . His call for national revolutions is Jacobin in method, Rousseauist in spirit, and Sartrian in language —altogether as French as can be.”) but also forced him to question and challenge the very nature of the colonized subject. The alienation of his black-skinned, white-masked fellow islanders made him realize that if colonialism was not fought and defeated, then the islands of Martinique and Guadeloupe would disappear, swallowed up by the tide of assimilation. He somehow sensed that the bravado of the Martinicans was a lot of hot air, that they would never rise up against their colonizers and he’d do better to put his ideas into practice in the French departement of Algeria where the men had the guts of their convictions. On his return from his final visit to Martinique in 1951, Alice Cherki (Frantz Fanon: Portrait, Paris: Editions du Seuil, 2000) quotes him as saying, “I met more milquetoasts than men.” Commenting on the tragic events of 1959 in Martinique to his friend Bertene Juminer while in Tunis, he told him: “Let them pick up their dead, rip their insides out and parade them in open trucks through the town. . . . Let them yell out: ‘Look what the colonialists have done!’ But they won’t do anything of the sort. They’ll vote a series of symbolic motions and start dying of poverty all over again. In the end, this outburst of anger reassures the colonialists. It’s merely a way of letting off steam, a bit like a wet dream. You make love to a shadow. You soil the bed. But the next morning everything is back to normal. And you don’t think any more about it” (Présence Africaine, 1st semester 1962: “Hommage à Frantz Fanon,” p. 127).

  Any visitor from outside France visiting the French islands of the Caribbean is immediately struck by the overwhelming presence of a metropolis seven thousand kilometers away, the extraordinary alienation of a petite bourgeoisie more attuned to France than their own destiny, and he or she cannot but admire Fanon’s lucidity. Perhaps this is one of the reasons why he is studied more in the universities of the English-speaking world than in France and the French Caribbean where the skeletons of the Algerian war and the color hierarchy, respectively, are too close for comfort. Perhaps this is one of the reasons why Fanon’s latest biographer, David Macey, and his new translator are two Englishmen, two islanders, who not only understand Fanon’s love-hate, off-again/on-again relationship with France, but are also fascinated by the only French-speaking Caribbean intellectual who, as Edouard Glissant says, “really matched action to words by espousing the Algerian cause” (Le Discours Antillais, Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1981, p. 36). As David Macey says, “It was his anger that was so attractive.” After all we Brits have a long history of angry young men. And then there is the way he has been treated — pulled in all directions by postcolonial scholars, made to fit their ideas and interpretations—and a great sense of injustice
comes to mind every time Fanon is mentioned.

  So this brings me to why I have crusaded for a new English translation of Fanon. First of all I was tired of people asking me if I translated anyone else besides Maryse Conde. But more important, I felt the need to challenge my skills at translating another type of text, one that defined as a theory the subject matter of alienation, colonization, and the color complex in so many of the French Caribbean novels I had already translated. Secondly, I felt that Fanon’s had not done him justice. I felt that his voice had got distorted and he should be given a second chance to be heard. John Felstiner wrote in his book Translating Neruda: The Way to Macchu Picchu that “perhaps the real ‘original’ behind any translation occurs not in the written poem, but in the poet’s voice speaking the verse aloud . . . a translator may also pick up vocal tones, intensities, rhythms, and pauses that will reveal how the poet heard a word, a phrase, a line, a passage. . . . What translation comes down to is listening.” I have the good fortune to be in possession of a tape of Fanon’s address to the First Congress of Black Writers and Artists in Paris in 1956. I have listened to that tape over and over again, and although Fanon’s voice is not particularly charismatic, in fact it is rather bland, I was struck by the way he uses language and the emphasis he places on many of the words. He hammers his thoughts home in a very precise, cut-and-dried manner. There is even the slightest hint of hysteria, a controlled anger, of someone who would not like to be contradicted, perhaps even the voice of an écorché vif, a tormented soul, as Francis Jeanson thought of him. Ato Sekyi-Otu, who wrote Fanon’s Dialectic of Experience (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996) argues that we should read Fanon’s texts “as though they form one dramatic dialectical experience” rather than considering his statements “irrevocable propositions and doctrinal statements.” “With what immensely complex and compelling force Fanon’s texts speak to us when we read their contents as speech acts in the moving body of a dramatic narrative!” And there is drama behind his voice born out of urgency as he worked against the clock. Knowing that Les Damnés de la Terre had been dictated to his wife during his final year, I used the oral tone I had captured over the tape in my translation of The Wretched of the Earth and endeavored to make it read more like an oral presentation with that earnestness of voice he was known for. In fact the many repetitions and lyrical, not to say delirious, digressions in Les Damnés de la Terre are proof of a man dictating his text with the knowledge that he has little time left to live and desperate to put his thoughts, every single one of them, down on paper.