Frantz Fanon

THE WRETCHED DF THE EARTH

Preface by JEAN-PAUL SARTRE

Translated by CONSTANCE FARRINGTON

T GROVE PRESS

New York

Foreword: Fram

ing Fanon by H

omi K. B

habha

The colonized, underdeveloped m

an is a political creature in the m

ost global sense of the term.

Frantz Fanon: The Wretched ofthe Earth

And once, w

hen Sartre had made som

e comm

ent, he [Fanon] gave an explanation ofhis egocentricity: a m

ember ofa colonised

people must be constantly aw

are of his position, his image; he is

being threatened from all sides; im

possible to forget for an instant the need to keep up one's defences.

Simone de B

eauvoir, The Force ofCircumstance

Frantz Fanon's legend in Am

erica starts with the story of his death

in Washington on D

ecember 6,1961. D

espite his reluctance to be treated "in that country oflynchers", I Fanon w

as advised that his only chance ofsurvival lay in seeking the leukem

ia treatment

available at the National Institutes of H

ealth in Bethesda, M

ary-land. A

ccompanied by a C

IA case officer provided by the A

meri-

can Embassy in Tunis, Fanon flew

to Washington, changing

planes in Rom

e, where he m

et Jean-Paul Sartre but was too

For my brother Sorab: doctor of m

y soul; healer of my m

ind.-HK

B

Simone de Beauvoir, The Force of Circum

stance, Vol. II: The Autobiog-raphy ofSim

one de Beauvoir, trans. Peter Green (N

ew York: Paragon H

ouse, 1992),317.

vii

ix viii

FOREW

ORD

enfeebled to utter a single word. A

few days Fanon w

as admitted to the hospital as Ibrahim

J:'anon, a suppos-edly "Libyan" nom

de guerre he had assumed to enter a hospital

in Rom

e after being wounded in M

orocco during a mission for

the Algerian N

ational Liberation H

is body was stricken, but his fighting days were not quite over;

he resisted his death "minute by m

inute," a friend reported from

bedside, as his political opinions and beliefs turned into the delirious fantasies of a m

ind raging against the dying of the light. H

is hatred of racist Am

ericans now turned into a distrust of the

nursing staff, and he awoke on his last m

orning, having probably had a blood transfusion through the night, obsessed w

ith the idea "they put m

e through the washing m

achine last night."z His

was inevitable. "W

e did everything we could," his doctor

reported later, "but in 1961 there wasn't m

uch you could do ... especially w

hen he came to us so late.'"

Perhaps it was the writ-

ing ofThe Wretched ofthe Earth in a feverish spurt betw

een April

and July of 1961 that contributed to this fatal delay; when his

Josie Fanon, read him the enthusiastic early review

s of the book, he could only say, "That w

on't give me back m

y bone m

arrow."4 O

n the day ofhis death, the French police seized cop-ies ofThe W

retched ofthe Earth from the Paris bookshops. 5 A

fter death, Sim

one de Beauvoir rem

embered 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

* *

*

2 Claude Lanzm

ann, as cited by David M

acey in Frantz Fanon: A Life (Lon-

don: Granta Books, 2000), 489-90. M

uch of the biographical detail and per-sonal incident com

es from Sim

one de Beauvoir's account ofFanon in The Force ofCircllm

stance, and from D

avid Macey's rem

arkably informed biography.

3 Joseph Alsop, "Passing of N

ew Left's H

ero an Odd Facet of U

.S. History,"

in Washington Post, February 21,1969, A

ZL 4 M

acey, 489. 5 rbid. 6 de Beauvoir. 329.

.........._.,......_

"__

......

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A colonized person m

ust constantly be aware of his im

age, jeal-protect his position, Fanon said to Sartre. T

he defenses of the colonized are tuned like anxious antennae w

aiting to pick up the hostile signals of a racially divided w

orld. In the process, the colonized acquire a peculiar visceral intelligence dedicated to the survival of body and spirit. Fanon's tw

o most influential

texts, Black Skin, White M

asks and The Wretched of the Earth,

evoke the concrete and contrasting worlds of colonial racism

as experienced in m

etropolitan France in the 1950s and during anticolonial A

lgerian war ofliberation a decade later. Is his w

ork in a tim

e warp? Is his im

passioned plea that "the Third World

must start over a new

history of man"7 m

erely a vain hope? Does

such a lofty ideal represent anything more than the lost rhetori-

cal baggage of that daunting quest for a nonaligned postcolonial w

orld inaugurated at the Bandung C

onference in 1955. vVho can claim

that dream now

? Who still w

aits in the antechamber of

history? Did Fanon's ideas die w

ith the decline and dissolution of the black pow

er movem

ent in Am

erica, buried with Steve Biko

in South Africa, or w

ere they born again when the B

erlin Wall

was dismem

bered and a new South A

frica took its place on the w

orld's stage? Questions, questions ....

we catch the religiosity in Fanon's language of revolution-ary w

rath -"the last shall be the first," "the alm

ighty body ofvio-lence rearing up ..."

8-and run it together w

ith his description of the w

idening circle of national unity as reaching the "boiling point" in a w

ay that rem

iniscent of a religious brotherhood, a church or a m

ystical doctrine,"9 we find ourselves both fore-

warned and w

ary of the ethnonationalist religious conflicts ofour ow

n times. W

hen we hear Fanon say that "for the people

fellow nationals are ever ow

ed the truth,"l0 we furiously object

7 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (W

E), 238.

8 WE, 2, 50.

9 WE, 84.

10 WE, 14.

x xi

FOREW

ORD

to such a narrow and dangerous definition of "the people" and

"the truth." To have Fanon uphold the

that the building of national consciousness dem

ands cultural homogeneity and the

disappearance or dissolution of differences is deeply troubling. Is he not dangerously outdated? Fanon's best hopes for the A

l-gerian revolution w

ere taken hostage and summ

arily executed, first by a bureaucratized m

ilitary rule that violated his belief "that an arm

y is never a school for war, but a school for civics ... ," II

and then by the rise of fundamentalist groups like the Islam

ic Salvation Front. Josie Fanon looked out of her w

indow in the EI

Biar district ofA

lgiers in October 1988 only to find scenes of car-

nage. In violently quelling a demonstration in the street

the army had enflam

ed the passions ofAlgerian youths, w

ho re-sponded by torching police cars before they w

ere felled by a bar-rage of bullets. Speaking to her friend the A

lgerian writer

Djebar on the telephone, Josie sighed: "O

h Frantz, the wretched

of the earth again."12 The legacy of Fanon leaves us w

ith ques-tions; his virtual, verbal presence am

ong us only provokes more

questions. And that is as it should be. "0

my body, m

ake of me

a man w

ho questions!" was Fanon's final, unfinished

prayer at the end of Black Skin, White M

asks. T

he time is right to reread Fanon, according to D

avid Macey,

his most brilliant biographer, because "Fanon w

as angry," and w

ithout the basic political instinct ofanger there can be no hope for "the w

retched of the earth [who] are still w

ith us."13 What

hope does Fanon's anger hold for us today? Although tim

es have changed, and history never appears hvice in the em

peror's new

clothes, mais plus ra change. ... N

ew global em

pires rise to en-force their ow

n civilizing missions in the nam

e of democracy

free markets w

here once progress and development w

ere

11 WE, 141.

12 Assia Djcbar, Le blanc de l'Algerie

Albin M

ichel, 106-7,

cited in Macey, 506.

13 Macey, 503.

FOREW

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seen as the shibboleths of a modernized, w

esternized salvation. As if such civic, public goods w

ere exportable comm

odities; as if these "other" countries and cultures w

ere innocent of the leav-ening spirit of freedom

; as if the deplorable tyrannies and dicta-torships ofour day, w

hich must be destroyed, w

ere not themselves

part of the intricate negotiations, and internecine histories, of w

orld powers and their political interests; as if any civilizing m

is-despite its avow

ed aims, had ever been free of psychological

terror, cultural arrogance, and even physical torture. "The colo-

nized, underdeveloped man is today a political creature in the m

ost global sense of the term

,"14 Fanon writes in The W

retched ofthe

Earth, and it is purpose, alm

ost half a century later, to ask what

might be saved from

Fanon's ethics and politics ofdecolonization to help us reflect on globalization in our sense of the term

. It m

ust seem ironic, even absurd at first, to search for associa-

tions and intersections behveen decolonization and globalization-parallels w

ould be pushing the analogy-when decolonization had

dream of a "Third W

orld" offree, postcolonial nations firmly

on its horizon, whereas globalization gazes atthe nation through

the back mirror, as it speeds tow

ard the strategic denationaliza-tion of state sovereignty. T

he global aspirations of Third World

"national" thinking belonged to the internationalist traditions of socialism

, Marxism

, and humanism

, whereas the dom

inant forces contem

porary globalization tend to subscribe to free-market

ideas that enshrine ideologies of neoliberal technocractic elit-ism

. And finally, w

hile it was the prim

ary purpose of decoloni-zation to repossess land and territoriality in order to ensure the security ofnational polity and global equity, globalization propa-gates a w

orld made up ofvirtual transnational dom

ains and wired

comm

unities that live vividly through webs and connectivities

"on line." In what w

ay, then, can the once colonized wom

an or m

an become figures of instruction for our global century?

J4 WE, 40.

xiii xii

FOREW

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To this end, there is an im

mediate argum

ent to be made that

suggests that the economic "solutions" to inequality and poverty

subscribed to by the IMF and the W

orld Bank, for instance, have "the feel ofthe colonial ruler," according to Joseph Stiglitz, once senior vice president and chief econom

ist of the World Bank.

"They help to create a dual economy in w

hich there are pockets of w

ealth .... But a dual econom

y 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 w

hat is purportedly the granting ofloans turns, at tim

es, into the peremptory enforce-

ment of policy. These dual econom

ies claim to sustain diverse

worlds of opportunity, consisting of global villages, silicon val-

leys, 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 suc-cesses of globalization. D

ual economies create divided w

orlds in w

hich 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

ofclass, the exploitation of wom

en'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 m

ention 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 brow

nouts that afflict those that do on any given day.16

Global duality should be put in the historical context ofFanon's

founding insight into the "geographical configuration" ofcolonial

15 Joseph E. Stiglitz, Globalization and Its D

iscontents (New

York: W. W

. N

orton, 2003), 40. 16 A

nil K. Rajvanshi, "K

ey Issues in Rural Electrification," published in

Projects Monitor, 16 O

ctober 2003, http://pune.sancharneUn/nariphaltan/

ruralelec.htm.

FOR

EWO

RD

governance,17 his celebrated description of the Manichaean or

compartm

entalized structure of colonial society. The generic

duality that spans the global world of colonized societies is "a

world divided in tw

o ... inhabited by different species."18 Spa-tial com

partmentalization, M

acey acutely argues, is typical ofthe social structure of settler societies like A

lgeria, but demographic

duality is also found in other colonial societies that were divided

between the club and the bazaar or the cantonm

ent and the civil lines. Fanon's em

phasis on the racialization of inequality does not, of course, apply uniform

ly to the inequities of contempo-

rary global underdevelopment. H

owever, the racial optic-if

seen as a symbolic stand-in for other form

s of social difference and discrim

ination-does clarify the role played by the obscur-ing and norm

alizing discourses of progress and civility, in both East and W

est, that only "tolerate" differences they are able to culturally assim

ilate into their own singular term

s, or appropri-ate w

ithin their own untranslated traditions. As Fanon puts it in

what is perhaps the m

ost quoted (and quarreled over) passage in The W

retched ofthe Earth:

The singularity ofthe colonial context lies in the fact that econom

ic reality, inequality, and enorm

ous disparities in lifestyles never manage

to mask the hum

an reality. Looking at the imm

ediacies ofthe colonial context, it is clear that w

hat divides this world is first and forem

ost what

species, what race one belongs to. In the colonies the econom

ic infra-structure is also a superstructure.1 9

In my view

, The Wretched ofthe Earth does indeed allow

us to look w

ell beyond the imm

ediacies of its anticolonial context-the A

lgerian war of independence and the A

frican continent-toward

a critique of the configurations of contemporary globalization.

17 WE, 3.

18 WE, 5.

19 Ibid.

xiv FO

REW

OR

D

This is not because the text prophetically transcends its ow

n time,

but because ofthe peculiarly grounded, historical stance it takes tow

ard the future. The critical language of duality-w

hether colonial or global-is part of the spatial im

agination that seems

to come so naturally to geopolitical thinking of a progressive,

postcolonial cast of mind: m

argin and metropole, center and

periphery, the global and the local, the nation and the world.

Fanon's famous trope of colonial com

partmentalization, or

Manichaeanism

, is firmly rooted w

ithin this anticolonial spatial tradition. B

ut there is another time fram

e at work in the narra-

tive of The Wretched of the Earth that introduces a tem

poral di-m

ension into the discourse ofdecolonization. It suggests that the future of the decolonized w

orld-"The T

hird World m

ust 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 im

pose on their "client" states. D

ecolonization 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 Wretched ofthe Earth to be effective

beyond its publication in 1961 (and the death of its author in that year), and to provide us w

ith salient and suggestive perspec-tives on the state of the decom

partrnentalized world after the dis-

mem

berment of the B

erlin Wall in 1989.

Fanon is resolute that the Third World should follow

the so-cialist path, "based on the principle that m

an is the most pre-

cious asset."20 But he is equally insistent that the T

hird World

"must not be content to define itself in relation to values w

hich preceded it. ... T

he basic issue with w

hich 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 oftim

e" (my em

phasis).21 Ifdecolonization can be achieved only through the destruction of the "com

partmen-

20 WE, 56.

21 WE, 55.

FOR

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xv

talized" colonial system, then the "new

humanism

" of the Third

World cannot properly em

erge until the bipolar tensions, con-tradictions, and dependencies of the cold w

ar are brought to an end. T

here are two histories at w

ork in The Wretched of the

Earth: the Manichaean history ofcolonialism

and decolonization em

bedded in text and context, against which the book m

ounts a m

ajor political and ethical offensive; and a history of the coer-cive "univocal choices" im

posed by the cold warriors on the rest

of the world, w

hich constitute the ideological conditions of its w

riting. In attempting to think proleptically of questions of free-

dom and fairness beyond the cold w

ar, Fanon intriguingly projects unfinished business and unansw

ered questions related to the mid-

twentieth century and the "end" of em

pire into the uncertain futures of the fin de siecle and the end of the cold w

ar. It is in this sense that his w

ork provides a genealogy for globalization that reaches back to the com

plex problems of decolonization (rather

than the simpler story of the death ofcom

munism

and the triumph

of free-market neoliberalism

), and it could be said, both factually and figuratively, that The W

retched of the Earth takes us back to the future. R

eflect, 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 ow

n day:

National consciousness is nothing but a crude, em

pty fragile shell. T

he 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 detrim

ental and prejudicial to the devel-opm

ent of the nation and national unity."22

It is, of course, one of the most significant lessons of the post-

colonial experience that no nation is simply young or old, new

22 WE, 97.

xvi FO

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OR

D

or ancient, despite the date of its independence. "New

" national, international, or global em

ergences create an unsettling sense of transition, as if history is at a turning point; and it is in such incu-bational m

oments-A

ntonio Gram

sci's word for the perceived

"newness" of change -

that we experience the palimpsestical im

-prints of past, present, and fuhIre in peculiarly contem

porary fig-ures of tim

e and meaning. Fanon's description of the "crude,

empty fragile shel1" ofem

ergent national histories quickens the long shadow

s cast by the ethnonationaIist "switchbacks" of

our Own times, the charnel houses of ethnic cleansing: Bosnia,

Rwanda, K

osovo, 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 the-

ses of "the clash of civilizations" once turned against Islam and

now targeting m

igrants, refugees, and minorities m

ore 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 w

ell as a projected aspiration-that must go beyond

"narrow-m

inded nationalism" or bourgeO

is nationalist formal-

ism because "if nationalism

is not explained, enriched, and deep-ened, if it does not very quickly hIm

into a social and political consciousness, into hum

anism, then it leads to a dead-end."23

Now

many readers have held that The W

retched ofthe Earth is long on prophecy and polem

ics and short on policy and plan-ning -

a deliberately universalized level ofanalysis that has led The W

retched ofthe Earth to become, as ShIart H

all has remarked, the

"Bible of decolonisation."24 It has also been justly argued that

Fanon's Third World is an iconic evocation ofA

frica, a symbol of

Pan-African solidarity com

posed ofhis syncretic experiences ofthe M

aghreb, West A

frica, South Africa, and the A

ntilles, with scant

23 WE, 144.

24 Interview w

ith Stuart Hall in Frantz Fanon; Black Skin, W

hite Masks.

dir. Isaac Julien (UK

: Arts C

ouncil of England, 1996).

FOR

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RD

xvii

awareness of Latin A

merica (w

ith the exception of Cuba), A

sia, or the M

iddle East. 25 These fine historical readings have greatly enhanced our under-

standing of the universalizing, generalizing tendency in Fanon's w

ritings. There is more to be said, how

ever, about Fanon's uni-versalism

if it is read, as I have proposed, in relation to a concept ofthe Third W

orld as a project marked by a double tem

porality. D

ecolonization demands a sustained, quotidian com

mitm

ent to the struggle for national liberation, for w

hen the high, heady w

ind of revolution loses its velocity, there is no "question of bridging the gap in one giant stride. T

he epic is played out on a difficult day to day basis and the suffering endured far exceeds that of the colonial period."26 B

ut the coming into being of the

Third World is also a project offuturity conditional upon being

freed from the "univocal choice" presented by the cold w

ar. Fanon's invocation of a new

humanism

-"Let us endeavour to

invent a man in full, som

ething which Europe has been incapable

of achieving"27-is certainly grounded in a universalist ontology

that informs both its attitude to hum

an consciousness and social reality. T

he historical agency ofthe discourse ofThird Worldism

, how

ever, with its critical, political stance against the im

posed univocal choice of "capitalism

vs. socialism," m

akes it less uni-versalist in tem

per and more strategic, activist, and aspirational

character:

The basic confrontation w

hich seemed to be colonialism

versus anti-colonialism

, indeed capitalism versus socialism

, is already losing its im

portance. What m

atters today, the issue which blocks the horizon,

is the need for a redistribution ofwealth. H

umanity w

ill have to address this question, no m

atter how devastating the consequences m

ay be. Z8

25 Macey, 469.

26 WE, 90.

27 WE, 236.

28 WE, 55.

xix xviii

FOR

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RD

Fanon's call for a redistribution of wealth and technology

beyond the rhetorical pieties of "moral reparation"29 is a tim

ely rem

inder of the need for something like a "right" to equitable

development (controversial though it m

ay be) at a time w

hen dual econom

ies are celebrated as ifthey were global econom

ies. A

nd coming to us from

the distances of midcentury decoloni-

zation, Fanon's demand for a fair distribution of rights and

resources makes a tim

ely intervention in a decade-long debate on social equity that has focused perhaps too exclusively on the culture w

ars, the politics of identity, and the politics of rec-ognition. Fanon's call has certainly been heard by popular m

ovements and social institutions com

mitted to debt relief or

forgiveness; it has led to health initiatives that sec the availability generic drugs for H

IV-A

IDS as an econom

ic necessity for the "right" to life and hum

an capability; and his influence is felt am

ongst reformist bodies that seek to restructure interna-

tional trade and tariffs, and democratize the governance of glo-

bal financial institutions, in favor of equitable assistance and redistribution.

actors and agents of these global initiatives of an interna-tional civil society in the m

aking, whether they are N

GO

s, human

rights organizations, international legal or educational bodies, or national and transnational popular m

ovements, have done

best to resist the coercive cultures of univocal choice. Some-

times they succeed; often they fail; m

ost likely they survive un-certainly betw

een success and failure. By seeing the need for equitable distribution as part of a hum

anistic project, Fanon transform

s its economic term

s of reference; he places the prob-lem

of development in the context of those forceful and fragile

"psycho-affective" motivations and m

utilations that drive our collective instinct for survival, nurture our ethical affiliations and am

bivalences, and nourish our political desire for freedom.

29 WE, 40.

FOR

EWO

RD

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 -ifI m

ay quote out of context-"the glow

ing focal point where citizen and in-

dividual develop and grow ...."30 It is Fanon's great contribu-

tion to our understanding of ethical judgment and political

experience to insistently frame his reflections on violence, de-

colonization, national consciousness, and humanism

in terms

ofthe psycho-affective realm-the body, dream

s, psychic inver-sions and displacem

ents, phantasmatic political identifications.

A psycho-affective relation or response has the sem

blance of uni-versality and tim

elessness because it involves the emotions, the

imagination or psychic life, but it is only ever m

obilized into so-cial m

eaning and historical effect through an embodied and em

-bedded action, an engagem

ent with (or resistance to) a given

reality, or a performance of agency in the present tense.

nervous conditions and political agitations of psycho-affectivity com

pose and decompose the com

partmentalized

worlds of colonialism

and metropolitan racism

. In Black Skin, W

hite Masks, Fanon dram

atically explores the psycho-affective predicam

ent of the Antillean N

egro as he is assailed by the de-personalizing, discrim

inatory gaze of racist recognition: "Look, a Negro . .. /" T

he black person, a free French citizen from an

overseas department of the republic, is assailed on a public thor-

oughfare in Lyon or Paris. He is forced to inhabit an alienating

and fragmented reality as soon as "the w

hite man's

calls this "other" being w

ho is "battered down by tom

-toms, can-

nibalism, intellectual deficiency, fetichism

, racial defects ...."31 Black citizens are fixed as dyes in the personae of stereotypes w

hose persecutory force creates a sense of social death; or they are vaporized into a m

ore general "climate of opinion" w

here

30 WE, 40.

31 Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White M

asks (New

York: G

rove Press), 116.

xx fO

REW

OR

D

person is seen as a threat, an infection, a symptom

"overdeterm

ined from w

ithout ... dissected eyes ... I am

fixed ... and my long antennae pick

up the catch phrases strewn over the

of things ...."32 It is the peculiarity of regim

es of racial oppression that they make im

-m

ediately visible and vivid the more m

ediated and abstract tices of pow

er such as class division, the and social hierarchies of status. "Looking at the colonial context," Fanon w

rites, "it becomes clear

divides this world is first and forem

ost what species, w

hat race one belongs to. In the colonies the econom

ic infrastructure is also a superstructure. The cause is effect: you are rich because you are w

hite, you are white because you are rich."33

It is the Manichaean m

entality that goes with such racial-

cultural discriminations, and the econom

ic divisions set up to accom

modate and authorize them

, that create the violent psycho-affective conditions that Fanon describes in The W

retched of T

he colonial vocabulary is shot through with arro-

anxiety: those hysterical masses; their

faces; this vegetative existence. 34 The colonized, w

ho are often devoid of a public voice, resort to dream

ing, imagining,

acting out, embedding the reactive vocabulary of violence and

retributive justice in their bodies, their colonial w

orld to smithereens is henceforth a

the grasp and imagination of every colonized

cate the colonial world .... To destroy the colonist's sector. ...

Challenging the colonial w

orld is not a rational confrontation of view

points. It is not a discourse on the universal, but the im-

passioned claim by the colonized that their w

orld is fundamen-

tally different."35

32 Ibid. 33 W

E, 5. 34 W

E, 7. 35 uro 6.

There is more to the psycho-affective realm

ofviolence, w

hich has become the cause celebre ofthe first chap-

ter of The Wretched ofthe Earth, "O

n Violence." H

annah Arendt's

assault on the book in the late sixties was an attempt at staunching

the wildfire it spread across university cam

puses, while she readily

acknowledged that it was really Sartre's preface that glorified vio-

lence beyond F anon's words or w

ishes. Sartre fanned the flames-

"We have certainly sow

n the wind; they are the w

hirlwind. Sons

violence. at every instant they draw their hum

anity from it"36-

that despite the doctrine of liberatory violence, m

an, deep down hated it."37 It is difficult to do jus-

tice to Fanon's on violence, or to appreciate his passion-

ate approach to the phenomenology of decolonization, w

ithout acknow

ledging a profound internal dissonance, in French colo-nial thought, betw

een the free standin2: of the citizen and the segregated status

the subject-the the sam

e colonized person. Indeed, I want to argue

troubled traffic between the psychic body and the body poli-

tic -the subjective experience of objective reality38 so typical

of Fanon's style-suggests that the psycho-affective relation is also "the glow

ing focal point where citizen and individual de-

velop and grow...."39 W

hen Fanon insists that the colonized's im

passioned claim to difference is a challenge to the discourse

rational confrontation and universality, he is both using and very w

ords and values -rationality, universalism

-French m

ission civilisatrice founded its govern-practices of colonial assim

ilation, associationism, and

integration.

36 Jean-Paul Sadre, Colonialism and Neocolonisalism

. trans. Brew

er, and McW

illiams (London: Routledge,

37 Ibid., 158. 38 Robert J. C

. Young, Postcolonialism

: An Historical Introduction

Blackwells, 2001), 274. Y

oung provides a most cogent and clarifV

imr

ductory account of Fanon's life and work.

39 WE, 40.

fOR

EWO

RD

xxi

xxii FO

REW

OR

D

The originality of the French phenom

enological approach to colonialism

and decolonization lies in its awareness of the

abiding instability of the system, how

ever stable its institutions m

ay appear. "If one chooses to understand the colonial system,"

Albert M

emm

i writes in The Coloniser and the Colonized, "he

must adm

it that it is unstable and its equilibrium constantly

threatened."40 The civilizing m

ission is grounded in a profound sense of instability-not a surm

ountable or sublatable "contra-diction"-as the French R

epublic gazes anxiously upon its own

mirror im

age as a world pow

er. On the one hand, France is the

supreme bearer of universal Rights and R

eason-"bearer even of a new

category of time for the indigenous populations";41 on the

other, its various administrative avatars-assim

ilation, association, integration-deny those sam

e populations the right to emerge as

"French citizens" in a public sphere of their own ethical and

cultural making. T

he principle of citizenship is held out; the poesis of free cultural choice and com

munal participation is

withheld. T

he fear of instability and disequilibrium betw

een freedom

and fealty, as I have described it, is evident in the history of co-lonial A

lgeria. Citizenship becom

es the unstable, unsustainable psycho-affective site in the conflict betw

een political and legal assim

ilation, and the respect for, and recognition of, Muslim

ethical and cultural affiliations. Betw

een 1865 and 1936, fewer

than three thousand Algerian M

uslims had availed them

selves of N

apoleon's senatus consulte, which extended French citizen-

ship to those Muslim

s who agreed to divest them

selves of civil stahlS under Islam

ic law. 42 A

gain, the Algerian statute of 1947

40 Albert M

emm

i, The Coloniser and the Colonised (Boston: Beacon Press,

1967) 120.

41 James D

. LeSueur, Uncivil W

ar: Intellectuals and Identity Politics Dur-ing the D

ecoloni:zation of Algeria (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania

Press, 2001), 22. 42 Ibid., 20. I am

indebted to this excellent work for historical inform

ation on the civilizing m

ission.

xxiiiFO

REW

OR

D

made a "grand" gesture, w

hich was no more than a sleight of

hand. The electoral system

was divided into two colleges: one

for Europeans and a small num

ber of Muslim

s who w

ere granted full political rights, the other for the m

ajority of the Muslim

popu-lation. Fearful of the increase in the M

uslim vote, the statute

allotted half the seats in the Algerian assem

bly to the first college, and in 1948 and subsequent years, the colonial adm

inistration 43

rigged the ballots to prevent further Muslim

participation.Such

. widespread disenfranchisem

ent bred a deep distrust in the Mus-

lim population, leading a num

ber of dissident groups to amal-

gamate in 1954 to form

the Front de Liberation Nationale (FiN

). H

ussein Bulhan describes the process: "G

radually those who for

decades sought assimilation into French society and the tradi-

tional nationalists joined forces in the FLN."44 W

hen "inte-gration" w

as proposed by the last governor-general, Jacques Soustelle (after the A

lgerian War of Independence began in

1954), the "Algerian fact" of diverse regional cultures, lan-

guages, and ethnicities was recognized, so long as these "pro-

vincial" -provisional?-French citizens could be kept "secure" under the surveillant eye ofthe paternalistic colonial pow

er that 45deeply distrusted w

hat it saw as the regressive zealotry oflslam.

Such a threatened equilibrium leads to a phenom

enological condition of nervous adjustm

ent, narcissistic justification, and vain, even vainglorious, proclam

ations of progressive principles on the part of the colonial state; and it is these very psycho-affective sym

ptoms that reveal the injustices and disequilibrium

, that haunts the colonial historical record. Fanon w

as quick to grasp the psycho-affective im

plications of a subtly punishing and disabling paternalistic pow

er:

43 Paul Clay Sorum

, Intellectuals and Decolonization in France (C

hapel H

ill: University of N

orth Carolina Press, 1977), 60.

44 Hussein A

bdilahi Bulhan, "R

evolutionary Psychiatry of Fanon," in Re-thinking Fanon: The Continuing D

ialogue, ed. Nigel G

ibson (Am

herst, NY: H

umanity Books, 1999), 155.

45 LeSueur, 23-27.

xxiv FO

REWO

RD

At the level of the unconscious, therefore, colonialism

was not

to perceived as a sw

eet, kind-hearted mother w

ho protects her from

a hostile environment, but rather a m

other who constantly

prevents her basically perverse child from com

mitting suicide or giv-

ing free rein to its malevolent instincts. T

he colonial mother is protect-

ing the child from itself, from

its ego, its physiology, its biology, and its m

isfortune. 46 '

French colonial policy acknowledges the naked right of the

colonized as individual-divested of cultural differences-to be identified as a citizen ofthe republic. But there exists, at the sam

e tim

e, a discriminatory denial or disavow

al ofthe colonized citizen's right to be represented and recognized as a culturally clothed subject w

ho may not conform

to the norms and practices of French

civil society. Without the rights of representation and participa-

tion, 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 comm

unal agency as a full and equal m

ember of civil society, w

hat kind ofshadow does that throw

on the public virtue of the French republic? This does not m

erely m

ake an ass of the law of assim

ilationist colonialism; it creates

profound ethical and phenomenological problem

s of racial injus-at the heart of the psycho-affective realm

of the colonial rela-tion. As Sartre perceived the problem

, "One of the functions of

racism is to com

pensate the latent universalism of bourgeois

eralism: since all hum

an beings have the same rights, the A

lgerian be m

ade a subhuman."47 It is this anom

alous and ambivalent

situation of universality-with-racism

, and formal citizenship-

without-equality, that is an unresolvable em

barrassment w

ithin the ideals and ideologies ofthe civilizing m

ission. I use the em

barrassment advisedly, to return to the question of colonial

"instability" and my discussion of the psycho-affective sphere

The Wretched ofthe Earth.

46 WE, 149.

47 \:n

rh

= 45.

FOREW

ORD

xxv

"On V

iolence" describes the struggle between brute realities

and resistant bodies in a prose that rises off the page to take you the hand, "to touch m

y reader affectively, or in other words

irrationally or sensually. For me w

ords have a charge. I find m

yself incapable of escaping the bite of a word, the vertigo of

a question-mark."48 T

he colonialist declares the native to be "a corrosive elem

ent ... distorting everything which

aesthetics or morals ... an unconscious and incurable instru-

ment of blind forces."49 Such an ontological obliteration of the

"other" results in "the colonised's affectivity lbeing put1on edge like a running sore flinching from

a caustic agent,"50 as the psyche retreats into m

uscular spasms and hysterical sym

ptoms. Treat-

the natives as something less than hum

an-settler vigilante groups called their w

anton killing of Muslim

Algerians "rat-

hunts"51-results in a process of depersonalization that creates a sense of bodily m

emory and a violent corporeal agency:

shanty-town is the consecration of the colonised's biological de-

cision to invade the enemy citadel at all costs, and if need be, by

the most underground channels" (m

y emphasis).52 These vio-

lent aspects of the realm of psycho-affective conflict and defense

do not, however, tell the w

hole story to be found in The Wretched

ofthe Earth. M

uch of the book is devoted to exploring the processes by w

hich decolonization turns into the project of nation building; and by delving into the "bubbling trepidation"53 that exists in the m

oment of transition, The W

retched ofthe Earth opens up possi-for positive and productive psycho-affective relations. "Re-

claiming the past does not only rehabilitate or justifY the prom

ise of a national culture," Fanon w

rites, "it triggers a change

48 Macey, 159.

49 WE, 6.

50 WE, 19.

51 Bulhan, in Gibson, 155.

52 WE, 81.

53 WE, 161.

xxvi FOREW

ORD

fundamental im

portance in the colonised's psycho-affective equi-librium

."54 The psycho-affective equilibrium

achicved through the creation of a national culture passes through a "national stage" on its w

ay to constructing a world-system

based on the ideals of global equity. "This cold w

ar ... gets us nowhere,"

Fanon argues repeatedly. "The nuclear arms race m

ust be stopped and the underdeveloped regions m

ust receive generous investm

ents and technical aid. The fate of the w

orld depends on the response given to this question."55 If the anticolonial m

ove-m

ent aims at establishing national sovereignty and cultural

dependence, the visionary goal of decolonization is to dismantle

the "either-or" of the cold war that dictates ideological options

and economic choices to Third W

orld nations as an integral part the supranational, xenophobic struggle for w

orld supremacy.

Cold w

ar internationalism, w

ith its dependent states and its di-vision of the spoils, repeats the M

anichaean structure of pos-session and dispossession experienced in the colonial w

orld. T

he unraveling of the Soviet system saw

the rapid emergence

ethnoregional patriotisms and nationalism

s of a fissionary kind that destroyed the existence of the very possibility of civil society in the m

idst of civil war and ethnic cleansing.

Fanon was com

mitted to creating a w

orld-system of Third

World nations that fostered a postcolonial consciousness based

on a "dual emergence" of national sovereignty and international

solidarity, for "it is at the heart of national consciousness that ternational consciousness establishes itself and thrives."56 T

he hopeful sym

metry of Fanon's dual em

ergence was based not on a "m

etaphysical principle" of cultural authenticity or geopoliti-cal exceptionalism

(the African "tradition," the A

sian "tempera-

ment," the Latin A

merican "spirit") but on the political

ethical principles of independence and security-a regional

54 WE, 148.

55 WE, 61.

56 WE, 180.

b 'I! f

nO'

__u

FOREW

ORD

xxvii

solidarity extended to any nation that seems to be internally

nerable to antidemocratic governance or externally threatened

by hegemonic, quasi-colonial pow

ers.57 In many ways, Fanon's

cherished ideals of regional integration and economic collabo-

ration on broad socialist principles of urban and agrarian devel-opm

ent were sullied by the corrupt and nepotistic practices of

the colonial bourgeoisie that he despised for its hedonistic ap-propriation of the role of the settler, its sm

all-time racketeering,

its lack of the "pioneering aspect, the inventive, discoverer-of-new

-worlds aspect" of a progressive national bourgeoisie. (A

c-cording to a W

orld Bank W

orking Report, almost 40 percent

South Mrican private w

ealth is held outside the country.)58 But

Fanon's belief in the critical importance of econom

ic and tech-nological support for "underdeveloped regions"

"the fate of the w

orld depends on the response given to this question" -is a trou-

bling issue that returns each time a new

famine occurs, or a de-

veloping country is shackled by unredeemable debt, and these

problems have had no satisfactory solution across the half cen-

tury from his day to ours.

Witl1 a few

exceptions, the cartography of the global south fol-low

s the contours of the Third World. T

he unanswered call for

"development as freedom

,"59 to use Am

artya Sen's excellent phrase, has a long history of failure (for w

hich national govern-m

ents must share responsibility w

ith the international comm

u-nity). H

owever, Fanon's proleptic proposal that the postcolonial

narrative of independent nation building could enter its interna-tional phase only after the end of the C

old War telescopes that long

history of neglect into our times, w

hence it reveals the poignant proxim

ity of the incomplete project of decolonization to the

57 WE, 179.

58 Paul Collier, A

nke Hoeffler, and C

atherine Pattillo, "Flight Capital as a

Portfolio Choice," W

orld Bank Policy Research Working Paper no. 2066

mary 1999).

59 See Am

artya Sen, Developm

ent as Freedom (New

York: A

nchor Books), O

xford UP, 1999).

u_

xxviii FO

REW

OR

D

dispossessed subjects of globalization. Caught up in this spiral of

history, the wretched of the earth, in our tim

e and Fanon's, enter the zone of psycho-affectivity and echo the horrifying call to lence. Fanon for our

And Fanon for other tim

es and places ...

* *

* In 1966, Bobby Seale and H

uey New

ton read The Wretched ofthe

Earth in a house in Oakland, and -so

the story goes 60 -w

hen they w

ere arrested some m

onths later for "blocking the sidewalk," the

text provided foundational perspectives on neocolonialism and

nationalism that inspired the founding of the Black N

ationalist Party. In A

Panther Isa Black Cat, written in 1971, Reginald M

ajor (K

elley) acknowledges Fanon's influence on the Panthers.

a sexist swagger that was part of the m

acho style of the times, M

ajor praises Fanon's analysis of the colonial m

entality in understanding the yardstick of"w

hiteness" that devalues black consciousness and results in a "cultural and psychic genocide"61 that leads to the inadequacy ofblack m

anhood. Gillo Ponte corvo' s Battle ofAlgiers

became a cult film

among the Bay A

rea Panthers because it was "Fanon-linked," and young revolutionaries attentively w

atched D

iction of terrorist acts and the organization of covert cells. found satisfaction in the flick. T

he natives won."62

* 0;<

* In the early seventies, Steve Biko's room

in the student residence at the U

niversity of Natal becam

e the meeting place for m

em-

bers of the South African Students A

ssociation; it was also the intellectual center of the black consciousness m

ovement. T

hat room

in Durban was the place w

here Biko, "the person

60 ed.,AfricanAm

erican Culture M

I: Gale Research,

1996), 50-51. 61 Reginald M

ajor, A Panther Is a Black C

at (New

York: William

Morrow

, 1971),138-39.

62 Ibid.

POREW

ORD

xxix

who bro'ught ideas,"63 first circulated The W

retched of the Earth to his friends and com

rades-writers, activists, com

munity w

ork-ers, actors, students-w

ho were also conversant w

ith the poetry and the politics of the Black Panther m

ovement. Fanon's singu-

contribution to the theoretical understanding of the black consciousness m

ovement lay in his extension of the econom

istic theories ofM

arxism tow

ard a greater emphasis on the im

portance of psychological and cultural liberation -

the psycho-affective realm

of revolutionary activism and em

ancipation.

* *

* In a prison cell in the notorious H

-Block of Belfast prison, som

e-tim

e after 1973, a young apprentice coach builder and mem

ber of the Irish R

epublican Arm

y, Bobby Sands, first read Fanon's

The Wretched of the Earth, of w

hich there were m

ultiple copies on the H

-Block shelves. A

historian of the lRA64 suggests that Fanon's incendiary spirit m

ay have set alight IRA passions be-

cause of passages like this:

last shall be first and the first last." Decolonisation is the putting

into practice of this sentence .... For if the last shall be first, this will

only come to pass after a m

urderous and decisive struggle between

two protagonists. T

hat affinned intention to place the last at the head things ... can only trium

ph if we use all m

eans to turn the scale, including, of course, that of violence.

* *

* Shiite revival ofthe 1960s and 1970s, w

hich developed into the Iranian revolution led by A

yatollah Khom

eini, was based on a revision of Shiite doctrine influenced bv M

arxism and com

-

63 N. Barney Pityana, M. R

amphele, M

. Mpum

iwana, and 1.. W

ilson, Bounds ofPossibility: The Legal.')' ofSteve Biko and Black Consciousness (C

ape Tow

n, South Mrica: D

avid Phillip, 1991),28-29,109,147. 64 R

ichard English, Armed Struggle: The H

istory of the IRA (New

York: O

xford University Press. 2003), 197-99,234-35.

.....'"_......

•.L .•j.'.• " + ............

xxx FO

REW

OR

D

to the ideology of Third World liberation. 65 N

o or intellectual was m

ore respected among the student m

ilitants w

ho followed the People's M

uiahideen than Ali Shariati, w

ho had read Fanon during his student days in Paris and translated

Wretched ofthe Earth into Persian. A

ccording to Giles K

eppel, a historian of political Islam

, "Shariati rendered the difference betw

een 'oppressors' and 'oppressed' with the K

oranic terms

mostakbim

ie (the arrogant) and mostadafine (the w

eakened or disinherited), thus transposing the theory of class struggle into the term

inology ofIslam."66 This "translated," hybrid term

K

homeini's political rhetoric -

via Shariati's translation of Fanon-after 1978, in his attem

pt to broaden the appeal of his m

essage and address a more diverse audience.

* *

* Finally, on Septem

ber 19, 2001, Richard Perle, form

er U.S. as-

sistant secretary of defense (1981-87), wrote the follow

ing three passages:

There is an air ofVichyite defeatism

about some ofthe com

mentary

on the current war on terrorism

.

We constantly hear the reiteration ofsuch them

es as "We don't know

w

ho the enemy is," "W

e don't know w

here to strike them" ... and that

"Wretched ofthe Earth" (to use the title of Frantz Fanon's fam

ous anti-colonial tract) are so desperate that they w

ould not honorable

death at the hands of what they see as the G

reat Satan.

u.s. Defense Secretary, D

onald Rum

sfeld ... say that it is a totallv new

kind ofwar w

hich the Free

65 Gilles K

eppel, Jihad: The Trail of Political Islam, trans. A

nthony F. Roberts (C

ambridge, M

A: Harvard U

niversity Press, 2002). Mv account de-

rives from this book.

66 Ibid. 67 R

ichard Perle, "Get G

overnments out ofTerrorism

Business," National Post, Septem

ber 19,2001, A16.

ew*

FOR

EWO

RD

xxxi

* *

* Fanon acknow

ledges the enormous significance of this phenom

-enological level of life w

hen he opens his essay "On N

ational C

ulture" with one of his m

ost enigmatic and inspiring pronounce-

ments: "Each generation m

ust discover its mission, fulfill it or

betray it, in relative opacity."68 I turn to that issue by first return-ing to m

y beginning: What form

s of unhappy consciousness prevail am

ong the colonized who feel threatened from

all sides? H

ow does the body speak in extrem

is, how does the m

ind with-

stand? "Colonialism

forces the colonized to constantly ask the question: 'W

ho am I in reality?"'69 Fanon writes in The W

retched ofthe Earth. From

where does the spirit of revolt arise in the m

idst of the confusion of "m

yriad signs of the colonial world"?70 How

do the oppressed discover the enduring strength to found a free

society, a national consciousness, if they are continu-ously aw

are of their own anxiety and fragility?

The Wretched ofthe Earth em

erges, year after year, in Oakland,

Belfast, Tehran, Washington, Paris, to say nothing of

Bombay, w

here I first read it, or wherever you m

ay be today as this book falls into your hands. Fanon is invoked repeatedly by liberal students, radical activists, hum

an rights workers, cultural histori-

ans, literary scholars, journalists, even a former U

.S. assistant de-fense secretary. It could be said that Fanon's street fighting days cam

e to an end in the 1970s and 1980s, and that he now takes his

on the bookshelves alongside CLR

James, Sartre, M

emm

i, M

arcuse, Guevara, A

ngela Davis .... Those w

ho claim to follow

in Fanon's footsteps, it is often said, only absorb his abstract ar-gum

ents and stirring sentiments; they fail to understand his self-

less engagement w

ith the Algerian W

ar of Independence and turn a blind eye to his failure to consider the possibility state built on the revolutionary violence of the FLN

68 WE, 145.

69 WE, 182.

70 WE, 16.

.".___.....__

xxxiii

in Tunis, hav-adm

inistration

xxxii FO

REW

OR

D

more

have J

on psycho-affective factors his refusal to prioritize the role of the organized the anticolonial revolution.

The insurgent energies of the A

lgerian peasantry and lumpen-

proletariat, Fanon believed, would guard against the corruption

and cooptation of "westernized" nationalist parties led by urban

elites. But in the opinion of som

e of his FLN com

rades, Fanon displayed a na'ive nostalgie de la boue in cham

pioning a peasantry had becom

e fragmented and displaced through the 1950s,

confined to refugee or resettlement cam

ps in Tuni-sia and M

orocco, others having migrated to

in Algeria or

France.71 It was in

late 1950s that Fanon's comm

itment to the

Algerian cause seem

ed to tum from

a a m

ore inward identification, a consum

mate sen-nISI

himselfas an A

lgerian. This radical indigenization of identity, like his overestim

ation of the peasantry, could be seen as his avoidance or enhancem

ent of his own natal and psychic reality-a com

pen-satory fam

ily romance that w

ould disavow his M

artinican origins,n through a phantasm

atic denial of the "unheroic assimilation" of

the Antillean heritage in favor of the "virile and decolonised fra-

ternity" of FLN

.73 Simone de B

eauvoir's mem

ories of her conversations w

ith Fanon flesh out this poignant and problem-

"Above all I don't w

ant to become a profes-

gerian independence.

of himself, as

existence as an Antillean fighting for Al-

71 Moham

ed Harbi, quoted in M

acey, 481. 72 See A

lbert Mem

mi's rem

arkable essay, "The Impossible Life of Frantz

Fanon," in Massachusetts Review (W

inter 1973), 9-39, and Dom

inated Man:

Notes Toward a Portrait (New

York: Orion Press. 1968).

73 Fransrois Verges, M

onsters and Revolutionaries; Colonial Family Ro-

mances and M

etissage (Durham

: Duke U

niversity Press), 211. 74 de Beauvoir, 317.

FOR

EWO

RD

Fanon's involvement in the A

lgerian revolution was primarily

as witness, doctor, diplom

at, writer-or as he was once know

n in "the pam

phleteer from M

artinique." (This moniker re-

frequent contributions to EI Mujahid, the A

lgerian after he took up

During his tenure atthe psychiatric hospital at Blida (1953-

56), there were occasions on w

hich he covertly trained (village m

ilitias) to cope with their ow

n attacks of terror ety w

hile they were carrying out assassination attem

pts; he also taught them

psychological ways and physiological means of w

ith-standing torture and resisting interrogation,75 In 1960, Fanon was involved in exploring the possibility of establishing a Saharan front in southern A

lgeria, to be accessed from M

ali, which could pro-

vide a line of supply and support for FLN forces. 76

The

leading up to the composition of The W

retched ofthe w

ere fraught with the violence and uncertainty of

of Independence, which the French state pur-

sued as if it were no m

ore than the "pacification" of a civil ing. French left-w

ing intellectuals came together

of the "Manifesto of the 121" to support the A

lgerian and com

pared the French military presence in A

lgeria to the "H

itlerite order": "Does it have to be recalled that fifteen years after

the destruction of the Hitlerite order, French m

ilitarism has, be-

cause of the demands of a w

ar of this kind, succeeded in reintro-ducing torture and has once m

ore institutionalised it in Europe?"77 Sim

one de Beauvoir, one of the staunchest supporters of the M

anifesto, expressed a shared sense of disgust and despair: "Ten thousand A

lgerians had been herded into the Vel' d'H

iv' like the once before. A

gain I loathed it all-this country,

75 de Bcauvoir, 315. 76 M

acey, 437-44. Once

thc Mali expedition.

77 Manifesto, quoted in M

acey, 449.

"'''''''''''0 the definitive account of

xxxiv FO

REW

OR

D

myself, the w

hole world."78 During a particularly brutal offensive

July 1959 named O

peration Binoculars, General R

ene Challe's

troops sought to root out the insurgents of the Arm

ee de Libera-tion N

ationale (ALN

) hiding in the high Kabylia m

ountains by annihilating local villages that offered support to the nationalists. The policy ofregroupement, or resettlem

ent, moved the rural popu-

lation to barbed-wire com

pounds resembling concentration cam

ps -

fifteen thousand people sequestered in a space meant for three

thousand and surrounded by bleak torched fields "without w

ater, w

ithout sewage or sanitation of any kind, w

ithout land to cultivate and for the m

ost part without w

ork. ..."79 A couple of years ear-

lier, in 1957, the southern edge of the Kabylia had been the site of

the appalling massacre of M

elouza. '{'be rivalry between the FLN

and the M

NA

(Mouvem

ent Nationaliste A

lgerienne), which had

centered on territorial control and tribal affiliation, exploded into a bloodbath w

hen the FLN leadership ordered its operatives to "ex-

terminate this verm

in"8o-a chilling, uncanny echo, half a cen-tury later, ofK

urtz's comm

and, "Exterminate the brutes," in Joseph

Conrad's classic tale of colonial turpitude in the Belgian C

ongo, Heart of Darkness. T

he FLN herded all m

ales above the age of fifteen, A

listair Horne M

ites, "into houses and into the mosque and

slaughtered them w

ith rifles, pick-axes and knives: a total of 301."81 Fanon forged his thinking on violence and counterviolence these conditions ofdire extrem

ity, when everyday interactions

were turned into exigent events of life and death -

incendiary relations betw

een colonizer and colonized, internecine feuds betw

een revolutionary brotherhoods,82 terrorist attacks in Paris

78 de Beauvoir, 321. 79 Jules Roy in A

listair Horne, A

Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954-1962

(New

York: Penguin Books, 1987), 338. 80 M

y account is based on Alistair H

orne, A Savage W

ar of Peace, 221-22. For the discursive representation ofthe event, and the im

plications of its vari-ous ideological interpretations and m

anifestations, see LeSueur, "Massacre

at Melouza: The 'W

hodunit' of the French-Algerian W

ar?" 166ff. 8t H

orne, 222. 82 W

E, 18.

FOR

EWO

RD

xxxv

and Algiers by the ultra right-w

ing OA

S (Organisation A

rmee

Secrete) and their pieds noirs supporters (European settlers in A

lgeria). As a locus classicus of political resistance and the rheto-ric of retributive violence, The W

retched of the Earth captures the tone of those apocalyptic tim

es:

The colonized subject discovers reality and transform

s it through his praxis, his deploym

ent ofviolence and his agenda for liberation. 83

But how

do we get from

violence to setting violence in motion? W

hat blow

s the lid?84

When the A

lgerians reject any method w

hich does not include vio-lence ... they know

that such madness alone can deliver them

from

colonial oppression. A new

type of relationship is established in the w

orld. The peoples of the Third W

orld are in the process ofshattering their chains, and w

hat is extraordinary is that they succeed. 85

Hannah A

rendt's objection to The Wretched ofthe Earth has

less to do with the occurrence of violence than w

ith Fanon's teleological belief that the w

hole process would end in a new

hum

anism, a new

planetary relation to freedom defined by the

Third World. C

ollective violence engenders close political kin-ships like suicide squads and revolutionary brotherhoods, she w

rote, but "No body politic I know

was ever founded on equal-ity before death and its actualisation in violence."86 A

rendt is, at best, only half right in her reading of Fanon. H

e is cautious about the celebration ofspontaneous violence-"w

here my blood calls

for the blood of the other" -because "hatred is not an agenda"

capable of maintaining the unity of party organization once vio-

lent revolt breaks down into the difficult day-to-day strategy of

83 WE, 21.

84 WE, 31.

85 WE, 34.

86 Hannah A

rendt, On Violence (N

ew Y

ork: Harcourt, Brace and W

orld, 1970),69.

xxxvi FO

REW

OR

D

fighting a war of independence. 87 O

n the other hand, Sartre's preface to The W

retched of the Earth (the nub of Arendt's attack

on Fanon's ideas) is comm

itted to bringing the colonial dialectic to its conclusion by carrying hom

e-to m

etropolitan France-

the lessons and the lesions of anticolonial violence. 88 Those adhere to principles ofnonviolence in the face of colonial oppres-sion are taunted w

ith the ethical impossibility oftheir positions

"even your non-violent thoughts are a condition born ofan age-old oppression...."89 Sartre pares aw

ay the pieties and vanities of En-lightenm

ent universalism to reveal its tolerance of racist ideas and

practices. He confronts his com

patriots with a spectacular "strip-

tease of our humanism

"90 while justifY

ing the uses of violence to recover an ontological claim

to humanity for those w

ho have been treated as subhum

an: "Sons ofviolence, at every instant they hum

anity from it: w

e were hum

an beings at their expense, they are m

aking themselves hum

an beings at ourS."9J For A

rendt, Fanon's violence leads to the death of politics; for Sartre, it draw

s the fiery, first breath of human freedom

. I pro-pose a different reading. Fanonian violence, in m

y view, is part

of a struggle for psycho-affective survival and a search for human

agency in the midst of the agony of oppression. It does not offer a

clear choice between life and death or slavery and freedom

, be-cause it confronts the colonial condition oflife-in-death. Fanon's phenom

enology of conceives of the colonized-body,

soul, culture, comm

unity, history-in a process of "continued agony [rather 1than a total disappearance."92 H

e describes

87 WE, 89.

88 I have slightly altered Sartre's "to bring the dialectic to its con-

elusion." See Sartre, Colonialism

N

eocolonialism, 150.

89 Sartre, 151. 90 Ibid., 150. 91 Ibid., 149-50. 92 I have adapted this phrase from

Frantz Fanon, "Racism and C

ulture" in Tow

ards an African Revolution, 35.

xxxviiFO

REW

OR

D

being with a harrow

-state of political consciousness and ing accuracy:

Exploitation, tortures, raids, racism, collective liquidations ... [all]

make ofthe native an object in the hands ofthe occupying nation. This

object man, w

ithout means of existing, w

ithout a raison d'etre, is bro-ken in the very depth

his substance. The desire to live, to

becomes m

ore and more indecisive, m

ore and more phantom

-like. It is at this stage that the w

ell-known guilt com

plex appears. 93

Does the "guilt com

plex" lie at the very origins ofviolence, or does the struggle for liberation have to violently free itself ofguilt in order to be effective? T

he double-edged nature ofthis question -guilt as a stim

ulant, or an obstacle to freedom, or possibly

both-fulfills Fanon's wish (expressed to Sartre and B

eauvoir) political leaders should be psychiatrists as well."94 Fanon's

style of thinking and writing operates by creating repeated

disjunctions-followed by proxim

ate juxtapositions -betw

een 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 m

aterial reality and mental or cor-

poreal experience. The double figure ofthe politician-psychiatrist,

someone like Frantz Fanon him

self, attempts to decipher

changing scale (measure, judgm

ent) of a problem, event, iden-

tity, or action as it comes to be represented or fram

ed in the shift-ing ratios and relations that exist betw

een the realms of nolitical

and psycho-affective experience. T

he connections between guilt and violence are part of such

a delicate balance:

The colonized subject is alw

ays on his guard: confused by the myriad

signs of the colonial world he never knows whether he is out of line.

93 Ibid. 94 de Beauvoir, 318.

," 'ffT

iM"r;s-

xxxviii FO

REWO

RD

Confronted w

ith a world configured, the colonized subject is alw

ays presum

ed guilty. The colonized does not accept his guilt, but rather considers it a kind of curse, a sw

ord of Dam

ocles. But deep dow

n the colonized subject know

s no authority. He is dominated but not domes-

ticated. He is m

ade to feel inferior, but by no means convinced of

inferiority. He patiently w

aits for the colonist to let down his

then jumps on him

. The m

uscles ... T

he symbols of society such as

barracks, military parades, and

serve not only as in-also

not signifY: "Stay where you are."

thing." ... This impulse to take

maintains a constant m

uscular tonus. It is a known

certain emotional circum

stances an obstacle usually es-calates action

emphasis).9 5

It seems, at first, that this is a straightforw

ard spectacle of Fanon-ian retributive violence. T

he origins of violence lie in a presump-

tive "false guilt," which the colonized has to assum

e because of his pow

erless position; but it is a guilt that he does not accept or interiorize-"H

e is made to feel inferior, but by no m

eans con-vinced of his inferiority." T

he eruption of violence is a manifes-

tation of this anxious act of masking, from

which the colonized

emerges as a guerrilla in cam

ouflage waiting for the colonist to

let down his guard so that he m

ight jump; each

tered is a stimulant to action and a shield to

intention to take the colonist's place. Because he is dom

inated by m

ilitary power and yet not fully dom

esticated by the hege-assim

ilation and the civilizing mission, the

UCOlOIllal HanoH

alist is able to decipher the double and op-posed m

eanings emitted by the sounding sym

bols of society, the bugle calls or police sirens: "They do not signify: 'Stay w

here you are.' B

ut rather 'Get ready to do the right thing.'" From

the torqued m

ind and muscle of the colonized subject "on guard"

95 WE, 16.

FOREW

ORD

xxxix

the nationalist agent as mujahid (FLN

soldier) or fidayine (FLN

guerrilla). There is, how

ever, another scenario that runs through this narrative of violence and is som

ewhat unsettling to its progress,

although not unraveled by it. Here the psycho-affective im

agi-nation of violence is a desperate act of survival on the part of the "object m

an," a struggle to keep alive. The "false" or m

asked guilt com

plex (as I have called it) emerges, Fanon tells us in the pre-

ceding quotation, when the very desire to live becom

es faint and attenuated, "m

ore and more indecisive, m

ore and more

phantom-like."96 At this point, the splitting, or disjunction, be-

tween being dom

inated and being domesticated-the irresolv-

able tension between the colonized as both subject and

from w

hich anticolonial violence emerges-is experienced as a

psychic and affective curse rather than, primarily, as a

both senses of the term). T

he native may not accept

the authority of the colonizer, but his complex and contradic-

tory fate-where rejected guilt begins to feel like sham

e-hangs a D

amoclean sw

ord; it threatens him w

ith an im-

disaster that may collapse both the internal life and

external world. A

t this mom

ent, the political agent may be

shadowed

rather than stimulated-by the psycho-affective

subject who also inhabits his bodily space. T

he colonizer's con-stant m

uscular tension may turn into a hysterical rigid lim

b, just as Fanon observes that "the colonist is an exhibitionist."97 T

he m

ujahid may hear the double call of siren and bugle and yet be

caught "in the tightly-knit web ofcolonialism

,"98 psychically split and politically paralyzed betw

een the comm

and to "Stay where

you are" and the desire to "Get ready to do the right thing." There

96 In a larger version of this essay to be publlshed (H

arvard University Press), I develop the

tion of an understanding of shame.

97 WE, 17.

98

xli xl

FOR

EWO

RD

is every possibility, as Fanon writes, "that the colonist keeps the

colonized in a state of rage, which he prevents from

boiling over •••

Lthis] periodically erupts into bloody fighting betw

een tribes, clans, and individuals."99 T

he aspiration to do the right thing m

ight be felled by the fragility of the individual, byatavis-anim

osities, by the iron hand of history, or by indecision and uncertainty, but these failures do not devalue the ethical and im

aginative act of reaching out toward rights and freedom

s. Fanon, the phantom

of terror, might be only the m

ost intimate,

if intimidating, poet of the vicissitudes of violence. B

ut poetic justice can be questionable even w

hen it is exercised on behalf of the w

retched of the earth. And if, as I have argued, the lesson of

Fanon lies in his fine adjustment ofthe balance betw

een the tician and the psychiatrist, his skill in altering the "scale" betw

een the social dim

ension and the psycho-affective relation, then we

have to admit that he is in danger of losing his balance w

hen, for instance, he w

rites: "Violence can thus be understood to be the

perfect mediation. T

he colonized man liberates him

self in and through violence. T

he praxis enlightens the militant because it

shows him

the means and the end."lOO K

nowing w

hat we now

know

about the double destiny ofviolence, must w

e not ask: Is violence ever a perfect m

ediation? Is it not simply rhetorical bravura to as-

sert that any form of secular, m

aterial mediation can provide a

transparency of political 'action (or ethical judgment) that reveals

"the means and the end"? Is the clear m

irror of violence not some-

thing of a mirage in w

hich the dispossessed see their reflections but from

which they cannot slake their thirst?

Fanon has a rich variety of readers who do not com

e to his w

ork to seek the "perfect mediation" of violence. They turn to

The Wretched ofthe Earth, generation after generation, for a m

ore obscure reason, arm

ed only with an im

perfect sense of obliga-tion tow

ard the ideals they want to serve and the values they seek

99 Ibid. 100 W

E, 44.

FOR

EWO

RD

to preserve. The m

essage they take away from

Fanon's book is a quieter, m

ore contemplative one: "Each generation m

ust discover its m

ission, fulfill it or betray it, in relative opacity."IOI A

ccording to his friends, Fanon was som

ewhat opaque in per-

son. There w

as a dark and hesitant air about him that infused

his speech and writing w

ith "an enigmatic quality, as though they

contained obscure, disturbing prophecies."IOZ H

is publisher, Francis Jeanson, called it the "bodily aspect of his intellectual approach."103 Jean D

aniel, the editor of Le Nouvel Observateur, rem

embers that the handshake ofthe dying Fanon becam

e "more

urgent and always seem

ed to have a message."I04 T

he deeper mes-

sages 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 enigm

atically toward our ow

n times, in this new

translation of The W

retched ofthe Earth. Each age has its peculiar opacities and its urgent m

issions. The

parts we play in the design and direction of historical transform

a-tions are shadow

ed by the contingency of events and the quality of our characters. Som

etimes w

e break the mold; at others, our w

ill is broken. W

hat enables us to aspire to the fraught and fervent desire for freedom

is the belief that human beings are capable of im

ag-ining w

hat Fanon once described as a "time [that] m

ust no longer be that of the m

oment or the next harvest but rather of the rest of

the world."I05

I would like to thank Mark Terng and D

avid Mulrooney for in-

valuable assistance with this essay, and Lia Brozgal for her excel-lent translations.

!OI WE, l32.

102 de Beauvoir, 3l7. IOl Francis Jeanson, quoted in M

acey, l59. 104 M

acey, 433. 105 urI;' l22.