Re-Reading Frantz Fanon: Language, Violence, and - OKCIR

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ISSN: 1540-5699. © Copyright by Ahead Publishing House (imprint: Okcir Press). All Rights Reserved.

HUMAN ARCHITECTURE

Journal of the Sociology of Self-

A Publication of OKCIR: The Omar Khayyam Center for Integrative Research in Utopia, Mysticism, and Science (Utopystics)

Since they were written—most of themwithin the

maquis

of the anti-colonial armedstruggle for the national liberation of Alge-ria—the two books, articles, and publishedcommunications that constitute the com-plete work of Frantz Fanon (1952, 1959,1961, 1964) have been the object of variousinterpretations which, usually, seek to un-derstand and respond to social, political,cultural and, sometimes, academic con-junctures related to the on-going deepeningof the systemic crisis of the modern world-system. In necessarily brief terms, thepresent reflection will begin by identifyingsome of those readings in their relative im-portance to the overall knowledge of oursocial reality and for political activism. To

do this, I will divide such readings into twogroups.

The first one, which I defend, acceptsand tends to prolong in time—into ourpresent and towards the future—Fanon’ssuggestions about liberation and for whathe called, in a strikingly Enlightenment lan-guage and following Aimé Césaire, a “newhumanism.” In very critical, often con-demning terms, this way of reading Fanonsees him as an important if not indispens-able reference to our present understand-ing of world-historical social reality—inparticular the unequal, structural interrela-tionship between core and periphery. To besure, this is the type of politically engagedreading

1

made within national liberation

Dr. Jose da Mota-Lopes is a Research Associate of the Fernand Braudel Center at Binghamton Universityand teaches at the Department of Languages, Literatures, and Linguistics at Syracuse University. His inter-ests and current projects in progress include Core-Centrism, Social Movements, and Africa in the World-Economy. Mota-Lopes is a former Deputy Director of the African Studies Center, Eduardo Mondlane Uni-versity, in Maputo, Mozambique.

Re-Reading Frantz Fanon Language, Violence, and Eurocentrism in the

Characterization of Our Time

José da Mota-Lopes

Binghamton University • Syracuse University––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

[email protected] • [email protected]

Abstract: The highly critical way the work of Frantz Fanon was received by the most importantnational liberation movements of the African continent has, in the last thirty years, more or lessdisappeared from our collective recollection. This is so much more anomalous as his mostimportant writings were produced within and for one of those movements, the Algerian FLN.After discussing other more well known readings of Fanon, this article recalls some of the basicaspects of that specific, politically-engaged, militant way of reading his work within the libera-tion movement. It asserts that this side-by-side consideration of different readings allows a moreaccurate, stimulating, and multidimensional approach to Fanon’s work, in general, and to hisconclusions about colonial language, spontaneous violence, and Eurocentrism, in particular.

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movements or other social movements inthe periphery and semi-periphery of theworld-system, and by an illustrious groupof political activists and scholars amongwhom we find names like those of EldridgeCleaver and Edward W. Said.

A second group of readings has its ori-gins within some of the most prestigiousuniversities of the systemic core. As it hap-pens with the first, this second approach toFanon’s work has produced texts intellec-tually very stimulating and with high lev-els of innovative scholarship. However,and among the aspects which are commonto them, there is the fact that methodologi-cally they tend to ignore everything di-rectly or indirectly related to the lifeexperience, hypotheses, and objectives to-wards a better and more equitable future ofsocial justice and liberty as they were livedand expounded by Fanon himself. In otherwords, they tend

to kill the author

by ignor-ing in his texts what Mbembe (2001: 6) callstheir “meaningful human expression.” Tobe sure, these readings are made to selec-tively isolate some of his ideas as spring-boards to other texts and other ideas. Butthe result implies, as well, unforeseen,maybe unwanted, consequences.

In the first place, by ignoring the authorand his conjuncture, they ignore as well notonly the fact that Fanon’s texts were mostlyproduced within a context of antisystemicstruggle and are

about both

the periphery

and

the core of the modern world-system,but also the fact that his approach to socialreality was done in a highly innovative,revolutionary way, from

the perspective of theperiphery

. Secondly, by eliding all reference to the

time and space of Fanon’s writings, in par-ticular their peripheral origins, these read-ings neutralize or substitute by other

tensions the tension that is a central featureof Fanon’s work as much as that of themodern word-economy and of our socio-historical reality, i.e., the effective and po-tential conflict determined by the unequal,polarizing relationship between the coreand the periphery.

Finally, by ignoring contexts, perspec-tives, tensions, time, and space, they over-look what I contend is a foundationalcharacteristic of Fanon’s research method-ology: his personal struggle against and, of-ten, rupture with some of the main featuresthat characterize our systemic structures ofknowledge in general, and those of socialsciences in particular, as instances of adominant Eurocentrism that consciouslyor, often, unconsciously, systematizesknowledge, its self-organization, and socialreproduction, not only within the core butalso within the periphery and semi-periph-ery of the modern world-system.

Sometimes also known as Europeanuniversalism, Anglo-American culturalmodernity, or even, in the coined expres-sion of Jalal Ali Ahmad (1961/1984

)

occi-dentosis

, Eurocentrism is one of the majorcharacteristics that in an a priori fashionand implicitly define the modes of thoughtthat emerged from more than five hundredyears of the long term historical processesthat changed Western Europe first, and theUnited States afterwards, into the core of anexpanding, evolving capitalist world-econ-omy. As Dipesh Chakrabarty points out(2000: 5), this tradition often described asstretching itself back to the ancient Greeks“is a fabrication of relatively recent Europe-an history…. However… fabrication or not,this is the genealogy of thought in whichsocial scientists find themselves inserted.”Social scientists, I would add, but not only.

The final part of this article will furtherdiscuss this feature. Because it implies theactive criticism and denunciation of intel-lectual distortions, oversights, and as-sumptions from within the structures ofknowledge that produce and justify them,

1

Such as that undertaken in Colloque deBrazzaville, between December 12 and 16, 1984,which was particularly important for the num-ber and level of its participants and their com-munications (cf. Elo Dacy: 1986).

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this is not an easy task. This is, however,what Fanon has exemplarily tried to do inhis work: his antisystemic reflection wasnot only made from within the system butalso

using

the system. By analyzing whathis work implies and, sometimes, tells usabout his own endeavor, I will try to pindown the starting points of the method-ological strategy he assumed to activelyneutralize the direct and indirect, alwayspresent, and usually unconscious, manifes-tation of those euro-centric structural fea-tures.

Based on his arguments about lan-guage as an instrument of colonial oppres-sion and the revolutionary role of violence,this will allow me to discuss what I contendis one, if not

the

most important, of the in-tellectual legacies Frantz Fanon left us. Torecognize how, in the struggle with themonster of unbridled and distorting Euro-centrism, how he was able to locate andplace it under control to be able

to think pastcolonialism

. His effort is today, more thanever, not only a referential model for a re-newed epistemological practice but also anindispensable intellectual project for all ofus who want, as Susan Buck-Morss (2006)so eloquently proposes,

to think past terror

.This is a central requirement of our time.

I

Two essential characteristics of thework of Frantz Fanon are not usually takeninto interpretative consideration.

The first, the most important, has al-ready been mentioned above: Fanon’s writ-ings were mostly done within the context ofa liberation movement involved in the pro-tracted armed struggle for the liberation ofAlgeria. What this means is that his reflec-tion about colonialism and national libera-tion is the reflection of a politically engagedcadre of the liberation movement in a veryspecific context of armed confrontationand, obviously, at least in part subordi-

nated not only to the hierarchy but also tothe strategic and tactical objectives of themovement and its struggle.

Secondly, the work of Frantz Fanon wasproduced from the early 1950s to the early1960s, that is, in about ten years: a veryshort period of time in intellectual terms.What this means is that his work must beread as an incomplete work that was cutshort by his untimely, sudden death in 1961.If attentively considered, this fact makes hisassertions a work in progress, involving of-ten vague and contradictory reflections. Ibelieve that it is important to point out thesefactors because they are seldom taken intoconsideration, in particular in scholarlyreadings of Fanon’s work.

In very general terms it can be said thatsuch academic readings of Fanon startedwithin the core, particularly in the universi-ties of the English speaking core, in the sec-ond half of the 1980s. This coincided withthe aggravation of what was then and therean ongoing crisis of the disciplines withinacademia. It led not only to the academicdiscovery of his work but also to its trans-formation, almost twenty years after hisdeath, into a basic reference in contempo-rary scholarship. The circumstances of sucha discovery are well known: Homi K.Bhabha, the influential critical theorist, wasinvited to introduce the 1986 British re-edi-tion of

Black Skin, White Masks

(

BSWM

)(1986) and the result was a remarkable text:“Remembering Fanon: Self, Psyche, andthe Colonial Condition” (Gibson 1999: 179-96). In it, Bhabha laments the lack of atten-tion the Left (and the academia) had givento Fanon’s work, implicitly emphasizes hisimport to what was then starting to beknown as Postcolonial Studies, and pro-poses his more open re-reading accordingto psychoanalysis and an incipient post-structuralism. After emphasizing the verydeep influence of Lacan in

BSWM

, Bhabhaconcludes that by “shifting the focus of cul-tural racism from the politics of national-ism to the politics of narcissism, Fanon

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open[ed] up a margin of interrogation thatcauses a subversive slippage of identityand authority.” The “need for Fanon be-comes urgent,” he tells us, before addingthat “the time has come to return toFanon… with a question: How can the hu-man world live its difference? How can ahuman-being live Other-wise?”

This text and its questions becamesince then central to literary criticism, fem-inism, race studies, post-colonialism, sub-ject-formation studies, and, crowning themall, so-called post-structuralism. It was fol-lowed, when not echoed or confronted, byother equally influential references toFanon’s work by, among many others, Ab-dul JanMohamed, Benita Perry, GayatriSpivak, or Henry Louis Gates Jr.; as NigelGibson points out, “inside the academy onemight wonder how there could be life forFanon before Bhabha” (Gibson 1999: 14).This had also been noticed by Louis GatesJr. who characterized the situation as the“reinstatement of Fanon as a global theo-rist.” Discussing the many instances inwhich Fanon started to be “used,” Gatescoined the phrase that better reflects thiswhole period: Frantz Fanon, he wrote, hadbeen made into “a Rorschach blot withlegs” (1991; Gibson 1999: 252).

This mode of reading Fanon is prob-lematic. But it is not necessarily a bad thing.On the contrary, it often leads to highly in-spirational debates on the conceptualiza-tion of our world while confronting at thesame time a still dominant but old, sur-passed, inefficient paradigm. In what is, atleast since the late 1960s, a more or lessopen confrontation against the intellectualhegemony of that paradigm and its Euro-centric structures of knowledge, readingFanon became essential. Even if this wasnot the intention of all those (usually) An-glo-American scholars, this was the resultof their close reading—a type of readingthat continues today. We must be glad forthat.

II

To be sure, that was not the first timeFanon was read and debated within thecore of the world-system. Actually, andstarting in France where his work was pub-lished between 1952 and 1964, he soonbecame one of the central references forthose wanting to understand the origins,nature, and possible futures of the nationalliberation movements—the liberationmovements of Asia, in general, that of Viet-nam, in particular, but also those of Africaand Latin America. The public oppositionto the French war in Algeria as well as thedevelopment of a generalized world pro-test against the U. S. aggression in Vietnamcoincided with the popularization ofFanon’s writings. At the same time, thewritings founded theoretically what was tobecome the third great ideological buildingblock of what is sometimes described as the1968 world-revolution: an expanding anti-colonialism of active solidarity with the lib-eration movements of the periphery, com-plementing a generalized opposition toAmerican imperialism and to the Soviettotalitarianism of state-socialism.

The importance of Fanon in the 1960sand 1970s can be measured by that influ-ence and its expression all over the world.But it can as well be seen in the multiplica-tion and intensity of the debates involvingsome of the main ideas in his work. Writingabout them, E. J. Hobsbawm (1973: 6-10)points out that they draw attention to thegenuine defects of analytical Marxism andthis is how Fanon seems to have been read,with some intellectual anguish, within tra-ditional social movements of the Left or in-stitutionalized parties of a self-declaredcommunist, Trotskyite, or socialist designa-tion. The reason was the generalized crisisof political theory and ideologies, in gen-eral, and of Marxism in particular. But thiswas also coincident with the core counter-offensive against the expectations of the1968 world-revolution and the launching of

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the Anglo-American process of neo-liberal-ization of the world-economy. It led to avast political debate around some ofFanon’s ideas.

Among the more confronted and dis-cussed ideas were the ones related to therevolutionary nature of both African peas-ants and the marginal

lumpen

of the colonialcities

against

urban workers considered byFanon as a “labor aristocracy”; his condem-nation of the national bourgeoisies in post-colonial Africa as exploitative and ready totake the place of the colonizer; and whatwas read as his contention that spontane-ous violence was the way out, perhaps theonly way out of colonial oppression and re-pression.

2

In an article published at thetime, Immanuel Wallerstein discussedthose theoretical debates to end up cor-rectly disposing of them as what he calls anoften blinding “fetish of terminology”(1979: 266). He concluded with a couple ofinterrelated invitations to his reader: thefirst one is to get away from polemics andget involved into a closer analysis of socialreality. The second, echoing Fanon, pointsto the level of liberation processes in Africaas the way to assess those ideas in debate.Fanon, he writes, “pushed us to look forwho would take what risks and then askedus to build a movement out of such a revo-lutionary class” (Wallerstein 1979: 267).

III

The movement built out of and bythose who chose to take what risks existedalready in the periphery. It was, to be sure,the national liberation movement. As em-phasized above, we tend very often to for-get that, with the partial exception of

BSWM

, the work of Frantz Fanon was pro-duced and mostly published within the his-torical context of an anti-colonial armedstruggle by one of the most famous libera-tion movements of which he was an activemember: the Algerian National LiberationFront, or FNL. We tend, as well, to forgetthat the armed struggle against the Frenchcolonial occupation of Algeria was beingwaged while, at the same time, a greatnumber of former European colonies in Af-rica were peacefully claiming for and weregranted their national independence as partof what is usually known as decolonization.

National liberation movements ap-peared where and when the peaceful recog-nition of national independence by theEuropean centers of colonial power was de-nied. Among their instruments to achievefreedom, the armed struggle constituted alast option to be used in case of the failureof all other possible, peaceful alternatives.Vietnam was, obviously, one of those cases;Algeria, in the North of Africa, was another;Southern Africa, with its complex mixtureof domination by apartheid, British andPortuguese colonialism, and settler’s inde-pendence, was yet another. What thismeans is that national liberation, the na-tional liberation movements, and the objec-tive of their armed struggle were

not

part ofthat decolonization process. Decoloniza-tion, I contend, is a core-originated and con-trolled process; national liberation is aprocess of the periphery (Mota Lopes 2005).Another important distinction is that whilearmed struggles of national liberation werewithout exception protracted struggles, of-ten determining profound changes in thoseinvolved (their mindset, their worldviews,

2

This point, one of the most controversial inthe work of Frantz Fanon seems to have been themain inspiration, with the Cuban Revolution it-self, for Che Guevara (and Regis Debray) con-struction of the so called “fuoco theory”—whichfailed in Latin America but not only: althoughless known, it failed in Africa as well (MotaLopes: forthcoming). On the other hand, thecentrality of violence in Fanon’s work originat-ed another, very different reading of his workthat makes of him a “theorist of terrorism.” Thiskind of interpretation started to appear in thesixties in France, to continue today, with partic-ular emphasis after 9/11. Its foundation is, ofcourse, Fanon’s reflection about violence by thecolonized as originating a spontaneous re-sponse against the violence of colonialism. See,as examples for this counter-insurgency type ofreading, Franks 2006:

passim

; 33-34; 69; 111; andRichardson 2006: 30, 143).

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and their objectives) decolonization was apeaceful and very rapid process—as quickas the political, economic, and administra-tive processes through which the occupa-tion of the African continent by Europeancolonialism took place.

It was within the parallel historical con-texts of decolonization by the core and ofnational liberation in the periphery thatFanon’s work was conceived, tested, writ-ten, and published. Basically, his work wasthe result of his engagement with the Alge-rian FLN: working as a psychiatrist in thecolony and, at the same time, clandestinelyas a FLN militant; and, later on, as a cadreand representative of the movement inTunis and Accra. This is the reason whyFanon’s work must be read not only as atheoretical reflection about the deep natureof colonialism as its subject matter, but also,perhaps primordially, as the result of a per-sonal, totalizing, life experience.

Secondly, Fanon wrote to be read by hiscomrades of struggle within the FLN, bythose outside who supported the on-goinganti-colonial struggle (particularly in theFrench Left), and by those within Africawho were feeling the first post-colonialabuses from their own decolonized elites inpower. Those political, didactic, organiza-tional, and practical objectives were essen-tially destined to serve the liberationmovement as a whole. They implied mobi-lizing objectives, that is to say, of bringingnew members into the struggle, at the sametime transmitting not only the hope but alsothe certitude of a better future. This is whyhis work chronicles and analyzes the expe-rience of the armed struggle, to offer it as anexample for other coetaneous or future lib-eration movements, and to project it intothe future of the struggle, that is to say, intothe independent national state. This wasalso the basic way Fanon was read through-out the two long decades of African antisys-temic national liberation, from Algeria toSouthern Africa—but with important polit-ical and practical differences and concerns.

IV

To read Fanon’s work in a non-Alge-rian situation of anti-colonial armed strug-gle means, first of all, to read it within acontext very similar to the one in which itwas produced. His writings give testimony,assert, propose, or discuss individual andcollective experiences that often belongednot only to the writer but also to the reader.But this reading, based on a personal,sometimes pleasurable identification, hadlimits. Fanon was seen as an Algerian writ-ing about his own struggle and, conse-quently, expressing ideas and givingtestimony about situations which were his-torically located and specific. To his non-Algerian reader, this implied a concern thatis not only very different but almost op-posed to that first sense of personal identi-fication. It consists in a position of radicalcriticism towards the writer and his writ-ings. In other words, the way Fanon wasread in other situations of national libera-tion struggle was, dominantly, a very care-ful, deeply analytical, and critical reading –often to the level of rejection.3

Two examples will be helpful to furtherelaborate some of the characteristics of thisway of reading. The first one, inevitably, isrelated with language. As we all know theEuropean language of the colonialist andits pathological use by the colonized is thecentral object of BSWM. In methodologicalterms, what Fanon does in his first impor-tant study4 is to privilege language as a re-lational element to analyze the psychiatric,individual consequences of its daily, per-

3 As Terence K. Hopkins never tired to half-jokingly tell his students, it is undeniable thatcontrary to academic readings, more or lessphysically inconsequential for their authors, aless accurate reading within the liberationmovement could be passable of being punishedby the fire of the enemy.

4 More correctly, BSWM is Fanon’s secondpublished important work. It follows, by somemonths, the publication of “Le Syndrome Nord-Africain” in L’Esprit, February 1952.

RE-READING FRANTZ FANON 51

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manent imposition and utilization as a wayto further characterize colonialism as gen-eralized oppression,5 its repressive nature,and its traumatic and social consequences.6

This characterization of colonialism makesclear why this long essay must be primordi-ally read as also expounding in depth thereasons why the colonized, the oppressed,the marginalized, or the repressed subal-tern, has often no other solution than joinother wretched of the earth to destroy thecolonial situation and conquer his free-dom—by all means necessary, includingthe use of violence. But the subject matter ofBSWM is not, as sometimes hurriedlystated by readers in the core, the colonial sit-uation. It is, rather and perhaps more im-portantly—and more revealingly, becauseusually less discussed—the condition of thecolonized from a peripheral perspective. It isa kind of scientific, first person narration ofsufferings located in the transition betweenthe individual and the collective, in thatcomplex juncture where the personal be-comes social, political, cultural, and histor-ical. It is this general characteristic that

makes very easy, almost immediate, thepersonal identification between the mili-tant reader of BSWM and what his authorwrites in highly innovative, ground-break-ing, and pioneering terms. But, at the levelof the liberation movement combatant, thisdoes not imply that the reader ceases to becritically active in his reading: on the con-trary.

A major criticism often made at theleadership level of the liberation move-ments of the former Portuguese colonieswas that the language problems denouncedand discussed by Fanon concerned whathistorically and sociologically was no morethan very small colonized minorities, thoseassimilated by the colonial system. To besure, the great majority of the populationsin the colony did not use, speak, or suffi-ciently understand the language of the col-onizer. In relation to the Portuguesecolonies, this is an obviously correct asser-tion as the preoccupation of speaking thelanguage “like the Portuguese do” was, inthe terms of the colonial law classifyingthem as such, a sine qua non requirementand, as such, a major, most probably trau-matic preoccupation of those “assimila-dos.” The great majority of the populationwas equally submitted to the violent op-pression of colonialism but that was a verydifferent form of oppression, exercisedthrough the guns and other weapons of thepolice and the military, through the whipand the “palmatória,” through the personalbrutality of the colonialist, through themany ways used to obtain “forced labor” orchibalo. In other words, the great majority ofthe population under the yoke of Portu-guese colonial oppression felt it directly ontheir bodies and souls, but not dominantlythrough the use of the language of the colo-nizer or the denial of their own mother-lan-guages.

On the other hand, within the SouthernAfrican liberation movements, and particu-larly after the early 1970s, language as aproblem had been relegated to a very dif-

5 This generalization of individual, psycho-logical, individual cases into the collective orcommon characteristics of a whole populationis, of course, problematic. To legitimize it, Fanonpresents them as part of a historical, long-term,structural trajectory. He is not always convinc-ing. This will be further discussed below. On theother hand, there is no doubt that the violence ofcolonialism originates serious collective psycho-logical traumas in a colonized people. But thereis very little in language, as presented by Fanon,to single it out as a major traumatic cause.

6 In her excellent biography of FrantzFanon, her personal friend and colleague, thepsychiatrist Alice Cherki (2006) writes that his“pronouncements on the function of language,though significant are not the important thing”(218). She is right. But a 1995 public declarationby no other than the U. S. General Colin Powellmakes one think twice about this. Asked aboutthe reasons why a surprisingly large number ofwhite Americans were supporting his candida-cy to the U.S. Presidency, the former African-American Secretary of State explained it by say-ing: “I speak English reasonably well, like awhite person.” Besides, he continued, visually“I ain’t that black” (Beinart 2007: 6).

52 JOSÉ DA MOTA-LOPES


ferent level of relative importance. In situa-tions of struggle like those then going on inSouth Africa, Namibia, and today’s Zimba-bwe, where the great majority of the popu-lation spoke English, the language of theenemy had been universally adopted bythe different liberation movements as themajor language of organization, communi-cation, and expression. A similar processhappened as well in Angola and Mozam-bique: since the first years of preparationfor the armed struggle, the dominant ideabecame that the colonizer’s language didnot belong to him: it was being conquered bythe armed struggle and, consequently, it be-longed as well to Mozambicans and to An-golans.

Moreover, language was an importantfeature in the construction of their nationalunity, identity, and international communi-cation. Without marginalizing the manyAfrican languages spoken in both territo-ries, the European language was assumedas a second, sometimes as a third languageby the liberation movement. In addition, itwas designated as the official language ofthe future, independent country. In otherwords, the colonial language was trans-formed into an instrument of liberation be-cause the direct confrontation with thePortuguese forces of repression destroyedits oppressive, colonialist nature. As such,and particularly in Mozambique, the Por-tuguese language started to be taught with-in the military bases of the liberationmovement and in the schools of the liberat-ed areas controlled by it. It also became notonly the major language of communication,but also the language of poetic and literaryexpression. This led to a historically ironicsituation: never the Portuguese languagewas so widely spoken, understood, read,and written in Mozambique as it was afterthe beginning of the anti-colonial liberationstruggle against Portugal.7 Nevertheless, acloser reading of Fanon shows us that de-spite the importance he allocates to lan-guage, he is also very much concerned, as I

will emphasize below, with the culture, his-tory, individual and collective survival ofthe colonized, as well as with anti-colonial-ist resistance in all its forms and as deter-mined, construed, and usually transformedin their confrontation with the daily vio-lence of colonialism.

If language is one of the main themesdiscussed by Fanon, violence, in its relationto liberation, is perhaps the most importantquestion addressed by him. It is also themost controversial, the most distorted, andthe least understood of his operative con-cepts. Historically, it constitutes as well thesingle most important issue around whichthe criticism within non-Algerian libera-tion movements seems sometimes to ap-proach the political rupture with theAlgerian militant and author. One reasonfor this, to a certain extent complementingwhat was said above about language, isthat Fanon tends to collapse into a singlemeaning what are two very different formsof violence: that of the traumatized colo-nized individual, and that of the nationalliberation movement.

To be sure, anti-colonial armed strug-gle, the collective violence of the liberationmovement, is not the sum total of the indi-vidual violence of some of its members orcombatants. Both in its role and in its objec-tives the armed struggle is obviously a verydifferent kind of liberatory action. Secondlyand directly contradicting the idea thatspontaneous violence was the major condi-tion for the conquest of national indepen-dence, the liberation movements inSouthern Africa soon assumed the idea thatspontaneous action was easily confrontedby the armed forces of the colonial or apart-heid regimes—leading to various massa-

7 Both in Mozambique and in Angola, thisprocess continued after independence. It was,however, slowed down in the last ten years dueto the South African fomented civil wars in bothcountries and to the IMF/WB imposition of neo-liberal programs of structural adjustment inMozambique.



cres of thousands of innocent men, women,and children in the region. Finally, and be-cause easily confronted and neutralized,“spontaneous violence” tended to becomepart of the counter-insurgency arsenal usedby the colonial enemy: by fomenting andcontrolling actions of pseudo-spontaneousviolence in order to violently neutralizethem, colonialism was able to create strongdeterrents (“exemplary actions,” in the lin-go of their Special Forces) against the effec-tive or potential activity of the liberationmovement.

Moreover, in the perspective of libera-tion, armed struggle was the last instance inthe struggle for national independence—not its beginning: it would be declared andstarted only after and when all the peacefulmeans of national and international dia-logue, pressure, and contact with the colo-nial power had been exhausted. Whilethose other means were being used, at alldifferent levels of eventual communicationwith the colonial power, the anti-colonialarmed struggle in the different colonies andother occupied territories of Southern Afri-ca was also being carefully prepared, ingeo-strategic, political, ideological, andmilitary terms. This was done during rela-tively long periods of time—until the mas-sacre of Sharpeville, in the case of the ANC,for more than two years in the case of FRE-LIMO, etc. What this also means is that theliberation movement was not specificallycreated as an instrument of violence, that isto say, its primordial objective was not toconfront militarily the enemy. But it meansas well that since the formation of the liber-ation movement, violence, under the formof militarized, anti-colonial armed strug-gle, was one of the means at its disposal.This was the reason why the military train-ing of the combatants of the liberationarmed forces included their political andideological preparation through coursescarefully programmed and taught to all itscombatants and cadres at all and every lev-el of the hierarchy of the movement.

Finally, in the perspective of the libera-tion movements, armed struggle was con-sidered as being the opposite of spontaneousviolence. Samora Machel, the leader of theliberation movement in Mozambique, wasvery clear about this: “spontaneous vio-lence underestimates the enemy,” he wrote,before adding: “[To] believe that a few ter-rorist actions would be enough to persuadethe enemy to give in… was in effect in op-position to the principle of people’s armedstruggle, since it implied that the struggleshould be launched immediately withoutany prior mobilization of the masses, with-out any preparation of cadres to guide andlead the process” (Machel 1985: 40).8

To be sure, these ideas imply a differ-ent, more precise definition of the enemythan the one we find in Fanon’s writings.On the one hand, at the level of the South-ern African liberation movements, the ene-my soon started to be defined in terms ofthe colonial system itself and of those de-fending it, not at the level of the individual.On the other hand, these ideas about therole of violence and on the definition of theenemy were assumed more than ten yearsafter Fanon’s death. They result, obviously,from the theoretical, ethical, and ideologi-cal advancement of the ideas defended andpracticed by the liberation movements inthe following decade of struggle and, con-sequently, they could not be present in hiswork. But they are not, as well, totally ab-sent. If we read Fanon as he deserves to beread, that is to say, closely, we have to con-clude, against often hurried readings, that

8 In a personal interview, Samora Macheltold me that during the armed struggle for theliberation of Mozambique the potential combat-ant had first to be instructed about the reasons ofhis or her future task: “the combatant using agun without knowing why in political terms,without knowing who the enemy was, and who,what, and how he was fighting,” he said, “wasnot a freedom fighter: he would be no more thana criminal, a common murderer without place inour struggle” (Mota Lopes 1974). This was a ba-sic principle, often repeated within the libera-tion movement.



many of the ideas about the liberatory roleof spontaneous violence have a fluid,changing form in the intellectual trajectoryof his writings. This is natural: the Fanonwho in 1952 published BSWM was not thesame Fanon writing the Wretched of theEarth (WE) at the end of that same decade.His conceptions were in a quick process ofchange, becoming more precise, more effec-tive, less emotional. Many of the ideas ofWE are present in BSWM but the two booksare not the same—just like the young psy-chiatrist finishing his studies and startingto work in Algeria in the early 1950s wasnot, or was not yet, the militant of the FLNat the end of that same decade. Besides,Fanon died two or three days before beingable to correct and probably edit the firstprinted proofs of WE. Had he been able todo it and many of the contradictions, repe-titions, ambiguities, vaguenesses, and im-precisions so easily detected in its pages(but usually as well not taken into accountby readers within the core) would mostprobably had disappeared.

In particular, it is obvious that his con-ceptualization of violence as an instrumentof liberation had evolved into new forms.Just like in BSWM, violence is in WE a cen-tral element of his political reasoning. Butwith an important addition: in some pagesof WE, not all of them, he talks about it asarmed struggle, as a process of liberationextended in time and transforming thosewho are involved in it. In many passages,spontaneous violence becomes “violence orga-nized and educated by its leaders.” And, assuch, it becomes a way to “make possiblefor the masses to understand social truths[as it] give[s] the key to them.” Contrastingthis with then already well-known instanc-es and situations of African decolonizationhe adds: “Without that struggle, withoutthat knowledge of the practice of action,there is nothing but a fancy-dress paradeand the blare of the trumpets. There is noth-ing save… a few reforms at the top, a flagwaving: and down there, at the bottom an

undifferentiated mass, still living in themiddle ages, endlessly marking time”(1964: 117-8). Moreover, violence continuesto be for Fanon the only solution against theviolence of colonialism—as it was in thespecific case of Algeria. But he also admits,reflecting important changes in his reason-ing, that “[t]here are other peoples and oth-er directions” and that “[w]e know for suretoday that in Algeria the test of force wasinevitable. But other countries through po-litical action and through the work of clari-fication undertaken by a party have ledtheir people to the same results” (1964:154).

What I am emphasizing here is theneed to re-read Fanon not only critically, aswithin the liberation movements, but alsoas a work in progress, often incomplete,ambiguous, and contradictory in manypassages—not forgetting the fact that withhis work Fanon opened up new roads, newperspectives, new areas of reflection thathad not yet been attempted, not onlywithin the core but also, even less, in thecolonized periphery. Among those roadsand perspectives, and despite the fact thatit is rarely if ever mentioned, I would saythat his suggestion about the need to con-front Eurocentrism, the unconscious condi-tioning exerted by the hegemonic Anglo-American intellectual tradition, pseudo-universalism, and structures of knowledge,was perhaps the most important.

V

Eurocentrism, not the Cartesian good-sense, is the thing in our world which isbetter and more equally distributed by ev-erybody and everywhere. With very smalllocalized exceptions it dominates today in-dividual and collective consciousnesseswithin the core of the modern world-sys-tem, and in most of its semi-periphery andperiphery, without distinctions of race,class, or gender. Basically, Eurocentrism



can be defined as the conscious or, usually,unconscious collective and individual in-tellectual processes through which Euro-pean cultural, political, economic, religiousand philosophical assumptions, concepts,structures of knowledge, and values (todayalso designated as Euro-American) are con-sidered or tend to be construed and as-sumed as the normal, the natural, or theuniversal—that is to say, as being intellec-tually and practically superior to all otherassumptions, values, and concepts stillmore or less surviving in the modernworld-system.

As a long-term historical process, Euro-centrism is intrinsic to the developmentand global expansion of the capitalistworld-economy and its structures of powerand accumulation. As Arif Dirlik correctlypoints out, “without the power of capital-ism and all the structural innovations thataccompanied it in political, social, and cul-tural organization, Eurocentrism mighthave been just another ethnocentrism”(Dirlik et al. 2000: 33). Besides conditioningall our forms of knowledge, Eurocentrismis also expressed through the so called uni-versality of canonic literature, the perspec-tive of the victor in the dominant historicalinterpretations, the division of the worldbetween civilized and primitive cultures,the expansionist assumptions and practicesof Christianity with its missions and prop-agation of the faith, the assumed superior-ity of Western science, including socialscience, cartography, art, and numerousother cultural and social practices (Ashcroftet al. 1998: 93). This is historically true in thecore as it is true, as the result of a more orless violent “cultural imposition” orthrough simple adoption and influence, inthe periphery, semi-periphery, and the dif-ferent diasporas of the world-economy.

Edward Said, one of the rare scholarswho extensively studied Eurocentrism con-cluded that it is more than an expression ofsuperiority of the west: it tends to destroy,distort, and irreversibly change other cul-

tures into a new culture. It is, he wrote, “thewestern style of dominating, restructuring,and having authority” over the rest of theworld (Said 1978). This is why Eurocen-trism continues to be dominantly presentnot only in our individual and collectiveeveryday practices, but also in the theoreti-cal questioning, methodologies,approaches, concepts, categories, theoreti-cal contexts, fields, and research strategiesof the dominant forms of thought of themodern world-system. At the level of theindividual, Eurocentrism can be described,as Fanon does, as being a usually uncon-scious set of central conceptions, ideas,images, values, and topoi which structureour world-historical knowledge and socialinterrelationship according to equallybuilt-in notions of truth, objectivity, andreality. When and if detected, these notionstend to be wrongly described as if theywere claims of universal validity—andthey are accepted as such without any kindof further epistemological questioning. Inother words, Eurocentrism is dominantand permanent not only because it servesand consolidates the dominant power ofthe capitalist world-system— namelytoday through the so-called neo-liberal eco-nomic projects of structural adjustment andtheir global imposition—but also because itis universally accepted and allowed toinfluence without questioning.

What is exemplary in the work ofFrantz Fanon is that he is very much awareof that influence, of its highly detrimentalconsequences, and he does not acceptthem. This is the origin of what will be herediscussed as being one of the most strikingfeatures in Fanon’s work, as impressive ashis multifaceted characterization of colo-nialism as a violent, traumatic form of in-terrelationship between the European coreand the periphery: the way he recognizedand confronted, in his work, the pernicious,distorting, blinding effects of the Europeancultural hegemony or Euro-centrist intel-lectual tradition. To do so, I contend, he



constructed and followed an original andmethodologically innovative strategy of re-search without which this type of under-standing of colonialism and liberationwould not have been possible. I will try be-low to synthesize them in three or four ba-sic points.

In the first place, Fanon assumed fully,professionally, what can be described as hisown perspective of social psychiatry. Theindividual, the traumatized “colonized”(but also the “colonizer”) is his object of ob-servation (and eventual healing) not onlythrough his or her general behavior, includ-ing introspection, but, also, through his/her language, through the way the patientlearned (by imposition or by imposing it)and now speaks or expresses him/herselfwith the language of the colonizer. This ap-proach originates some of the more impres-sive pages of BSWM. They can be read asexpressing a vertical, in depth descent intothe mind and consciousness of the op-pressed. To a great extent, this descent re-verses the trajectory followed, for instance,by John Searle who tries “to climb up thelevels from mind to language and social re-ality generally” (Searle 1998: ix). On thecontrary, Fanon “goes” from the languageand the violent social reality of colonialismtowards the individual mind. What hefinds there is the dominant weight of a mas-sive psycho-existential complex and theanomalies of affect responsible for its struc-ture and influence (1952: 10). He finds alsothat the inferiority complex of the colo-nized has its correspondence in the superi-ority complex of the colonizer. In thedepths of the human mind, he finds, inshort, a pervasive, ever-present, interre-lated, traumatic psychosis only possible ofbeing solved (healed) through violence. Forhim, this constitutes a universal, systemic,structural characteristic.

Secondly, Fanon tries to root his psy-chological approach in time, in history, butnot only: “Ideally,” he adds, “the presentwill always contribute to the building of the

future” (1952: 12-3). Looking back in time,he points out the centuries of incomprehen-sion that, in the juxtaposition of white andblack races, have created that “massivepsycho-existential complex.” This repre-sents as well, he points out, not only the“failure of Europe” but also the need “for anew Humanism.” But he looks also to-wards another future: by analyzing thatcomplex he wants “to destroy it” (1952: 12).To a great extent, what Fanon does is to es-tablish a longue durée, historical, horizontaltrajectory that permits his generalization ofpsychiatric, individual cases to the wholeof society—at the same time projecting it-self into better, more just, more humanisticand equalitarian possible futures.

Thirdly, Fanon assumes his subjectmatter, colonialism and its violence, in rela-tional terms. What this means is that hedoes not assume the perspective of the vic-tim—he correctly considers negritude andAfro-centrism as avatars of Anglo-Ameri-can universalism—as he obviously doesnot assume the position of European mo-dernity that collapses or hides expansion,violence, and racism with the mirage ofprogress and civilization. To a great extent,he keeps firmly in view and discusses bothrealities as if they were (as they indeed are)a single one related in his study of themthrough language, the language (as well asthe culture, the history, the existence, andthe violence) of the colonizer imposed anddestroying as inferior the language (as wellas, the culture, the history, the existence,but also the self and the liberty) of the colo-nized. Fanon’s approach is a multidimen-sional approach that destabilizesEurocentrism by frontally refusing whatAshcroft (1998: 92) calls the authoritativeinterpretations of Euro-centric conceptionsand practices of History, written from thepoint of view of the victors, that is to say, ofcolonialism.

Finally, and perhaps as importantly,Fanon is quite aware that in his own mind,education, culture, and experience of life,



he was also deeply affected not only by Eu-rocentrism but also by the psycho-social,existential complex of the colonized. Hefinds them inside himself, particularly theformer, always ready to distort his state-ments, the way he frames the result of hisanalytical research, his conclusions. Theseare the reasons why he raises what he callshis “antennae” (1952: 32-3; 172; 191) to con-front them.

Sometimes, these antenna with which,he tells us, “I touch and I am touched,” col-lapse. With anguish, with horror, he thenfeels that he tends to become condescend-ing and recognizes in himself “the stigmataof a dereliction in my relations with otherpeople” (1952: 33). In a different passage healso tells us how “archetypes belonging tothe European” are easily taken over by the“collective unconscious” of the oppressed.It happens to him, his own consciousness isoften taken over by those archetypes: “I tooam guilty,” he explodes: “There is no helpfor it: I am a white man. For unconsciouslyI distrust what is black in me, that is, thewhole of my being” (1952: 191).

Simultaneously, Fanon fights here an-other, radically different and probably evenmore difficult combat. It was DipeshChakrabarty who first called our attentionto it: his combat to “hold on to the Enlight-enment idea of the human even when heknew that European imperialism had re-duced that idea to the figure of the settler-colonial white man” (Chakrabarty 2000: 5).This is important at two levels.

According to the first one, and as it isobvious in his work, Fanon was able tocarefully distinguish inside the dominantand repressive legacy of historical Eurocen-trism what is or is not important both to theunderstanding of the present and to theconstruction of possible futures. In doingso, he becomes aware of ways and means ofempowerment within Eurocentrism (for in-stance in his professional condition of psy-chiatrist) and that it is possible to useEurocentrism against or to denounce Euro-

centrism. Secondly, and with that objective,

Fanon is able to avoid the simplistic dichot-omies to which so many authors have lazilyreduced this question: to be or not to beagainst reason; to be or not to be against En-lightenment; to be or not to be against mo-dernity and its Euro-centric intellectualtradition; to be or not to be a victim. Ratherand as already pointed out, Fanon assumesthe existence of a common, relational his-tory in which the either-or of the easy di-chotomies is substituted by a single, long-term, structural trajectory. And it is in thattrajectory that he finds starting points capa-ble of offering critical approaches and alter-natives to Eurocentrism as an intrinsic partof world-systemic, global, structures ofpower. In such a protracted struggle, andperhaps as in all liberation struggles, thereis no doubt about how difficult it is to keepaway or, at least, under control in our con-sciousness the heavy, usually unconscious,lurking influence of Eurocentrism.

But, without this effort, the study ofour subject matter (as the success of thestruggle) will always be incomplete, dis-torted, manipulated. In other words, with-out it we will not be able to understand oursocial reality, the social reality of the mod-ern world-system, and, eventually, tochange it. This is what Fanon taught usand, for a better understanding of ourworld, this is what we can learn withFanon.

WORKS CITED

Ahmad, Jalal Ali 1961: Occidentosis, Plague fromthe West, Berkeley: Mizan Press.

Bill Ashcroft et al. 1998: Post-Colonial Studies,London: Routledge

Beinart, Peter 2007: Black Like Me, The NewRepublic January 30.

Chakrabarty, Dipesh 2000: ProvincializingEurope, Princeton: Princeton UniversityPress.



Cherki, Alice: Frantz Fanon, A Portrait, Ithaca:Cornell University Press.

Dacy, Elo (ed) 1986: L’Actualite de FrantzFanon, Paris: Karthala

Dirlik, Arif et al 2000: History After the ThreeWorlds, London: Rowman &Littlefield.

Fanon, Frantz (1952) 1967: Black Skin WhiteMasks, NY: Grove Press (BSWM).

Fanon, Frantz 1986: Black Skin White Masks,London: Pluto Press.

Fanon, Frantz (1959) 1965: A Dying Colonial-ism, NY: M. Review Press.

Fanon, Frantz (1961) 1966: The Wretched of theEarth, NY: Grove Press (WE).

Fanon, Frantz (1964) 1967: Toward the AfricanRevolution, NY: Monthly Review Press.

Franks, Jason 2006: Rethinking the Roots of Terror-ism, London: Palgrave.

Gibson, Neil C. ed, 1999: Rethinking Fanon,New York: Humanity Books.

Fanon, Frantz 2003: Fanon, The PostcolonialImagination, London: Polity.

Hobsbawm, E. J. 1973: “Passionate Witness,”NY Review of Books, 22 February, 6-10.

Machel, Samora 1985: Selected Speeches andWritings, London: Zed Press.

Mbembe, Achile 2001: On the Postcolony, NewYork: Temple University Press.

Mota Lopes, Jose 1974: O Tempo e o Modo deSamora Machel: Entrevista com o Presidenteda Frelimo, Maputo: Tempo.

Mota Lopes, Jose 2005: Colonialism, NationalLiberation, and Structural Adjustment inthe Modern World-Economy, PhD Dis-sertation, Binghamton University (TBP).

Richardson, Louise 2006: What Terrorists Want,New York: Random House.

Said, Edward 1978: Orientalism, New York:Vintage Books.

Searle, John 1998: Mind, Language, and Society,New York: Basic Books

Wallerstein, Immanuel 1979: The CapitalistWorld-Economy, New York: Cambridge University Press.

Documents

Re-Reading Frantz Fanon: Language, Violence, and - OKCIR