>
>
> By HOMI K. BHABHA
>
> Frantz Fanon's classic of decolonization, The Wretched of the Earth, was
> published in Paris in the fall of 1961, as the author lay dying of
> leukemia
> in a hospital bed at the National Institutes of Health, in Bethesda, Md.
>
> Born in Martinique in 1925, Fanon enlisted in the French Army in World War
> II, studied medicine and psychiatry in Lyon, then served as head of the
> psychiatric department in a French colonial hospital in Algeria. Alienated
> from France during the Algerian war, he quit his hospital post because he
> saw psychiatric ethics as irreconcilable with the politics, physical
> torture, and psychic humiliation of the colonial system. He joined the
> Algerian independence movement, wrote for nationalist newspapers, and, as
> ambassador to Ghana for the provisional Algerian government, established a
> southern supply route for the Algerian army.
>
> Fanon's profound commitment to the Algerian cause should not obscure the
> cultural hybridity of his own transnational existence. Like other
> third-world intellectuals and leaders before him, Fanon moved between the
> colonial periphery and its metropolitan center. In Lyon he quickly
> discovered that the invitation to assimilate into French society was
> inevitably underscored by demeaning racial stereotypes and cultural
> assumptions. Knowledge is not power when you are black, he discovered, and
> the colonized person can only ever hope to become a second-class, partial
> citizen.
>
> Fanon's first book, Black Skin, White Masks (1952), explored the psychic
> trauma and political disfigurement caused by the colonial predicament. His
> mastery of various schools of European philosophical and political thought
> -- Marxism, historicism, phenomenology, psychoanalysis, Surrealism --
> enabled him to conceive a revisionary, even revolutionary, postcolonial
> humanism. The Wretched of the Earth ends on a salutary note of inclusion
> and
> renewal: "For Europe, for ourselves, and for humanity, comrades, we must
> make a new start, develop a new way of thinking, and endeavor to create a
> new man."
>
> Like Gandhi and Mandela, Fanon eagerly grasped the tools of the master and
> turned them into the weapons of the oppressed. In The Wretched of the
> Earth
> he assesses the moral economy of Western humanism and its claims to
> universal rights and representations. He does not simply indict the West
> for
> its hypocrisy or bad faith. He deftly dismantles its ideals of law and
> order, progress and discipline, by revealing the everyday violence and
> injustice required to uphold them once they become instruments of colonial
> coercion instead of obligations that arise from civic consent.
> Decolonization, Fanon argues, works in two directions. The colonized must
> be
> freed from the iniquity of alien rule, while the colonizers must be freed
> from the guilt and alienation caused by the illegitimate rule in which
> they
> participate. In his preface to The Wretched of the Earth, Sartre
> recognizes
> the particular value of that dual disengagement: "The people of Europe are
> also being decolonized. ... Let us look at ourselves if we have the
> courage,
> and see what is happening to us. We must face up to that unexpected
> spectacle: the striptease of our humanism."
>
> Fanon's thinking and writing balance the subjective and the objective, the
> historical and material reality with mental phenomena and corporeal
> experience. He once expressed a wish to Sartre and de Beauvoir that "all
> political leaders should be psychiatrists as well." Fanon is the
> pre-eminent
> politician-psychiatrist, with the capacity to frame his reflections on
> violence, decolonization, national consciousness, and humanism in terms of
> the psycho-affective realm -- the realm of the body, the world of dreams,
> of
> psychic inversions and displacements, of phantasmal identifications. What
> forms of unhappy consciousness prevail among the colonized who feel
> threatened from all sides? How does the body speak in extremis? How does
> the
> mind withstand? "Colonialism forces the colonized to constantly ask the
> question: 'Who am I in reality?,'" Fanon writes.
>
> Is The Wretched of the Earth now only a historical and scholarly artifact?
> In the era of globalization, is it a relic of nationalistic struggle? Or
> do
> Fanon's insights transcend the particulars of his time? Might they help us
> make sense of today's global political and economic tensions?
>
> It's hard to revel in Fanon's dreams while wrestling with his political
> ethic of violence. Combine the religiousness in Fanon's language of
> revolutionary wrath "the last shall be the first," "the almighty body of
> violence rearing up" -- with his description of the widening circle of
> national unity as reaching the "boiling point" in a way that "is
> reminiscent
> of a religious brotherhood, a church or a mystical doctrine," and we find
> ourselves both forewarned and wary of the ethnonationalist religious
> conflicts of our own times.
>
> When we hear Fanon say that "for the people only fellow nationals are ever
> owed the truth," we furiously object to such a narrow and dangerous
> definition of "the people" and "the truth." Fanon's view that the building
> of national consciousness demands cultural homogeneity and the dissolution
> of differences is deeply troubling. Is he not dangerously outdated?
>
> Fanon's best hopes for the Algerian revolution were taken hostage, and
> summarily executed, first by bureaucratized military rule that violated
> his
> belief "that an army is never a school for war, but a school for civics,"
> and then by the rise of fundamentalist groups like the Islamic Salvation
> Front. Josie Fanon, his wife, looked out of her window in the El Biar
> district of Algiers in October 1988 only to find scenes of carnage. In
> violently quelling a demonstration in the street below, the army had
> inflamed the passions of Algerian youths, who responded by torching police
> cars and were felled by a barrage of bullets. Speaking to her friend the
> Algerian writer Assia Djebar on the telephone, Josie sighed, "Oh, Frantz,
> the wretched of the earth again."
>
> More broadly, it must seem a stretch to search for lessons for the
> globalization of our era in the decolonization of Fanon's. Decolonization
> had the dream of a third world of free, postcolonial nations firmly on its
> horizon. Globalization gazes at the nation-state through the rearview
> mirror, as we speed on a fiber-optic freeway toward the strategic
> denationalization of state sovereignty.
>
> The global aspirations of third-world national thinking belonged to the
> internationalist traditions of socialism, Marxism, and humanism, whereas
> the
> dominant forces of contemporary globalization are free-market ideas
> embedded
> in ideologies of technocratic elitism. And while it was the primary
> purpose
> of decolonization to repossess territory in order to ensure national
> polity
> and global equity, globalization propagates a world of virtual,
> transnational domains and wired communities.
>
> In what way, then, can Fanon instruct us in our global century? x For one
> thing, the economic antidotes for inequality and poverty, as prescribed by
> the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, for instance, have
> "the
> feel of the colonial ruler," in the words of Joseph Stiglitz, the bank's
> former senior vice president and chief economist. "They help to create,"
> he
> writes, "a dual economy in which there are pockets of wealth. ... But a
> dual
> economy is not a developed economy."
>
> The granting of loans becomes an enforcement of policy that rapidly
> reproduces dual, unequal economies worldwide. These dual economies sustain
> silicon valleys and oases of outsourcing -- but such signs of global
> development are darkened by the colonial shadow. In dual economies, strata
> of prosperity mask the ubiquitous, underlying, persistent poverty and
> malnutrition, the caste and racial injustice, the exploitation of women's
> and children's labor, and the victimization of refugees. For instance,
> "India Shining," the 2004 electioneering slogan of the "high tech"
> Hindu-nationalist BJP government, shrugged off the darker, daily reality
> of
> the 63 percent of rural households that do not have electricity, and the
> 10
> to 15 hours of blackouts and brownouts that, on any given day, afflict
> those
> that do.
>
> Such an instance of global economic duality echoes Fanon's celebrated
> description of the compartmentalized structure of colonial society. The
> Wretched of the Earth, well beyond the immediacies of its anticolonial
> context -- the Algerian war of independence and the African continent
> anticipates configurations of contemporary globalization.
>
> There is also, in Fanon's writing, an eerily contemporary and ominous
> sense
> of the clock ticking. He suggests that the future of the decolonized world
> is imaginable, or achievable, only in the process of resisting the
> peremptory and polarizing choices that superpowers impose on their client
> states. Decolonization can be achieved only by destroying the
> Manichaeanism
> of the cold war. His work prompts us to ask what pressures the
> Manichaeanism
> of the war on terror imposes on the new client states.
>
> Fanon was wary of the national consciousness of "young" nations. "National
> consciousness is nothing but a crude, empty, fragile shell," he wrote.
> "The
> cracks in it explain how easy it is for young, independent countries to
> switch back from nation to ethnic group and from state to tribe -- a
> regression which is so terribly detrimental and prejudicial to the
> development of the nation and national unity." Fanon foreshadows the
> ethnonationalist switchbacks of our own times, the charnel houses of
> ethnic
> cleansing: Bosnia, Rwanda, Kosovo, Gujarat, Sudan. He anticipates the
> regressions into religious-fundamentalist tribalism, and the reactionary
> theses on "the clash of civilizations" that targeted, at first, Islam, and
> now migrants, refugees, and minorities more generally.
>
> "If nationalism is not explained, enriched, and deepened," he wrote, "if
> it
> does not very quickly turn into a social and political consciousness, into
> humanism, then it leads to a dead end."
>
> Many readers have held that The Wretched of the Earth is long on prophecy
> and polemics, and short on policy and planning, a deliberately
> universalized
> "bible of decolonization," as Stuart Hall put it. But Fanon's rejection of
> a
> univocal choice between capitalism and socialism is strategic, activist,
> and
> aspirational. The political dichotomy then and the cultural dichotomies
> now
> overlay a more fundamental economic requirement: the redistribution of the
> world's wealth.
>
> Fanon's demand for an equitable distribution of wealth and technology
> beyond
> the rhetorical pieties of "moral reparation" is akin to today's calls for
> a
> "right to development." What rings past his particulars through the
> decades
> is his emphasis on social equity. The politics of identity, the politics
> of
> recognition, and the culture wars have become somewhat eclipsed by global
> initiatives toward minoritarian equity and an international civil society.
> Sometimes they succeed; often they fail; usually they hover uncertainly in
> between. Fanon's generous humanistic project places the problem of
> development in the context of our collective human instinct for survival,
> our ethical affiliations and ambivalences, and our desire for freedom.
>
> Fanon, the phantom of terror, might be the most intimate, if intimidating,
> poet of the vicissitudes of violence. But poetic justice can be
> questionable
> even when it is exercised on behalf of the wretched of the earth. And if
> Fanon finely adjusted the balance between the politician and the
> psychiatrist, evened the scale between considering social and
> psycho-affective relations, then we have to admit that he is also in
> danger
> of losing his balance when, for instance, he writes: "Violence can thus be
> understood to be the perfect mediation. The colonized man liberates
> himself
> in and through violence. The praxis enlightens the militant because it
> shows
> him the means and the end."
>
> Few readers come to Fanon's work seeking that dubious "perfect mediation"
> of
> violence, although that small part of the book has received a
> disproportionate amount of attention. They turn to The Wretched of the
> Earth, generation after generation, armed with only an imperfect sense of
> obligation toward the ideals they want to serve. The message they take
> away
> is a quieter, more contemplative one, which is also to be found in the
> opening sentence of his seminal essay "On National Culture": "Each
> generation must discover its mission, fulfill it or betray it, in relative
> opacity."
>
> The messages of poet-politicians are never as easy to decipher as the
> myths
> offered up in their names. Each age has its own peculiar opacities and
> urgent missions. What seems to survive the contingent movements of
> historical change is Fanon's passionate hope that a liberated
> consciousness
> should be grounded in a historical sense of "time [that] must no longer be
> that of the moment or the next harvest but rather of the rest of the
> world."
>
> Homi K. Bhabha is a professor of English and American literature, and
> chairman of the program in history and literature, at Harvard University.
> This essay is adapted from his introduction to a new edition of Frantz
> Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth, to be published next month by Grove
> Press.
>
> _________________________________________________________________
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