On Frantz Fanon's "The Wretched of the Earth"

In 1925, on the French colonial island of Martinique, one of the most important thinkers of the 20th century was born, France Fanon. He was born to parents of both African and French descent, and was brought up in the ways of French culture. For most of Fanon's life, he identified with French nationality. He even fought for France in World War II. But despite his initial loyalty to France, the French colonizers didn't see Fanon as equal. For centuries, Europeans justified their colonial conquest by claiming it was a civilizing mission, that they were bringing these other nations and people into the modern era. In his early adulthood, Fanon began to see behind this myth and saw colonialism for what it really was. Fanon became a vocal critic of colonialism. In his 1961 text, The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon wrote about the psychological effects of colonialism and the psychological hurdles of decolonization. So one of the things that I remember was that that very basic claim that Fanon begins with, which is that the last shall be the first, and the first shall be the last. This idea that decolonization has to upend the colonial order. My name is Manon Ahmed. I am an associate professor of history at Columbia's History Department. Fanon saw colonization as an inherently violent process, and therefore believed decolonization had to be as well. For Fanon, the only way decolonization could fully happen was through a violent struggle between the last, also known as the colonized, and the first, or the colonizers, where eventually the colonized emerged on top. They would become the first, and the colonizers would become the last. Fanon didn't think full decolonization was about returning to pre-colonial life, nor was it about fully adopting the culture of the colonizers. He believed a new national culture would emerge when a nation turns its attention away from its oppressors and towards its own people. And so I think the appeal of this text really is in that second half, where decolonization and third world and the future, which is the now, the future is the now, the struggle is right now, but the future of an emancipated world, emancipated from colonialism, he kind of lays out a kind of a blueprint for it. And I think that's what I think is the most kind of incredibly important part of the book. Welcome to Rit Large, a podcast about how books change the world. I'm Zachary Davis. In each episode, I talk with one of the world's leading scholars about one book that changed the course of history. For this episode, I sat down with Professor Manon Ahmed to discuss France Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth. France Fanon was born in 1925 on the French-occupied Caribbean island of Martinique. Fanon's father was a descendant of enslaved Africans, and his mother was of African and French descent. Fanon grew up middle class and was steeped in French culture. He attended the most prestigious high school in Martinique and studied with writer, poet, and politician, Emma Césaire. Césaire spent his life speaking out against European colonialism and specifically the myth that colonization was a civilizing mission. Early in his career, Césaire developed the term "negretude." This was an empowering term for celebrating and taking pride in being of African descent. Césaire was an incredible influence on young Fanon and helped him start to see behind the veil of colonization. Through Césaire, he gets exposed to, for example, the concept of "negretude." It's also through Césaire that he really kind of figures out what the kind of theoretical models are that he will go on to kind of challenge, including Marxist thought and so including communism. Fanon finished school when he was 18, right in the middle of World War II. He left Martinique and headed to Europe to fight for France. A few years earlier, Nazi Germany invaded France and occupied much of the northern part of the country. The southern part and its colonies were ruled by the French general Philippe Petain. Petain got rid of the old French government and established the French state, also known as Vichy France. His regime was officially independent, but collaborated with Nazi Germany. Vichy France was authoritarian, traditionalist, xenophobic, and anti-Semitic. An organization called the Free French Forces quickly assembled. This group was essentially the pre-war French government in exile led by Charles de Gaulle. They were fighting both Nazi Germany and the Vichy regime. 18-year-old Fanon joined this group when he arrived in France. He's someone who fights for France, fights for France in the sense that he's also someone who takes up the French cause in the Second War and is incredibly engaged in the struggle against Nazi and the National Socialists. So someone who's not only kind of brought up in the colony, but someone who at some point I think identifies with the French worldview in a sense. Fanon was injured in the war and was honored with a medal. During his time in Europe during the war Fanon experienced a lot of racism, both from the white Europeans he was fighting with and from civilians and journalists he encountered. And that racism followed him from the army to his next academic pursuit, dentistry. So if you think about dentistry as something tied to one of the very primary orifices on our human body and how as a practice, as a medical practice, how intimate it is, right? Like someone is all up in your mouth. And to think about what that would mean for an African diaspora man in colonized Martinique and obviously as a medical professional, what does that intimacy, is that intimacy allowed? And it wasn't allowed actually. His dental studies didn't last long. After just three weeks in dental school, Fanon changed direction. He struggles to become a dentist and has to switch towards psychiatry, you know, another type of intimacy, right, with the mind of the colonizer and the mind of the colonizer. In addition to his psychiatric studies, Fanon also studied drama, literature and philosophy and he began to write. He writes about the kind of racism that he faces, especially in his first book, Black Skin, White Mask. You know, he's very young when he writes that, I mean, I think 25 years old. And he says that he faced a lot of racism and that's what made him kind of change his kind of outlook. So I think that's where, you know, you see like this shift happening, right? So for someone who's fought for France to move to the metropole from the colony, to try to kind of go up the ranks as the colony allows you to do, and then to hit that wall and then to hit and to face that racism. And I think that's where his kind of intellectual world kind of switched to kind of diagnosing and thinking about colonization itself. Fanon practiced psychiatry for a year in France and then moved to Algeria. In Algeria, he worked as a psychiatrist in a French hospital. At the time, Algeria was under French rule, but unrest was brewing. The Algerian Nationalist Political Party wanted independence. In 1954, the Algerian War of Independence broke out. Fanon, who no longer identified as French and now identified as a subject of French colonization, joined the war. But this time, he was fighting against France. So it's amazing that he fought for France in a war and then ends up fighting against France in another war. I mean, that is two wars in a life is unreal on opposite sides. Absolutely. And you know, I think we can expand even like someone like Gandhi, right, who again very much believes in the English side of things, let's just say, goes to London, becomes a barrister, takes a job in South Africa, thinks he's one type of colonized subject. And then in South Africa, famously on a train is, you know, taught his colonial place and realizes then that this is a figment. This is a colonial figment. This figment of, you know, that you have a, that we can hear you or we can train you if you speak enough English or if you speak enough French and if you get these, if you fight for us and if you get these medals that you have access to the colonial world. And so that shattering of one's worldview, that is the colonial worldview rendered through the colonial kind of educational system. So you know, in a way, you can think of it as a radicalization, but Fanon, for example in Richard of the Earth, says it's when you wake up from the dream, right? It's when you say, oh yeah, this is it. This is the reality that I have to now fight as a colonized subject. Two years later, Fanon resigned from his job at the French hospital. He wanted nothing to do with French colonialism. He wouldn't even work in a French institution. In his letter of resignation, he wrote, "There comes a time when silence becomes dishonesty. For many months, my conscience has been the seat of unpardonable debates. The decision I have reached is that I cannot continue to bear a responsibility at no matter what cost on the false pretext that there is nothing else to be done." He's kind of expelled from Algeria by the French in '57. The French government ordered Fanon's expulsion because he supported Algerian independence. By this time, anti-colonial activists were beginning to see some fruits of their labors. Fanon's old high school teacher, M.A. Césaire, had published his landmark text, Discourse on Colonialism. The Indian lawyer and anti-colonial nationalist, Mahatma Gandhi, had led a successful, non-violent passive resistance campaign against the British rule in India. Countries such as Britain and France had begun to decolonize parts of their empire. Fanon saw the powerful effect that Césaire and Gandhi's efforts were having on the colonial world. Once he left Algeria, Fanon then moved to Tunis and began writing for an Algerian French language resistance newspaper. He also served as ambassador to Ghana. Then things took a turn for the worse. In 1960, Fanon was diagnosed with leukemia. Around this time, Fanon traveled to Rome to meet with one of his intellectual idols, the French existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre, who agreed to write the foreword to Fanon's next book, The Wretched of the Earth. Fanon resonated with many of Sartre's ideas on how categorizing people by race and religion can lead to and fuel oppression. Fanon eventually headed back to Tunis and wrote The Wretched of the Earth. Shortly after, he died from leukemia at the age of 36. So, you know, it's a very short life, in a sense. So the text itself, The Wretched of the Earth, what is his argument? It's written, you know, in his very last months of his life. So, it's basically more or less the last text he writes. He knows he's dying. He knows he has very little time left. Obviously, he's fighting. He's not, you know, there's famously, I think, Simon de Beauvoir describes a meeting with Sartre and him, where they make, you know, he sort of, he's already asked Sartre to write the foreword to the text, The Wretched of the Earth, in which he's, you know, he describes him as very, you know, eager to have like a longer publishing life, right? I'm going to write this, and I'm going to write this, and, you know, he doesn't. I mean, he has a, when even when he's diagnosed, it's very much understood that he has maybe a year left. And so, the text that we have The Wretched of the Earth is, I think, both composed of things he had already written, that either he expands or develops in particular kind of ways, or stuff that he kind of dictates to his wife and to another secretary from scratch as he is kind of without access to his writing, as in he's without access to books and etc. So it's very much a curious text in the sense that it's compilations or it's amalgamations of different things that are done in different types, times of his life, as well as stuff that's kind of his practice, his practice as a psychiatrist. And then it kind of a summa of, you know, his kind of intellectual reading, not only of the conditions in Algerian struggle for independence, but across Africa, and then by extension beyond the Third World. In The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon analyzes the psychological effects of colonization on an individual and national level. The first part of the text is called "on-violence." Here, Fanon explores the role of violence in both colonization and decolonization. He argues that decolonization must be a violent process because, quote, "violence is the only language spoken by the colonist." He saw colonialism as an inherently violent system, in which nonviolence only empowers the elites. The next section of the text is called "on-national culture." In this part, Fanon explores how previously colonized nations can move forward and form a new national culture. He argues that instead of returning to their pre-colonial culture, these new national cultures should be built on the resistance against colonial domination. Then there's the last bit, which is a colonial war and mental disorder, which is like these case studies that are part of the text. In this, as a whole, what he's taking is, I think, Amos' heirs' kind of explication on what colonialism is as a discourse. He's actually kind of positing decolonization as the necessary step. What does decolonization mean? In order to think of decolonization, he has to explain what colonization means, right? And then if decolonization has to operate in a particular way, then how do we go about building the kind of argument, intellectual argument for that? Fanon was influenced by Emma Sezaire's term "thingification," which he developed in his 1950 text, "Discourse on Colonialism." In the text, Sezaire proposes the following equation. Colonization equals "thingification." What he means by this is that through colonization, the colonizer recognizes the land, resources, and people they are colonizing simply as things or commodities. The colonized, the colony is made into a thing. Now what do you do with the thing? You can extract things from it. You can map it. You can census it. You can create it, objectify it. You can do whatever we do with things, right? Commodity. Build it into a commodity, and we can render it into different ways. This thingification occurs when the colonizers see the people, cultures, land, and resources they are colonizing only as a commodity. They have a binary view of the situation, or as Fanon describes it, a Manachian view. The colonialism equals "thingification" part hasn't gone away, and we are still very much thinking through the thingification of the world. And here, I think that's where kind of boats Sezaire and Fanon become so important for us. The thingification makes me think about how the will of those populations just never factors, never. And it's like a foregone conclusion that doesn't matter until there's sort of enough real power that things are transformed into subjects. Absolutely. And I think that's really one of the most important part of, I think, decolonial thinking or decolonizing our thought processes, right? But how do we actually turn these processes that we imagine are driven by, I don't know, free market or, you know, some other universally acclaimed good to actually be impacting lives of human beings? Fanon recognized that decolonization had to be a process, and could not simply be just the end of colonial rule. And I think what Fanon says, he says, decolonization is truly the creation of new men. But such a creation cannot be attributed to a supernatural power, colon. The thing, in quotes, the thing colonized becomes a man, a person, through the very process of liberation. For Fanon, this liberation happens when the colonized subjects resist colonial thingification. In The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon has a passage where he describes the freedom that the colonized subjects still possesses, even when under colonial rule, the freedom of dreams. A world compartmentalized, mannequian and petrified, a world of statues. The statue of the general who led the conquest, the statue of the engineer who built the bridge. A world cock-shore of itself, crushing with its stoniness the backbones of those scarred by the whip. This is the colonial world. The colonial subject is a man penned in, apartheid is but one method of compartmentalizing the colonial world. The first thing the colonial subject learns is to remain in its place and not overstep its limits. Hence the dreams of the colonial subject are muscular dreams, dreams of action, dreams of aggressive vitality. I dream I am jumping, swimming, running and climbing. I dream I burst out laughing. I am leaping across the river, chased by a pack of cars that never catches up with me. During colonization, the colonized subject frees himself night after night between 9 in the evening and 6 in the morning. You see how he is able to tell us, the colonized subject who is a think to the colonizer is in this mannequian dialectic that he points out. But that subject is dreaming. That subject is free every night. Now eventually in Fanon's text, that subject will have to take up the revolutionary arm and fight for that freedom. But in that paragraph, I think what I have always found incredibly important is that the mind that belongs to the colonized subject that Fanon wants us to remember is there, is dreaming, is dreaming of freedom, is dreaming of movement, of laughing, of being carefree. And he goes on to kind of talk about the dance, both the ritualistic dance and the dance of the ritual. And he talks about storytelling, stories like the zombies or stories like other mythic creations. How all of these are incredibly important because what they say is what they do is they resist that dignification. And from that place, that resistance takes shape, the resistance against the colonization. How does he want to liberate the colonized mind to create a new world fit for its inhabitants? I mean, so one of the things that I think is incredibly important that both Fanon but also Gandhi and others have pointed out is the role of those who are among the colonized in order to buttress and support colonization. So black skin, white masks in that sense is the national bourgeoisie or the elite that step in as mediators or step in as translators or step in as kind of people who will shepherd you from colonization to decolonization, the people who are trusted by the colonizers to kind of do the job of civilization. And I think both Fanon and Gandhi and others, other decolonial thinkers are rightfully incredibly skeptical of these people or these kind of mediation roles precisely because of the colonization that's happening inside the mind. It's where the colonizer is able to convince sometimes a large majority of people that the colonized life is righteous, that we were primitive or our arts and literature didn't amount to much or we would never have invented the printing press or the railway, more whatever, kind of my idea that was important in that colonization. And so any true decolonization would not be the actual liberation of the people. What it would mean is that you would get a white elite be replaced by people with black skin and white masks who would continue that colonization and would continue that process. And to be incredibly clear eyed that that's actually what happens in decolonization. And that is that there are these, whether they're military strong, what we call strongmen or they're political dynasties that come into power in the post-colonial states, in majority of post-colonial states, who are able to kind of transition and they remain in power. From Fanon's perspective, this is not decolonization. And so there, the question of the mind becomes important, right? Because what are these elites saying? These elites are saying back to the people that they are now leading that English education or U.S. geopolitics or World Bank's criteria for nationalization versus free market, on all of these bits, whether it's coming from Harvard School of Economics or University of Chicago, Milton Friedman, et cetera, et cetera, all of these bits are smarter than you are. So the counter to this is, for Fanon at least, this colonization of the mind, is that this colonization, just as it's a dichotomy outside, right? It creates this divide between the kasbah, the inhabitations of the colonized and the inhabitations of the European. In the mind of the colonized, there's a similar fracture of consciousness. And that fracture has to be healed and that has to be come back together. And resistance, violence in that sense, which is not the, again, I want to say, we haven't said this before, but I want to say the violence is not the choice of the colonized. Violence is the choice of the colonizer and the colonize has to basically respond in it. And it's through this violence that this kind of dialectic can be resolved because it creates the unity that he says is needed for decolonization. A large part of colonialism involves the colonizer imposing their culture on the colonized. For Fanon, decolonization wasn't about continuing the colonial culture but building a new world. One of the things that he says at the end of the book, which is something that I think Gandhi says very explicitly in Hind Swaraj as well, which is, you know, we don't want Africa to become a new Europe, we don't want India to become a new England, right? This is not, decolonization is not where we just become those who colonized us. And I think that is an incredibly important kind of radical futurity, right? It's different. It's not about simply becoming our own colonizers in that sense, right? And so this idea that he ends with, which is, you know, that we have to take humanity forward to create a new world, I think is something that's incredibly important that I always think with, especially with figures like I mentioned, Gandhi, who are very clear that fighting colonialism and building a new world are kind of part of the same continuum but have different means. We fight colonialism in order to reject the colonizer, but we build a new world not to become, you know, versions of the colonizer. What was the general reception to the book? And you know, as yourself a scholar of decolonization, how do you place this among other texts, among other movements? What's it standing today? This is a text that I think is published in almost immediately in a translation in '62. Sartre's forward to it makes it available globally, I think immediately. And it's, you know, it's read certainly in the late '60s, by the late '60s, in most sites around the world, especially sites where there is a struggle for freedom and struggle for emancipation that's ongoing. In 1962, one year after Fanon's death, Algeria gained its independence from France. Many Algerians who fought for independence believed the wretched of the earth was directed towards them. It's incredibly important for Algeria itself. Fanon becomes an important figure in how Algeria sees itself afterwards, after independence. I think one of the ways in which I would suggest it has an impact that's maybe most legible is in the kind of thought of black and queer feminists, especially the abolition-centered thinkers, Angela Davis, Sylvia Winter. In the '80s, especially how to imagine a global solidarity movement. And in that, Fanon is incredibly important, precisely because he links himself to the struggles against the British Empire, and, you know, it is someone who's read within those various domains. And I think the ideas of connecting race to capital are something that's taken up in the '80s and '90s by a number of theorists. And I think when young people and people who are in capacity of teachers, as I am, when in 2014 and 2015, when we looked back, I think it's that moment of the '60s, especially folks like Fanon, who is obviously early '60s, '61, but through Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr., and then going on to Angela Davis, and Amir Baraka, and Cornell West now. That is the kind of intellectual legacy on which a global solidarity, whether it's in terms of Rhodes Westfall or Black Lives Matter, in the sense of its constellation of how to enunciate the need against statues. The statue is an important monument, is an important part of that. It's not like Fanon went away, but we're seeing Fanon enter curriculum, enter public discourse in an incredibly important way, and not alone, not alone, not alone, along with the people who have written alongside him, and then obviously those who have written after him. And I think that collective, however, Fanon, like other theorists of the European Enlightenment, where each terrorist kind of always had the capacity to be put in a conversation with other, right? You can read Kant, but can you really read Kant without Hume? You can read Hume, but can you really read Hume without Housseau? And so you take that world as a given, and then against that comedy, you would always only be able to say, well, there's one Gandhi, and well, there's just one Fanon. And I think that's what's changed now. That's what I feel is the radical newness in the moment today. France Fanon left a huge impact on the world. He looked at colonization and decolonization through a psychological lens, and helped the world recognize the mental impacts of both. For Fanon, true decolonization requires shedding the old colonial mindset and building a new world. Its uniqueness was to demonstrate that the task of resistance against colonialism and the work of theorizing the colonial thought were related and connected, that one can do both. One can be a scholar, be a theoretician, and be engaged in praxis. And I think that linkage, which is in the figure of Fanon, is just such an incredibly important pivot in the history of letters, as it were. We tended to have a world in which you imagine Kant has never left Königsberg, and he has come up with a universal theory of morals and universal critique of reason. And sure, we can just go with that, but why not? Hegel has never traveled anything, but he's given us a universal theory of history and a universal theory of aesthetic. Sure, we can just go with that, why not, etc., etc. I think that's the model that European Enlightenment was really particularly kind of invested in. Because guess what traveling means? The colony. Do you know what I'm saying? So there's a simulchra, there's an illusion that is useful. And I think figures like Fanon put that illusion to rest, and they show us what a radical practice looks like. Rit Large is produced by Jack Pombriant and me, Zachary Davis. Script editing is by Galen Beebe. We get help from Fair Undo. Our theme song is by Ian Koss, and our branding is by Dan Pedgey. We're a member of Lit Hub Radio. Rit Large is a Lyceum original production. You can find us on our website, ritlarge.fm. There you'll find transcripts, links to the books we discussed, and more information about today's guest. Thanks for listening, see you next time.