25
It would cheer you up to read Fanon
…
„Excuse me?”
... This un-suppressible violence is, as
he exactly demonstrates, no absurd
thunderstorm, also not the breakthrough
of wild instincts, not even the effect of
a resentment: it is nothing else than the
self-inventing new human being …
 ... We
are quoting the preface of Frantz
Fanon‘s „The Wretched of the
Earth”, written by Jean-Paul Sartre
in September 1961 ...
• 1952-56 member of the French
Communist Party
• 1956 criticism of the intervention
of the Soviet Union in Hungary
• 1968 criticism of the intervention
of the Warsaw Pact-members in
Czechoslovakia
CONTROL!
... Do we have, at least, a picture of
this French philosopher who, behind his
spectacles, was able to look, at the same
time, always in two different directions
… ump … could look … ump
… was allowed to look?
„Pardon, I presumed you would be
interested in me, not in my
preface-writer …“
Ah,
welcome on our rolling stage, Monsieur
Fanon! Author of an anti-colonial
manifesto! Born in 1925, to a
middle-class family in the French colony
of Martinique, exposed to the conflict
between Black Skin and White Masks …
„Nicely placed, the title of my
first book … You see, because of my
schooling and cultural background, I
conceived myself as French, and the
disorientation I felt after my initial
encounter with French racism decisively
shaped my psychological theories about
culture. I inflected my medical and
psychological practice with the
understanding that racism generates
harmful psychological constructs that
both blind the black man to his
subjection to a universalized white norm
and alienate his consciousness. A racist
culture prohibits psychological health in
the black man.
 In 1953, I
became Head of the Psychiatry Department
at the Blida-Joinville Hospital in
Algeria, where I instituted reform in
patient care and desegregated the wards.
During this tenure in Blida, the war for
Algerian independence broke out, and I
was horrified by the stories of torture
my patients — both French torturers
and Algerian torture victims — told
me.
The Algerian War consolidated my
alienation from the French imperial
viewpoint, and in 1956, I formally
resigned my post with the French
government to work for the Algerian
cause. My letter of resignation
encapsulated my theory of the psychology
of colonial domination, and pronounced
the colonial mission incompatible with
ethical psychiatric practice. I wrote:
If psychiatry is the medical
technique that aims to enable man no
longer to be a stranger to his
environment, I owe it to myself to affirm
that the Arab, permanently an alien in
his own country, lives in a state of
absolute depersonalization. . . . The
events in Algeria are the logical
consequence of an abortive attempt to
decerebralize a people.
Following my resignation, I fled to
Tunisia and began working openly with the
Algerian independence movement. In
addition to seeing patients, I wrote
about the movement for a number of
publications, including Sartre‘s Les
Temps Modernes, Presence Africaine, and
the FLN newspaper el Moudjahid; but my
work for Algerian independence was not
confined to writing. During my tenure as
Ambassador to Ghana for the Provisional
Algerian Government, I established a
southern supply route for the Algerian
army. You can imagine that this type of
involvement created many enemies who
tried to get me out of the way. I was
very lucky to have escaped some close
calls during assassination
attempts.“ …
You
want us to take up your story from here?
Well, death did not come from outside, it
came from within, and it came terribly
fast.
While in Ghana, you developed leukaemia,
and though encouraged by friends to rest,
you refused. You completed your final and
most fiery indictment of the colonial
condition, The Wretched of the Earth, in
ten months, and Jean-Paul Sartre
published the book in the year of your
death. On 3rd December 1961, you were
able to read the first print-samples;
whether you acknowledged Sartre‘s
preface remains unknown; three days later
you died at the National Institutes of
Health in Bethesda, Maryland, where you
had sought treatment ...
What we find interesting is that your
early writings were directed towards a
European audience, Monsieur Fanon, but
this last work addresses the wretched of
the earth only …
„You realised that the title does
quote the first stanza of the
INERTNATIONAL?“
Of
course, but still, you distance yourself
from the working class Europe‘s and
from Western left-wing intellectuals. It
seems you did not accept them anymore as
confederates of colonized peoples in
their efforts to gain their freedom. You
are placing your hope on the violent
uprising of the African masses. If we
understood Sartre correctly, the wretched
of the earth were, in their despair, left
with tunnel-views?
„It is time to distance myself from
my friend‘s preface. What Jean-Paul
did was to make his own points based on
my theories. This did lead to a
simplified perception of my book.“
25
To slay a European means to hit two flies
with one stroke … What remains is
one dead person and one free person.
„I did not write this sentence, but
Sartre did in his lengthy preface. Of
course, this coined the line for
interpretation of the whole work. For
many readers it was enough to browse that
preface, and may be the chapter
‚About Force‘, and the message
was clear: Fanon delivers an apology to
use force, Fanon delivers a manual for an
armed liberation struggle.
If Trotsky will follow Sartre‘s
recommendation to read my book, than, I
have to insist, it should be read in my
sense, not in Sartre‘s.
I pinpointed the therapeutically function
of violence. In this context, I
concentrated my argument on violence of
the colonised as ignited by the violence
of the colonisers. I never affirmed
violence as it were. Violence can only be
legitimated in a given historical and
concrete situation.
The Algerian example
shows how the process of consciousness
building of the people was determined by
their experiences during their liberation
struggle. Other peoples may reach the
same results by employing other means. In
Algeria, as it is known by now, the trial
of strength was inevitable, but in other
parts of the world peoples have reached
similar results through political
struggle and explanatory work of their
relevant party.“
—
tazara — tazara — tazara ...
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