Frantz Fanon (1925-1961), is a
leading theorist and activist of third world struggle against colonial
oppression. He is one of the most powerful voices of revolutionary thought in
the twentieth century. He fought against Nazism in France and there he got
trained as a psychiatrist. He experienced both racism and colonialism. Aime Cesaire,
a leader of the negritude movement, had a great influence on him. Black
Skin, White Masks (1967). He supported the Algerians in their fight against
French rule. He produced a number of writings connected with Algerian and
African revolution. The Wretched of the Earth is his most comprehensive
and influential work. It analyses the conditions and requirements for effective
anti-colonial revolution from a Marxist perspective. It also articulates the
connections between class and race. Fanon points out the utter difference
in historical situation between the
European bourgeois class which once overturned feudalism and the African
bourgeois emerging as successor to colonial rule.
In the particular essay “Concerning
Violence” Fanon observes that the decolonization process, which is usually
hailed as liberation, renaissance of a nation etc. is often associated with
violence. Decolonization is a phenomenon which results in the substitution of
one species by another. The colonizer will always have certain demands and will
target the whole social setup to change from the bottom up. This suggests that
the consciousness of the native is not a tabula-rasa. Later, this would come
out wearing the mask of liberation and decolonization offering the colonists
nothing but a terrifying future. That is, the change in social structure is
often associated with violence of one species over the other. The process
involves practicing the idea in the statement “the last shall be the first and
the first last” and creates a sense that the process of decolonization is a
successful one.
Fanon
detaches himself from the prejudice of a colonized and the colonists and views
them as two protagonists who shed blood for achieving the status of last to the
first and first to the last. In his examination the colonized will find it
suitable to use the means of violence to turn up this order. Fanon suggests a
compartmentalized world; a world cut into two as settlers and natives where the
frontiers are the policemen who act like spokesperson between the two. These
intermediaries use the language of pure force but they neither lighten the
oppression nor seek to hide the domination. In Fanon’s perspective, in the
colonized state the government and the natives communicate and sustain the
relationship involving oppression and domination through the spokesperson who
are the policemen. They bring violence into the home and into the mind of the
native.
Then Fanon moves on to describe the
structure of the colonial world where the two segments do not work for a higher
unity but settlers always stay immersed in the fear of being displaced from a
comfort zone sustained in their town. The native is envious about the settler’s
place. The Marxist analysis on colonial imperialism has much more to
incorporate to interpret colonial phenomenon. The economic reality, inequality
and the difference of ways of life has to do with certain human realities such
as belongingness and not belongingness to a particular race. Colonialism has
brought forth certain human realities related to their sense of belongingness
to a particular race and this demands Marxist analysis to extend itself while dealing
with colonial problem. In colonial states foreigner despite of his acts of
economic wielding remains a foreigner as ‘the other’. The conflict never exists
only among the rich and poor.
The colonial world tries constantly
to bring ‘order’ which is done usually by breaking the native social forms,
customs of dress, external life. But anyhow this causes the emergence of a
mental picture in the native to wreck this colonial world from its root.
Fanon talks about how the colonial
world apart from physical delimitation establishes the prejudices and ideas
against the natives as ‘quintessence of evil’. The natives get declared as
incapable of knowing and distancing values as well as destroying ‘beauty’ and
‘morality’ by the settlers. How the natives are ideologically established as
inferior through the production and propagation of new ‘knowledge’ can be
observed here. It is said that the
natives are often pictured in terms of zoological terms. In India the
propagation of prejudices in relation to lower caste people as having no intellect
to discern does remind the same attitude towards the marginal sections. "Would you teach the Gospel to a
cow?" he told a Christian missionary in 1936. "Well, some of the
Untouchables are worse than cows in their understanding" (Roy 245) are the statements
which seem analogous with the views of settlers.. Christian church,
missionaries play a major role in promoting acts of separation of ‘bad’ from
the ‘evil’ and they, however, did not call the natives to God’s way but to the
white man’s the oppressor’s way.
How
the language gets constituted of colonial vocabulary and how it is used to
describe and also to advocate Manichean ideals is shown by Fanon. But on the
contrary the native, however, knows his ‘bestial’ nature and laughs at
settler’s words and always remains ready to counterattack and mock at the Whiteman’s
values. The intermediary on the other hand can never expect a co-existing of
two parts. It tries to establish in the new world after the decolonization
process by making the settler take a very concrete jump into the unknown. In
other words, the native finds the settler similar in several aspects and
attains a status of mind which would but focus on the settler’s flight. Thus,
this consequently leads to a unification of natives in a national level
disregarding their heterogeneity in terms of race, and other forms of
divisions.
In
India Gandhi took similar ground while dealing with caste practice which led
him to treat it as an internal matter that should be dealt once freedom is
achieved. The colonialist bourgeoisie will continuously be hammering ideas in
the minds of natives of the importance of individual thought but as soon as the
native come in contact with his people during the struggle for freedom, forgets
the importance of individualism. He comes across a different vocabulary
consisting terms such as brother, sister, friend that will change the attitude
of the native and the interest of one native will be discovered by the troops
as everyone; either as everyone saved or everyone massacred.
The
text attempts to highlight the hypocrisy of proponents of decolonization which
wears the mask of liberation or renaissance and at the end of which instigate
violence to the individual; who are the species cut among the two worlds as
natives and settlers. The text sheds light upon the psychological aspect of
individuals involving in the process of decolonization. The Marxian perspective
must extend itself so that it can explain social phenomena involving aspects
that cannot be dealt under mere economic terminologies.
References:
Fanon, Frantz. The
Wretched of the Earth. Trans. Richard Philcox. New York: Grove Press, 1964. Print.
Roy, Arundhati. "The Doctor and the Saint." R.,
Ambedkar B. Annihilation of Caste. New Delhi: Navayana, 2014. 245.
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