Alienation and Freedom
by frantz fanon
edited by jean khalfa and robert j. c. young
translated by steven corcoran
bloomsbury academic, 816 pages, $29.95
In the ferment of the present moment, with its surging floods of migrantsn and its ostensibly gratuitous but historically rooted violence, it oftenn seems there is a voice missing in the babble of platitude andn prevarication. That voice might warn of history and its legacies, ofn chickens come home to roost. It might ask what we thought was going ton happen, and why we are surprised that actions have consequences acrossn centuries. If such a voice were to be heard, it would as likely as not ben the voice of Frantz Fanon, the only man capable of seeing to the heart ofn the age.
n Fanon was born in French colonial Martinique in 1925. Having spent somen time in France, he went to Algeria, where he became intimately involved inn the War of Independence of the 1950s. Drawing on his work as an psychiatrist, Fanon showed how colonialism infects history, woundingn colonizer and colonized. His life’s work might be summarized as thenbreathing of full life into Hegel’s master–slave dialectic, set out in Phenomenology of Spirit.n
n At the core of Fanon’s thinking is the idea that man is easily persuaded ton take leave of himself, of his nature and personality and culture, and onlyn with extreme difficulty finds his way back. This process of dislocationn can occur under the force of the will to power, or it can occur from then experience of being looked upon or spoken to as though an animal or object.n
n Colonialism thus created two kinds of barbarism. One was the barbarism ofn those who became persuaded by the indictment of their alleged precolonialn savagery that they ought to vacate their backward culture and embracen “civilization”; the other was the barbarism necessary to inflict this lien and make it stick. Fanon spoke with equal solicitousness to each party butn found sympathy for only one: the put-upon wretch with his face beneath then boot of the planter.n
n The first thing the colonizer did, Fanon tells us, was to “plant deep inn the mind of the native population the idea that before the advent ofn colonialism their history was one which was dominated by barbarism.”n Colonization is something the native ultimately does to himself, havingn been persuaded of his own inadequacy. For this reason, freedom cannot ben regained by negotiation, but only by a redemptive act. The violentn occupation of lands and minds can be answered only with violence of then heart and hand.n
n For all its fury, Fanon’s writing is delivered in the style of a lovenletter—intimate and raw and burning with knowingness. The Wretched of the Earth is his love letter to Africa and itsn people, as though to a woman he seeks to convince to leave her violent,n exploitative husband and come with him to a future that can be different inn ways he cannot particularize but can promise in their essence because hen and she—together—will become new actors making their own history. “We mustn leave our dreams and abandon our old beliefs and friendships of the timen before life began,” he writes. He tells her exactly what she has come to,n what she has surrendered of herself, what trade-offs she has made, whatn tricks she has succumbed to. He lays it all bare; then he tells her how ton set herself free.
n Fanon’s remedy was a process of what he called “tearing away” from then influence of the colonizer. This was no mere physical act but a deepn sundering of the mind from the hitherto seemingly stronger mind of then other, a reinvention rather than a rediscovery of self, because the self isn no longer a certain thing, having been polluted and infected with alienn impulses.n
n Fanon was aware, having looked into the minds of many of his own people,n that this was not a straightforward matter. Shame, guilt, self-hatred, alln the pathologies colonialism inflicts tend to ensure that its nature remainsn hidden. And at the back of these syndromes is another: that colonialism,n from the beginning, proposed itself as an unambiguously virtuous andn constructive phenomenon. The colonizing nations claimed that what theyn brought to the outlying areas of the world was no less than civilizationn itself, and so everyone else ought to be thankful.n
n Nations and people colonized by great powers tend to become infantilizedn and enfeebled. They become mimics. They surrender not merely theirn political independence but also their existential independence. Mostn pathetic of all, they remain convinced that their condition is almostn entirely their own fault, and that the best efforts of the colonizers haven failed to rescue them from their indolence, inertia, and backwardness. Andn so, on the face of things, the colonizer’s assertions appear to be true: Hen did his best with his whip, but those he sought to assist have remained inn the dark ages.n
n At the back of all this is another invisible phenomenon: an ideology ofn progress that holds there to be just one way of advancing into the future,n the one best way. If that were the case, it would be obvious that at leastn the intentions of the colonists were virtuous. But of course it is bogus.n What makes a particular civilization preeminent in its time is not then irrefutability of its ideas or achievements, but the power it has used ton advance these at the expense of all others.n
n Alienation and Freedom n is probably not an essential book for those wishing to understand Frantzn Fanon. There are great things in it, but it is intimidatingly hefty, andn reading it is like entering a gray warehouse of information. But there isn much here of value. The book opens, for example, with the scripts of twon plays written by Fanon as a young man. There are separate sections of hisn psychiatric and political writings, which make for an interesting contrast,n and a wonderful section about Fanon’s personal library, complete with somen of his marginal notes in the volumes found there.
n I came across Fanon about twenty-five years ago, when an Irish academicn mentioned him in an article about Ireland. He used just a few phrases, butn something in those quotations struck me as true. I sensed immediately thatn there might be in this man’s work a trove of insight about my own country,n though he had never set foot on its soil.n
n Ireland was never, technically speaking, a colony of England, but it wasn colonized in all the ways Fanon diagnoses and condemns. It was robbed,n starved, beaten, and tortured. It suffered slaughter and famine. It hadn its language destroyed, and came close to losing its faith. In many partsn of the country, the indigenous culture was all but eradicated by then famines of the 1840s. Our music survived only patchily.n
n Our experience had strong similarities with those of many Africann countries, with one difference: Our skins and the colonists’ were the samen color, subtly altering the nature of the master-slave relationship. Inn Ireland there was not individual slavery, but rather a whole peoplen enslaved by another, their lives and loves disregarded in the service ofn men who believed themselves to exist on a higher level of the human.n
n After independence, a native ascendancy assumed the political, cultural,n economic, and administrative roles of the colonizer. The colonial mentalityn continued. The Irish mind, though ostensibly freed, repressed those aspectsn of its culture it had been taught to despise. “Tearing away” from then colonist’s values never occurred. The colonial period is generally treatedn as a minor prang between an ass-cart and an English Land Rover at an shorted-out traffic light, both parties shaking hands and undertaking to don their own repairs. There is a complete unwillingness to acknowledge thatn the last 850 years may have imposed a psychic burden on the present.n
n If you look at the nature of Irish life, politics, economics, and culturen today, you may begin to see a pattern: the rush, having achieved freedom,n to enter another dependency by joining what is now the European Union; then disdain that exists in Ireland for our native music and language; then almost hysterical attempts to portray Ireland as the most liberal countryn in the world ever; the pride taken in the totalitarian empires of Facebookn and Google cynically dodging taxes by taking Dublin as their Europeann headquarters; the fake internationalism that overrides Irish nationhood ton serve the interests of globe-trotting elites.n
n All these are symptoms of the condition diagnosed by Fanon: dependency,n mimicry, self-hatred, the loud and constant assertion of modern valuesn masking the inability to stand against the world. Some 850 years after then Norman invasion, we continue to insist that we are not barbarous, that wen are human. But still we wish, deep in our souls, to be accepted as then equals of our former masters, because only this will render us “civilized.”n
n Fanon came too late for Ireland, though it is doubtful that we would haven listened had he come earlier, for the same ideas already existedn half-formed in the work of Padraig Pearse, who led the Easter Rising ofn April 1916 and was executed a fortnight later in the most destructive actn ever inflicted upon the Irish nation. Pearse, like Fanon, had understoodn the scale of the cultural reconstruction that must follow a snatchedn independence, but that knowledge drained away with his lifeblood in then yard of Kilmainham Gaol on May 3, 1916.
n Pearse, like Fanon, was a philosopher and natural poet, and wrote severaln books of poems, short stories, and essays. Colonization was his greatn theme, too. He spoke of Ireland’s servitude using the word “slavery.” Forn Fanon this was a literal description; for Pearse it was metaphor.n
n Sometimes it seems that Pearse and Fanon are the same mind, the same man.n In a series of essays written just before the 1916 rising, Pearse outlinedn in detail the specifications of true freedom and the process by which itn would have to be attained. In “The Murder Machine,” about the Englishn education system in Ireland, he described the colonial mechanism. It “aimedn at the substitution for men and women with ‘Things.’” Many of those wen regarded as people had been rendered mere things by this machine. “Men andn women, however depraved, have kindly human allegiances. But these Thingsn have no allegiance. Like other Things, they are for sale.” In Pearse, thesen understandings are inchoate, half-formed; in Fanon they are whole.n
n There is an important coda to be added to the history of Ireland’sn relationship with colonization. The Irish experience was not all one-wayn traffic. We have been both hare and hound. Ireland was never an imperialn nation, but it did play a central role in the colonial adventuring of othern nations, supplying the missionaries whom Fanon encountered in Africa andn repeatedly included in his denunciations. He believed the missionariesn provided the moral alibi for those seeking to plunder and torture. It isn not an implausible idea: that while we Irish may not have mounted our ownn occupations of the lands and minds of other peoples, we supplied many ofn the spiritual accomplices to the ambitions of others, providing tyrannyn with a gracing aspect. For us to say that what they carried with them—then gospel—was the truth is merely, to some African ears, a rephrasing of then notion of the colonizer’s one best way. Fanon would be quick to retort thatn it was not Africa’s way, and that that ought to be the end of it.n
n But there is more to the story than that. Fanon’s view of religion nevern overcame a central contradiction. Fanon characterizes the native asn superstitious and primitive, using rhetoric very much like that of then colonialists he despises. In his haste to cast off the colonizer’s chains,n he echoes the modernizing and progressive rhetoric that colonizers hurledn at native superstition. He includes in the category of superstition then religion preached by the colonizers themselves.n
n In fact, Fanon’s secular-humanist worldview was shot through with an Christian sensibility that clearly had its roots in the French-Martiniquen society of his childhood. “If it is true that consciousness is a process ofn transcendence,” he wrote in Black Skin, White Masks, “we have ton see too that transcendence is haunted by the problems of love andn understanding. Man is a yes that vibrates to cosmic harmonies.”n This is the voice of a believer, not an atheist.n
n His critics will respond that Fanon was not Christlike, that all thatn sulfuric incitement seems more than occasionally to vacate the love ofn justice that suffuses his work. And yet his frequent bellicosity, if seenn objectively, can be described harmoniously with St. Augustine’s concept ofn the just war waged “to put to death wicked men.”n
n Since Fanon’s death, a great change has taken place in the postimperialn picture. It is doubtful that Fanon in 1961 anticipated that the finaln collision and conflagration he was announcing might play out at the heartn of the West. Yet this is now unfolding, in two unexpected ways. In then first, the pattern of colonialism has been unleashed in reverse through then waves of immigrants that have flooded Europe since the removal of then Gaddafi regime in Libya. At the same moment—apparently coincidental withn the first, though perhaps not—the half-adult descendants of the colonistsn have gone into revolt in their home territories, denouncing their ownn antecedents as war criminals, demanding the demolition of monuments to then colonial adventurers, and speaking darkly of the need for restitution. Then two phenomena are connected by a faintly acknowledged guilt that infectsn the culture of the West in a manner astonishingly resonant of Fanon’sn explication of the effects of colonialism on the African native:n self-hatred in reverse gear, tearing its way to a comprehensive undoing.
n Meanwhile, Europe’s old colonizing instinct today confines itself to homen territory, where it takes the form of a new elitism wrapped in ideology.n The upper layers adopt pious and amnesiac positions on the role their ownn progressive ideas played in colonization, while imposing radical socialn policies on their “deplorable” fellow citizens at home. It is as though then colonial muscle, seeking exercise, has decided to reform not foreigners butn the recalcitrant populations at home. Hence gay marriage, gender theory,n abortion, secularism, and mass immigration. Opposition to any of thesen marks one as a savage.n
n In a recent First Things article, a review of books concerning then political shifts in Eastern Europe, Ryszard Legutko noted the tendencyn within Europe for the formerly colonial powers to try to enforce thesen agendas on recalcitrant former communist nations like Poland and Hungary,n which have defended Christian values against the new moral revolutionsn emanating from the former great powers. “This,” he noted with some irony,n “has turned these countries into the great blackguards of the Westernn world, criticized and bullied by American and European politicians,n journalists, academics, artists, film stars, and pop stars.” Thesen tendencies, Legutko believes, are leading to the consolidation ofn conservative forces in Eastern Europe.n
n Elsewhere in Europe, things look much worse. Descendants of colonialn adventurers seek to dodge responsibility by reinventing themselves as then tolerant and inclusive patrons of the downtrodden. But there are problems.n One is that the reproductive reluctance of these elites, together withn their penchant for abortion, ensures that they are already well-advanced inn the process of self-elimination. A demographic crisis now grips Europe,n assuming the appearance of a mass suicide. At the same time, the colonialn chickens are coming home to claim their inheritance: great waves ofn migrants crossing the Mediterranean and demanding their birthright as then sons and daughters of the slaves whose stolen labor enriched the nations ofn Europe.n
n Jean-Paul Sartre, in his incendiary preface to Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, seemed momentarily to envisage ourn present, before dismissing it as fanciful. “It’s our turn to tread then path, step by step, which leads down to native level. But to become nativesn altogether, our soil must be occupied by a formerly colonized people and wen must starve of hunger. This won’t happen.”
n It shows signs of happening now, as so graphically outlined by Douglasn Murray in The Strange Death of Europe. “By the end of then lifespans of most people currently alive,” Murray somberly predicts,n “Europe will not be Europe and the peoples of Europe will have lost then only place in the world we had to call home.”n
n From the perspective of the wronged, the crimes of Europe cannot ben assuaged by apologies or compensation, only by vengeance. Here, guilt is an useless emotion. The student revolutionaries of today, fifty years on fromn ’68, seem to overlook the fact that, once the pursuit of retribution getsn into stride, they themselves will be up against the wall. In time theirn guilt will evaporate; their high feelings, too. As an alternative ton placing his head upon the block, the white man will rediscover in himselfn the resolve to survive and the wherewithal to defend himself. A bloodyn contest will be the result.n
n For all his avoidance of religious idioms, Fanon—like Padraig Pearse—sawn the fight for freedom in spiritual terms: the total freedom of man rathern than a political or territorial freedom. His project from the beginning wasn the resuscitation of the human soul, buried deep under the layers ofn mimicry and self-hatred imposed by the settler tyrant. To a large extent,n his reservations about the Church were rooted in the particularities ofn Algeria, to which the colonizer took a kidnapped Christ.
n In Ireland, an interesting and a rather different dynamic emerged. Then Church, being native, became a rebel church, its priests and nuns sidingn with the people, in some instances going down in history as patriots inn their own right, like Fr. Murphy, the hero of Vinegar Hill, celebrated inn the stirring ballad “Boolavogue.” It was only post-independence thatn elements of the Church settled in with the new establishment that, lackingn Pearse’s understanding of the psychodynamics of freedom, proceeded to runn Ireland as though nothing much needed to change.n
n Pearse and Fanon sang from the same hymn sheet, but in different languages:n Pearse in the language of freedom expressed as a faith in absolute reality,n Fanon in the language of existential freedom avoiding mention of ann explicit point of origin or destination. Both men had been born and raisedn as Catholics, and it is plain from their respective writings that neithern was oblivious to the meaning of the fact that Christ suffered violence atn the hands of a colonial power and its native quislings. Tearing himselfn away from that malign relationship—albeit with a divine passivity—he calledn us to do likewise.n
n Both Pearse and Fanon believed that, for us in our human inadequacy,n tearing away sometimes requires more direct methods. Otherwise, as Fanonn noted, human beings could allow themselves to be subjected to a version ofn Christianity that required acquiescence in their own enslavement. Thisn cannot be right or true. There are passages of the Bible in which slaveryn is regarded with ambivalence, but the New Testament leaves little wigglen room, especially in the words of Christ as relayed by St. Paul the Apostle.n In his Epistle to the Galatians, Paul tells us: “For freedom Christ has setn us free; stand firm therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke ofn slavery” (Gal. 4:31–5:1).n
n To attain the kingdom of the Lord, Paul confides, the former slave and hisn master must be reconciled as brothers (Philem. 16), which might be deemedn the ultimate end of all political endeavor, one most urgent during then present confrontation between Europe and the Third World. Absent then realization of such brotherhood, of which Frantz Fanon has been then greatest modern prophet, the world faces imminently a Calvary from whichn only the former master or his former slave will emerge to know any kind ofn freedom.n
John Waters is an Irish writer and commentator, the author of nine books, and a playwright.
Photo by Pacha J. Willka via Creative Commons. Image cropped.
