by Nigel C. Gibson
In the Cheikh Djemal’s film “Frantz Fanon: His Life, His
Struggle, His Work,” Rehda Malek, one of the co-editors of El
Moudjahid at the time, recalls how he was “impressed by Fanon’s
intellectual vivacity and the speed in which he could write papers,”
adding that “he could write an article almost without crossing out
a word in a direct and spontaneous way.”
In a sense the same can be said of his writing of L’an 5 de la
révolution algérienne and Les damnés de la terre which
were “written” orally, so to speak, with Fanon speaking and his
assistants writing down or typing his ideas. Though we know that
Fanon gave much thought to each work, they were of the time and
written very much for the time, and in the latter case very much
against the time. Fifty years later, we consider these works as part
of the oeuvre of a brilliant man, to be pored over and taken apart,
every phrase scrutinized. And yet, when it was published, Les
damnés was roundly criticized by the French liberal, and left
intelligentsia. Communists and liberals agreed: Fanon’s analysis
was flawed; his insights were simply insights not theory; he made
wild generalizations; he didn’t understand Algeria, or Islam, or
the peasantry, and so on.
It was in the United States of America, that land of lynchers as
Fanon puts it, where his books became famous. The Americas were
Fanon’s first resting place. Born in the Caribbean, he died in a
Bethesda hospital and was reborn in the 1960s revolts. And yet in his
soon to be republished Fanon: A Life, David Macey’s richly
detailed and valuable biography of Fanon, Macey is dismissive of
Fanon’s knowledge of America which he says is not particularly
empirical since it is “derived primarily from literary sources …
based on novels” (193). Is Fanon’s understanding of the US
problematic? Certainly Richard Wright’s Native Son tells
more about the “Negro” in the United States of 1940 then any
empirical work.
But Macey insists that it is not only the fact that Fanon understands
America through novels but also that his understanding of the novels
themselves is suspect. Of Fanon’s reading of Chester Himes’ If
He Hollers Let Him Go Macey argues that his own “analytic
schema, and perhaps at some level his own desires, almost forces him
to misread the [book]” (194).
Macey’s criticism is not, however, confined to Fanon’s
understanding of the US. Macey contends that in Black Skin
Fanon “confuses” Jean Veneuses’ story with Germaine Geux’s
notion of abandonment, and more damningly he insists that Fanon
really didn’t understand Freud and “misrecognizes”
psychoanalysis (192, 194).1
These are not new criticisms. The British Communist Party critic Jack
Woodis said the same thing in the early 1970s arguing that Fanon was
given to “exaggeration,” “unscientific judgments,”
“over-simplification” and often “carried away by his own
eloquence” (1972: 25, 27, 28, 34).2
What is at stake in Macey’s criticisms? A sense of “objectivity”?
A criticism of sloppy research directed at Fanon and also
postcolonial Fanon studies?
But then also in the conclusion, one is taken aback when Macey
proclaims that Fanon had “certainly had a talent for hate” (505).
Certainly? On what basis? That almost certainly is without empirical
knowledge.
And yet these kinds of schoolmaster’s comments also appears in a
footnote to the new translation of Black Skin White Masks. One
wonders why Richard Philcox chooses to correct Fanon in a note on
page 131 that Joel Chandler Harris, the author of the Uncle Remus
stories, was from Georgia not Louisiana. Certainly Fanon could have
been misinformed even if Harris did work in New Orleans. But what is
more important is the internal audience. Philcox adds “It is
interesting for Fanon scholars to know that Fanon was not very
rigorous in his scholarship.” The concern with scholarship
has little to do with Fanon but represents tensions and pretensions
within postcolonial studies as an academic field. This is not to say
that Fanon was not concerned with correct data. Indeed, his articles
on sociotherapy at Blida hospital and on day-hospitalization in Tunis
reflect his concern with empirical veracity. The tension is best
understood instead as a stress between text and context, that is to
say between Homi Bhabha and David Macey, but it is one where everyone
agrees first in principle that Fanon’s political writings have
little contemporary relevance.3
This governing attitude to Fanon is evident in Bhabha’s 2004
foreword to Philcox’s translation of The Wretched titled
“Framing Fanon” which quite literally frames Fanon by throwing
Fanon’s decolonial revolutionary humanism into the garbage,
reducing his contribution to violence, and thus ends up with nothing
to put in its place but a kind of wishful ethics against the IMF and
World Bank.
Translations are not neutral; they are both products of history and
are also highly charged politically. Translations therefore take on
lives of their own. Tellingly, Macey and Philcox also tell us when
they first read Fanon. Macey bought copies of his work in 1970 in
France, quickly adding that after reading “Althusser, Lacan and
Foucault[,] Fanon began to look naive.” Like other Marxists of the
British new left, Macey was drawn to French structuralism, and
Fanon’s work seemed decidedly dated and passé.
Macey’s
description of Fanon as naïve is reminiscent of Bhabha calling
Fanon’s humanism “banal and beatific” in his now seminal piece
“Remembering Fanon.” Attracted to Lacan through structuralism,
both Bhabha and Macey are, in a sense, products of the same
intellectual trajectory. So Macey’s “return” to Fanon could
only be refracted through a postcolonial academic discourse that is
in fact indebted to and read through French theory--Althusser, Lacan
and Foucault. In other words, Macey’s biography is intimate with
Bhabha’s “remembering Fanon” even if he is at pains to disagree
with its consequences; the unquestioned assumption, as I mentioned
earlier, is that the historical Fanon has almost no resonance with
British postimperial realities.
In “On Retranslating Fanon, retrieving a lost voice,” the
afterword to The Wretched, Philcox more self-consciously
writes about his reading Fanon and tellingly quotes Macey, ‘“it
was his anger that was so attractive.’ After all,” continues
Philcox, “we Brits have a long history of angry men.”
I wouldn’t necessarily include myself among “we Brits,” but I
was introduced to Fanon through a pamphlet by John Alan and Lou
Turner, Frantz Fanon, Soweto and American Black Thought. Fanon
was immediately connected to a “Black world” and most concretely
to Biko and Black consciousness in South Africa. Sure, I was angry in
1981; you could say that about many Black and White youth in
Britain’s Thatcherite “inner cities” facing the racist violence
of the British nationalists and criminalization by the British
police. But it wasn’t anger that drew me to Fanon. What interested
me in how Steve Biko used Fanon’s theory was the way in which
theory could become concrete in different situations. I was
interested in how and why revolutions had gone wrong and in the
context of the Irish question (the hunger strike was just about to
begin) I was drawn to thinking about the relationship between
national liberation and internationalism. Early in 1981, before the
Brixton “riot” and the 1981 inner city rebellions in England, I
got hold of a copy of The Wretched of the Earth in New York
for a dollar from the Barnes and Noble annex on 16th
street.4
It was the 1968 mass market Black Cat edition, the one with a black
image of people in motion set against an orange background. Black
Cat: I thought it had something to do with the Black Panthers (which
I later found out from Charles Denby was named after the Black
Panther of the Lowndes County Freedom Democratic Party in Alabama).
For me it was always the Black Panther edition. 1968. The year of
revolutions. In France, Czechoslovakia, Mexico, and in the United
States5
… It was Fanon who had been right there.
“And then there is the way he has been treated,” writes Philcox,
“pulled in all directions by postcolonial scholars, made to fit
their ideas and interpretations—and a great sense of injustice
comes to mind every time Fanon is mentioned” (2004 244). For
Philcox, his translation of The Wretched is an attempt to give
back Fanon’s voice, his “tone, intensities, rhythms, and pauses”
(2004 245). And though this is not the place to delve into the
translations (and I have spoken about the translations by the
African-American poet, Constance Farrington, and by Richard Philcox
elsewhere6)
I do want to make one point about Black Skin White Masks.
Published first by Grove in 1967, it is forgotten that it was an
American translation for a popular market. One example: while “Y a
Bon Banania” refers to a popular breakfast cereal in France (with
“the obvious connection between blacks and apes through the
mediating symbol of banana flour [See Gordon 2005 17], it meant
nothing to most people in the US. Markmann’s translation “Sho
good eatin’” certainly made sense and conveyed a similar meaning
to what Fanon was saying (see Turner 2011).
The thing about translations is not only that they take on a life of
their own but they also reflect different contexts. Homi Bhabha’s
“Remembering Fanon,” which became the introduction to the 1986
Pluto Press British edition (Markmann translation) of Black Skin
has become a canonical re-reading of Fanon for postcolonial studies.
It doesn’t refer to the French text at all, but is explicitly
connected to a dig at English leftism: “In the popular memory of
English socialism,” Bhabha begins, “the memory of Frantz Fanon
stirs a dim deceiving echo … a polite English refusal.”
If in France in the 1970s Fanon was found only in obscure second-hand
bookshops, in the United States his works were being newly minted in
mass market editions and becoming essential to discussions and
intellectual debates foundational to the evolving Black and antiwar
movements (and embryonic Black studies programs). And yet along with
the US translations, we should also remember the groundedness of
Black Skin in the American drama. If, for example, the “lived
experience” or “fact of blackness”7
expressed by America’s “native son” at the end of chapter five
drives Fanon to weep, the reference to “twelve million black
voices” (a title of Wright’s later book) reflects the American
drama “cast in a different play,” he says: a play in utter
contrast to the French tragedy; a play of struggle and war, the
defeats, truces, and victories (1967a 221) with which Fanon
identifies.8
Still involved in the French drama, a whole different play would
begin with the Algerian revolution. If the real context for
sociotherapy at Blida-Joinville Psychiatric hospital was a dynamic
and living society, he logically could not carry on the work in a
society that had become the asylum, with the medical profession
intimately connected to the production of pathologies which
rationally pursue the torture “inherent in the whole colonialist
configuration” (1967b 64). Thus, in one of his first articles for
El Moudjahid (October 1957), Fanon questioned the humanist
commitment of the European left and liberals to a society which,
using medical terminology, is a “gangrene germ and the source of an
epidemic” and whose essence is torture, violation and the
inauguration of an “unconditional reign of justice” (1967b
64-66). In other words, there was no middle ground, no space for an
intellectual’s autonomy. Such a society had to be opposed.
Fanon’s own break
with the “French drama” is a product of the objective situation.
Nov 1, 1954 dates the beginning of the Algerian liberation struggle.
He often refers to the date as a historical dividing line—a before
to which there is no going back. The struggle requires an absolute
commitment, as he puts it in his 1956 speech to the first congress of
Black writers. And just as he demands, in The Wretched, that
intellectuals practically aid the revolution through commandeering
resources snatched from colonial education, he works concretely,
counseling those scarred by torture, harboring guerillas on the run
and training fighters in how to take care of the wounded (see 1967c),
and directly aiding the armed struggle by teaching the bombers how to
remain calm. As De Beauvouir recounts: “he taught them to control
their reactions when they were setting a bomb … and also what
psychological and physical attitudes would enable them to resist
torture best” (315).
Fanon had been
recruited into the FLN by Ramdane Abane, the Kabylian leader who
became Fanon’s mentor. Abane was a key figure behind the battle of
Algiers and the conference at Soummam in 1956 held to create a
coherent political program for the FLN, which was essentially a
united front of different tendencies. Soummam declared that the
military wing been brought under collective political control and put
forward a vision of a future Algeria that remained Fanon’s.9
They both believed in the “revolutionary dismantling of the
colonial state” (Cherki 105). Explicitly critical of theodicy, the
principle adopted as the Soummam platform was for a future democratic
Algeria with the “primacy of citizenship over identities (Arab,
Amazigh, Muslim, [Jewish] Christian, European, etc.)” (Abane 39).
Soummam, in other words, represented a political position and vision,
which Fanon acknowledged in Year 5 of the Algerian Revolution,
arguing that “in the new society that is being built there are only
Algerians. From the outset, therefore, every individual living in
Algeria is an Algerian … We want an Algeria open to all, in which
every kind of genius can grow” (1967c 152, 32). By 1958 Abane was
dead, liquidated by the FLN.
Fanon refused to be publicly critical of the FLN even after the
murder of Abane. This he later regretted, recounts De Beauvoir, but
at the same time he needed to work out his thoughts through writing
(Cherki 106). Despising some FLN leaders and militarists who reduced
the struggle for independence to a simple equation of power, Year
5 was interesting in that it says almost nothing about the FLN or
about political organization but concentrates instead on the radical
changes that had taken place in Algerian society since November 1954.
He first titled the book “the reality of the nation,”10
but even so felt that that did not reflect the specificity and
fluidity of the revolutionary moment. But Fanon balked when Maspero
later changed the name to the “sociology of revolution” saying,
as publishers do (when they get overly concerned about marketing),
that it was no longer the fifth year of the Algerian revolution.
Fanon recoiled because “sociology” was too intimately connected
to an imperial project (1967c 37). The problem with sociology,
including an ethno-sociology, is not that it doesn’t contain an
element of truth but that it has a false premise taking a situation
arising out of colonialism as a dehistoricized cultural fact. Fanon
insists that colonialism throws all elements of society into
confusion, distorting and subverting all cultural relations. The
first thing the colonized learn is to remain in place, argues Fanon.
Similarly, the anticolonial revolt can throw everything into
confusion in a new way, fundamentally upsetting colonized society and
“upsetting its limits” (2004 15). Under the most severe
conditions—bombardments and raids on civilians—new attitudes and
new relations emerge in what Fanon calls the “drama of the people”
(1967c 142), and the militant intellectual’s role is to aid this
unfolding and avoid “erecting a framework … which follows an a
priori schedule” (2004/1968 113). In other words, though
organization is absolutely essential to help bring together scattered
and local rebellions against colonial society, the organization can
itself become a pathology which suffocates thinking. Fanon warns
against the brutality of revolutions, not only the brutal violence
and counter-violence that worries him in Year 5 (see his
introduction) but also the “sclerosis” that knee-jerk
anti-imperialism brings. In The Wretched he is
explicitly critical of what he calls the fetish of organization often
along military lines whose goal is to silence political discussion,
calling the militant who wants to take shortcuts in the name of
getting things done not only an anti-intellectual but atrocious,
inhuman and sterile. Instead, gesturing to organization as organic,
he insists that the search for truth is the “responsibility of the
community” (2004 139) with the local, fully inclusive and
democratic meetings the practical and ethical foundation of the
liberated society. These “liturgical acts,” he writes, “are
privileged occasions given to a human being to listen and to speak …
and put forward new ideas …” (2004 195) to become
self-determining and decolonize the mind. Connected to everyday life
and decision making, these daily acts are seemingly banal, but in the
local engagements time becomes “space for human development,” as
Marx puts it, is “no longer … of the moment or the next harvest
but rather of the rest of the world” (2004 135). Critics have
dismissed Fanon’s claims as romantic, but they are based on
experience not flights of fancy. Fanon gives the example of lentil
production during the liberation struggle, writing of the creation of
production/consumption committees among the peasants and FLN, which
he says encouraged theoretical questions about the accumulation of
capital: “In the regions where we were able to conduct these
enlightening experiments,” he argues, “we witnessed the
edification of man through revolutionary beginnings” because people
began to realize that “one works more with one’s brain and ones
heart than with one’s muscles” (2004 133; 292).
Talking of the political economy of food he adds, “We did not have
any technicians or planners coming from big Western universities; but
in these liberated regions the daily ration went up to the hitherto
unheard-of figure of 3,200 calories. [But t]he people were not
content with [this] …. They started asking themselves theoretical
questions: for example, why did certain districts never see an orange
before the war of liberation, while thousands of tons are exported
every year abroad? Why were grapes unknown to a great many Algerians
whereas the European peoples enjoyed them by the million? Today, the
people have a very clear notion of what belongs to them.” It would
not be surprising to hear questions about the objectivity of these
enlightening experiments.
In Black Skin White Masks Fanon decries social science
research methods, saying that they should be left to the botanists.
Why? Because scientific objectivity was barred to him (1967a 14,
225), he was part of the research. Here, in The Wretched, he
talks about “objectivity” always being directed against the
colonized. And then there is the revolutionary “objectivity” of
the enlightening experiments, and in Year 5 he posits himself
as part of the “we.”
At the time of its publication, Year 5 did not cause much of a
stir in France; even Pierre Bourdieu recognized in his work that
radical changes were taking place in Kabylia.11
The government, however, found the book particularly incendiary and
banned it as it was continually reprinted by Maspero. And yet in the
wake of Algerian independence and the 1965 English translation by
Haakon Chevalier (a Berkeley professor of literature, friend of
Robert Oppenheimer’s and Communist Party member who left the United
States in 1950 after being accused of “anti-American activities”),
the divide between Fanon’s descriptions and post-independence
Algerian reality became the source of new criticisms from Marxists
(and later from feminists12)
that Fanon was a romantic conservative. Discounting Fanon’s
“enlightening experiments,” a British Marxist, Ian Clegg, argued
in his book Workers’ Self-management in Algeria that Fanon
simply “lacks a critical and dialectical analysis of the process of
the formation of consciousness.” It is an argument repeated by Neil
Lazarus, who while generally sensitive to Fanon’s work finds, in
his recent Postcolonial Unconscious, that Fanon “often
phras[es] subaltern thought in the elitist-idealist vocabulary of
negation, abstract totalization and self-actualization” (2011 177).
Lazarus references James Scott to emphasize the disconnection between
the intellectual’s romanticism and the local movement’s concern
with the concrete immediate. Beyond the tired vanguardist notions of
saving theory for theoreticians, Fanon was concerned in The
Wretched that the work of intellectuals and militants was to
patiently explain to the people that the future depended on their
self-conscious and collective work. At the same time, Fanon rejected
as populist and opportunist the idea that that put an end to
theoretical. In other words, isn’t dialectical movement—engaging
practice and theory—exactly what is at stake, not simply in what is
living and what is dead in Fanon but what is living and dead in our
period? It is the latter question that calls for us to approach
Fanon’s thinking not as an a priori application of
theoretical categories but as always dedicated to the practical
matter of changing the world. In other words, the fact is not only
that Fanon would, as Edouard Glissant put it, act on his ideas by
joining a revolution13
but that for Fanon ideas were at one and the same time influenced by
practice and themselves transformative. What Lazarus elsewhere
calls Fanon’s “remarkable” essay, “The Pitfalls of National
Consciousness,” is precisely the product of a critical and
dialectical analysis, a summing up of the experience of
decolonization. And yet, interestingly, in one of those “snares of
history” that Fanon speaks of, the American rebirth of Fanon—in
the context of King and Malcolm, and debates about non-violence and
self-defense—was made famous by the book’s first chapter “On
Violence.”
“The Wretched of the Earth became essential reading for
Black revolutionaries in America and profoundly influenced their
thinking,” remarks Kathleen Cleaver (214), adding, “Fanon’s
analysis seemed to explain and to justify the spontaneous violence
ravaging across the country, and linked the incipient insurrections
to the rise of a revolutionary movement.” The colonial world that
Fanon wrote about “bore a striking resemblance,” she continues
(215), “to the world that American blacks lived.”14
For Cleaver (216), the special relevance to the Black Panthers “was
Fanon’s analysis of colonialism and the necessity of violence.”
This is not to suggest that there were not other discussions of Fanon
in the US in the 1960s,15
but Cleaver’s summation suggests that was powerfully attractive to
young American revolutionaries was the clarity of Fanon’s
descriptions of colonial manicheanism, the problem remain how to get
beyond a Manichean reaction toward a new politics. Associating
Algeria with Fanon, some Panthers fled to Algeria in the late 1960s
and thus it was through the Panthers that Fanon returned momentarily
to Algeria. But noticeably shorn of his internal critique of the
liberation movements and postindependence, Fanon became reduced to
the status of just another anticolonial figure. Yet, just as Eldridge
Cleaver was opening the First Pan African Cultural Festival in 1969,
Fanon had made his way across the Limpopo into the heart of settler
colonial Africa—apartheid South Africa with US Black theology
intellectuals like James Cone providing an important link between
Fanon and the emergent Black Consciousness movement. The situation in
South Africa was Manichean, but recognizing that “The most potent
weapon of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed,”
Biko took from Fanon a critique of alienation and interiorized fear
as the basis for a new politics of solidarity, and a notion of
Blackness not reducible to claims to indigeneity or a politics of
identity but an “attitude of mind.” Linking Black consciousness
to national consciousness and grounding his analysis in Fanon’s
“Pitfalls of National Consciousness,” Biko argued in an interview
with Gail Gerhart in 1972 that it was possible to create a
“capitalist black society, [a] black middle class,” in South
Africa, and “succeed in putting across to the world a pretty
convincing, integrated picture, with still 70 percent of the
population being underdogs” (Biko 42).
Biko’s prediction became painfully true. And a Fanonian critique of
post-apartheid South Africa now seems quite obvious. And yet it is in
the responses to the crises of contemporary South Africa and the
liberation party’s social treason that the high point of the
struggle recognized by Fanon can be recast. The maturity of our age
means that a non-state directed politics based in what Fanon calls
“the rationality of revolt,” which begins in the refusal to
remain quiet and stay in place, can as a movement in motion, “uncover
unknown facets,” “bring to light new meanings … underline
contradictions … [and] decipher social reality.” This is not
simply voluntaristic; the struggle, he says, is the work of the
muscles and brains of African collective working out politics
from the ground up. This is the school of the struggle, and the
challenge for each generation is to think with it and inside it. It
is in this context that we can also call on Fanon’s work to help
illuminate and aid new political subjectivities and spaces to develop
autonomous politics. Rather than reducing Fanon to the past or to a
politics of the experiential, perhaps we can take Fanon’s writings
as interlocutions in which different historical moments and movements
bring out new resonances and explicate new insights.
The damnation of the world’s majority inscribed in the Manichean
geographies so well described by Fanon in The Wretched of the
Earth obviously did not end with the negotiated settlement and
the withdrawal of formal colonial rule. The violence that orders
colonialism, the violence that follows the colonized home and enters
every pore of their body, is reconfigured in the contemporary world
of razor wire transit camps, detention zones, and prisons, in rural
pauperization and in the shanty towns and shack settlements. It is
the silent scream of much of the world’s population, who appear
most of the time without solidarity, without agency, without speech.
Beyond the gated citadels, beyond the zones of tourism, in the zone
of often bare existence, there seems no way out. And yet, at a moment
like ours in 2012, all of a sudden the rationality of rebellion is
made absolutely clear. So too the relevance of a Fanonian political
will.
Yet more than a simple us and them, the “we” for Fanon was not
simply a commitment but a creative “we,” a we of political action
and praxis, thinking and reasoning. Indeed this was not only his
critique of colonialism but also of the neocolonial afterlife.
“Colonialism is not a thinking machine,” Fanon argues, but all
too often its aftermath, the new nation, is mired in the same
mindlessness, indeed stupidity created by the nationalist party’s
will to power often mediated by crude force and in crude
colonial ideologies against the very people who made liberation
possible. In contrast, Fanon’s “we” is wonderfully articulated
in Derek Walcott’s poem, “the Schooner Flight”: “Either I’m
nobody or I’m a nation.” It is the nobodies, the damned, the
impoverished and the landless who for Fanon become the source, the
basis, the truth of the “reality of the nation.” As S'bu Zikode
from Abahlali baseMjondolo in South Africa first said, “we are poor
in life but not in mind.” The movement stresses that collectively
“we think our own struggles.”
In the context of the continuing legacy of apartheid’s spatial
politics, so clearly articulated in The Wretched of the Earth,
it is not surprising that one of the largest and most sustained
social movements in post-apartheid South Africa is a movement of
shack dwellers called Abahlali baseMjondolo, people who live in
shacks.
I speak of Abahlali because it is a movement I have worked with,
bringing it into conversation with Fanon, as Zikode puts it in the
preface to Fanonian Practices in South Africa.
Like other grassroots movements, their struggle was not the result,
as Fanon puts it in Black Skin, “of a Marxist or idealistic
analysis but quite simply because [they] cannot conceive of life
otherwise than in the form of battle against exploitation, misery,
and hunger” (1967a 223). In the same vein, James Scott’s argument
that resistance begins “close to the ground, rooted firmly in …
the realities of daily experience,” expressed the birth of
Abahlali. Their initial goals were, as Scott continues, “modest.”
The revolt began in one shack settlement in Durban in 2005 in
response to seeing the land promised to the settlement cleared for
commercial use. They wanted the promised-land, they wanted the
politicians and city officials to speak with them not about
them, and they wanted the promises of housing in the city that
had been made by Nelson Mandela to be realized. And as Scott notes,
they were not “aiming at large historical abstractions such as
socialism” or criticisms of the World Bank and globalization. They
deplored these “isms” as detrimental to building solidarity and
as they grew politically they became skeptical of leftists and
researchers who said they supported them but only wanted to use them
for their own organizations, ideologies, research programs or
careers. Unlike NGOs like the Shack Dwellers International, which
claim to represent settlements to the housing department, Abahlali as
a grassroots movement that grew from one settlement to settlements
across the city based on local democratic inclusivity. Their meetings
began to include discussions of socialism or what they call “living
communism” alongside inclusive and careful readings of the
provincial slums act, which Abahlali later defeated at the
constitutional court in 2009 with the help of lawyers who, in a
Fanonian sense, took their orders from below. The victory came at a
cost. Nothing is ever given for free, to paraphrase Frederick
Douglass. Two weeks before the formal decision, armed men attacked
Abahlali’s office in Kennedy Road destroying the library that
included all of Fanon's titles and violently evicting many Abahlali
members from the settlement. Over 1000 people fled as the local ANC
branch took over the settlement.
In contrast to Scott’s intimation, Abahlali was never
anti-intellectual, and they made the very subtle distinctions between
the demand for things needed to live—such as electricity to prevent
shack fires and struggles against removal to peri-urban areas far
away from the city—and life. Life as creative, social, and
fully human; life, in other words, as the struggle against what Fanon
called a daily “living death” (1967b 11) which meant subverting
space and place. “When Abahlali began to resist evictions it
created a crisis,” argues S’bu Zikode, Abahlali’s former
president, and “when we began to take our place in the discussions
and political life in our cities it created a[nother] crisis
because,” he adds in a Fanonian vein, “we as shack dwellers
should have known our place. We should not live or think or speak or
act outside that place” (Zikode 2011). In other words, by refusing
their place in life (as things) they become political subjects as
they break out of the confines of place, becoming “human during the
same process by which it frees itself” (Fanon 2004), and in doing
so “they make that oppression visible and force a rethinking of
conceptual categories” (Neocosmos 2012).
In Black Skin,
Fanon argues that a Black intellectual is not only a contradiction in
terms16
but a threat. The same can be said for the
“shack intellectual.” The shack dweller is seen as smelly, dirty,
uneducated, lazy, feral and criminal and so the idea of a shack
dweller who is also an intellectual is seen as a
priori absurd, as outrageous, even as
fraudulent.17
And yet Fanon has becomes part of Abahlali’s library, which begs
Abahlali’s implicit challenge to militant middle class and
university trained intellectuals who are committed to social change.
This is a question addressed in my book Fanonian Practices in
South Africa (which I don’t have the space to rehash here); it
touches critically on the massive academic corporation and its
reproduction (citation industries, think-tanks, funding, grants, all
of which reproduce themselves hegemonically, i.e. allowing for
criticism promoting calculation and ulterior methods) and the effort
of trying to find spaces, sensitive to thinking beyond place, to do
something different. It is not good enough to herald the movement;
aiding it begins by being sensitive to thinking outside of place and
thus being wary, as I put it in Fanonian Practices, that “the
idea that radical intellectuals should abandon critical intellectual
work to become ‘one with the masses’ is just as unrealistic
and detrimental to a grassroots movement as to think that to really
be critical the intellectual must become ‘autonomous’ from all
grassroot movements” (Gibson 2011 219, conclusion). Thinking Fanon
fifty years later offers new beginnings for thought and praxis.
Bibliography
Abane, Beläid. “Frantz Fanon and
Abane Ramdane: Brief Encounters in the Algerian Revolution,” in
Nigel C. Gibson, editor, Living Fanon. New York: Palgrave,
2011.
Bhabha, Homi. 1986. “Remembering
Fanon,” reprinted in Nigel C. Gibson, editor, Rethinking Fanon
Amherst: Humanity Books
Biko, Steve. “Interview with Steve
Biko” in Andile Mngxitama, Amanda Alexander and Nigel Gibson
editors, Biko Lives. New York: Palgrave, 2008.
Cherki,
Alice. Fanon: A Portrait.
Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006.
Clegg,
Ian Workers’ Self-management in Algeria
New York: Monthly Review, 1971.
Cleaver,
Kathleen, Neal. “Back to Africa: The Evolution of the International
Section of the Black Panther Party” in Charles E. Jones eds. The
Black Panther Party Reconsidered. Baltimore
MD: Black Classic Press, 1998.
DeBeauvoir,
Simone. 1992. The Force of Circumstance.
New York: Paragon.
Fanon,
Frantz. Black Skin White Masks.
Translated by Charles Lars Markman. New York: Grove, 1967.
__________.
Black Skin White Masks.
Translated by Richard Philcox, New York: Grove, 2008.
__________. Toward the African
Revolution. Translated by Haakon Chevalier. New York: Grove,
1967.
__________. A Dying Colonialism.
Translated by Haakon Chevalier. New York: Grove, 1967.
__________.
The Wretched of the Earth.
Translated by Constance Farrington. New York: Grove, 1968.
__________.
The Wretched of the Earth.
Translated by Richard Philcox. New York: Grove, 2004.
Gibson,
Nigel C. 2011. Fanonian Practices in South
Africa: From Steve Biko to Abahlali baseMjondolo New
York: Palgrave.
Glissant,
Edouard. Caribbean Discourses: Selected
Essays. Charlottesville: University of
Virginia Press, 1999.
Gordon,
Lewis R. 2005. “Through the Zone of Nonbeing: A reading of Black
Skin White Masks in celebration of Fanon’s Eightieth Birthday,”
The C.L.R. James Journal
11, no.1.
Helie-Lucas,
Marie-Aimeé. 1999. “Women, Nationalism, and Religion in the
Algerian Liberation Struggle” in Nigel C Gibson eds. Rethinking
Fanon Amherst: Humanity Books.
Lazarus,
Neil. 2011. Postcolonial Unconscious.
Cambridge: Cambridge UP
Macey, David. 2000. Fanon: A
Life. London: Picador
Neocosmos, Michael. 2012. “Thinking
Emancipatory Politics: displacement, subaltern consciousness and the
limits of a history of the (neo-)colonial world,” Forthcoming
Journal of Asian and African Studies.
Sayles, James Yaki. 2010.
Meditations on Frantz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth
Montreal: Kersplebedeb
Scott, James. 1985. Weapons of
the Weak. New Haven: Yale UP
Turner, Lou. 2011. “Rage and Reason: Specters of Fanon in African American Radicalism,” paper given at the National Council for Black Studies 35th Annual National Conference Cincinnati, Ohio March 18.
Woddis, Jack. 1972. New Theories
of Revolution: A commentary on the views of Frantz Fanon, Régis
Debray and Herbert Marcuse. New York: International Publishers.
Zikode, S’bu. 2012. “Upgrades v
Evictions” www.abahlali.org/node/8734
accessed Feb 20, 2012.
Zouligha.
1999. “Challenging the Social Order: Women’s Liberation and
Contemporary Algeria,” in Nigel C Gibson eds.
Rethinking Fanon Amherst: Humanity Books.
Notes
1
Though, on the other hand his evidence for Fanon’s familiarity
with Lacan is less than convincing. What may lie behind this is a
reaction to the way Fanon was being read after Homi Bhabha
(especially as Macey’s own comprehensive Lacan
in Contexts).
2
On the other hand, Alice Cherki notes Fanon’s deep interest in
people’s histories as well as commitment to creating popular
archive alongside his rigorously empirical psychiatric articles. On
example of this is Cesare Bermani’s recent publication and
introduction of an unpublished draft of an article co-authored by
Jack Azoulay, François Sanchez,
and Frantz Fanon titled “Introduction
aux troubles sexualité de chez le Nord Africain” that richly
reports on “traditional” forms of
therapy and how wrong the commentators are who insinuate that Fanon
had no interest in concrete Algerian lives. It comes from the
Pirelli archive and is reprinted in Alfabeta
n.2 December 26, 2011 and I
am indebted to Renate Siebert for sharing it with me.
3
I say political since Bhabha might argue that resistance is found in
third space of enunciation that Fanon almost unconsciously opens up
in Black Skin. Quoting Macey that now is the time to read
Fanon “to hear the quality of the anger that inspired” Fanon,”
Lazarus (2011 178-9) tellingly adds that Macey “believes that
Fanon’s ideas and commitments are obsolete. The world has changed
fundamentally since Fanon’s time” and “Fanon ‘has little to
say about the outcome of decolonization.”
4
And then I took the opportunity to go to Detroit to meet Raya
Dunayevskaya. Detroit, the scene of the 1967 urban rebellion, and at
that time a city rapidly in decline, was mapped out almost along the
lines that Fanon had written about.
5
An important footnote, an echo from the US, was the birth of the
“civil rights” movement in Derry.
6
On Bhabha’s “framing Fanon” and Philcox’s translation see my
“Relative Opacity: A new Translation of Fanon’s Wretched of
the Earth, Mission Betrayed or Fulfilled” in Social
Identities 13.1 (2007).
7
Markmann preferred “The fact of Blackness” rather than the
literal translation “The lived experience of the black.”
8
In a sense the tragedy of this struggle is reported in The
Wretched when the torturer and the tortured both seek help from
Fanon on the hospital grounds. Fanon found the torturer, who was
being treated for post-traumatic stress disorder, having a panic
attack. It took a long time for the tortured to believe that the
police were not coming to take him back. Torture is the essence of
colonial rule and for the torturers who act without a guilty
conscience the next stage for the torturer is absolute sadism (see
2004: 196, 199 n.25).
9
Additionally it is likely that Fanon took over the Soummam
Platform’s analysis of the agrarian question: “The massive
participation of the population (peasants) in the Revolution … has
profoundly marked the character of resistance … For the peasant
population is deeply convinced that its thirst for land can only be
satisfied by the victory of national independence” (Abane 38).
10
It could have easily been the lived experience of the nation!
11
Though (though like the Trotskyists) disagreeing that the peasantry
could be independently revolutionary (see Macey).
12
As well as the scholarly criticism of McClintock and Fuss included
in my Rethinking Fanon, see Helie-Lucas and Zouligha.
13
Glissant writes that “it is difficult for a French Caribbean
individual to be the brother, friend, or quite simply the associate
or fellow countryman of Fanon. Because, of all the French Caribbean
intellectuals, he is the only one to have acted on his ideas,
through his involvement in the Algerian struggle.” Fanon made a
“complete break” and yet Martinican intellectuals have failed to
recognize him almost at all. He adds (69) that they could not find
in Fanon a figure who “awakened (in the deepest sense of the word)
the peoples of the contemporary world.”
14
Of course the influence had been mutual since the descriptions of
Black American life by writers such as Richard Wright played a role
in Fanon’s work. See Turner, “Racing.”
15
George Jackson’s Blood in my Eye was an important
engagement with Fanon from within and behind America’s prison
walls. And in this lineage the most serious reading of Fanon’s
Wretched of Earth is James Yaki Sayles’ “Meditations on
Frantz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth” reprinted in a collection
of the same name. He is critical of the way that The Wretched
has been read narrowly and one-sidedly as a conception of violence
failing to note how little Fanon speaks of arms and much more about
“the need for people to develop their consciousness and to learn
to lead themselves …” (186). Unfortunately, Sayles left
unfinished his meditations. I would have especially been interested
in how he would develop Fanon’s revolutionary humanism (161).
16
As Lewis Gordon argues (2005 18), in Black Skin White Masks
Fanon is in a “supposedly cat-and-mouse game with Reason because
it wasn’t his ‘nature’” and thus when he walked into a room,
reason walked out!
17
The paranoid hostility to the idea of the shack
intellectual on the part of the authoritarian left has matched that
of the state to the point where the authoritarian left has
consistently supported the state against the movement.
