New Preface to the
Arabic translation of Fanon: The
Postcolonial Imagination
by Nigel Gibson
It is with great pleasure and a sense of great honor that I write this introduction to the Arabic translation of Fanon: A Postcolonial Imagination. I am particularly indebted to Dr. Fayiz Suyyagh and all those associated with the Tarjuman Unit for this opportunity; I am also cognizant of the historic context of this translation, the massive and continuing revolts popularly known as the “Arab Spring” which have helped generate renewed interest in Frantz Fanon’s ideas.
When it was published, Fanon’s last
book, Les damnés de la terre, was
roundly criticized by the French liberal and left intelligentsia. Communists
and liberals agreed: Fanon’s analysis was flawed, his insights did not add up
to a theory, he made wild generalizations with his dismissal of the proletariat
as revolutionary, which was as absurd as his embrace of the peasantry and “lumpen-proletariat.”
In France Les damnés only sold a few
thousand copies. Translated into a number of languages over the next few years,
it was the United States of America, that land of lynchers as Fanon put it,
where his books first became famous. And yet, as Black radicals in the U.S. quoted
The Wretched of the Earth and found Black Skin White Masks a source for
their own psychological liberation, he was caricatured, even by those as
sophisticated as Hannah Arendt, as a philosopher of violence. The legacy of
such inaccurate reductionism is still felt fifty years later.
While the Black Panther Party in the
U.S., which associated Fanon with revolutionary Algeria, opened up an
international office in Algiers in 1970, in reality Fanon had been completely forgotten
by the leaders of the newly independent Algeria. His writings were too critical
for the new regime. And even when an Arabic translation of Les damnés by two Syrians, the author and nationalist politician
Jamal al-Attassi and the well-respected translator Sami Droubi, appeared in
1963, its revolutionary significance was hamstrung by the elision of Fanon’s
criticisms of the nationalist elites—party, military, and intellectual—who were
ruling across the regime in the guise of socialism and Pan-Arabism.
Perhaps the most important
interpretation of Fanon in the region came through the work of the French
educated Iranian sociologist Ali Shariati. Shariati had corresponded with Fanon
while translating A Dying Colonialism
into Persian and developed a synthesis of Fanon’s ideas with Shi’a Islam.[1]
Fanon had replied to Shariati about A
Dying Colonialism, making it clear that he did not share his views “with
respect to Islam.” The difference was deeply political and should not be dismissed
as a manifestation of Fanon’s atheism or a misunderstanding of the place of
Islam in Arab culture. Rather, thinking from within the Algerian revolution, Fanon
was concerned that any system of thought—secular or religious—could take the
place of developing a truly liberatory ideology, one based in the radical actions,
and radical changes in social relations and thinking that had been generated by
the popular struggle from the bottom up. Replying to Shariati, he said he feared
“that the spirit of sectarianism and religion may result in a setback for a
nation that is negated in the process of becoming, of distancing it from its
future and immobilizing it in its past.”[2]
In fact, Shariati’s attempted synthesis of Fanon and Shi’ism had an important
influence on Iranian intellectuals, even creeping into Khomeini’s’ political
rhetoric and becoming popularized during the Iranian revolution.[3]
The
popularization of Fanon encouraged by the Black Panthers and by Ali Shariati have
resulted in Fanon’s arguments and ideas being vulgarized, distorted and ultimately
turned into their opposites. His quest for human liberation has been turned
into a justification for what he fought against, a reactionary anti-imperialism
or essentialist and patriarchal cultural nationalism; any ideology that, as he
put it to Shariati, immobilizes the struggle for freedom. Correcting these and
other distortions, born out of the canonization of Fanon in postcolonial
studies, was one of the tasks of Fanon:
The Postcolonial Imagination. My goal was to explicate Fanon’s thought for
itself; and looking back, now, ten years after its original English
publication, the idea of radical changes in consciousness that are the hallmark
of historic revolutionary movements remains pivotal to elucidating Fanon’s
dialectic of liberation.
Fanon’s Marxian notion that people
change as they make history, which he explores in some depth in A Dying Colonialism, keeps being
concretized as we have seen, across the Arab world. But just as Fanon cannot be
simply mechanically applied to the contemporary revolt, neither is the meaning
of any revolt immediately clear. Fanon’s call to work out new concepts in the
context of and engagement with mass movements, with full knowledge of history
and its process of becoming, remains the challenge to radical theoreticians. And
thus, while Fanon is interpreted as a thinker for our postcolonial period, the
work of interpretation is not simply one of representation. In Fanon: The Postcolonial Imagination, I have
tried instead to remain faithful to what I consider Fanon’s untidy dialectic, because
Fanonian thinking develops not posteriori,
but in the context of the struggle for liberation. At the same time, however, I
have tried to highlight Fanon’s thought as a totality.
It is often forgotten that Fanon was a
psychiatrist. Beneath his concern for the social, economic, and political
liberation of colonized people lay his belief in the importance of psychological
health and mental liberation. For Fanon
the social, political and psychological were all interconnected, each an
element of what he called a “new humanism.” As I argue in chapter four of Fanon: The Postcolonial Imagination, becoming
Algerian and identifying one hundred percent with the liberation struggle was a
result of the impossible situation Fanon found himself in Blida-Joinville
Hospital. The psychic health of the Algerian people as a whole, not only those
at the hospital, was at stake. He could no longer work, he argued in his
resignation letter, in a situation which encouraged the systematic dehumanization
and decerebralization of the people. Akin to contemporary authoritarian
regimes, the legitimacy of the dying colonialism in Algeria was based on brute
force with no possible reciprocity other than through violence. This is the
truth of postcolonialism where the damned of the earth, the majority of the
people made wretched by (neo) colonialism, are condemned to struggle for
survival and their very non-existence as human beings is held in place by
violence. The colonized and wretched of the earth are reduced to the status of non-beings.
Without reciprocity, without equality, there is no ethical standard, and for
Fanon a society that keeps people in their place by violence and the fear it
creates, by the secret police, and by torture is indicative of a sick society
that must be replaced.
Fanon’s reconceptualization of the dialectic,
developed in his critique of Hegel, was not simply understood to force
recognition from the master, but to establish a totally new element. The new
element was the objective truth of the actional subjectivity of those who had
been held in check and denied their humanness. It was only on this ground that
a genuine reciprocity, “the birth of a human world”[4]
could emerge. For Fanon, action was crucial, and he recognized that the new
beginning was signaled by cognitive liberation; that is to say it is only when
people experience a liberation from the fear that has held them in place for
years that they begin to understand their collective social power. By transgressing
the physical and psychical spatial boundaries that condemn them, they can be
said to have entered the revolutionary moment. And yet, this moment, often
experienced as standing up against the asymmetrical violence of the state, is
only the beginning of Fanon’s dialectic of liberation.
Fanon writes of the debilitating and
traumatic effects of war on all people. According to Fanon’s colleague, Alice Cherki,
Fanon abhorred violence. And critics, fixated on the opening chapter of The Wretched of the Earth, “Concerning
Violence,” have ignored how the work is bookended by the psychological effects
of the colonial war. Thus Fanon’s work as a psychiatrist and his deep sensibility
to human suffering has been elided. The dimension of human tragedy conveyed in
these case studies indicates another of Fanon’s concerns, namely the ongoing
work of healing and disalienation continued for an indefinite period after the
end of colonial rule.
The psychological and social liberation
of the individual and of the community, including Fanon’s acute awareness of
the brutal impact of debilitating poverty, underscores the importance and openness
of Fanon’s untidy dialectic which, I argue, is expressed in Fanon’s critique of
Sartre in Black Skin White Masks.
Fanon always returns to lived human experience without any recourse to an external
unifier (party, state, or ideology, including religion that “already knows”) to
judge the outcome of individual and social struggle. The simplicity of the
method is exposed in Fanon’s “Pitfalls of National Consciousness” where he asks
the question that is on everyone’s mind, “was independence worth fighting for?”
Today, after the “Arab spring,” which did help to liberate minds from fear, we
might further ask, are these nations now doomed to repeat another cycle of
authoritarian rule by a new set of elites? Or will it be the second phase of
the anticolonial revolution that Fanon had hoped? And how can an engagement with Fanon aid that
new phase?
In Les
damnés de la terre, Fanon speculates that predicting the timing of a revolution
is a fool’s game. And yet when the lid blows off, as it did in Tunisia in the spring
of 2011, there is nothing that can stop the spread of the idea. And that idea—that
it is masses of self-organized people, not elite politicians that change
history and make history—quickly took on a global dimension. The idea that the
Arab masses were ideologically and politically astute made concrete Fanon’s
conclusion to Les damnés, that part
of the intellectual’s daily work (whether that intellectual is from the
university or the shanty town) is to convince the oppressed that they become
political leaders through collectivity and thereby do away with the old idea of
political leadership.[5]
And though we often hear the tired lament among intellectuals, often promoted by
the Western media and by the local elites, that the masses are politically
backward and unable to see beyond their immediate needs, we hear every day of
men and women across the Arab world, coming together under the most dire circumstances,
and organizing the daily running of “liberated spaces.” Standing up to the
violence of the state, whether there is no resort to arms or whether the
absolute and enduring violence of the state necessitates an armed response, are
forms of counter violence. In other words, as I point out in Fanon: The Postcolonial Imagination, to
be made thinkable, any discussion of violence has to be historicized. For Fanon
collectively standing up against oppression and for the human dignity is essential
role but it is always carried out without guarantees and with tremendous
risk.
And yet, at the same time we have to be cognizant
of what Fanon called the strengths and weaknesses of spontaneity. Fanon notes
that the struggle is often first organized in reaction to the oppressor, so
when there is a change of tactics the movement often suffers. Where early local
successes seem to buoy the belief that victory is near, there becomes the need
for a deeper reflection and strategy. Insurgent movements quickly discover that
air raids and sophisticated military hardware means that there cannot be a
strategically privileged position. This is not simply a change of military
operations but entails wholly new relations between the armed militants and the
local people. Indeed, Fanon insists, and his resolve remains significant, that
the future cannot be decided by military tactics but only by the most inclusive
discussion that encourages masses of people to be involved in articulating,
often in the most practical of ways, the goals of the struggle. It is this thinking
and acting together that helps nurture a new social consciousness. Thus,
revolutionary humanism is an expression of what Fanon calls the “radical
mutation in consciousness” that accompanies social revolution.
Rather than simply celebrating
spontaneous revolt as if that would in itself signal the end of the regime, a
crucial part of Fanon’s philosophic legacy calls for moving beyond Manichean
and reactive thinking, and opening up revolutionary thought to the uncertainties
and challenges of thinking practically about a new society in the context of
the real (not abstract) current social struggle. Calling the militant’s voluntarist and
anti-intellectual use of shortcuts to get things done atrocious, inhuman, and
sterile,[6] the question did not concern the
leftist notion of raising the consciousness of the “backward masses” but
rather, how new forms and theories of organization maintain an ongoing
liberation outside the fetish of state-centric politics.
It is in this dangerous “interregnum”—in
which the old is dying, as Gramsci put, and the new cannot be born[7]—that
life can be pumped into bankrupt, reactionary, and fundamentalist ideologies. Fanon
warns that such politics cannot sustain a liberation movement and can instead become
a politics of identity based on racism, sectarianism, and xenophobia. Resentment and revenge, feelings
often encouraged during the struggle for short-term ends, cannot create
liberated beings; and actions based on mimicking the colonizer give rise to new
forms of chauvinism and gangsterism. Fanon points out that during the
anticolonial struggle, a politics of subservience, often justified by the need
for unity against a common enemy, takes the place of a culture of discussion
(and democracy). This “sclerotization” of politics[8] leads to a “brutality of thought,” a brutality
which is not simply a reflection of colonialist and capitalist dehumanization,
but is also the product of reactions to the violence of the increasingly
cornered authoritarian regime. Fanon understood that in an armed struggle, brutality
is often encouraged by the asymmetry of a liberation war which can only answer
aerial bombing with rifle fire. Critical of any turn toward militarism, and a
purely military solution, he warned of the “brutality of thought typical of
revolutionary voluntarism.”[9]
What was crucial, he argued was the ability of revolutionary movements to
entertain shades of meaning and thoughtful debates from within the struggle that
creates a real basis for solidarity. Rejecting a knee-jerk anti-imperialism
that leads to short-term alliances with oppressive regimes, Fanon speaks of a
revolutionary humanism arguing that the militant intellectual’s role is to help
the movement’s self-comprehension always emphasizing that ideas matter and that
“exploitation can wear a black face or an Arab one.”[10]
Critical of appeals to identity, Fanon’s concept of national liberation become
a politics in which “every kind of genius may grow.” To talk about the future society, for
example, was to include everyone without reference to any identity. The future
had to be “open to all.”[11]
If the function of society is to serve
human needs, this must also be the measure of any truly decolonized society. Just
as Fanon’s was aware of the brutality of the postcolonial party/military/state manifested
by the security apparatus “immobilizing and terrorizing” the people,[12]
he understood that the struggle
for true liberation also bred pathologies, psychological disorders, traumas and
stresses, created by extreme situations. These would have to be addressed
humanely and patiently through sociotherapy and other collective therapies. In
the last chapter of his final book, The
Wretched of the Earth, which colors the Fanon of Fanon: The Postcolonial Imagination and remains an important maxim,
he contends that “the
important theoretical problem” is not simply vigilance but one of self-study
and self-reflection: “at all times and in all places, to make explicit, to
demystify, and to harry the insult to humanity that exists in oneself” (my emphasis).[13]
[1] As well as
translating Les damnés into Persian,
Shariati transformed some of Fanon’s concepts, for example translating the
damned or wretched of the earth into the Islamic term, downtrodden (mostazafin).
[2] Quoting in Alice
Cherki, Fanon: A Portrait (Ithaca:
Cornell U.P., 2006) p. 199.
[3] See Homi Bhabha’s foreword to
Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth
(New York: Grove Press, 2004) p. xxx. Alice Cherki notes that Fanon’s name,
specifically “our Brother Frantz Fanon,” was printed on posters which asserted that
wearing the Chador was an anti-imperialist act. See Alice Cherki, Fanon: A Portrait (Ithaca: Cornell U.P.,
2006) p. 200. This had little to do with what Fanon argued in his essay
“Algeria Unveiled” which is discussed in Chapter 6 of Fanon: The Postcolonial Imagination.
[4] Frantz Fanon, Black Skin White Masks (Grove: New York,
2008) p.193.
[5] On Fanon’s
challenge to intellectuals see my Fanonian
Practices in South Africa: From Steve Biko to Abahlali baseMjondolo. New
York: Palgrave Press, 2011.
[6] See Frantz
Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove, 1968) p. 199.
[7] Antonio
Gramsci, Selections from the Prison
Notebooks (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1971) p. 276.
[8] Frantz Fanon, A Dying Colonialism (New York: Monthly
Review), p.67.
[9] Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove, 1968) p. 147.
[10] Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York:
Grove, 1968) p. 146.
[11] Frantz Fanon, A Dying Colonialism (New York: Monthly
Review), p.32.
[12] Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York:
Grove, 1968) p. 175.
[13] Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York:
Grove, 1968) p. 305.
