Mikaela Erskog
In what seems to be the most extensive academic
examination, interpretation and advocation of Fanon's oeuvre, Fanon's
Dialectics of Experience by Ato Sekyi-Otu really works out how very
original Fanon's work was in his time and is today. Sekyi-Otu encounters Fanon
within and beyond Fanon's work. He negotiates how Fanon has been one of the
most complex interlocutors of the colonial context. He not only by presents a
nuanced reading of Fanon's texts but also outlines the relationships between
Fanon and the academic subjectivities that precede and succeed Fanon and how
these all came to relate to and conceive of the colonial context.
Sekyi-Otu (1996) argued that Fanon found that the
likes of Hegel and successive narratives had been unable to capture the
“originality of the colonial context." On this understanding, Sekyi-Otu
argued that Fanon was able to really comprehend the originality of the
colonial context through his humanist critiques of past and (then) present
thinkers; Sekyi-Otu explaining how Fanon points to the limitations of applying
thinking such as Marxist analyses (having to “stretch” working class struggle),
Hegel’s master/slave (as inadequate conceptions of the colonizer/colonized
dynamic) and Sartre’s critique of Negritude (as undermining the fact of
blackness in and beyond the colonial context). In light of Sekyi-Otu’s academic
labor, one is made aware of how Fanon really performs the political work of the
anti-colonial, humanist struggle by ‘keeping the enemy closer’, by really
examining colonial life (or the lack thereof) towards finding a life worth
living.
***
To me, politics is about performance, performance
in its immediate sense being the quality of execution
of an action, operation, or process (Emphasis added; OED, 2014). What is
political is not merely the action (lets say violent insurgency) but the quality
of said action in, what Sekyi-Otu might refer to as, its immediacy (the where,
why and how that then articulates as violence). Now, it is not my concern to
get into how politics is performance (which I hope to do at a later stage), but
rather what performance implies: of experiencing within and of particular
and/or general circumstances.
I take as given that foundational to a politics of emancipation is
Fanon’s pronouncement that “a consciousness [must be] pledged to experience”
(PN, 128; BS, 134 - Sekyi-Otu, 1996: 54). However, Sekyi-Otu points out
that what Fanon does (with seemingly unparalleled sophistication) is to examine
the performance of said politics, looking at the quality of the
execution of an actional emancipatory mode of being (i.e. living politics). So,
if a consciousness pledged to experience enables one to pursue an authentic or
self-styled or living political praxis, Fanon looks further at the conditions
in which consciousness is able to really and meaningfully be pledged to
experience. As mentioned above, part of achieving a politics of emancipation is
understanding what influences the quality of execution of an action. Simply, in
order to operate for one’s self, of oneself, the quality of the operating needs
to be examined according to that which constitutes performance. In this case, I
will look at how Fanon (according to Sekyi-Otu) sees space as part and parcel
of one’s performance (which I take to be one’s living politics).
Politics of space
One of the ways in which Sekyi-Otu accounts for the
sophistication of Fanon's understanding of the colonial context (and therefore
the potential for a politics of emancipation) is the way in which he observes
the colonized embodiment. Fanon is observes that for the colonized, at the
heart of inhabiting space (in fact the lack of really inhabiting space)
is the embodiment of "quintessential evil" within the colonial
context.
Fanon sees that the colonized embodiment is not
only being prescribed to perform within what becomes to be a particularised
situation (of colonized Other) but also being Other as the situation of being
simultaneously conceived of as experiencing a multiplicity of spaces (body,
race and ancestry) (Sekyi-Otu, 1996: 83). For:
"The
multiplicity of the spaces assigned to the black body is at once belied by, and
yet is a function of, the "totalitarian character" of colonial
coercion and racial segregation. The peculiarity of the colonial condition of
being-in-space is that whatever the relative material size of the space
assigned to the subjugated, the colonized must remain absolutely fixed in this
space, separated by an unbridgeable chasm from the "others,"
compelled to renounce the "self," the individuality which is normally
validated in the body's spatial strategies. The colonized subject, Fanon writes
elsewhere, is "besieged from within by the colonizer" (SR, 78; DC, 92
)." (Sekyi-Otu, 1996: 83)
This then becomes a problematised embodiment in the
very first and physical sense (of existing in a black body in a white
supremacist system) and by way in which he articulated the extension of
embodiment, of being black embodiment and simultaneously being within
a space of black embodiment, delineated for black embodiment. By this I
mean that Sekyi-Otu highlights the way in which the "quintessential
evil" embodiment (the colonized) is not only conceptually oppressed but
that the very environment in which he or she exists in denys human existence
and continues to reiterate the imposed embodiment. As such, it is clear that
the performing of politics is undeniably disallowed as the quality of one’s
mode of being is not one that is genuinely being-within-space.
Sekyi-Otu (1996: 95) goes on to further explain the
importance of issuing a spatial critique on to those attempting to announce an
'authentic' and 'original' response to the colonial context, namely the
advocates of Negritude. As, for Fanon, even when the colonized asserts
his/herself in the form of practicing (I say with caution) a particularly
African tradition, the colonized is only able to express his/herself within
that particular space. Fanon (Sekyi-Otu, 1996: 95) wrote with regards to
expression through dance and possession:
"The
circle of the dance is a permissive circle: it protects and permits.
At certain times on certain days, men and women come together at
a given place, and there, under the solemn eye of the tribe... [the exhibition
of] the huge effort of a community to exorcise itself, to liberate itself, to
explain itself. There are no limits - inside the circle... (DT,
22; WE, 57).
Within the framework of Negritude is still a
politics of exclusion that Fanon's critique of colonial space makes abundantly
clear (if his theoretical critiques had not already). As such, Fanon's spatial
critique of oppressive societal organisation evidences how "reactive
practices of the colonized... are so many manifestations of misdirected
aggressivity, so many botched acts of transcendence in the context of life
lived in captive space." (Sekyi-Otu, 1996: 96).
According to Sekyi-Otu’s interpretation of Michael
Weinstein idea of coercion, "At the centre of coercion is effective
control of space" and coercion is "the imposition of restraint in the
spatial dimension of human existence."(Sekyi-Otu, 1996: 78). Therefore,
recognition of Fanon’s articulations, of the complexity of situations that
proscribe and restrain behaviour by virtue of spatiality, are important to any
society hoping to decolonise. As, if the very roles and relations within the
making of space are not made visible and then reconfigured for the purpose of
decolonising, then even if a society is conceptually liberated (societal
consensus that "we are all human beings and equals"), Du Bois's Veil
remains as concrete as the walls of Sandton suburbia. As aforementioned:
"...
if we examine closely this system of compartments [the Manichean colonial
social organisation], we will at least be able to reveal the lines of force
it implies. This approach to the colonial world, its ordering and its
geographical layout will allow us to make out the lines on which a decolonized
society will be organized" (DT, 7; WE, 37-38)." (Emphasis added;
Sekyi-Otu, 1996: 84)
Sekyi-Otu (1996: 88) sees in Fanon’s critiques the
very centrality of recognizing the problem of the spatial in the colonial
context, as he reads Fanon's conception of violence to then be directly linked
to the restriction of space as he quotes Fanon: "...the impulse to take
the colonizer's place implies a tonicity of muscles the whole time. In fact we
know that in certain emotional conditions, the presence of an obstacle
accentuates the tendency towards motion." As such, the 'mainstream'
misreading of Fanon’s utterances about violence becomes more pronounced as
Sekyi-Otu suggests that Fanon's 'advocations' of violence by the colonized
against the colonizer are rather an articulation of the way in which the
colonial spatial schema facilitate an immediate knowledge that articulates
itself in violent reaction.
Sekyi-Otu's (1996: 89) exploration of Fanon's
understanding of space in the colonial context provides further understanding
of the nature of the work needed to be done in the decolonizing process. As
"during the period of colonization, the colonized never stops achieving
his freedom from nine in the evening until six in the morning. (DT, 18; WE,
52)."
***
Reading Black Skins, White Masks, Wretched
of the Earth and A Dying Colonialism, one spots a large iceberg,
identifiable and formidable above the tempestuous, dark sea’s waves. Reading Fanon's
Dialectics of Experience is like being told that the iceberg is actually
attached to an underwater glacier, that goes much deeper than one initial
perceived.
Ato Sekyi-Otu makes
visible the complex thinker that was[is?] Frantz Fanon.
References
Sekyi-Otu,
A. Fanon's Dialectics of Experience, Harvard University Press:
Massachusetts, London, Cambridge, 1996.
