by Wairimu
Muriithi
Tracey Denean Sharpley-Whiting, in her book Frantz Fanon: Conflicts and Feminisms (henceforth
ConFem) (1998), provides a
feminist-centred response to feminist critiques of the revolutionary doctor and
theorist, a meta-feminist critique, if you will. Like Lewis Gordon in What Fanon Said (published 17 years
later, in 2015), Sharpley-Whiting challenges notable feminist works on Fanon,
mainly from the academy, by positing them as misreadings, misinterpretations,
oversimplifications and/or even uninformed. The text’s engagements range from
three main feminist frameworks – liberal Euro-American lit-crit feminism, Algerian
nationalist feminism and radical U.S. Black feminism – to a closing call to
post-modern US academic feminists to (re)commit to “Fanon’s radically humanist
profeminist consciousness” (1998: 24).
Sharpley-Whiting
appreciates feminist scholar bell hooks’ engagement with Fanon, recognising it
for its refusal to accept the binaries that have created a tendency to “dismiss
his relevance to feminism and indict his thoughts as not simply ‘sexist’ nor
masculinist or phallogocentric, a substantially more accurate assessment, but
misogynist” (1998: 90). She is therefore not unwilling to concede that Fanon
has shortcomings, or even to discuss them, but to show how relevant his work is
to “post-movement feminist liberation theory and praxis” (1998: 1). As such,
Fanon certainly cannot be read through the Western first and second waves of
feminism, with their blatant lack of commitment to anti-racism – like French
feminism in Algeria during colonisation – and must be carefully engaged with as
important theory for Black radical thought and postcolonial feminisms.
Sharply-Whiting
references hooks’ rejection of “energetic[ally] setting up Fanon as anathema to
feminist resistance politics, as fundamentally misogynist” (1998: 89). This,
perhaps, is the problem Fanon’s work has faced over the years. The question, as
was posed to hooks, often seems to be “In what ways was Fanon sexist?”, already
presuming a Black, male patriarch, especially given that “it is rare to seek
hear such condemnation of white male writers” (hooks in Sharpley-Whiting 1998:
90).
Sharpley-Whiting
notes “[l]anguage was the primary instrument through which Fanon observed
racism and alienation” (1998: 9). It appears to also be the ways in which
Euro-American scholars engaged with Fanon’s work, especially when noting his
predominant use of masculine referents. Not only does the text maintain
“masculinism is categorically different from antifeminism and misogyny” (1998:
11), it is critical of postmodernism’s renunciation, “in the words of Edward
Said, of universal values of truth and freedom for local situations and
language games” (1998: 98). In What Is
This ‘Black’ in Black Popular Culture, Stuart Hall asserted, “blacks are
ambiguously placed in relation to postmodernism as they were in relation to
high modernism […] [it] remains extremely unevenly developed as a phenomenon in
which the old centre/peripheries of high modernity consistently reappear”
(1993: 22). In Fanon’s work, therefore, his ambiguous placement lies in trying
to point to the instances in which his language tends towards the masculine by
absenting the feminine. Put differently, it is typical for feminist writing to
often include the key words, ‘woman/women’, ‘feminism’ and gender neutral or
the two main gender referents – when I am reading on a screen, for instance, I
often conduct a search (Ctrl + F on the keyboard) for these words to determine
the author’s feminist leanings (or lack thereof). But Fanon’s own personal and
political context is often disregarded – he apparently had little social
interaction with women of colour, and no WOC patients – and eliding his
argument for a New Humanism, “profoundly grounded in the belief in ‘[a] social
democracy in which man and woman have an equal right to culture, to material
well-being, and to dignity’” (Sharpley-Whiting 1998: 3).
Of course,
Fanon’s limited interaction with WOC would be no excuse to be sexist, and much
of his speculations, observations and imperfections would result in limitations
in his thinking about women. For instance, in the chapters in which women are a
primary subject – that is, in chapters where the phrases are not just ‘men and
women’ – he overwhelmingly discusses them in reference to sex and sexuality,
not even to impose any moral values, but in a way that “forecloses his humanism
to the (black) female, whom he presents, in hooks’ words, as “a sexualised body,
always not the body that ‘thinks, ’ but also appears to be the body that never
longs for freedom” (Sharpley-Whiting 1998: 91). This rigidity does not see
women for their own contributions, and weaknesses (to disavow the myth of the
strong Black woman), outside of a perpetual external sexualisation; it is
easily the same rigidity that ties a woman’s body to the nation-state as bearer
of a nation and carrier of its culture.
In my
reading of The Wretched of the Earth,
I note Fanon’s negligible specificity on women’s liberation, but also that his
general rejection of colonisation and its after effects is already anti-misogynist and pro-woman because of the inherently
patriarchal nature of colonialism. His tendency towards the transcendental
could arguably be read as too optimistic, especially when it takes for granted
that “women must demand that their liberation, their needs, and their specific
oppressions be clearly addressed and incorporated into national liberation
movements from the outset” (Sharpley Whiting 1998: 59); but it is an optimism
that was also informed by the transitions he was witnessing first-hand during
the Algerian Revolution, any such transitions (and more) that keep many women
hopeful and moving. In any case, Sharpley-Whiting’s counter-critiques –
agreeable or otherwise – make it clear that any preoccupation with locating
Fanon as a feminist thinker runs the very real risk of dictating feminist
liberation by “totalising feminist paradigms” (1998: 91). The question ought to
be, ‘How can Fanon’s thoughts – on love, on violence, on mental health, etc. –
be useful to feminist liberation?’;
the answer to which is bound to produce more comprehensive answers for a
revolutionary theory and praxis today that reaches for that new humanism.
Bibliography:
Hall, Stuart. "What is this" black" in black popular
culture?" Social Justice 20.1/2
(51-52 (1993): 104-114.
Sharpley-Whiting, T. D., Frantz
Fanon: Conflicts & Feminisms. Oxford:
Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 1998.
