The Wretched of the Earth
The following are my notes on The Wretched of the Earth, by Frantz Fanon. These notes are subject to change in the future.
General Background Information
Frantz Fanon was born in Martinique. He was taught by Aimé Césaire in secondary school. After Vichy control of Martinique was overthrown by local uprising he returned to Martinique. Soon after he joined the French war effort as a member of the AFL. He contributed to multiple successful campaigns but was disgusted with the level of racism he encountered. After de Gaulle’s policy of removing non-white soldiers from the French Army was put into place he returned to Martinique and focused on continuing his education. Thereafter he trained in psychiatry and became a practicing physician.
Summary
Foreword: Framing Fanon by Homi K. Bhabha
Bhabha characterizes the work as being primarily concerned with a Manichean characterization of colonial history, where colonies exist in a dual economy in which the privileged class is able to act in a way the colonized can not.
This Manichean quality applies to the division of the third world and the first world in modern politics. One economy is exploited and operates in service of the other.
Bhabha establishes Fanon as being for a Humanist revolution in the third world. Primarily within the context of Pan-Africanism Fanon advocates for the third world to reject the univocal choice of socialism or capitalism, and instead construct a robust national consciousness and structure based in prioritizing the human first, rejecting the standards set out by Europe.
The psychoanalytic aspect of Fanon is emphasized. It is claimed that Fanon’s analysis is mainly carried through the psycho affective and the phenomenological lens. Specifically, the passage on violence is claimed to be more about violence as a means of opposing oneself to the sub-humanization systems of colonialism impose on their colonial subjects in order to remedy the psychological affliction of guilt without cause, rather than an explicit political call to action.
Preface: John Paul Sartre
Sartre makes it clear that Fanon is writing [[The Wretched of the Earth]] for a colonized audience, and that the European has no place in the work. He explains that Fanon is dryly diagnosing the failure of Europe, and is writing the text to give colonized peoples the ability to govern themselves and emancipate themselves from the structures given to them by their colonizers. In diagnosing these failures he only describes the European to give the colonized person insight into how their oppression has affected them, and how they can rehabilitate their minds and psyches.
Sartre acknowledges his preface has no real place in this work, but he includes it so that the European can see that the violence Fanon describes is inevitable, and that the European is complicit, unless they join the fight to make history and destroy colonial structure.
On Violence
The process of decolonization is always violent. It is a complete rejection of the colonizer and the colonizers value. Nothing less than complete destruction of the colonizers grasp of the colonized can be accepted. In Fanon’s words “the last shall be the first.”
The colonized intellectual and the colonizer attempt to appeal to the colonizer’s values during the process of decolonization, but seeing how these values were perverted and ignored during the violent process of colonization, the colonized ignores these pleas. Instead, the collective values that had been repressed emerge, even the colonized intellectual begins to remember these values when immersed in the revolution.
The colonized is constantly set into a state of rage by the colonizer. The colonizer intends to display his authority as a means of security, yet he is unable to completely pacify the colonized. The colonized are brought to fratricide as a method of claiming control over their lives and expelling the violence that they are treated with in a way that will not result in them being exterminated. The colonized use the realm of myth and magic to cope with their reality. In the face of djinns or zombies, the colonizer no longer is at the forefront of their minds. The revolution allows them to face their reality, and removes the need for this distraction.
When decolonization occurs it is as a result of the colonized realizing that colonization is not reason, nor does it have a body, it is simply violence, and therefore it must be met by a greater violence to be subdued. The bourgeois colonized will be reasoned with by the colonized elite, they will be told that their aims are the same and that nonviolence must be reached or whatever they have gained will be lost. Only the peasant class can be truly revolutionary, they have everything to gain and nothing to lose from decolonization.
The bourgeois colonized and the colonizers work together to attempt to dissuade violence from fully actualizing. The colonial system would be hurt by complete military domination of the colonized country, and guerilla warfare has shown that even if the colonized country has fewer arms and soldiers, they can still cause significant casualties to the point that war would become unprofitable. In other words, the colonizer can not respond to violence without defeating the point of colonization.
The colonizer can only defeat decolonization by complete military occupation, any other form of repression will result in the violent struggle of the colonized destroying the colonial project. The colonizer knows that the capitalist system relies on these nations not achieving a national consciousness, but it can also not afford to dedicate all its military to colonization as the prospect of a war against socialist nations requires them to not be weakened on multiple fronts.
Violence is the political method by which the colonized respond to the violence that is positioned at them should they choose to reject the colonizing nation. This violence attempts to weaken the colonizers position such that maintaining the colony becomes untenable. Through this violence the individual is rid of their guilt complex and they are an undeniable part of the movement towards a national consciousness. Now they must be fully committed.
Once a nation is liberated, they are left in relative squalor. The colonizing nation removes its capital and refuses reparations unless they are viewed as charity. The colonized nation must open itself back up to the economic exploitation the colonized nation had established in order to avoid starvation.
The Third World must reject the dichotomy of socialism or capitalism, and instead produce an economic mode that applies to its individual context, the above impoverishing being taken into context.
The colonizing nations must return capital to their colonies as a form of reparation. Fanon also poses that without them doing this their own proletariat will protest and their financiers will battle their cartels, leading to national ruin. The problem of our time is not capitalism against socialism, but the redistribution of wealth for the good of mankind.
Grandeur and Weakness of Spontaneity
The masses are always in conflict with the political party. The party is a structure imported from the Western metropolis. The tension between the party and the masses is not mapped cleanly onto colonial society. In a colony the urban proletariat effectively take the role of the bourgeois, they have little to gain and everything to lose from revolution.
The urban proletariat and the national party both view the peasant class largely similarly: they are untrustworthy, unintelligent and weak. Leaders amongst the rural masses have no problem with the colonizer, they distrust the urban proletariat as they oppose modernization and the capture of rural peoples as a market.
As the national liberation movement moves forwards its leaders emerge from the enfranchised workers within the more metropolitan areas of the colonized state. Labor unions form along the same lines that political parties do. While the peasant now has food, their station will change very little under the rule of the bourgeois worker’s union or the inner city political party. Two paths are possible, either the party will oppress the peasants in the same way that the colonizer did, or disenfranchised radical elements from within the party and the union will discover the lumpenproletariat to be worth more than just a blunt revolutionary force and will attempt to enfranchise them.
The spontaneous nature of the lumpenproletariat is not sufficient to bring about the nation, the controlled military force of the colonizing nation will be able to drive off attacks of the citadel and cause heavy losses to colonized attacking groups. This results in creation of guerilla warfare.
The force of the lumpenproletariat is not enough. The hope of national liberation will prove to be a great weakness if the leaders of liberation movement do not enlighten the lumpenproletariat. They will not win by pure force, and hatred of the colonizer alone will not sustain the lumpenproletariat through a prolonged war. The colonized will cater to certain segments of the colonized population. It becomes evident that a national consciousness is what is required, and the function of politics is revealed.
As concessions are made the colonized must realize that these concessions are made on their side, the colonizer will never give up resources it isn’t been forced to. They must become stalwart and avoid the temptation of mystification to focus on enlightenment.
In order to foster national consciousness those revolutionary leaders who enter the fields must focus the populace on their movement. So long as they can make enough of the lumpenproletariat real stakeholders in the building of the nation they are able to enact real change, rather than simply changing a flag while leaving the people mired in the dark ages.
The Trials and Tribulations of National Consciousness
While the people fight against oppression under the muddied principles of liberal universalism, national consciousness develops. Unfortunately this consciousness is challenged by its champions being the weak national bourgeoisie, whose apathy and weak ties to those who mobilize the movement disable them from understanding the violence of the revolutionaries. If left to develop uncritically a nation may revert to an ethnic group and a state may revert to a tribe.
The national bourgeoisie must be used to enrich the revolutionary movement. They do not have the capacity to organize the economy of the nation, and their calls for nationalization are merely a call for a transfer of power from the colonist to the national bourgeoisie. They have not learned that which the colonist bourgeoisie knows and instead skip to the senility of the modern European bourgeoisie.
The colonialist sets up a tourist industry with the national bourgeoisie, and the unrefined products are sold through the usual channels, but the wealth is not spent on developing the capital of the country.
Territorial, tribal and religious divides are played up by the colonialist and the vision of African unity is corroded. The colonists goal is to ensure no real change in systemic exploitation occurs, rather their concession is a change in who is nominally in control of these systems. The national bourgeoisie accepts this. Their goal is to enrich themselves and produce a state they control. They allow the stoking of racial and religious tensions and create the same system of racism and repression the colonialists created. Unlike the colonialists they do not have the capital or relationships to maintain their political power and repression, this causes the creation of a bourgeois dictator. This leader may be honest in his aims, but eventually he is broken down by the interests of the party.
The national bourgeoisie has no purpose, it is a symptom of a class of people who strive to enrich themselves at the cost of the movement towards African unity and national consciousness. It lacks the one quality a bourgeois needs to be effective: money. It will never accumulate enough capital to start industrialization before all opportunities have been poached by foreign nations.
The nations political party must not be used as a tool to enrich its members, instead it must be constructed explicitly to enfranchise the rural masses that fought for and earned independence. The political body must be constructed such that the nation is held sacred, rather than the tribe or the capital. By involving the peasant and the rural person in both the creation and operations of the political party national consciousness can be developed. Educating them on the function of their work and on the goals of the nation will enable them to feel like stakeholders in their nation and make them more productive workers.
The populace must be made aware that the success of their national project is entirely on them. The party must not fall for attempts to develop the populace that mimic what bourgeois Western nations do.
The goal of the leader should be to furnish the mind of every citizen, it is only then that a national consciousness can develop and a previously colonized state can become self sufficient. The mental state forced on the colonized subject must be expunged in every citizen of the new nation.
On National Consciousness
The colonized scholar aims to unearth the previous glory of the colonized nation in order to remove the notion that he and his culture is necessarily uncivilized and without history.
It becomes evident upon analysis that the goal of the colonizing nation is to convince all colonized subjects that without the colonizer they would degrade themselves to a state of barbarity. This allows the colonized nation to subjugate the minds of even the citizens who are concerned with national consciousness, as they conceive of themselves as an other, and as an untethered agent.
The colonized scholar should not aim to lean into the colonizers definition of the native, nor should they define their thoughts and organizations in symmetry with the colonizers culture. To produce art, whether it be poetry, literature, painting or song in the decolonized nation the artist must disconnect themselves from the sense of self and the art that they constructed when they were a part of the colonized nation. Once they have done this they will realize that their identity and the sense of self they carry will be necessarily engaged with their people and their condition as an active member in the building of the nation. After the nation has been established then a unique artistic culture may develop, but until then the artist should not attempt to mimic or project an image of the revolution, they should join it and their art should reflect them being wholly integrated with the movement.
Mutual Foundations for National Culture and Liberation Struggle
National culture can not develop or breathe while a state is colonized. This is not only because the colonizer aims to destroy and denigrate the civilization and personhood of the colonized person but also because the development of culture requires its people to engage with themselves freely. The colonized subject is forced to live their entire existence in opposition with the colonizer, and the colonizer is unwilling and unable to interact with the colonized person in such a way that culture could be developed.
It is for this reason that the development of national culture requires the national consciousness to be wholly focused on liberation. It is in fact this focus that will become the nucleus of national culture.
One should pay attention to the production of narrative in any nation. The story teller will produce stories that reflect the interest and will of the people. In the case of the colonized nation attempting to produce a new national consciousness we will see intellectuals begin to be producers. The work that artist create will reflect the struggle.
This struggle is the purest manifestation of culture possible. Culture is only sensibly produced and developed within a nation, and national consciousness is the outcome of a new culture developing. In effect, when a national liberation movement involves all the people of a specific nation then the culture, or the struggle, will healthily produce a new national culture, or humanism once the project of liberation has been completed.
This nation building act positions the people and the nation to be able to communicate with others. It is therefore the imperative of the colonized intellectual to create works that earnestly reflect the will of the people towards liberation such that they may one day be in earnest conversation with international voices.
Colonial War and Mental Disorders
Colonization and the war for liberation causes deep and long lasting mental illness in the colonized population. The colonizers explicit intent is to dehumanize the colonized person. To make them believe that they are not human and that they are fundamentally deficient. During the war of liberation the freedom fighter must make peace with violence and regain their sense of self, without the constant doubt about their personhood that they have been conditioned to feel.
In this section Fanon goes through cases of specific Algerians and French people who he has helped treat to illustrate that these illnesses are explicitly caused by the colonizer, and that they are not benign or random.
Series A
These cases are characterized by being responses to specific stimulus within the war in Algeria.
Case No. 1
This case is concerned with a man who becomes impotent after he learns his wife has been raped by French soldiers.
After he learns the news he is initially extremely active in the liberation movement. Eventually he starts to suffer from insomnia and migraines. Upon being treated he initially acts as though everything is fine. He is disinterested in anything related to the liberation movement and does not want to hear news from the front. Eventually he reveals what has happened. He reveals that he feels his wife and his daughter have been tainted. He feels shame and regret that his wife was raped because of her unwillingness to reveal information about him or other members of the militia.
Soon after revealing this information he slowly begins to convalesce. He decides that he loves his wife and he will try to keep his marriage when the war is over.
Case No. 2
This case is concerned with a survivor of a brutal massacre. He feels that he has been spared for a reason, by god.
His declared intent is to “kill everyone”. He suspects everyone is plotting on his death. After months of being kept in the inpatient facility he begins to communicate less. Eventually he asks to be released so that he may learn a trade.
Case No. 3
This case is concerned with a boy who murders a French woman when they encounter her alone in the house of the man the are looking for. His mother had been killed while he was way fighting for the FLN. He kills the French woman in a fugue state after he hears her plead for her life by bringing up her children.
He is haunted by the ghost of this woman, a disembowled ghost in the form of his victim.
They are unable to help him dispel this ghost, she arises anytime the patient thinks of his own mother.
Case No. 4
This case is concerned with a French police officer who is unable to have children with his wife. His life is in order, except for the fact that he closes all his windows when he sleeps and stuffs cotton balls in his ears.
He has recently been assigned to become a torturer. We learn that he is haunted by his experiences torturing. He consciously hates the work and even blames the Algerians he is torturing for not giving up information and forcing him to go through with it.
One day he sees an Algerian victim of his in the facility and suffers a panic attack. The victim also becomes paranoid and fears the clinic is a front put up by the French government.
He improves over time and is repatriated. The victim also improves, but he takes much longer.
Case No. 5
This case is concerned with a French police officer and torturer who wants to address his violent outbursts on his wife and children.
He is aware that the nature of his work must be what is causing his general disposition to be so aggressive and cruel, but he is unwilling to distance himself from his work. Instead he blames ‘the troubles’.
This case is clear evidence of the willingness of the French torturer to imagine himself siloed from his cruel and sadistic acts, rather he simply occupies different stages at different times in his day.
Series B
These cases are characterized by being responses to the general atmosphere of war in Algeria.
Case No. 1
This case is concerned with two young boys who kill a French friend of theirs.
When interrogated about the murder it is revealed that the only motive was to kill a French person. They had no specific quarrel with this French boy, in fact he was their friend. The selected him because he would be easy to lure to the mountains where they would stab him to death.
The both see the murder as justified. Not only a response to previous French aggression but a necessary consequence of the violent rhetoric French military men espouse.
Case No. 2
This case is concerned with a young Algerian man who rapidly descends into madness. Earlier in the war he eschewed any activities related to national liberation, instead he was deeply involved in his studies as an engineer. He is referred to then emaciated, in a state of confusion and with a broken jaw.
At a family gathering he gets the impression that his family view him as a coward, a sissy and a traitor.
He becomes unable to eat and his heart begins to beat at what feels like 180 beats per minute. One day his madness drives him to walk to a majority French occupied area and declare in front of a police station “I am an Algerian”.
The police officers subdue him and torture him for weeks to try to get information out of him. He is released when they realize he is a sick person.
Case No. 3
This case is concerned with a young French woman who has developed a minor anxiety disorder.
Her father has died but she is completely disgusted by him as he was a chief torturer. She is appalled that at his funeral so many men report him to be an honorable and noble man.
Case No. 4
These cases are all young children who’s parents have been killed while fighting for Algerian freedom.
Their symptoms are marked by deep reverence for parental figures, insomnia, sadistic tendencies despite deep love and enuresis.
Case No. 5
These cases are all puerperal disorders. Algerian women who either during or after pregnancy, in other words during maternity, suffer from debilitating mental illness.
They suffer from suicidal tendencies, paranoid delusions, guilt and fear that their children will be taken from them and asthenic depression.
It must be pointed out that their symptom are not treated by sedation or a reversal of their symptoms, it is the dire circumstance of their lives which cause these symptoms.
Series C
These cases come about immediately after or during torture.
Group No. 1
These patients can be split into two categories. Those who know something and those who know nothing. Those who know something and confess are of course immediately killed, those who don’t confess are rarely seen by the mental treatment centers Fanon is a part of. This leaves those who know nothing.
These people are plagued by depression, anorexia and constant restlessness.
Group No. 2
These patients have been tortured with electricity. They suffer from phantom pain, apathy and phobia of electronics.
Group No. 3
These patients have been administered Pentothal, or ‘truth serum’. The results are not consistent and frequently result in the rapid deterioration of the mental state of the victim before any information can be extracted so it has fallen out of favor. French doctors act as though they are on the side of the victim and over weeks attempt to convince the victims they are there to help, then the serum is administered and interrogation begins.
These patients suffer from verbal stereotypy, repeating phrases such as “I didn’t tell them anything”, blurred perception, phobia of one on one conversations, and generalized inhibition.
Group No. 4
There are two categories of brainwashing centers in Algeria, split into centers for intellectuals and centers for nonintellectuals.
Intellectuals are forced to roleplay as though they were collaborators constantly. They are interrogated and tortured while this happens and they are forced to constantly be in the presence of others while they give presentations about anti-revolution ideas.
Eventually they are released after they have completed a satisfactory session with a psychiatrist. This is intended to make them feel as though the roleplay that they were engaging in has not ended.
Intellectuals suffer from phobia of a collective discussion and inability to defend any viewpoint when released from these centers.
Nonintellectuals are broken through their body while they are forced to admit the inferiority of the Algerian and the FLN. Once they are released they aren’t seriously affected mentally but their body aches for healing.
Series D
The issues characterized in this series are psychosomatique. These conditions are of the body but they arise as a result of the bodys adaptations to mental conditions that are forced upon it. These conditions are specific to the colonial war in Algeria, and French doctors had characterized these as native deficiencies of the Algerian.
Symptoms include stomach ulcers, renal colic, disturbed menstrual cycles, hypersomnia, whitening of hair, paroxysmal tachycardia and muscular stiffness.
From the North African’s Criminal Impulsiveness to the War of National Liberation
“Fighting for the freedom of one’s people is not the only necessity. As long as the fight goes on you must re-enlighten not only the people but also, and above all, yourself on the full measure of man.”
The French believe that the Algerian is a habitual killer, which is to say that criminality is almost always expressed with violence. They also believe the Algerian prefers to kill through brutal methods, such as with a knife, and that he kills without motive. Doctors justified this by claiming that the Algerian has an underdeveloped frontal lobe, they compare the Algerian to the lobotomized European. Specifically it is a Dr. Carothers who was responsible for this characterization to the psychological community.
It is important to note that Dr. Carothers defined the Mau-Mau revolt as the expression of an unconscious frustration complex.
These descriptions are brought up to show how far the Algerian revolution has gone in displacing these ideas within the minds of the average Algerian. These impulses that have been described as native to the Algerian have disappeared now that the revolution is under way. The Algerian both examines himself to do better, to be a more effective revolutionary, but he also no longer is beset by the colonized mental condition that led to many of these disorders occurring.
The criminality described above can then be explained as a consequence of being under colonial rule. The colonizers makes the act of living life an act of survival. Securing food is the ultimate concern. Petty thievery is attempted murder, as ones resources are already spread too thin to support oneself. One’s fellow man is made to occupy the position of the oppressor, as scarcity causes them to be the usurious creditor.
The Algerian fights to create a nation, where rather than being a product of his state he is involved in its creation, maturation and triumph. They fight to remove all untruths planted within them by the oppressor.
Conclusion
Fanon urges the reader to act now. He reemphasizes that Europe is failing. Replicating Europe, whether it be structurally or ideologically will simply lead to the same outcomes Europe is already seeing. He urges peoples of Third World nations to build a new society, one based in humanism that focuses on the individual and their role within a collective.
Final Thoughts
Fanon’s analysis of the nature of the guilt complex are spot on. Forcing oneself to face the untruths implanted in one’s mind is difficult, but it begins with reanalyzing all the assumptions we make about ourselves and our failure, not from an anticolonial context, but from an independent mode of thought that relates to those values we care about.
Points of Investigation
- How does China’s development cohere with Fanon’s analysis of the colonized nation’s need for outside capital to become truly powerful?