The Wretched of the Earth

The Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is not an easy read for several reasons, but it was one of the most enlightening reads about racial issues I've read. Fanon talks (this book was apparently dictated from his hospital bed) about the psychological impact of colonization, especially on the colonized. From South America to Africa he has identified certain cycles and predicted behaviors and outcomes stemming from colonialism. Although the age of colonialism is mostly behind us, the roles of the colonized (marginalized minorities) and colonizer (majority in position of power) still exist, and it helps explain some of the phenomenon we can still see in society today (why is there Black on Black violence, why are there gangs, why is there such animosity toward those in power when "they are only trying to help lift them", how does racism even occur). The psychology may not be what you think--but Fanon spells it out with examples. This is not to say I didn't have to re-read almost every sentence twice--it's very dense. Also, toward the end, his case studies on those who torture and those who get tortured show that in war everyone loses. Those were easier to understand, but harder to read because of the emotional impact it had. So, not a beach read, but important to start understanding power/post-conlonialism/ racial theories.

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For me words have a charge. I find myself incapable of escaping the bite of a word, the vertigo of a question-mark."

Preface

Roughly, this meant: You are making monsters out of us; your humanism wants us to be universal and your racist practices are differentiating us.

Europe, therefore, has hardened the divisions and conflicts, forged classes, and in some cases, racism, and endeavored by every means to generate and deepen the stratification of colonized societies.

Read Fanon: you will see that in a time of helplessness, murderous rampage is the collective unconscious of the colonized.

This repressed rage, never managing to explode, goes round in circles and wreaks havoc on the oppressed themselves. In order to rid themselves of it they end up massacring each other, tribes battle one against the other since they cannot confront the real enemy—and you can count on colonial policy to fuel rivalries;

I. On Violence

The colonized know all that and roar with laughter every time they hear themselves called an animal by the other. For they know they are not animals. And at the very moment when they discover their humanity, they begin to sharpen their weapons to secure its victory.

The colonies have become a market. The colonial population is a consumer market.

colonialist bourgeoisie is aided and abetted in the pacification of the colonized by the inescapable powers of religion.

The very same people who had it constantly drummed into them that the only language they understood was that of force, now decide to express themselves with force.

II. Grandeur and Weakness of Spontaneity

The unions, the parties and the government, in a kind of immoral Machiavellianism, use the peasant masses as a blind, inert force of intervention. As a kind of brute force.

III. The Trials and Tribulations of National Consciousness

In the underdeveloped countries a bourgeois phase is out of the question. A police dictatorship or a caste of profiteers may very well be the case but a bourgeois society is doomed to failure.

For the people the party is not the authority but the organization whereby they, the people, exert their authority and will.

People must know where they are going and why.

And in the more or less long term a people gets the government it deserves.

The citizen must appropriate the bridge. Then, and only then, is everything possible.

The army is never a school for war, but a school for civics, a school for politics.

IV. On National Culture

When the colonized intellectual writing for his people uses the past he must do so with the intention of opening up the future, of spurring them into action and fostering hope.

By imparting new meaning and dynamism to artisanship, dance, music, literature, and the oral epic, the colonized subject restructures his own perception.

We believe the conscious, organized struggle undertaken by a colonized people in order to restore national sovereignty constitutes the greatest cultural manifestation that exists.