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Frantz
Fanon (1925-1961) was a Martinican psychiatrist and
revolutionary who became involved in the Algerian
national liberation struggle during the 1950s. He
wrote a number of books (1), one of which became extremely
influential: The Wretched of the Earth (1961).
The writings of Frantz Fanon influenced the thinking
of Irish Republicans from the 1970s onwards (2). That
is why it is interesting to examine his ideas.
Fanon’s
first book, “Black Skin, White Masks”
(1952) was a devastating critique of the psychopathological
effects of colonialism. Colonialism has imposed “an
existential deviation” (PN, 16) on the colonised
as colonialism creates an inferiority complex in Blacks
and other colonised races.
The
analysis that I am undertaking is psychological
In spite of this, it is apparent to me that the
effective disalienation of the black man entails
an immediate recognition of social and economic
realities. If there is an inferiority complex, it
is the outcome of a double process: primarily economic,
secondarily, the internalisation -or better, the
epidermalisation-of this inferiority. (PN, p.28)
He
showed how the oppressed tended to interiorise the
racist and colonial stereotypes. This is the “black
skin, white mask” syndrome. This inferiority
complex in blacks results in a desire to "whiten
the race" or "lactification"
(PN, 47). If being black or colonised has connotations
of inferiority, blacks and other colonised people
will denigrate their own race and will want to become
“more white than white”. One can witness
a similar process amongst many middle class Catholics
in the North or with "West Brits" in the
south, as they try to be "more British than the
British" and denigrate their own Irishness. That
is the “existential deviation” imposed by
the legacy of British rule. Fanon would probably have
called Dublin 4 historical revisionism historical
lactification. In 1953, Fanon started to work in the
Blida-Joinville Hospital in Algeria. He saw the limits
of colonial psychiatry. In 1954, for an Algerian population
of ten million, there were only eight psychiatrist
and 2500 beds! Fanon's hospital was designed for 971
patients, but there were over 2000. But more than
that, it was the colonial context itself which made
therapy problematical. In his letter of resignation
he wrote:
If
psychiatry is the medical technique that aims to
enable man no longer to be a stranger to his environment,
I owe it to myself to affirm that the colonised,
permanently an alien in his own country, lives in
a state of absolute depersonalisation.
To
heal from colonial neurosis, decolonisation is necessary.
Frantz Fanon is one of the precursors of ethnopsychiatry,
and his analysis of psychiatry and therapy under colonialism
is highly original. However, some of his conclusions
are quite dubious - like denying the importance of
the Oedipus complex for Blacks and colonised people.
In
“The Wretched of the Earth” (1961),
Fanon’s most important work, he continued to
develop important insights into the psychology of
oppression of colonial people, as well as a theory
of liberation through violence, and how the revolutionary
third world could create a new human being. Fanon
analysed the central place of violence within colonial
society -economic, political, military, cultural and
psychic. Colonial reality is “Manichean”
(DT, 33). Its central division is that between coloniser
and colonised, and it is based on force. “The
colonial world is a world cut in two. The dividing
line, the frontiers are shown by barracks and police
stations.” (DT, 31) Any observer can attest
the truth of this sentence from Belfast to Bogota.
If colonialism is of a violent nature, Fanon concludes
that only a counter violence can eradicate it: “For
the colonised, life can arise only from the decomposing
cadaver of the coloniser.” (DT, 69)
Fanon
is the apostle of violent decolonisation. Violence
is the "absolute praxis" (DT, 63).
“The colonised man finds his freedom in and
through violence. This rule of conduct enlightens
the agent because it indicates to him the means and
the end.” (DT, 64) But Fanon’s specific
contribution, his originality, lay in emphasising
the essentially pathological nature of the
colonial situation, on how neurosis and mental pathologies
developed as a result of the colonial situation. Therefore,
he stressed that violence had not simply a political
or strategic function, it has an individual and existential
therapeutic value, as it liberates colonised and oppressed
people from colonial neurosis and inferiority complexes.
“At the level of individuals, violence is
a disintoxifying force. It frees the colonised from
his inferiority complex and from his desperate and
contemplative attitude. It makes him fearless and
restores his self respect.” (DT, 70)
Fanon
may appear “blood thirsty” to many, but
there is probably a lot of rhetoric in his writing.
And from reading the chapter on "Colonial War
and Mental Disorders", Fanon was clearly aware
of the pathological effects of violence. He provided
there ample cases illustrating such syndromes as homicidal
impulses in a survivor of mass murder, the onset of
impotence in a liberation fighter whose wife was raped
by soldiers, the continual terror of a former police
inspector involved in torture, the suicidal obsessions
of an FLN member who becomes guilt-ridden for placing
a bomb in a public place killing ten civilians. Perhaps,
Jean-Paul Sartre’s foreword to Fanon’s book
is far more extreme:
The
native cures himself of colonial neurosis by thrusting
out the settler through the force of arms (…)
The rebel’s weapon is the proof of his humanity.
For in the first days of the revolt you must kill:
to shoot down a European is to kill two birds with
one stone, to destroy an oppressor and an oppressed
at the same time: there remains a dead man and a
free man; the survivor, for the first time, feels
a national soil under his foot”
(DT, 20)
By
curing the oppressed from colonial neurosis, violence
and the liberation struggle were supposed “to
set afoot a new man” (DT, 242). What led
Fanon to believe this were a number of phenomenon
he had observed during the Algerian struggle. Fanon
had seen how armed struggle had changed the place
and role of women and youth in Algerian society through
their involvement in struggle, or how for example,
petty criminals transformed themselves into freedom
fighters. The film “The Battle of Algiers”
(3) represented very well this process in cinematographic
terms. The liberation struggle indeed tended to temporarily
and conjuncturally change the role of women, young
people etc in society, but the social nature of the
FLN struggle resulted in those changes not lasting.
For example, women’s place within independent
Algeria has not been the most progressive. The ongoing
political violence in Algeria can testify to the ultimate
failure of the FLN project. Fanon’s mystique
of violence overestimated its progressive impact.
Postcolonial
Algeria has in fact a lot in common with the image
given by Fanon of parasitic native ruling classes
and neo colonialism in his chapter on the “pitfalls
of national consciousness”. This chapter
has proved far more accurate than his optimistic voluntarism
about the possibility of the third world creating
a new humanism given the degeneration of African and
other postcolonial states into the corrupt neo-colonial
instruments of the IMF and the World Bank. “The
Wretched of the Earth” is a document of its times,
of the hopes decolonisation had raised. Its value
is perhaps more moral than political. Its analysis
of the social forces and strategies involved in the
liberation struggle - the poor peasantry in particular
- is now recognised as being basically flawed (though
Fanon was right to be highly critical of the national
bourgeoisie). But Fanon’s book is certain to
remain a classic of revolutionary and anti-imperialist
literature. Unfortunately the majority of recent interest
in his work comes from so-called “postcolonial
studies”, who are trying to bury what was revolutionary
in Fanon’s thought into the academic quagmire.
It is time for the oppressed to re-appropriate Fanon.
NOTES
(1)
Books referred to: Les Damnes de la Terre
(Paris: Francois Maspero, 1961) = DT, Peau Noire,
Masques Blancs (Paris: Le Seuil, 1952) = PN
(2)
For example: Freeman “Read Memmi, Read Fanon”
(An Phoblacht 13 February 1976, p.6), R.G.
McAuley “Fanon on Algeria: Lessons for Irish
Republicans Today” (An Phoblacht-Republican
News 13 September 1980, p.10), John Squire “Frantz
Fanon” (An Phoblacht-Republican News
27 October 1988, pp.8-9). Fanon was widely studied
in jail by Republicans. Bobby Sands was acquainted
with his writings. Two recent books have noted the
importance of Fanon for Irish Republicans. Brian
Feeney Sinn Fein (Dublin: O Brien Press,
2002) pp.363-367 quotes Tom Hartley and Danny Morrison
on the matter. See also Richard English Armed
Struggle (London: McMillan, 2003) pp.234-235
for a similar view.
(3)
"The Battle of Algiers" (1965), film directed
by Gillo Pontecorvo. For an alternative view, see
the future theorist of postmodernism Jean-Francois
Lyotard La Guerre des Algeriens (Paris: Galilee,
1989) one of the most lucid and penetrating contemporary
commentators of the Algerian war.
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