Everybody knows that the dice are loaded
Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed
Everybody knows that the war is over
Everybody knows the good guys lost
Everybody knows the fight was fixed
The poor stay poor, the rich get rich
That's how it goes
Everybody knows
Everybody knows that the boat is leaking
Everybody knows that the captain lied
Everybody got this broken feeling
Like their father or their dog just died
Everybody talking to their pockets
Everybody wants a box of chocolates
And a long stem rose
Everybody knows
Everybody knows that you love me baby
Everybody knows that you really do
Everybody knows that you've been faithful
Ah give or take a night or two
Everybody knows you've been discreet
But there were so many people you just had to meet
Without your clothes
And everybody knows
Everybody knows, everybody knows
That's how it goes
Everybody knows
Everybody knows, everybody knows
That's how it goes
Everybody knows
And everybody knows that it's now or never
Everybody knows that it's me or you
And everybody knows that you live forever
Ah when you've done a line or two
Everybody knows the deal is rotten
Old Black Joe's still pickin' cotton
For your ribbons and bows
And everybody knows
And everybody knows that the Plague is coming
Everybody knows that it's moving fast
Everybody knows that the naked man and woman
Are just a shining artifact of the past
Everybody knows the scene is dead
But there's gonna be a meter on your bed
That will disclose
What everybody knows
And everybody knows that you're in trouble
Everybody knows what you've been through
From the bloody cross on top of Calvary
To the beach of Malibu
Everybody knows it's coming apart
Take one last look at this Sacred Heart
Before it blows
And everybody knows
Everybody knows, everybody knows
That's how it goes
Everybody knows
Oh everybody knows, everybody knows
That's how it goes
Everybody knows
A heartfelt apology to my European Friends....I am so sorry and
ashamed to be a subject of the British state. When I see the Brexit
Party wave little flags designed for sand castles that will be washed
away by the incoming tide I wretch. It's a metaphor, an allegory and a
message to the little flagwavers of the Brexit Party. A full English
Brexit in all its ignorance is coming as the Union Jack clashes with the
sunset of the British state.. When we live in a society where to
point out racism is seen as worse than racism itself we see the
consequences of social conservatism and the closing of tolerance and
understanding. Mark Francois, Nigel Farage and Nigel Evans as the prime
gammon of these dreadful times make e ashamed to belong to these
damp isles. Those who wave their little flags the those who know our
history the least and our culture and literature even less. They have no
idea that the Magna Carta was imposed by French Knights and the
"Glorious Revolution" by a Dutch army. The fog in the channel cuts us
off from our European roots and the little Englanders who live here do
not even know that half of Margaret Thatcher's Cabinet were the children
or grandchildren of migrants. I love the literature, culture and
folklore of the nation's of the British Isles. I love Europe and how
the sunlight shines on the marble of Venice. I love the smell of the
Cistine Chapel, of the feeling of the fine sand on the Sicilian beach,
of the city if Rome. The outline of the medieval cathedrals of Germany
and the cafe society of France.
I loath the neo liberalism of much of the EU yet I loath the
bluekippers even more. I love the Europe of Goethe, Gramsci and
Machiaevelli, the Divine Comedy of Dante and the works of Petrarch and
Boccaccio. I understand the long European influence on Chaucer,
Shakespeare and Milton. This is a terrible time, the time of the
chlorinated chicken and of fake news. I am so ashamed of being a subject
of and sharing the same country as Francois, Farage and Evans .None of
this trio will even know the works I talk about or what they mean. They
will simply call me unpatriotic and 'un' British and will tell me to
live elsewhere. They are so predictable and I am so ashamed of them.
Please understand my fellow Europeans I am so sorry. Please forgive us.
They know not what they do....if possible I would like to have associate
European Citizenship but if not I understand. I will always be
European, Welsh and a citizen of the world. Fuck off Farage return to
your public school, stockbroker and Tory background I know you and see
the minnow of your soul and the shark of your mind. Sorry Europe I
really am...
After Corbyn....the Labour Party is a complex organism with a complex
psyche. I understand it's obsessions, traumas and compulsions. It's
shadow and Id reveals all it denies, has experienced or desires.
Negotiating its highways and byways at times resemble a
psychoanalyrical encounter or a cultural tour through the last 120
years.
Despite it all the sense of denial and conflicting
paradigms of its members and elected representatives is most
instructire. There is a shocking inability
that I often notice at meetings to understand the simple premise that
all councillors and Members of Parliament come from the membership, is
accountable to the membership and should prior to every election be
selected from the membership. Often when raised at meetings I will
hear the plaintiff cry " we are a broad church" implying quite simply, "
Shut up I have been elected and am here for life. You Lefty...get it
clear." The truth is that Jeremy Corbyn has changed the game the Labour
Party is being democratized and made clearly socialist. It's officials
are the servants of its members not it's masters.. The party has reached
600,000 members and both Starmer and Long~Bailey are making encouraging
sounds of the continued need for further devolution. It is time for an
Independent Labour Party in both Wales and Scotland, the recognition of
nationhood for the countries of the British Isles. Emily Thornbury's and
Lisa Nancy's comments on the SNP and of self determination in Catalonia
and elsewhere shockingly ignorant and outdated. The British state is
dead and Labour must become a non unionist eco-socialist party commited
to dramatic constitutional reform, a written constitution and
proportional representation. Lisa Nandy's flotation with the social
conservatism of blue Labour is unhelpful and reactionary. Labour's
decline in the heart lands go back and prior to Blair. Socialism is
about empowerment and decentralisation. It involves the principles of
eco-socialism and subsidiarity. It's about diversity, respect and
toleration of difference. It's about celebration of multiple identities
and of respect . It's about feminism and the varieties of ethnicity.
'Listening to people' does not mean excepting racism, homophobia or
prejudice. Dawn Butler on Novara Media last night, called Labour's job
the CORE approach..CampaignOrganise, Reform and Educate. Without Corbyn
none of this would have been possible. Thank you Jeremy you have drawn
so many of us to Labour and brought so many to politics. You have made
Eco Socialism a central tenet of the Labour Party . No one else could
have done it and you have our affection, respect and gratitude. In time
you will be recognised for your achievements and the viscious attacks
upon you seen for their real purpose. Thank you Jeremy Corbyn for your
caring, courage and basic humanity..for your love of people, learning,
and literature. You have changed the game and your legacy lives on....
People are sick & tired of racists
If you ask for equal treatment you’re pushy
If you object to being demonised you’re shutting down free speech
If you raise concerns you’re ungrateful
If you don’t laugh at racist jokes you’ve no sense of humour
It’s so tiring & insulting
It's getting lighter each morning. The bulbs are emergiing in our
back garden. The darkness is less and overwhelming and more peneteable.
Yet 11 pm on Friday will bring a closing of outlook, philosophy and
attitude. Not all Brexiteers are socially conservative and xenophobic
but all those who are socially conservative and xenophobic are
Brexiteers. The Venn diagram is clear and says it all. Never have I seen
so many white men suffer from ontologically insecurity to such a profound
level. Why is it that so many white males cannot imagine what it feels
like to be black, brown, homosexual, transgender, disabled or a woman?
It's really easy to deny, project and displace your fears,
particularly because you don't notice the prejudice and discrimination
because it's not aimed at you. It's easy to go along with 'a common
sense" of reality that is white, male, straight and non disabled. It's
easy to be like every body else who is like you. It's easier to spot the
paedophile, the 'uppity one' and the 'threat" from those who are not
like you. To have empathy, understanding and perception requires
imagination . It is not an easy task and many cannot or will not do it.
We all have prejudices and we should seek to understand where they come
from and how they work. There are few monsters said Primo Levi but the
dangers are that many obey, listen and go along with them They are just
doing their job and they are non political.The banality of evil comes
from those just doing their job and act out the instructions of the
monsters. There are no excuses yet on Friday at 11pm it will be seen as
the will of the people. A great closing off of tolerance, outwood
thought and understanding of other cultures is about to happen.
Perhaps Huawei 5g technology offers the socially conservative model of
state capitalism new vigour and a new capacity of a surveillance.
Perhaps human freedom and data privacy presents a threat to the new
conservatism of Boris Johnson. Perhaps the Tories know that China is
becoming the dominant world power as America slips . The modern
conservative knows a new model of the state is coming and it is state
capitalist in form and it's model China. A new Confucian age of neo
conservatism is coming as we are ripped from Europe and become a new
Singapore. Friday is a milestone upon this journey and with it we
becomemore socially conservative and subject to surveillance.. after
all we are good patriots who know our place and we have got our country
back...eh? To be psychologically healthy you must be able to understand
other perspectives and experiences...Friday is about the opposite
Graham LawIndeed,
a new dark age is coming as Britain withdraws from the world into
isolationism and fearful self-exile. Brexit was never about the UK
opening out to the whole world by leaving the confines of a small corner
of it. Few of those who wants us to leave
the EU would have hearts and minds open enough to embrace relationships
with other parts of the world - beyond the parts, that is, where skins
are mostly white and English is the first language. If Brexit was about
freeing us up, then why do some many of its advocates want is to get
into an even more restrictive partnership with Trump's America?
No,
for its supporters, Brexit has always been about retreat, withdrawal,
about self banishment, about turning back into comforting puritannical
dullness from the horrors of contintental joie de vivre
Race. Rage against the ravings of the right... whatever Friday brings
it will not be pleasant. It's not even about the EU or indeed remain or
leave . It's about what comes next, it's about what comes with it and
who will be next. Whatever the Lexit campaign says , whatever criticism
is levelled at the EU nothing compares to the shrinking of our outlook
and perceptions. The 'other' will be next, the disabled, the benefit
claimant and the different. On Friday the Street Gangs of
the Far Right will brandish the Union Jack and cast their hateful eyes
upon who they will come for next. There is a closing of the mind here on
Brexit Island, a closing of tolerance, respect and understanding. I
have no sympathy for the bland centrism of the #FBPE types yet I have a toxic fear of right wing natavists of the right and what they will do next and who.
At 11am on Friday the lights will go out as they did in an August over
100 years ago. It is not the EU I mourn for but instead a European
attitude and the recognition of European History, Culture.and thought
that will be lost in a flood of chlorinated chicken and the rank
philisophy of the Trumpian rust belt. Those who celebrate the
'leavening" the most will know the history, literature and culture of
Europe the least. For whom will the bells toll and boom the most? For
the most vulnerable, the fragile and exposed. They will come for those
of different cultures and ethnicities, identities and sexualuties.
Friday will bring a post modern neo fascism scratched upon a 50p coin
and those who march behind it the reality of the Mail, Star and Daily
Express....Rage, rage against the coming of the Far Right...this is the
age of Mark Francois, Farage and Fascism. I hear the kipper 'ex pats"
living in Spain celebrate Brexit and yet they still remain. In the words
of Leonard Cohen 'every soul is like a minnow , every mind is like a
shark" And like the Emperor clothes they do not see they are economic
migrants clinging to white fragility and ontological insecurity. They
know not what they do or indeed who they are. .Rage, rage against the
coming of the far right. Auschwitz has been liberated but 75 years and
now xenophobia and prejudice close in once more, hate crimes surround
us... Rage rage....against the shadows of the fascist night. the ghosts
of Kristallnacht walks in that darkness..and the glass shines in the
streets..
The Moon Goddess is an important deity in many cultures around the world where they form a central role in mythology.
The moon is associated with the divine feminine as in many tribal
societies the feminine cycles were linked to the phases of the moon.
Not
all the lunar deities were female Chandra is the God of the moon in
Hinduism and Mani the Germanic moon gods are to examples of this.
However on this page I am going to concentrate my attention on the Moon
Goddesses.
The Moon was important in ancient calendars,
helping people to measure time and to determine when the best time was
for planting and harvesting crops. This fertility aspect of the lunar
Goddess is reflected in large numbers of the entries below. The moon and the stars were also a way that the ancient people navigated the land and seas. Many of the lunar Goddesses like Hecate and Cerridwen, are also associated with magic and the intuitive nature of women. The
lunar deities are also very important archetypes in the modern pagan
movement and Wicca. Discover more about the triple moon Goddesses and
their relationship to the phases of womanhood in Wiccan Goddesses. Below I have included an updated A-Z list of moon deities.
Moon Goddess List
Aega (Greek) - A
beautiful moon deity. Her mother Gaia, the ancient earth Goddess, hid
her in a cave during a Titan attack on the Olympic deities to prevent
her from being taken away. Aine
(Celtic) - Goddess of love, growth, cattle and light. The name of this
Celtic Goddess means "bright" as she lights up the dark. Celebrations to
this Goddess were held on Midsummer night Anahita
(Persian) - A river Goddess who was also Goddess of Venus and the moon.
Her name means "pure" Or immaculate one" as she represented the
cleansing and fertilizing flow of the cosmos. Andromeda (Greek) - Although today she is linked with the stars many scholars believe that Andromeda was a pre-Hellenic moon deity. Anunit (Babylonian) - Goddess of the moon and battle. She was also associated with the evening star and later became known as Ishtar. Arianrhod (Celtic) - Goddess of the moon and stars, her name means "silver- wheel" the wheel of the year and the web of fate. Artemis (Greek) - The Greek Goddess of the hunt, nature and birth. This maiden Goddess is symbolized by the crescent moon. Arawa
(African) - Lunar Goddess of the Suk and Pokot tribes of Kenya and
Uganda. Her parents were the creator God Tororut and his consort Seta. Athenesic (Native North American) - A moon Goddess of several north central Native American tribes, Auchimalgen (South American) - This moon Goddess was a Deity of divination and a protectress from evil spirits. Bendis (Greek) - Bendis was the consort of the sun God Sabazius. Her cult flourished in Athens during the fifth century BCE. Britomartis (Crete) - In addition to her lunar attributes she was also the patron Goddess of Cretan sailors. Candi
(Indian) - The female counterpart to Chandra, ancient Hindu lord of the
Moon. The two were said to take turns: one month the Candi would become
the moon and the next Chandra fulfill the role. Cerridwen(Celtic)
- This crone, Goddess is most famous for her cauldron of wisdom. She
was the mother of the great bard Taliesin, and is deeply linked to the
image of the waning moon. Chang- O (Chinese) - The Chinese Goddess who lived on the moon She is celebrated to this day on full moon night of the 8th lunar month. Coyolxauhqui
(Aztec) - Aztec moon Goddess, her name means "Golden Bells." She was
the daughter of the Earth goddess, Coatlicue and the sister of the Sun
god, Huitzilopochtli. Dae-Soon (Korean) - Lunar Goddess. Diana
(Roman) - Diana was the Goddess of the hunt and wild animals. She later
took over from Luna as the Roman Goddess of the moon, responsible for
fertility and childbirth. Gnatoo (Japanese) - One of twelve Buddhist deities called the Jiu No O, adopted from Hindu mythology. Gwaten
(Hindu) - She is derived from the Hindu God Soma, and is portrayed as a
woman holding in her right hand, a disk symbolizing the Moon. Epona
(Roman/Celtic) - This horse Goddess was associated with the night and
dreams. In western Ireland,legends still abound of hearing the
hoof-beats of her horse as she rides west to escape the rays of the
rising sun. She was also a Goddess of magic, fertility and feminine
power. Hanwi (Native
North American) - Goddess of the Oglala Sioux, she once lived with the
sun God Wi. Due to a transgression, she was forced by him to become a
creature of the night. Hekate
(Greek) - A crone Moon Goddess, deeply associated with the waning and
dark moons. She is depicted as haunting crossroads with her two large
hounds, and carrying a torch, symbolic of her great wisdom. Hina Hine
(Polynesian) - This Hawaiian Goddesses name means 'woman who works the
moon'. In her myths it is said that she grew tired of working for her
brother and fled to the moon to live in peace. Hina-Ika ("lady of the fish") - Once again we see the link between the lunar Goddess to the tides. Huitaco
(South American) - This Colombian Goddess was a protectress of women as
well as a deity of pleasure and happiness who was always battling with
her male counterpart Bochica, a God of hard work and sorrow. Ishtar (Babylonian) - Some myths say she is the daughter of the moon, others the mother. Isis (Egyptian) - This powerful and widely worshipped Goddess was not only a moon deity, but a Goddess of the sun as well. Ix Chel
(Mayan) - A Central American moon Goddess and the lover of the sun.
Poisonous snakes were her totem animal. She was also Goddess of
childbirth. Izanami (Japanese) - This Goddess controlled the tides, fishing and all destructive sea phenomena. Jezanna (Central African) - Goddess of the moon and healing. Juna
(Roman) - A Goddess of the new moon. She was worshipped mainly by women
as she was the Goddess of marriage, pregnancy and childbirth. Her Greek
equivalent was Hera. Jyotsna (Indian) - A Hindu Goddess of twilight and the autumn moons. Komorkis (Native North American) - The Blackfoot tribe celebrated her as the Goddess of the moon. Kuan Yin
(Chinese) - A Buddhist Goddess. Modern feminist Pagans believe she far
pre-dates Buddhist origins. She was a Goddess of the moon, compassion,
and healing, Lasya (Tibetan) - Goddess of the moon and beauty who carried a mirror. Lucina
(Roman) - Goddess of light with both solar and lunar attributes. She
was Christianised as St. Lucia, a saint still honoured at Yule in many
parts of Europe. Luna
(Roman) - An ancient moon Goddess, the namesake for the Latin word luna
meaning 'moon'. Her name also forms the root of the English words
'lunar' and 'lunatic'. Mama Quilla
(Inkan) - As the Goddess of the moon she was the protectress of married
women. A large temple to her was erected at the Inkan capitol of Cuzco.
She was associated with the metal silver. Eclipses were said to occur
when she was eaten and the regurgitated by the Jaguar Woman. Mawu (African) - She ruled the sky with her twin bother, the sun God Lisa. To her people she symbolized both wisdom and knowledge. Metzli (Aztec) - In Aztec mythology mother moon leapt into a blazing fire and gave birth to the sun and the sky. Rhiannon (Celtic) - A Goddess of fertility, the moon, night, and death. Her name means 'night queen'. She is also known as Rigantona. Sadarnuna (Sumerian) - Goddess of the new moon. Sarpandit
(Sumerian) - Goddess of moonrise. This pregnant Goddess's name means
"silver shining" referring to the reflective quality of the moon. Sefkhet
(Egyptian) - According to some myths this lunar Goddess was the wife of
Thoth. She was also the deity of time, the stars, and architecture. Selene (Greek) - A mother Goddess linked to the full moon. She is widely worshipped by Pagans today. Sina (Polynesian) - This moon Goddess was the sister of the sun God Maui. She was sometimes called Ina. Teczistecatl (Aztec) - A Goddess of sex, symbolised by the four phases of the moon: dark, waxing, full, and waning. Trivia (Roman) - She is the equivalent Goddess to Selene in Roman mythology. Xochhiquetzal
(Aztec) - This magical moon Goddess was the deity of flowers, spring,
sex, love, and marriage. She was the wife of storm God Tlaloc. She is
also the patroness of artisans, prostitutes, pregnant women and birth. Yemanja
(Native South American) - She was the Brazilian Goddess of the oceans
symbolized by a waxing crescent moon. Yemanja was also considered to
represent the essence of motherhood and a protector of children. Yolkai Estsan
(Native North American) - A Navajo moon deity fashioned from an abalone
shell by her sister Yolkai, the Goddess of the sky. She was the Navaho
Goddess of the earth and the seasons, and is also known as White Shell
Woman. Zirna
(Etruscan) - A Goddess of the waxing moon. She is always depicted with a
half-moon hanging from her neck, indicating that she was probably
honored at the beginning of the second quarter phase of the moon.
The Goddesses of the moon are not the only heavenly deities, why not also explore the role of the Sun Goddesses
Born on the island of Martinique under French colonial rule, Frantz
Omar Fanon (1925–1961) was one of the most important writers in
black Atlantic theory in an age of anti-colonial liberation struggle.
His work drew on a wide array of poetry, psychology, philosophy, and
political theory, and its influence across the global South has been
wide, deep, and enduring. In his lifetime, he published two key
original works: Black Skin, White Masks (Peau noire,
masques blancs) in 1952 and The Wretched of the Earth
(Les damnés de la terre) in 1961. Collections of essays,
A Dying Colonialism (L’an V de la révolution
Algérienne 1959) and Toward the African
Revolution (Pour la revolution Africaine), posthumously
published in 1964, round out a portrait of a radical thinker in
motion, moving from the Caribbean to Europe to North Africa to
sub-Saharan Africa and transforming his thinking at each stop. The
2015 collection of his unpublished writings, Écrits sur
l’aliénation et la liberté, will surely
expand our understanding of the origins and intellectual context of
Fanon’s thinking.
Fanon engaged the fundamental issues of his day: language, affect,
sexuality, gender, race and racism, religion, social formation, time,
and many others. His impact was immediate upon arrival in Algeria,
where in 1953 he was appointed to a position in psychiatry at
Bilda-Joinville Hospital. His participation in the Algerian
revolutionary struggle shifted his thinking from theorizations of
blackness to a wider, more ambitious theory of colonialism,
anti-colonial struggle, and visions for a postcolonial culture and
society. Fanon published in academic journals and revolutionary
newspapers, translating his radical vision of anti-colonial struggle
and decolonization for a variety of audiences and geographies, whether
as a young academic in Paris, a member of the Algeria National
Liberation Front (FLN), Ambassador to Ghana for the Algerian
provisional government, or revolutionary participant at conferences
across Africa. Following a diagnosis and short battle with leukemia,
Fanon was transported to Bethesda, Maryland (arranged by the U.S.
Central Intelligence Agency) for treatment and died at the National
Institute for Health facility on December 6, 1961.
1. The Problem of Blackness
In 1952, Fanon published his first major work Black Skin, White
Masks. Though just 27 at the time of its publication, the work
displays incredible literacy in major intellectual trends of the time:
psychoanalysis, existentialism, phenomenology, and dialectics, as well
as, most prominently, the early Négritude movement and U.S.
based critical race work in figures like Richard Wright. Modest in
length, the book is notable for its enormous ambition, seeking to
understand the foundations of anti-Black racism in the deepest
recesses of consciousness and the social world. The book is
Fanon’s major work on blackness. In fact, his focus shifts in
the years following the publication of Black Skin, White
Masks, moving away from blackness as a problem—perhaps
the problem—of the modern world and toward a wider
theory of the oppressed, colonialism, and revolutionary resistance to
the reach of coloniality as a system. But that shift is unthinkable
without Fanon’s early meditations on anti-Black racism.
Fanon’s reflections on anti-Black racism and how it forms, then
deforms, the subjectivity of white and Black people both, is crucial
for understanding the multiple levels of colonial subjugation and the
terms of its overcoming. There is something about anti-blackness as
treated in Black Skin, White Masks that is a concrete,
uncomplicated distillation of coloniality as such. Fanon’s first
book, then, can be said to set out the basic structure of his anti-
and de-colonial work, initially and emphatically in the terms of
describing the effects and affects of anti-black racism.
Fanon’s method in Black Skin, White Masks is a
complicated question and one of the more interesting bits of scholarly
discussion. The primary approach in the text is
existential-phenomenological, something borne out in the rich,
textured personal narratives that seize upon the essential structures
of the narrativized event of anti-blackness, and also indicated in the
title of the fifth chapter—L’experience
vécu (experience vécu translates the key
phenomenological notion of Erlebnis, properly rendered in the
Richard Philcox translation as “lived-experience”). Lewis
Gordon’s work on Fanon has argued for the centrality of
existentialism and existential framing of key questions across his
oeuvre, especially in Gordon’s early work Fanon and the
Crisis of European Humanity (1995) and recently in What Fanon
Said (2015). The influence of Jean-Paul Sartre and Maurice
Merleau-Ponty also lends credence to the phenomenological
characterization, but Fanon’s sustained engagement with the
Négritude movement, psychoanalysis, Hegelian thought, and
Marxism (something evidenced most clearly in later works and
documented in Reiland Rabaka’s multi-volume interpretation of
Fanon, Négritude, and revolutionary Africana theory) opens up
the question of methodology to any number of interpretations and
remains one of the more engaging areas of Fanon-interpretation. Homi
Bhabha’s innovation as a reader of Fanon has been to draw out
the post-structuralist dimensions of his thought, thereby weaving
Fanonian themes into contemporary postcolonial theorizations of
hybridity, language, subjectivity, and time. We see much the same in
Anthony Alessandrini’s provocative book on Fanon and cultural
studies, Fanon and the Future of Cultural Politics (2014),
which puts Fanonian thinking in dialogue with Michel Foucault, Edward
Said, Jamaica Kincaid, and Paul Gilroy, among others. In the end,
Fanon is a unique thinker who blends personal narrative and
political strategizing with heady social theory and numerous
philosophical twists and turns.
The introduction to Black Skin, White Masks contains key
conclusions and foundational pieces of analysis summed up
Fanon’s simple declaration: that Black people are locked in
blackness and white people are locked in whiteness. As well, Fanon
offers a sketch of the relationship between ontology and sociological
structures, asserting that the latter generate the former, which, in
turn, lock subjectivities into their racial categories. The chapters
that follow are in many ways a long, sustained argument for these
assertions, venturing into questions of language, sexuality,
embodiment, and dialectics. Perhaps most importantly, Fanon’s
opening gambit introduces the central concept of the zone of
non-being. The zone of non-being is the “hell”, as Fanon
puts it, of blackness honestly confronted with its condition in an
anti-Black world. The anti-Black world, the only world we know, hides
this non-being to the extent that it ascribes a place and role to
abject blackness. But the truth is the zone of non-being. In an
interesting and crucial twist, Fanon, in the Introduction, does not
describe descent into this zone as nihilism or despair. Rather, he
counters with a vision of subjectivity as “a yes that
vibrates to cosmic harmonies” (1952 [2008: 2]). Descent into the
zone of non-being produces this yes and its revolutionary
power, revolutionary precisely because the anti-Black world cannot
contain or sustain the affirmation of Black life as life, as being, as
having a claim on the world. This claim and this yes is the
positivity of what becomes political violence in Fanon’s later
work.
Across the core chapters of Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon
draws together the existential experience of racialized subjectivity
and the calculative logic of colonial rule. For Fanon, and this is
critically important, colonialism is a total project. It is a
project that does not leave any part of the human person and its
reality untouched. This is no more evident than in the opening chapter
to Black Skin, White Masks on language. Fanon’s
reflections on language, racism, and colonialism begin with a wide
claim: to speak a language is to participate in a world, to adopt a
civilization. The claim reflects in many ways the philosophical milieu
of mid-century French and German philosophy, which in phenomenology,
existentialism, and hermeneutics explore the very same
claim—that language, subjectivity, and reality are entangled as
a matter of essence, not confusion or indistinction. But the colonial
situation makes this all the more complicated. If speaking a language
means participating in a world and adopting a civilization, then the
language of the colonized, a language imposed by centuries of colonial
domination and dedicated to the elimination or abjection of other
expressive forms, speaks the world of the colonizer. To speak as the
colonized is therefore to participate in one’s own oppression
and to reflect the very structures of your alienation in everything
from vocabulary to syntax to intonation. It is true that many
Afro-Caribbeans speak pidgin and creole as part of everyday life. But
Fanon, in a claim that does not age well in Caribbean theory, measures
pidgin and creole expression against French, arguing that
Afro-Caribbean speaking, in those registers, is a fallen, impoverished
version of the metropolitan language and thus participates in
inferiority. In this way, vernacular speech speaks the
colonizer’s world into existence in naming the colonized as
derivative, less than, and fundamentally abject. Caribbean theory from
the 1970s to the present has largely been dedicated to defending the
legitimacy of creolized language and cultural forms, against Fanon and
against colonial languages as the measure of being and knowing.
But there is no alternative for Fanon. In one of the most important
moments of the book, Fanon discusses the problem of diction and racial
embodiment. The black person can perfect speech, learn to speak
perfect French and sound like a sophisticated Parisian. That
might promise a certain kind of liberation from the
alienation in and through mastery of proper French. That is, if the
black colonial learns to speak as well as the white Parisian, then
perhaps there can be equal participation in language and its world.
Yet, this is impossible because of what Fanon terms the
epidermal character of race. To be black and speak with
perfect diction is still to be black, and therefore marked as special,
unique, and surprising. Fanon’s anecdotes in the opening chapter
describe this as the surprise of white French people at the
articulateness of a black French speaker. Surprise is a reminder of
inferiority, not in the content of one’s presence, but rather on
the bearing black skin has on the white mask of perfect diction. There
is no escape from the epidermal skin. Embodiment frames linguistic
performance and limits its significance. Fanon also remarks on how
this fated-to-failure emphasis on diction in turn alienates the black
person from his or her fellow black people—the desire to be
white, Fanon’s characterization of the drive to perfect diction,
means alienation from blackness and this lands the black subject,
again, in the zone of non-being.
The second and third chapters of Black Skin, White Masks
theorize interracial sexuality, sexual desire, and the effects on
racial identity. Fanon’s theorizations return to one and the
same theme: interracial desire as a form of self-destruction in the
desire to be white or to elevate one’s social, political, and
cultural status in proximity to whiteness. In that sense, all
depictions of interracial sexuality (exclusively heterosexual) are for
Fanon fundamentally pathological. The black woman who desires a white
man suffers under the delusion that his body is a bridge to wealth and
access. Mayotte Capécia’s novel I Am a Martinican
Woman (1948) guides Fanon’s analysis and he takes her book
to be exemplary of the black woman’s psyche and of the limits of
interracial desire. The black man who desires a white woman suffers
under the delusions of what her body offers: innocence and purity.
Fanon draws this from Germaine Guex’s book La Névrose
d’abandon (1950) and expresses it directly when writing, in
the voice of Guex’s Black man, “When my restless hands
caress those white breasts, they grasp white civilization and dignity
and make them mine” (1952 [2008: 45]). The white body and Black
desire for that body function much as language does in the opening
chapter to Black Skin, White Masks: the passage to standing
in the world, made impossible by the epidermal racial scheme, and
therefore fated to alienation at every turn. Fanon’s analyses
are provocative, associative, and infused with the language of
psychoanalysis and existential-phenomenology. And, thus, in each turn
of the story, interracial desire is pathological, not because of the
content of the characters and their desire, but because anti-Black
colonialism is a total project that has infiltrated, modified, and
calcified all aspects of the lifeworld.
The incredibly important fifth chapter to Black Skin, White
Masks, titled “The Lived-Experience of the Black Man”
(“L’expérience vécue du noir”), is
bookended by two chapters examining psychological accounts of the
colonized. In the fourth chapter, Fanon undertakes a systematic
critique of Octave Mannoni’s psychoanalytic account of colonial
oppression and in the sixth chapter he works through a psychoanalytic
account of racialized libidinal economy. Both chapters are crucial for
understanding the role of psychoanalysis in Fanon’s thought, as
well as an opportunity to see his creativity as a reader who
repurposes colonial or colonial-tinged methods and analyses for the
sake of clarification of the effects of anti-Black racism under
colonial domination. Fanon’s conclusions are not surprising, of
course. Psychoanalysis, like his original readings of interracial
relationships, provides Fanon a language for describing all the
effects and affects on desire under anti-Black racism, and how
gendered notions of power, embodiment, and selfhood are structured
from the inside by the colonial practice of racism. What he
uncovers in his critique and repurposing of psychoanalysis are new
layers of pathology on the part of the colonizer, of course, but also
of the colonized who cannot function as intact psyches. As well, Fanon
argues in some detail against the capacity of European psychoanalysis
to understand the colonial situation. Blackness requires modifications
in method, especially if that method is to open space for resistance,
rebellion, and liberation.
But “The Lived-Experience of the Black Man” is really the
key chapter in the book. In that chapter, Fanon deploys the conceptual
tools developed in previous chapters in order to debunk the remaining
legacies of racial essentialism. A good bit of this was undertaken in
the first chapter, where Fanon critically reads Aimé
Césaire and his articulation of Négritude around the
question of language. The existential-phenomenological character of
the fifth chapter, however, adds real depth and texture to
Fanon’s position. It begins and returns repeatedly to an
anecdote in which a white child points to Fanon and declares
“Look, a Negro!” Fanon explores how this phrase is akin to
a racial slur, how racism is integral to the declaration itself rather
than being an addition to it: to say “Negro” is to say an
anti-Black slur. In developing this account, Fanon revisits Jean-Paul
Sartre’s account of the gaze and how it fixes the identity of
the other, here infusing that account with a rich treatment of the
structures of an anti-Black racist lifeworld. The white gaze fixes
blackness, making it with a slur and epidermal character, thus sealing
blackness into itself. As well, Fanon discusses Sartre’s account
of anti-Semitism in Anti-Semite and Jew: An Exploration of the
Etiology of Racism (1948), noting how it is inadequate to the
phenomenon of anti-Blackness as a form of racism. Whereas the
anti-Semite fears the Jew because of his alleged power and
super-capacity, the anti-Black racist detests the Black person because
of his alleged weakness and incapacity. That is, anti-Semitism
reflects a panic about Jewish superiority, anti-Black racism reflects
contempt for Black inferiority. With this complex in place, Fanon
returns with some important sympathy to Césaire’s version
of Négritude, exploring the limits and possibilities of poetry
for an alternative vision of Black life. Négritude may be
naïve and fundamentally wrong at the level of ontology, but it
does alter the affective relation of Black people to themselves. That
is no small accomplishment. Across these discussions, Fanon develops
his notion of the inferiority complex, which is his subtle and
important account of how anti-Black racism is internalized by Black
people and how that internalization adds complexity to the pathologies
of living under colonial rule. Négritude, whatever its limits,
is an antidote and Fanon’s appreciation for it is one of the
more compelling parts of the chapter.
The seventh and final full chapter offers a critical reading of
dialectics, filtered through both Alfred Adler’s psychology and
G.W.F. Hegel’s philosophy. At stake in the chapter is
recognition—recognition of blackness, of subjectivity, and
therefore of humanity. This is one of the most enigmatic ideas in
Black Skin, White Masks. Fanon is deeply critical of
dialectical thinking, while at the same time drawing deep, important
lessons from it. In particular, Fanon is concerned with how a
dialectics of recognition might simply mean elevation of the
Black person to a sense of humanity created by and modeled on white
people. The entirety of the text, of course, has been dedicated to
disputing that move and offering alternative ways of thinking about
the future. So Fanon rejects the nascent, or sometimes explicit,
conception of recognition that appeals to a pre-constructed idea of
the human—suspicious, rightly, that such an idea is always
racialized. And so too he is suspicious of any dialectical method that
leaves a sense of measure intact—namely, a dialectical method
that proceeds from a logic of recognition. Fanon resists at every turn
the desire for recognition if that recognition proceeds from an
inevitably colonial sense of standard or measure. Rather, in terms of
Hegelian methodology, Fanon is interested in the risk of life at the
center of Hegel’s dialectic, and how that dialectic both exposes
the conceptual dependency of the colonizer on the colonized
and how confrontation, the work of negation in dialectical
thinking and struggle, aims to destroy pre-existing forms of relation.
If those pre-existing forms of relation are destroyed, then a certain
kind of revolution is possible, one in which the humanity of the
colonized black person might emerge, on its own terms, for the first
time. Fanon’s imagination turns to the future as unprecedented.
What could blackness be after colonialism?
The conclusion to Black Skin, White Masks follows through on
this notion of futurity and a dialectics dedicated to the destruction
of pre-existing forms of relation. Fanon’s conclusion is written
in very short paragraphs or provocative, declarative sentences. Across
the final pages, Fanon outlines a theory of history and memory that
underpins his vision of Black liberation, including most prominently
the notion that we are not bound to history, we are not slaves to the
past, and therefore any kind of future is possible. Fanon rejects the
idea of reparations, for example, precisely because that idea would
link Black people to the past in a crucial way and make that link
inextricable from imagining justice. In place of the past, Fanon
appeals to the openness and undetermined character of the future. What
does Fanon want for black people? In perhaps the most famous line of
the book, Fanon concludes with the plea: “Ô mon corps,
fais de moi toujours un homme qui interroge!” (“O my body,
always make me a man who questions!”) (1952 [2008:
206]). Subjectivity in the interrogative is therefore Fanon’s
solution to the problem of racial entrapment, the opening motif of how
white people are trapped in whiteness, black people trapped in
blackness. The man who questions has broken out of that trap.
The effusive optimism and hope of the Conclusion aside, Black
Skin, White Masks is an essentially pessimistic book. That is,
the book describes a psychological, linguistic, ontological, and
libidinal landscape that is structured through and through by
anti-Black racism. No desire or mode of being is left untouched.
Fanon’s evocation of a total break with the past in the
Conclusion confirms this pessimism and shows that his sense of
liberation is tied to an apocalyptic revolutionary
praxis—something we see developed over the following decade.
In the immediate half-decade that follows the publication of Black
Skin, White Masks, Fanon revisits key claims about anti-blackness
and the possibilities of Black life that enrich, deepen, and widen his
formulations in 1952. One of the questions that arises quite naturally
from Black Skin, White Masks is how well, if at all, the
concept of blackness developed therein travels across the Caribbean to
the United States, or from the Caribbean to Africa. Fanon does not
spend much time discussing the United States; while some of his
unpublished work, recently collected in the volume Écrits
sur l’aliénation et la liberté, shows a keen
interest in the work of Richard Wright, and the early rustlings of the
early civil rights movement (along with Wright) are mentioned in
Black Skin, Whites Masks, Fanon’s move to refine and
nuance his account of blackness turns to Africa. In the 1955 essay
“West Indians and Africans” (“Antillais et Africains”),
Fanon renews his critique of the Négritude movement and its
nostalgic orientation toward the continent. In a provocative
association, Fanon concludes the essay by linking “the great
white error” of colonialism with his characterization of
Négritude thinking as “living in the great black
mirage”. (1964 [1994: 27]) Alongside that criticism of
Négritude, Fanon blends personal history, reportage, and a bit
of existential-historical sensibility in discussing the
differences between Afro-Caribbeans (West Indians) and black
Africans. Fanon’s occasion is the Second World War and the
experience of West Indian and black African soldiers fighting side by
side, which allowed intimate exchange about racial identity. These
exchanges, on Fanon’s account, return again and again to the
notion that West Indians are not Black enough, perhaps not Black at
all, which he implies adds to the psychological and moral appeal of
Négritude. A key lesson to draw from this essay, especially in
light of the work that follows it, is that Fanon’s skepticism
about blackness as an identity—inextricably bound to
anti-blackness—moves him further and further away from concerns
about the Black experience. This move is deeply connected to his time
in Algeria, as we see below.
As well, Fanon’s well-known essay from 1956 “Racism
and Culture” (“Racisme et culture”) re-engages the question of
blackness and argues for a deep, abiding connection between
anti-blackness and cultural formation more broadly. The essay,
delivered at one of the most important gatherings in the history of
black Atlantic thought, the 1956 Congress of Negro Writers and
Artists, de-links racism from the psyche and the interpersonal,
lodging racism instead inside the very workings of
culture. Fanon’s contribution to the 1956 Congress broke from
the emphasis on Négritude and Négritude thinking at that
meeting, and his reflections are noteworthy for that reason alone.
Against the emphasis on racial quasi-essentialism, “Racism and
Culture” examines how anti-Black racism is part of the structure
and function of culture, rather than identifying blackness as an
inherent site of resistance. Fanon writes that racism
is never a super-added element discovered by chance in the course of
the investigation of the cultural data of a group. The social
constellation, the cultural whole, is deeply modified by the existence
of racism. (1964 [1994: 36])
This move positions Fanon against Négritude in familiar and new
ways. It is familiar in that he rejects racialized thinking as central
to Black liberation struggle, entwining race and culture at their
core; nothing from a racist culture can inform liberatory racial
thinking precisely because the existence of racism “deeply
modifies” what appears in culture as race. Fanon
underscores this when he deems blues, an African-American vernacular
art form, a “slave lament” that is “offered up for
the admiration of the oppressors” (1964 [1994: 37]). It is in
some ways new, insofar as he gathers together the multi-faceted
analysis and pessimism of Black Skin, White Masks and
distills it all into a vision of race and culture. And like the
conclusion to Black Skin, White Masks, and indeed most of his
work, the vision is essentially apocalyptic. “The end of race
prejudice”, Fanon writes, “begins with a sudden
incomprehension” (1964 [1994: 44]). Which is to say, for Fanon
the de-linking of racism and culture only comes at the moment that
culture itself, as we have known it, becomes incomprehensible and we
begin the work of assembling new cultural forms. This insight is fully
developed five years later in the central chapters of The Wretched
of the Earth.
2. Algeria
Fanon’s move to Algeria in 1953 marks an important turning point
in his thought. He continues to write on anti-blackness in select
essays and occasions, but Fanon’s shift is deep and meaningful.
Whereas Black Skin, White Masks was concerned exclusively
with the structure of an anti-black world and how that world bears on
the body and psyche of the colonized, Fanon’s time in Algeria
and later travels to sub-Saharan Africa broaden his analysis. Instead
of a question of blackness, colonialism becomes for Fanon a larger,
more general question of the oppressed in the global south. The
Wretched of the Earth is the boldest and most important
expression of this shift, but the time he spends analyzing Algeria on
its own terms reveals Fanon’s increasing sensitivity to
difference inside the colonial experience. Also, many of his
most important writings in this period were published in French
language newspapers across the continent of Africa, in particular the
Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN) newspaper El
Moudjahid (for which he served on the editorial board), which
hosts some of his most interesting reflections. This shift in his
thinking, as well as some of the later points of emphasis and
theoretical transitions, bolster Ato Sekyi-Otu’s argument in
Fanon’s Dialectic of Experience (1997) that
Fanon’s work ought to be read as a series of political
experiences or stages in and at the basis of an unfolding of a long,
complex system of thought.
Three essays are of particular significance in this period:
“Algeria’s European Minority” (“La minorité
européenne d’Algérie”), “Algeria
Unveiled” (“L’algérie se dévoile”), and
“The Algerian Family” (“La famille
algérienne”).
Fanon’s reflections in “Algeria’s European
Minority” offer an important and insightful example of applying
the anti-colonial dimensions of Black Skin, White Masks. The
key anti-colonial insight in that text was how measure—the
imperial function of whiteness in the Black psyche—structures
the world. Liberation, in Black Skin, White Masks, looks a
lot like displacing measure in the name of the questioning subject.
Measure, here, means simply the ideal or standard according to which
“the human” is evaluated. Fanon’s argument in
Black Skin, White Masks is that “the human”, an
idea that comes from the European tradition, is a fundamentally racial
idea deployed as a tool of alienation for the colonized. Liberation
from measure means displacing the racialized idea of the human and
initiating a movement toward, then into, a new humanism. When
this notion travels to Algeria in “Algeria’s European
Minority”, a critical essay addressing the possibility of
revolutionary Europeans in North Africa, we see how it also applies to
the white minority under colonialism. The revolution in Algeria is a
moment of decision for all Algerians, and pointedly so in the case of
the European minority who had lived there for generations and at an
elevated social and political status. The default mode, of course,
would be to associate the European minority with the colonizing power:
France. But Fanon argues that this is not necessarily the case and
that, in fact, revolutionary solidarity across racial-national lines
is possible, even necessary (and, through examples in the text,
actually practiced). Algeria, then, is revealed to be as much an
ideological category for identification with as it is a national,
religious, or racial category. The Wretched of the Earth will
explore these possibilities even further as a blueprint for the
colonized global South. But Fanon is particularly meticulous in
“Algeria’s European Minority”, examining in detail
how each twist and turn of the psyche reflects possibilities and
limits, and in that meticulousness shows the enduring insight from the
opening of Black Skin, White Masks – namely, that white
people are locked into whiteness, Black people into blackness.
“Algeria’s European Minority” unpacks the process by
which white people can unlock themselves in or be unlocked by
anti-colonial struggle and revolutionary action. In that sense, the
text is an important study of how what comes to be called “race
traitor” politics can and should work in a revolutionary
context.
In “Algeria Unveiled”, Fanon explores the relationship
between Islam, tradition, colonial rule, and revolutionary
consciousness. The veil puzzles Fanon and challenges his deepest
political commitment: postcoloniality means an embrace of the
new. Revolution is absolute and radical, marking a break with the
past rather than a return to a different version of the past. The
future is the future, and so full of the unprecedented. What does that
mean for traditions that have been suppressed by colonial rule, for
example the veil in Islamic cultural practice? In his work on
blackness, Fanon was quite clear that a return to African
civilization—the imperative of the Négritude
movement—represents a mirage and only doubles the loss of the
past by losing black people in an illusion. But that is not the case
with his treatment of Islamic traditions in Algeria and other parts of
the Maghreb. The suppression of those traditions, on Fanon’s
account, marginalize or push tradition into secret—or, perhaps,
keep the tradition in the open, but always as backward, abject, and
contrary to modernity. This means tradition is still alive, not a
mirage, and as alive also valued deeply by communities resisting
colonial rule. Such traditions can be instrumentalized for the sake of
revolutionary action, only to be evaluated after colonialism
for their suitability in a postcolonial nation and culture. The same
logic is elaborated in “The Algerian Family”, where Fanon
explores the traditional structure of families in Algeria, in
particular how those families set gender identity, power, marriage,
and reproduction in fixed roles. Revolutionary families, he argues,
identify these fixed roles and break with them while also
maintaining a conviction that their practices are Algerian—that
is, Algerian in the new sense.
These reflections on racial-national identification, religion, gender,
and family all return to the same basic argument: revolution is about
the new. But that does not mean merely rejecting the past and
suspending all tradition. Rather, it means, for Fanon, identifying
sites for transformation inside tradition, with emphasis on those
sites which offer revolutionary or tactical possibilities. These
essays and the many shorter companion pieces from the time show Fanon
puzzling over his dual commitments—to a revolution that is
always for the future and to “the people” who are often
deeply committed to traditions. Thinking through that crossing of
commitments is the task of any revolutionary thought and Fanon’s
careful thinking is exemplary.
3. Black Africa
In terms of volume, Fanon’s turn to Africa in the years
following the publication of Black Skin, White Mask is
overwhelmingly occupied with North Africa, and Algeria in particular.
However, he also gives some key attention to sub-Saharan Africa or
what he called “black Africa” in key essays, editorials,
and letters collected in Toward the African Revolution.
Though there is some variety in terms of content and particular
thematic sites, Fanon’s relationship to sub-Saharan Africa is
fairly consistent. The Algerian experience and ideology that emerged
from it structures Fanon’s take on anti-colonial struggle in the
region, but he does not return to questions of anti-Black racism.
Algeria is for Fanon the exemplar of revolutionary struggle. So, when
talking about black Africa, Fanon will urge forgoing deep connections
to or retrievals of pre-colonial Africa—something that reflects
his early critiques of Négritude, for sure, but are in these
later essays really plainly political and strategic. Africa is,
ideologically, a unity for Fanon, and that unity is regularly
articulated in terms of shared colonial struggle. Thus, the divisions
between North and sub-Saharan Africa are erased in a shift of
perspective; memories and grievances that might flow from legacies of
the Arab slave trade are part of the disposable past. What matters is
the shared condition in the present, and therefore to the future of
unified anti-colonial struggle. In “Unity and Effective
Solidarity are the Conditions for African Liberation”
(“Unité et solidarité effective sont les
conditions de la libération africaine”) (1960), Fanon is
plain in writing that “inter-African solidarity must be a
solidarity of fact, a solidarity of action, a solidarity concrete in
men, in equipment, in money” (1964 [1994: 173]). All of these
solidarities reflect an anti-essentialist approach to revolutionary
struggle, which is consonant with Fanon’s work from the
beginning. Also of note is how Fanon, in this context, asserts the
necessity of the neutrality of anti-colonial struggle in Africa with
regard to Cold War alliances. The history of post-independence Africa,
which was the site of so many proxy wars and destabilization efforts
from both sides of the Cold War, bears out Fanon’s observation
and assertion.
Fanon also pauses to pay special attention to Patrice Lumumba who
in 1961, when “Lumumba’s Death: Could We Do
Otherwise” (“La mort de Lumumba: pouvions-nous faire
autrement?”) was written, was known as a promising and important
revolutionary leader. Lumumba immediately after became emblematic of
both the revolutionary promise and seemingly inevitable neo-colonial
fate of independent black Africa. This short essay is full of
interesting observations, most of which revolve around the failure in
Congo to unify around an anti-colonial ideology. The lack of this
ideology, he notes, is what made Congo susceptible to Belgian and
other European/American meddling, which then made Lumumba a natural
target. Lumumba’s bold identification with anti-colonialism
enacted what Fanon most wanted: neutrality in the Cold War, singular
focus on the nation and the continent against colonialism in all
forms. Lumumba’s death leads to the greatest threat to
genuinely independent, anti-colonial Africa: national infighting
instead of continental solidarity and the return of intra-national
ethnic conflict that destabilizes what is most in need of
stabilization.
In the end, it remains unclear how well Fanon understood the diversity
of sub-Saharan Africa and its difference from North Africa, where he
spent most of his time on the continent and to which his reflections
are largely dedicated. The occasional pieces leading up to The
Wretched of the Earth raise interesting questions and show how
Fanon was dedicated to building lines of solidarity and shared
struggle. African unity was paramount in Fanon’s work on the
continent, and he boldly extends the Algerian experience to the
central and southern regions of Africa. At the same time, and this
becomes particularly clear when he reflects on black Africa’s
memory of the slave trade, Fanon in The Wretched of the Earth
calls for a suppression of memory and historical difference in the
name of broader solidarity among the continent’s oppressed
peoples. This has the strength of forging a vision of a future
de-linked from the past—a project consistent with the
revolutionary conclusion to Black Skin, White Masks—and
yet seems largely unaware of or unconcerned with the consequences of
forgetting the historical experiences of large swaths of sub-Saharan
Africa. As well, the difference between settler colonies and those
administered from a distance fades a bit when Fanon travels his
reflections to black Africa, a difference that has received a more
nuanced treatment in postcolonial theory since Fanon.
That said, work by Nigel Gibson in Fanonian Practices in South
Africa (2011) and Achille Mbembe in Critique of Black
Reason (2013 [2017]) and Politiques de
l’inimitié (2016), as well as essays by thinkers
such as Mabogo Percy More, Richard Pithouse, and others, have placed
Fanon in critical dialogue with sub-Saharan African political
realities and emerging theoretical movements. This is some of the most
exciting contemporary work in Fanon studies and indicates the rich,
provocative resources in his work for the twenty-first century.
4. The Wretched of the Earth
Without question, the 1961 publication of The Wretched of the
Earth (Les damnés de la terre) changed
Fanon’s global profile as a thinker of anti-colonial struggle,
revolutionary action, and post-colonial statecraft and
imagination.
In many ways, Wretched is a fulfillment of the short,
suggestive promissory notes on anti-colonial struggle found in the
many essays, editorials, and letters written in the time following
Black Skin, White Masks. Those occasional writings and major
essays shift focus away from anti-Blackness as a core theme and toward
a broader sense of the effects of colonialism on the psyche, cultural
formation, and political organization. That shift in focus allows
Fanon to think more broadly about the meaning and purpose of
revolutionary struggle.
The opening chapter to Wretched is surely the most famous, in
part because of the sheer power and provocation of its reflections, in
part because it is the focus of Jean-Paul Sartre’s well-known
Foreword. Fanon’s concern with violence is critical for
understanding the trajectory of Wretched, which ambitiously
moves from political agitation to cultural formation to postcolonial
statecraft to global philosophical re-orientation. It all begins with
violence.
Violence is important for Fanon as a precondition to liberation,
something George Ciccariello-Maher in Decolonizing Dialectics
(2017) links to a broader concern in Fanon with decolonizing
methodology and revolutionary praxis. Violence as precondition
operates in two directions: internal to the colony among the
colonizers and external in the formative conflict between the
colonized and the colonizer. Internal to the colony, Fanon breaks the
colonized into three groups. First, there is the worker whose
relationship to both the colonized and colonizer is organized around
its capacity to work. This is a complicated relationship, one
that is both a relation of dependency (material needs are supplied by
the colonial system) and naturally revolutionary (exploited, yet also
that upon which the colonizer depends). Second, there is the
colonized intellectual, a compromised figure who plays a
crucial role across the body of Wretched, whether in relation
to cultural renewal or to political resistance. The colonized
intellectual mediates the relation of the colonized for the colonizer,
translating the terms of colonial life into the language, concepts,
and thinkable politics of the colonial power. There is
potential in the colonized intellectual, insofar as it is a
figure whose epistemological roots cross with the life of the
colonized masses, but any potential is compromised, if not outright
obliterated by the role the intellectual plays: to aid and abet the
colonizer. Third, there is the lumpen proletariat, a term
borrowed from Karl Marx’s analysis of the dialectic’s
remainder and translated into the conditions of colonialism. The
colonial lumpen are disposable populations that provide nothing to the
colonial system (displaced people, slum dwellers, subsistence
farmers), and therefore, from the outside, remain the greatest threat
to the system. In a certain sense, this is a formalization of
Fanon’s earlier reflections on the role of the fellah
in colonial Algeria—the group lying outside the system of urban
colonial and anti-colonial struggle, a figure of purity and pure
revolutionary power.
Violence emerges as a critical concept in this moment. Part of the
colonizer’s fantasy of power and control lies in a perception of
weakness, of inferiority, that is inherent in the colonized. The
colonized are weak and therefore, in some fundamental sense, deserve
their abject condition. This is consistent with Fanon’s
reflection on the inferiority complex in Black Skin, White
Masks, but writ large and as a characteristic of a population and
people. If the inferiority of the colonized is an assumption
and psychological reality of colonial life, then
revolutionary violence cannot but be a shock to the entire system. The
colonizer is shocked into awareness of the humanity of the
colonized in the moment in which they are willing to risk their lives
for another future. The colonized are shocked into awareness of their
own potential and, in that potential, find themselves capable for
forming a wide cultural, social, and political identity. Identity
formation is critical in Fanon’s analysis; colonialism is a
total project, so the colonized find themselves adrift in abjection.
But violence changes all of that. Violence is simultaneously a saying
of no to colonialism and a saying of yes to the
possibilities of post-colonial life. The system cannot survive this
shock. And so it means everything to the three classes of colonized
life. The workers see the system on which they are dependent begin to
collapse. Exploitation becomes a site of resistance, rather than
something to be endured for the sake of material needs. The colonized
intellectual is exposed as counter-revolutionary and a key element in
the oppressive system. And the lumpen find an identity for the first
time, moving from disposable excess to anti-colonialism’s most
potent revolutionary force.
Violence is therefore tasked with the greatest of pair of intertwined
tasks: elimination of the colonial system at the level of imagination
(how colonizer-colonized relations are naturalized as superiority and
inferiority) and of material reality (exploitative relations of
subordination and extraction), as well as formation of cultural,
social, and political identities. The first chapter of
Wretched outlines and amplifies this enormous potential of
revolutionary, anti-colonial violence, and the chapters that follow
elaborate the complexities of post-colonial formations of culture and
politics.
The next three chapters explore in great detail how revolutionary
violence is related to collective identity formation (Chapter Two),
consciousness of national identity (Chapter Three), and perhaps most
importantly the formation of national culture (Chapter Four). What we
see across these chapters is how potent and fecund Fanon’s
conception of violence is, as well as how his various meditations on
revolution and identity in the essays between his first and his last
book pay real conceptual and strategic dividends. Conceptually, Fanon
draws the sharpest contrast between what he calls the colonized
intellectual and the revolutionary masses. The colonized intellectual
is exactly what the terms suggests: a go-between who translates the
colonized for the colonizer, in the colonizer’s language and for
the political, social, and cultural purposes of the colonizer. The
masses do not drive the colonized intellectual’s reflections,
but rather the colonial vision of the world structures everything.
Contrasted to that are the revolutionary masses who make a
new political, social, and cultural order through
revolutionary struggle itself. In this characterization, Fanon eschews
vanguardism and all the sorts of elite revolutionary structures that
follow from it. Rather, for Fanon, struggle itself generates
political, social, and cultural identities and concepts; there is no
prefiguring this element of a postcolonial world. Revolution makes
everything revolutionary, and the postcolonial state cannot be thought
without it. And so Fanon’s elaboration of this movement also
criticizes atavistic notions of postcolonial state- and culture-craft,
rejecting nostalgic turns to a precolonial African society as a vision
for post-revolutionary society.
If the colonized intellectual and the precolonial forms of life are
not just insufficient for, but actually damaging to, postcolonial
world-making, then the future is a break with the past. Grievances
composed of memories of historical violence (e.g., the Arab slave
trade in black Africa) or ethno-religious and other cultural disputes
give way to revolutionary action that dispenses with, rather than
draws on, memory. The break with the past, at the level of
organization and intellectual formation, is made through revolutionary
violence. So too is the future. There is no pre-existing national
consciousness or national culture, no genius or visionary who
conceives it ahead of time, which means that revolutionary violence
must be purposeful, intentional, and oriented toward world-making. In
this way, Fanon’s work on violence is never nihilistic or
random. Strategically, this means everything because conceptions of
politics, culture, and the postcolonial social order hinge on the
proper sense of violence. The Wretched of the Earth concludes with one of Fanon’s
most provocative and exciting pieces, evoking in much the same way as
the conclusion to Black Skin, White Masks the possibility of
a new future. In 1961, the future is for Fanon the question of the
fate of humanism, a motif he shares with, most notably,
Césaire’s 1955 text Discourse on Colonialism.
What is humanism, Fanon asks, if it is held up to the measure of the
world? That is, what does humanism look like if disentangled from the
European concept, which is riddled with histories of violence and
subjugation, and instead reflects or is infused with the liberation
struggles of the global South? In terms of conceiving the
post-colonial nation, Fanon returns to one of his earliest motifs:
measure. Post-colonial nations, created through anti-colonial
violence, cannot be duplications or imitations of European states. In
part, this is a resolutely anti-colonial ideological position: make
for yourself, do not make for the colonizer. But it is also, if not
largely, based in a critique of Europe that understands Europe to be
in crisis itself, to be dependent upon (at every level) structures of
exploitation and extraction. Europe is a “spirit built on
strange foundations” and characterized by “stasis”.
(1961 [2005: 237]) Post-colonial states need different foundations,
and so must work with new concepts and new imaginations of
collectivity. Central to this are conceptions and imaginations of the
human itself. “[W]e must make a new start”, Fanon writes,
“develop a new way of thinking, and endeavor to create a new
man”. (1961 [2005: 239]) Fanon does not give this “new
man” content. The new man belongs to the future. The new man is
to come.
5. The Case Studies
Fanon’s training in psychiatry is a central part of his work,
from the methodological approaches to and characterizations of the
dynamics of anti-Black racism in Black Skin, White Masks
through the attention to postcolonial anxieties of cultural formation
and statecraft in The Wretched of the Earth.
But apart from method alone, Fanon’s published and unpublished
works offer case studies of victims of colonialism, studies which
emphasize the lived pathologies of everyday life under colonial rule.
Many of these are in the unpublished writings collected in
Écrits sur l’aliénation et la
liberté, but a key series of case studies are included in
The Wretched of the Earth. These studies are generally
under-thematized by Fanon scholars and postcolonial theory scholars
more widely, though a few recent publications indicate a renewed
interest in how concrete psychiatric work might function as part of
the postcolonial theory archive and in Fanon’s larger project.
The collaborative study by Nigel Gibson and Roberto Beneduce
Frantz Fanon: Psychiatry and Politics (2017) goes a long way
toward closing this gap in the literature, examining in detail both
the history and theoretical work underlying Fanon’s psychiatric
writings and case studies. As well, David Marriott’s Whither
Fanon (2018) embeds the psychiatric writings and therapeutic
practice inside Fanon’s work on anti-blackness and postcolonial
politics.
Fanon’s original studies consider a range of disorders resulting
from colonial violence. Some are mental disorders, by which Fanon
means a generalized sense of anxiety caused by colonial domination and
acted out in discrete parts of the personality. Others bear the
disorder on the body and disfigure the person from the inside out or
create sexual disorders connected to colonial degradations around
femininity and masculinity. As well, Fanon includes a short piece at
the end of The Wretched of the Earth on the medicalization of
criminality in Algeria, with particular interest in how those
disorders might be repurposed for the sake of revolutionary struggle.
The studies are very detailed and narrativized, which opens up a new
dimension of Fanon as critical observer. The studies also draw out the
tension between psychiatric treatment and political ideology,
something Fanon would argue is not overlaid on the situation by the
therapist, but instead discovered, in therapy, to have been installed
by the colonial order. The influence of this aspect of Fanon’s
work can be seen in the Black Panther Party’s work in the United
States on prisoner reintegration and public health initiatives, all of
which were seen as blending care for the oppressed with harnessing
revolutionary potential.
6. Legacy and Influence
We could say that, in many ways, Fanon’s legacy and influence
outsizes his modest output as a writer. Fanon wrote for about a
decade, which, in any comparison with other major thinkers, is almost
no time at all. The pages produced, as well, are modest. Black
Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth are
substantial books composed of original chapters and analysis, but the
other two works A Dying Colonialism (1959) and Toward the
African Revolution (posthumously published in 1964) are comprised
of short essays, preliminary analyses, and occasional pieces. While
those shorter, preliminary, and occasional works are fascinating and
important, they are a portrait of a thinker in motion, a thinker whose
commitment to diverse and unfolding revolutionary
sites required both quick takes and patient contemplation. Fanon moved
very quickly through the Algerian struggle and did not hesitate to be
declarative, and his work on black Africa is very much the same,
albeit without the same concrete engagement and intellectual
background. Yet, Fanon is also patient and reflective, something we
see in the psychiatric studies that simultaneously underpin his
broader analyses and suggest other productive avenues for thought.
In other words, looking back six-plus decades later, we can see
Fanon’s oeuvre as composed of profound, enduring insights and a
body of un- and under-developed work. This mixed legacy in the written
work has not limited Fanon’s enormous influence. He was, in his
time and certainly in the decades following his death, a hero to and
intellectual inspiration for anti-colonial and anti-racist struggle,
informing the work of thinkers from all over the global South. Latin
American militants drew on Fanon’s insights, as did so many on
the continent of Africa and across South Asia. His impact on cultural
studies is also sizable. Fanonian concepts inform countless
discussions of race, nation, migration, language, representation,
visuality, and so on. This is largely due to Fanon’s unique
ability to engage across theoretical approaches and, in those
approaches, infuse analysis with rich phenomenological descriptions of
the body and psyche under colonial domination. Reiland Rabaka’s
Forms of Fanonism (2011) is especially interesting here for
its careful work to reinscribe these kinds of analysis into the Black
radical tradition more broadly.
The recent publication and translation into English of Fanon’s
unpublished works, which range from letters to a draft of a play, will
surely open up new dimensions of commentary. One of the signature
features of Fanon-commentary is the creativity of the interlocutors
who, if not doing lineage of influence textual study, have worked to
interpret and extend Fanon’s ideas. Indeed, this is one of the
more interesting features of Fanon scholarship, something Henry Louis
Gates, Jr. famously described as Fanon’s function as a sort of
Rorschach test—we see more in Fanon than is in the text. This is
the fecundity of Fanon’s thinking, really. Books like Glen
Coulthard’s Red Skin, White Masks (2014) and Hamid
Dabashi’s Brown Skin, White Masks (2011) rewrite
Fanon’s first work with an eye toward the similar-yet-different
forms of colonial experience in indigenous North America (Coulthard)
and the Middle East (Dabashi). Other writers such as Homi Bhabha,
Nigel Gibson, Lewis Gordon, Richard Pithouse, and others have extended
Fanonian categories and concepts to treat the experience of exile,
migration, diaspora, African-American and Caribbean experiences,
contemporary post-Apartheid South African struggles for justice, and
so on. This kind of work underscores the fecundity of Fanon’s
ideas, their elasticity and capacity for extending across historically
and culturally diverse geographies. Such elasticity and capacity
largely derives from Fanon’s attention to the colonized as a
lumpen and revolutionary force, something to which he gives great
descriptive and existential depth, rather than merely making an
abstract ideological centerpiece. This attentiveness to the presence
of deep resistance amongst the masses, even in the midst of profound
and powerful forms of colonial oppression, is one of Fanon’s
greatest contributions to revolutionary theorizing of the black
Atlantic, global south, and racially marginalized populations. It is
why Fanon’s work so exceeds page count and number of books. To
have located and described the colonized subject under colonial
domination with such precision and texture—this is Fanon’s
gift to scholars, for sure, but more than that it is his gift to all
who are engaged in radical struggle against racialized oppression.
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