The Wretched of the Earth
My preferred way of engaging with books is reconstruction. These notes were created during my reading process to aid my own understanding and not written for the purpose of instruction. With that said, I’ve decided to share these unedited notes on the off chance they are helpful to other readers.
The Colonized World
Fanon paints a highly compartmentalized view of the colonized world. Compartmentalized meaning that there is a profound sense of seperation between the colonized and the colonizers but also within the colonized. The natives are compartmentalized by being demonized, through western values, through laws and zoning, by infighting and mysticism. This whole structure is sustained through a system of violence.
Compartmentalization through Morality
The colonized world is a Manichean world with Good (the colonizer's and their liberal humanitarian values) and Evil (the colonized). The latter is defined not only as an absence of values but rather a negation of values -- as subhuman in that he can't even be sensible to ethics.
Native society is not simply described as a society lacking in values. It is not enough for the colonist to affirm that those values have disappeared from, or still better never existed in, the colonial world. The native is declared insensible to ethics; he represents not only the absence of values, but also the negation of values. He is, let us dare to admit, the enemy of values, and in this sense he is the absolute evil. He is the corrosive element, destroying all that comes near him; he is the deforming element, dis figuring all that has to do with beauty or morality; he is the depository of maleficent powers, the unconscious and irretrievable instrument of blind forces.
Compartmentalization through Values
An elite class within the colonized, the native intellectual acts as a spokesperson for the colonizers. “The native intellectual accepted the cogency of these ideas, and deep down in his brain you could always find a vigilant sentinel ready to defend the Greco-Latin pedestal.“
But in the process of seeking liberation, these western values appear to be useless.
Now it so happens that during the straggle for liberation, at the moment that the native intellectual comes into touch again with his people, this artificial sentinel is turned into dust. All the Mediterranean values—the triumph of the human individual, of clarity, and of beauty—become lifeless, colorless knickknacks. All those speeches seem like collections of dead words; those values which seemed to uplift the soul are revealed as worthless, simply because they have nothing to do with the concrete conflict in which the people is engaged.
But they are actually worse than useless, Fanon reasons.
1. Individualism creates separation within the colonized. Structurally analogous to the marxist critique of liberalism, this egoistic individualism only helps enforce separation. Instead, the colony must return to an African metaphysics of group belonging. “Brother, sister, friend—these are words outlawed by the colonialist bourgeoisie, because for them my brother is my purse, my friend is part of my scheme for getting on… [The native intellectuals] discover the sub stance of village assemblies, the cohesion of people's committees, and the extraordinary fruitfulness of local meetings and governments. Henceforward, the interests of one will be the interests of all.”
2. They help reinforce this Manichean Good from Evil in a Schmittian way: whoever is against liberal humanitarian values must be non-human.
Compartmentalization through Laws
The natives and the colonizers are judged under different sets of laws. Furthermore they also live in drastically different locations, one marked by peace and safety another marked by violence and volatility.
Compartmentalization through Infighting and Mysticism
The native is "overpowered but not tamed; he is treated as an inferior but he is not convinced of his inferiority". He represses much of his anger and oppression.
One outlet to this repression is infighting (since you can't fight the colonizer) because it is an act of avoidance of the true enemy.
Tribal feuds only serve to perpetuate old grudges buried deep in the memory. By throwing himself with all his force into the vendetta, the native tries to persuade himself that colonialism does not exist, that everything is going on as before, that his story continues. Here on the level of communal organizations we clearly discern the well-known behavior patterns of avoidance. It is as if plunging into a fraternal blood bath allowed them to ignore the obstacle, and to put off till later the choice, nevertheless inevitable, which opens up the question of armed resistance to colonialism.
Another outlet is mysticism, these myths always had scary demons in them, this is another act of avoidance: the terror of the European pales in comparison to the terror of the demon.
The supernatural, magical powers reveal themselves as essentially personal; the settler's powers are infinitely shrunken, stamped with their alien origin. We no longer really need to fight against them since what counts is the frightening enemy created by myths. We perceive that all is settled by a permanent confrontation on the phantasmic plane.
Much like how Becker observed the French mental wards cleared out as soon as the French revolution began, "during the [actual] struggle for freedom, a marked alienation from these practices is observed."
Sustained by Violence
These modes of compartmentalization are sustained by violence. Oppression is much more explicit than in European countries. It is the direct violent actions of the policeman and the soldier that sustains the structural separation of the colony.
In the colonies it is the policeman and the soldier who are the official, instituted go-betweens, the spokesmen of the settler and his rule of oppression. In capitalist societies the educational system, whether lay or clerical, the structure of moral reflexes handed down from father to son, the exemplary honesty of workers who are given a medal after fifty years of good and loyal service, and the affection which springs from harmonious relations and good behavior—all these aesthetic expressions of respect for the established order serve to create around the exploited person an atmosphere of submission and of inhibition which lightens the task of policing considerably. In the capitalist countries a multitude of moral teachers, counselors and "bewilderers" separate the exploited from those in power. In the colonial countries, on the contrary, the policeman and the soldier, by their immediate presence and their frequent and direct action maintain contact with the native and advise him by means of rifle butts and napalm not to budge. It is obvious here that the agents of government speak the language of pure force. The intermediary does not lighten the oppression, nor seek to hide the domination; he shows them up and puts them into practice with the clear conscience of an upholder of the peace; yet he is the bringer of violence into the home and into the mind of the native.
Violence as Liberation
The first reason that Fanon endorses violence is because in many ways it is the only option. “From birth it is clear to him that this narrow world, strewn with prohibitions, can only be called in question by absolute violence.” Precisely because of these forms of compartmentalization, the colonizers do not see the colonized as fully human, seeing them incapable of reason or morality.
This is quite Schmittian, all of these dimensions: law/morality/values are merely dimensions that help create the ultimate dimension of the political namely that of friend vs. enemy. Once this dimension is created, the other dimensions lose their power and you cannot hope to argue on their basis for a resolution. This is also why Gandhi, in his recommendation for satyagraha, focuses so much on resolving the friend/enemy distinction and instead turn decolonialization back into a moral rather than political matter.
Furthermore, you have to use violence because you are completely outside of the political system there is no other way, no one cares about your humanity, you have no way of showing value than violence. "The starving peasant, outside the class system, is the first among the exploited to discover that only violence pays. For him there is no compromise, no possible coming to terms; colonization and decolonization are simply a question of relative strength".
The second reason is that the system is naturally violent already. The whole edifice is sustained by violence so the native does not have a choice of whether to be violent or not but whether he will just let it happen to him.
The third reason is that he cites the effectiveness of violence in decolonialization from other historical examples.
Lastly, he thinks that violence can have a healthy and cathartic psychological effect.
At the level of individuals, violence is a cleansing force. It frees the native from his inferiority complex and from his despair and inaction; it makes him fearless and restores his self-respect.
…
When the people have taken violent part in the national liberation they will allow no one to set themselves up as "liberators." They show themselves to be jealous of the results of their action and take good care not to place their future, their destiny, or the fate of their country in the hands of a living god. Yesterday they were completely irresponsible; today they mean to understand everything and make all decisions. Illuminated by violence, the consciousness of the people rebels against any pacification.
Post-Colonialization
The most important thing Fanon believes in a post-colonized world is for these countries to gain their self-sufficiency through redistribution of wealth. This is important because there is a danger of colonial oppression living on through global economic oppression.
He believes that Europeans need to repay, not aid but reparations. He believes all the wealth of Europe is stolen from the third world: "Europe is literally the creation of the Third World. The wealth which smothers her is that which was stolen from the under developed peoples." He believes that the fight between socialism and capitalism is a global phenomena: "what counts today, the question which is looming on the horizon, is the need for a redistribution of wealth. Humanity must reply to this question, or be shaken to pieces by it."
As a result, he thinks that the third world will convince Europe to repay because the European proletariat will recognize them as brothers-in-oppression. They will encourage the bourgeois to pay.