Frantz Fanon

Investigates the role of violence in social change, as reflected in its use by colonized peoples to achieve the liberation of the Third World

The Wretched of the Earth

The wretched of the earth.

nhu ⋆𐙚₊˚⊹

Let us decide not to imitate Europe; let us combine our muscles and our brains in a new direction. Let us try to create the whole man, whom Europe has been incapable of bringing to triumphant birth. 

The Algerian's criminality, his impulsivity, and the violence of his murders are therefore not the consequence of the organization of his nervous system or of characterial originality, but the direct product of the colonial situation. 

For a colonized man, in a context of oppression like that of Algeria, living does not mean embodying moral values or taking his place in the coherent and fruitful development of the world. To live means to keep on existing.

The scenario is as follows. First, "I am a doctor, I am not a policeman. I am here to help you." In this way after a few days the confidence of the prisoner is won.t After that, "I'm going to give you a few injections, for you're badly shaken." For a few days, treatment of any kind at all is given—vitamins, treatment for heart disease, sugar serums. On the fourth or fifth day the intravenous injection of pentothal is given. The interrogation begins. 

No one has clean hands; there are no innocents and no onlookers. We all have dirty hands; we are all soiling them in the swamps of our country and in the terrifying emp tiness of our brains. Every onlooker is either a coward or a traitor. 

In fact what the settler was saying to the native was "Kill yourself that I may become rich." Today, we must behave in a different fashion. We ought not to say to the people: "Kill yourselves that the country may become rich."

They started asking themselves theoretical questions: for example, why did certain dis tricts never see an orange before the war of liberation, while thousands of tons are exported every year abroad? Why were grapes unknown to a great many Algerians whereas the European peoples enjoyed them by the mil lion? Today, the people have a very clear notion of what belongs to them. 

The people come to understand that wealth is not the fruit of labor but the result of organized, protected robbery. Rich people are no longer respectable people; they are nothing more than flesh-eating animals, jackals, and vultures which wallow in the people's blood. With another end in view the political commissioners have had to decide that no body will work for anyone else any longer. The land be longs to those that till it. 

It is true that if care is taken to use only a language that is understood by graduates in law and economics, you can easily prove that the masses have to be managed from above. But if you speak the language of everyday, if you are not obsessed by the perverse desire to spread confusion and to rid yourself of the people, then you will realize that the masses are quick to seize every shade of meaning and to learn all the tricks of the trade. […]  Everything can be explained to the people, on the single condition that you really want them to understand. 

The African Weekly, published in Brazzaville, which ad dresses the princes of the regime thus: You who are in good positions, you and your wives, today you enjoy many comforts; perhaps a good education, a fine house, good contacts, and many missions on which you are delegated which open new horizons to you. But all your wealth forms a hard shell which prevents your seeing the poverty that surrounds you. Take care. This warning coming from The African "Weekly and addressed to the henchmen of Monsieur Youlou has, we may imagine, nothing revolutionary about it. What The African Weekly wants to point out to the starvers of the Congolese people is that God will punish their conduct. It continues: "If there is no room in your heart for con sideration toward those who are beneath you, there will be no room for you in God's house." 

Racialism and hatred and resentment—"a legitimate desire for revenge"— cannot sustain a war of liberation.

They discover that the success of the struggle presupposes clear objectives, a definite meth odology and above all the need for the mass of the people to realize that their unorganized efforts can only be a temporary dynamic. You can hold out for three days— maybe even for three months—on the strength of the ad mixture of sheer resentment contained in the mass of the people; but you won't win a national war, you'll never overthrow the terrible enemy machine, and you won't change human beings if you forget to raise the standard of consciousness of the rank-and-file. Neither stubborn cour age nor fine slogans are enough. 

The working class has nothing to lose; it is they who in the long run have everything to gain. 

Colonialism and imperialism have not paid their score when they with draw their flags and their police forces from our territories. For centuries the capitalists have behaved in the under developed world like nothing more than war criminals. Deportations, massacres, forced labor, and slavery have been the main methods used by capitalism to increase its wealth, its gold or diamond reserves, and to establish its power.

Of course we know that the capitalist regime, in so far as it is a way of life, cannot leave us free to perform our work at home, nor our duty in the world. Capitalist exploitation and cartels and monopo lies are the enemies of underdeveloped countries. On the other hand the choice of a socialist regime, a regime which is completely orientated toward the people as a whole and based on the principle that man is the most precious of all possessions, will allow us to go forward more quickly and more harmoniously, and thus make impossible that caricature of society where all economic and political power is held in the hands of a few who regard the na tion as a whole with scorn and contempt. 

This European opulence is literally scandalous, for it has been founded on slavery, it has been nourished with the blood of slaves and it comes directly from the soil and from the subsoil of that underdeveloped world. The well-being and the progress of Europe have been built up with the sweat and the dead bodies of Negroes, Arabs, Indians, and the yellow races. 

During the colonial period the people are called upon to fight against oppression; after national liberation, they are called upon to fight against poverty, illiteracy, and underdevelopment. 

The colonial regime owes its legitimacy to force and at no time tries to hide this aspect of things. 

The great victory of the Vietnamese people at Dien Bien Phu is no longer, strictly speaking, a Vietnamese victory. Since July, 1954, the question which the colonized peoples have asked themselves has been, "What must be done to bring about another Dien Bien Phu? How can we manage it?" Not a single colonized individual could ever again doubt the possibility of a Dien Bien Phu; the only problem was how best to use the forces at their disposal, how to organize them, and when to bring them into action. This encompassing violence does not work upon the colonized people only; it modifies the attitude of the colonialists who become aware of manifold Dien Bien Phus. This is why a veritable panic takes hold of the colonialist govern ments in turn. Their purpose is to capture the vanguard, to turn the movement of liberation toward the right, and to disarm the people: quick, quick, let's decolonize. Decolonize the Congo before it turns into another Algeria. 

The leaflet only expressed what every Algerian felt at heart: colonialism is not a thinking ma chine, nor a body endowed with reasoning faculties. It is violence in its natural state, and it will only yield when confronted with greater violence. 

A belief in fatality removes all blame from the oppressor; the cause of misfortunes and of poverty is attributed to God: He is Fate

And when one day our human kind becomes full-grown, it will not define itself as the sum total of the whole world's inhabitants, but as the infinite unity of their mutual needs. 

High-minded people, liberal or just softhearted, protest that they were shocked by such inconsistency; but they were either mistaken or dishonest, for with us there is nothing more consistent than a racist humanism since the European has only been able to be come a man through creating slaves and monsters. 

Try to understand this at any rate: if violence began this very evening and if exploitation and oppression had never existed on the earth, perhaps the slogans of non-violence might end the quarrel. But if the whole regime, even your non-violent ideas, are conditioned by a thousand-year-old oppression, your passivity serves only to place you in the ranks of the oppressors. 

Frantz Fanon's seminal work on the trauma of colonization, The Wretched of the Earth made him the leading anti-colonialist thinker of the twentieth century. This Penguin Modern Classics edition is translated from the French by Constance Farrington, with an introduction by Jean-Paul Sartre. Written at the height of the Algerian war for independence from French colonial rule and first published in 1961, Frantz Fanon's classic text has provided inspiration for anti-colonial movements ever since, analysing the role of class, race, national culture and violence in the struggle for freedom. With power and anger, Fanon makes clear the economic and psychological degradation inflicted by imperialism. It was Fanon, himself a psychotherapist, who exposed the connection between colonial war and mental disease, who showed how the fight for freedom must be combined with building a national culture, and who showed the way ahead, through revolutionary violence, to socialism. Many of the great calls to arms from the era of decolonization are now of purely historical interest, yet this passionate analysis of the relations between the great powers and the 'Third World' is just as illuminating about the world we live in today. Frantz Fanon (1925-61) was a Martinique-born French author essayist, psychoanalyst, and revolutionary. Fanon was a supporter of the Algerian struggle for independence from French rule, and became a member of the Algerian National Liberation Front. He was perhaps the preeminent thinker of the 20th century on the issue of decolonization and the psychopathology of colonization. His works have inspired anti-colonial liberation movements for more than four decades. If you enjoyed The Wretched of the Earth, you might like Edward Said's Orientalism, also available in Penguin Modern Classics. 'In clear language, in words that can only have been written in the cool heat of rage, he showed us the internal theatre of racism'Independent

Life-changing and edifying are the two adjectives I’d use to describe this book. Fanon’s work uncovers the brutalities of colonialism in the context of Algeria, and hauntingly yet, perfectly reveals the state of the world as it is today. 

muskaan bal

A distinguished psychiatrist from Martinique who took part in the Algerian Nationalist Movement, Frantz Fanon was one of the most important theorists of revolutionary struggle, colonialism, and racial difference in history. Fanon's masterwork is a classic alongside Edward Said's Orientalism or The Autobiography of Malcolm X, and it is now available in a new translation that updates its language for a new generation of readers. The Wretched of the Earth is a brilliant analysis of the psychology of the colonized and their path to liberation. Bearing singular insight into the rage and frustration of colonized peoples, and the role of violence in effecting historical change, the book incisively attacks the twin perils of post independence colonial politics: the disenfranchisement of the masses by the elites on the one hand, and intertribal and interfaith animosities on the other. Fanon's analysis, a veritable handbook of social reorganization for leaders of emerging nations, has been reflected all too clearly in the corruption and violence that has plagued present-day Africa. The Wretched of the Earth has had a major impact on civil rights, anticolonialism, and black consciousness movements around the world, and this bold new translation by Richard Philcox reaffirms it as a landmark.

absolutely fundamental, incredible, clear, resounding. i actually found much of fanon's insight into the violence of the colonial situation applicable to an understanding of the omnipresent coercion and dehumanization in child abuse, psychiatry, etc. truly an essential read and an excellent litmus test for who is really with it

eris

This is a book everyone, especially white people, should read. I read it in English, which has an addendum about how the translator & editor were going back and forth regarding certain words like 'colonised' → 'colonist', trying to more accurately represent the state pushed onto those people by the white colonizers. Even the word 'colonizer' gives power to people that shouldn't have it.
This version also tries to simplify the "1950s pompous writing style", as the translator writes, to make it easier to understand for younger generations.

Truthfully it's been difficult to read it. Some chapters I read twice because of their immense importance and... relevance, ~60 years later. Other chapters I read with a knot in my stomach, especially those that describe in detail methods of torture the French state was conducting in Algeria, just... awful.

But it was in that chapter I learned in more depth about the psychiatric effects of racism, from his time as a resident psychiatrist at Pontorson, Mont Saint-Michel, dealing with victims of racism but also torture — on both ends, which I found fascinating. Although I have zero empathy for police, it has a few stories about the trauma those pieces of shit also felt from the immense amount of people they tortured, day in, day out. Hope they rot in hell forever. I piss on their graves.

But anyway, here's a good quote:

“The truth is that colonization, in its very essence, already appeared to be a great purveyor of psychiatric hospitals. [...] Because it is a systematized negation of the other, a frenzied determination to deny the other any attribute of humanity, colonialism forces the colonized to constantly ask the question: Who am I in reality?”

I loved the sprinkled parallels to Palestine throughout the book, but also zooming out and pointing out how deeply rooted racism is on the whole planet. We should be ashamed of ourselves.

The one thing I hated with a passion was his speciesism. He talks about slavery but casually writes a story about solidarity — how poor families should lend their only donkey to transport revolutionaries into battle. And if the donkey gets gunned down they should not get mad, they should only ask if the revolutionary survived. Cognitive dissonance at its finest.

elizabeth

Fanon presents a cogent and devastating exploration of the "colonial situation" and a compelling argument for using the master's tools to dismantle the master's house. Well, not only that the colonized people can or should use those tools, but that they must. As Sartre so succinctly puts it in his chilling introduction: "no gentleness can efface the marks of violence; only violence itself can destroy them." Fanon's observations of the worlds of the colonizer and colonized--divided by barracks and police stations and generating an "atmospheric violence"--seems eternally pertinent.

This would all be enough, but Fanon also lays out an intelligible vision of a post-colonial nation involving the development of a decentralized government and a decolonized consciousness.

I haven't wholeheartedly identified as a pacifist but I also haven't not identified as one. I struggle with the idea that violent means, even if justly exacted, can achieve truly peaceful ends where a new form of nation and power--not modeled off Europe or the US or defined only in relation to colonizers--can take hold. But my own lack of surety about this isn't on Fanon, nor is it a failure of his argument. This is about as not-a-pacifist as I've ever felt. 

"You must open this book and enter into it."

Zack Dihel

Alexander Enriquez

It's been awhile since i've read this book. I should read it again.

The author takes the perspective of the colonized, with no efforts whatsoever to empathize or explain the reasons behind those that oppose them. While I agree that western society's values are pure hipocrisy, especially in the eyes of the colonized, I can't enjoy a one-sided narrative. 

The Wretched of the Earth

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