FRANK WILDERSON: One of the things that makes
Fanon extremely valuable, whether you are
a revolutionary or whether you are a psychologist
or a psychiatrist or a psychoanalyst, or whether
you are a student, is his explanatory power.
About 15 years ago I was struck by a comment
that Subcomandante Marcos made to the media
when they came to the Zapatista stronghold.
And he said, one of the reasons why the Mexican
government hates us so much is because we
can explain everything. We can explain everything.
And I just got a big kick out of that.
I think that is--if that's true of Subcomandante
Marcos then it is three and ten times truer
of Frantz Fanon. You can go to Frantz Fanon
to explain everything. For example, the bombings
that took place in Paris, there's a pithy
little two-sentences here from a woman named
Deborah Wyrick, who wrote a book, Frantz Fanon
for Beginners, that I use for my undergrads
and even my grad students. And she writes
this--but she's talking about the Algerian
revolution.
She writes: French intellectuals and leftists
present a certain kind of problem. Although
their politics should put them in the category
of friends of the Algerian revolution, they
are either--they either demonstrate what Fanon
calls, quote, pseudo-solidarity, or have abandoned
the cause completely. Militant Algerian revolutionary
tactics throw them into a panic. By condemning
a, quote, terrorist--in quotations--a terrorist
act, the intelligentsia loses sight of the
reasons why violence is necessary to overturn
colonial rule, a point that Fanon talks about
in Wretched of the Earth. This is a forest
and the trees problem based on a misguided
emphasis on the individual. In this type of
thinking, a single act of brutality or a single
act of kindness eclipses the entire struggle.
Well, that's clearly what's happening here.
I'm not on the side of ISIL, I'm damn sure
not on the side of the French and the Americans.
But what you see is all the caring energy
for the recent attacks in Paris, the same
pattern of caring energy going to these individuated,
non-Arab and non-black subjects. And that,
unfortunately, is something that Fanon can
go on to explain as something that happens
when Arabs are aggressing against blacks,
as in Mauritania. So you have these hydraulics
of whiteness that impose itself on every scale
of abstraction that Fanon has explained. And
precisely what that means is that the darker
you are, and blackness is the darkest, you
can only be imagined, you can only be categorized
in the news, as a kind of perpetrator or terrorist.
But no caring energy towards your victimhood
can come forth. So that's why we have all
this energy about Paris, and not about Kenya
several years go.
I think it's of value today, because there
are kind of, in the brief time we have, there
are two big ideas in what I just said that
are traced throughout all of Fanon, and that
are really important. One big idea is, as
brother Dhoruba bin-Wahad from the Black Liberation
Army said on your radio show a while back,
is that the colonized world or the Western
state demands that the sovereign--that they
have a sovereign right over violence. So that
they can use whatever violence they want for
their own needs, whether to get oil or to
repress black liberation, and that violence
is always characterized, narrativized as legitimate.
And it enters our minds as a legitimate form
of violence.
So any type of response to that, which is
what Fanon was talking about in his first
chapter of The Wretched of the Earth, has
two problems. One, it is actually a tactical
problem of finding the kind of strength and
paramilitary capacity to fight state violence.
But two, and which is more important, is finding
a way to legitimate your own response to that
violence in your own head first, and in the
heads of people like you second. Then in the
heads of the rest of the world.
So what we have is a situation in which the--again,
I'm not on the side of ISIL for many different
reasons, but what is clear here is that Fanon's
racial analysis is never not in the mix. It's
always in the mix. Here is a Western power
that is responsible, along with the United
States, for the problems in the Middle East.
Responsible for millions of deaths in the
Middle East. They get hundreds of deaths on
one day, and suddenly they're narrativized
as victims. The only way they can do that,
narrativize themselves as victims and make
it stick, to understand that you go from Fanon's
second book, Wretched of the Earth, back to
his first book, Black Skin White Masks, and
you find the strategies of narration which
are subtended, meaning connected to structural
violence, that allow for the idea that white
is right to be naturalized.
Those strategies have never gone away. They've
been shot through a prism and they've changed,
but I would say that they've been more intensified.
And so Fanon is more important today than
he's ever been.
---
I think one of the reasons that Fanon is--Fanon
is popular amongst academics partially because
his theories of psychoanalysis, part of the
bedrock for racializing psychoanalysis, Lacan
and Freud didn't think of the psychoanalytic
subject, the person on the couch, as a raced
person. And Fanon comes in and he says, no,
this is what's most important in terms of
value in the unconscious, whether one is black
or not.
And as a result, that strain of Fanon allows
black people to understand the dynamics of
their own suffering for themselves and to
themselves, and allows academics to do their
work in ways that Lacan was able to help them
with. For activists, there's a way in which
reading Fanon will strengthen your--I could
say your ethical backbone.
One of the things that Fanon's writing does
is not just the content, but it's the style.
In other words there's an irreverence that
he has towards everything that the colony
and the colonist has set up. And that irreverence
is something that's really hard to kind of
get into your bones and your zeitgeist. So
for example, one starts off as an activist
wanting to right the wrongs and make reforms
in civil society. And one gets frustrated
because civil society morphs and shapeshifts
to the point where it will make reforms on
one side but intensify the oppression on the
other side.
One reads Fanon, and in the first few pages
of Wretched of the Earth one gets a sense
that it's okay to be against the entire project
of the world. You don't have to whittle down
your antagonistic energy towards substantiating
various acts of discrimination. Fanon clearly
calls the settlers' community, the settlers'
side of town, a side of town that is unethical
precisely because it's parasitic upon the
casbah, or the ghetto, or the township. And
so one then can be against European space
and time as opposed to simply against European
acts of discrimination. And he says, you know,
he puts in a really pithy phrase. He says,
when the settler, when the native understands
that the settler believes in the way, just
the same way that the native believes that
this shapes the world in a very necessary
manner, so it allows you to laugh and release
yourself of the moral guilt that comes along
with your project and the way you've been
raised, I'd say, in a very simple nutshell.
That's a very complicated question. The first
answer is yes, he did. You have to remember
that MK was basically run by the Communist
Party. 15,000 people in Umkhonto we Sizwe,
90-95 percent of them were Communist Party
members. But they were black. So they were
black, having come out of Biko's Black Consciousness,
primarily, in the '70s and gone into MK. So
they came with Fanon. Now, when they come
with Fanon into MK and the Communist Party,
the Communist Party is a line to the Soviet
Union. And it says to them, well, Fanon has
an unsophisticated reading of Marxism. The
way he stretches Marxism in The Wretched of
the Earth is not okay.
So the point is that there's a tension there,
because the black cadre are very much invested
in Fanon. The multicultural central committee
understands this. But I would say that Fanon
is the kind of cult figure of the black cadre
of MK, but his work does not figure into the
authorized political discourse of the Communist
Party because it's aligned with the Soviet
Union. But we must remember that one does
18 months in prison if one gets caught with
The Wretched of the Earth. So that alone,
that alone catalyzes, you know, captures the
imagination of black people. It's a tension,
that's what I'm trying to explain.
