- Hello Delphine Chaume.
- Hello.
-Welcome to this Forum of
the Humanities, which you already know well
as you were interviewed last year
about the “Rumour in Orléans”.
Today we are here to talk about
another classic of the human sciences,
namely “The Wretched of the Earth”
by Frantz Fanon.
And you’re commenting under two hats:
you are the producer of “Un livre un jour”
(“One book, one day”) on France Télévisions
and you are also regularly involved with
different undergraduate courses
in the ESCE International Business School.
So today we’re going to talk about
”The Wretched of the Earth” by Frantz Fanon.
A choice you suggested to me which I
then went on to discover.
Of course, I knew of the text,
but I had never read it.
And I was struck by this text, which
became an instant classic,
by its style: we really don’t expect,
when reading a classic,
particularly in human sciences,
to find such an explosive style
in classical literature.
I will start with an example
because
I think that it will explain
this better.
“For if, in fact, my life ...”
This is Frantz Fanon speaking
“...  is worth as much as the settler's,
his glance no longer shrivels me up
nor freezes me, and his
voice no longer turns me into stone.
I am no longer on tenterhooks in his presence;
in fact, I don't give a damn for him.”
Yes, so this is basically Frantz Fanon’s
style, it’s very lyrical,
very forceful, and full of import.
In fact, he mixes registers,
levels of language. So it’s both a
highly formal language
and, at the same time, highly crude.
The registers are also different,
because there’s political analysis,
at the same time as a cultural analysis,
like clinical cases,
because he was a psychiatrist,
something we’ll come back to.
So very concrete at the same time,
and the work encompasses the entire situation
of the colonised countries: this text
is both an alarm call and, at the same time,
highly visionary, because it
foresees all of the difficulties
of independence.
And it’s a very specific context
given that the text was published in ‘61.
So, well, in Algeria at that time,
 on 11 April, De Gaulle gave his speech
about Algeria having the potential to
be a sovereign nation state.
22 April marked the Generals’ putsch,
and on 17 October ‘61, so very shortly
before this text appeared,
there was the protest that turned
into a massacre in Paris.
The Massacre of the Algerians.
And so, when this text was published
by Éditions Maspero
it was immediately banned upon leaving
the printers, on the grounds of it being
an attack on the state’s domestic security.
But it was still covertly circulated,
and the press took considerable
note of it, mainly due to the preface
by Jean-Paul Sartre.
Yes, this was also one of the elements that
gave the text such notoriety:
it was Jean-Paul Sartre who wrote
the preface to “The Wretched of the Earth”.
In fact, the preface has been read more
than the text itself.
And Sartre remarks upon something: 
namely that it is the first time, he says,
that a text written
by a colonised person ...
Here, of course, I’m using the terms
of the time: does not address
Westerners, to warn them, to alarm them,
but the colonised themselves.
So it leaves us out, us Westerners.
We are reading a text
that is not aimed at us, and this may also
be part of the text’s power.
Yes, well, it also needs to be noted
that Frantz Fanon wrote it
when he was dying. He knew he was
going to die because he has leukaemia
so it’s a bit like a sort of last will
and testament, this text,
which is basically addressing
the disinherited of the poor countries,
and here again ...
There we are, the Wretched of the Earth.
It’s also the singularity of this text.
At this time, where the working class,
at this time, was not really interested
in what was happening in the colonies.
And Fanon puts it well in his text:
in fact, Marxist analysis do not
necessarily apply to poor countries,
to colonised countries,
because the leading species,
as he calls it, comes from elsewhere.
So such analyses are not necessarily
relevant. Marxist analyses.
It’s not dominator-dominated,
or even exploiter-exploited,
it’s foreigner-indigenous, in fact.
Absolutely, exactly. That’s it. And he
is also therefore not just interested
in the disinherited of the poor countries,
but in those who have been
dispossessed of their lands.
It’s really ... Anything that we might also
have criticised Fanon for subsequently:
this space of peasant Manicheism,
which is, however, truly the heart of
the discourse here: there’s highly specific
attention paid to the rural masses.
And then, to return to Sartre’s preface,
which is indeed very well known,
which managed, as you said, to
eclipse Fanon’s text a little.
In fact, this preface devotes little time
to Fanon’s text, because, in essence,
although Fanon is addressing the colonised,
the disinherited of the poor countries,
 Sartre is addressing Europeans.
So it’s not at all the same aim,
the same goal.
And then, above all, in fact, Sartre
goes on to radicalise Fanon’s position
on violence: Sartre justifies
violence, sometimes we could even accuse
Sartre of inciting criminality,
while Fanon, however, analyses violence,
makes it a physical necessity
for the colonised, in fact,
and doesn’t justify it like Sartre does.
With the words, here I have Sartre’s
words that caused the polemic at the time:
“You must kill: to shoot down a European
is to kill two birds with one stone,
to destroy an oppressor and the man
he oppresses at the same time:
there remains a dead man,
and a free man ...”
There, some of you will have read it,
and we can
interpret it as an apologia for
violence and for crime.
Which is not, in fact, something
Fanon says, far from it.
And, furthermore, when the text appeared
with this preface, which Fanon had asked
Sartre to write, Fanon remained silent,
which was not like him. He remained
silent regarding this preface but he asked
François Maspero to let him
explain himself at some point, that is,
to be able to respond in some way
to this preface, but he didn’t have
the time to do so.
Now there is, of course, something very
interesting in Sartre’s preface,
the way in which it turns the spotlight to
Europeans, and displays colonialism to us
as a Western product, and as, above
all, the mirror of our own neuroses.
This is the West that
built itself on the Declaration
of the Rights of Man: men are born
free and with equal rights.
The West, particularly the French,
the French Revolution, the heritage of
the French Revolution. Now, the fate reserved
for the colonised, for indigenous peoples,
completely falls out of this framework,
and suddenly there’s a discourse
at two speeds, truly split: between
a Western side with the right to egality,
and indigenous peoples stripped
of these rights
because they have been
stripped of humanity, animalised,
and we can see this in the discourse of the
time, in face, this removal of the humanity
of indigenous peoples.
Rendered less than nothing.
Yes, so in essence, what Fanon is
talking about, that is, the discourse
of the colony on the colonised,
is a zoological discourse: swarming, rapid
demographical growth, the yellow reptile, etc.
And if the colonised revolts, it’s not
just because he is dying of hunger, but
because he is considered to be an animal.
No just an animal, but entirely
dehumanised, in fact,
but also seen as an incarnation of evil..
And in a certain way the colony freezes
the colonised in this sphere of evil,
and this is what first provokes shame,
and then hate. And here we need to return
to Fanon and Fanon’s experience,
and his being a psychiatrist, as this
is really important for reading his text
and to best understand it. Fanon studied
medicine in France, but developed
a passion for philosophy,
anthropology, and, very quickly,
turned his attention to psychiatry.
He met François Tosquelles in the
Saint-Alban Hospital (France),
and François Tosquelles was an
anti-Franco Spanish psychiatrist.
And here Fanon began to understand
that politics, psyche, and somatic traits
are linked, entirely interconnected.
It was a real revelation for him.
And from there he returned to Algeria,
went to work at the Bilda Hospital in Algeria,
and he set about trying to change
the relationship between caregivers
and the lunatics. Here again we are using
the vocabulary of the time.
This is to say, as much from the point of view
of Europeans as of Algerian Muslims.
He would try to put the cultural referents,
social cues, and the language of the
Algerians, that is, the patients,
at the heart of the care.
Almost, in fact, a precursor
to ethnopsychiatry, we might say.
And here we get to a very important point,
and links up to what you were saying, that is:
in ‘56 he resigned, refusing, in fact,
to provide care, that is,
to de-alienate, and to put individuals at
the heart of society, because this
society is not just unfair:
it is an unequal society, a murderous one,
and he refused, in the end, to de-alienate
these individuals, that is, to render them
effective in this unfair society.
There’s also the subtlety you noted
in Fanon’s text, that perhaps isn’t
present in Sartre’s preface:
it’s that the violence Fanon talks about
and defends, or which he legitimises or, at
any rate, justifies, is the violence
that is first and foremost produced by the
colonial system in the body, spirit,
and, effectively, if this would then free
him, colonised him in this violence,
de-alienated him, this would, in the end,
be a justification of the colonial system.
So we see the interweaving between the
psyche and the social:
the two are intimately linked.
I’d like to suggest, Delphine, that
we listen to a passage that will just
bring us back to two important concepts:
violence of course, that we’ve just looked at,
and the question Manicheism,
the distinction between Good and Evil.
So I suggest we listen to
Boris Brugard on this topic.
Thus we see that the primary Manicheism
which governed colonial society is preserved
intact during the period of decolonization;
that is to say that the settler
never ceases to be the enemy, the opponent,
the foe that must be overthrown.
The oppressor, in his own sphere,
starts the process, a process
of domination, of exploitation
and of pillage,
and in the other sphere the coiled,
plundered creature which is the native
provides fodder for the process
as best he can,
the process which moves uninterruptedly
from the banks of the colonial territory
to the palaces and the docks
of the mother country.
In this becalmed zone the sea
has a smooth surface, the palm tree
stirs gently in the breeze, the waves lap
against the pebbles, and raw materials
are ceaselessly transported,
justifying the presence of the settler:
and all the while the native, bent double,
more dead than alive, exists interminably
in an unchanging dream.
The settler makes history;
his life is an epoch, an Odyssey.
He is the absolute beginning:
"This land was created by us";
he is the unceasing cause: "If we
leave, all is lost,
and the country will go back
to the Middle Ages."
Over against him torpid creatures,
wasted by fevers,
obsessed by ancestral customs,
 form an almost inorganic background
for the innovating dynamism
of colonial mercantilism.
The settler makes history and is conscious
of making it. And because he constantly refers
to the history of his mother country,
he clearly indicates that he himself
is the extension of that mother country.
Thus the history which he writes is not
the history of the country which he plunders
but the history of his own nation in regard
to all that she skims off,
all that she violates and starves.
The immobility to which the native
is condemned can only be called in question
if the native decides to put an end
to the history of colonization--
the history of pillage - and to bring
into existence the history of the nation--
the history of decolonization.
A world divided into compartments,
a motionless, Manicheistic world,
a world of statues:
the statue of the general
who carried out the conquest, the statue of
the engineer who built the bridge;
a world which is sure of itself, which crushes
with its stones the backs flayed by whips:
this is the colonial world
The native is a being hemmed in;
apartheid is simply one form of
the division into compartments
of the colonial world.
The first thing which the native
learns is to stay in his place, and
not to go beyond certain limits.
This is why the dreams of the native
are always of muscular prowess; his dreams
are of action and of aggression.
I dream I am jumping, swimming,
running, climbing;
I dream that I burst out laughing,
that I span a river in one stride,
or that I am followed by a flood of
motorcars which never catch up with me.
During the period of colonization,
the native never stops achieving his freedom
from nine in the evening
until six in the morning.
The colonized man will first manifest
this aggressiveness which has been
deposited in his bones against his own people.
This is the period when the black men
beat each other up, and the police
and magistrates do not know
which way to turn when faced with the
astonishing waves of crime in North Africa
We shall see later how this phenomenon
should be judged.
When the native is confronted with
the colonial order of things, he finds
he is in a state of permanent tension.
The settler's world is a hostile world,
which spurns the native, but at the same time
it is a world of which he is envious.
We have seen that the native never ceases
to dream of putting himself in the place
of the settler -- not of becoming
the settler but of substituting himself
for the settler. This hostile world,
ponderous and aggressive,
 because it fends off the colonized masses
with all the harshness it is capable of,
represents not merely a hell from which the
swiftest flight possible is desirable,
but also a paradise close at hand which is
guarded by terrible watchdogs.
In what we’ve just heard, one of the
key words is the “Manicheism”:
the distinction between Good and Evil.
But perhaps this is the difference
between the system, or the thought,
of Marxist dialectics:
a position, another, and exceeding this.
In the Manichean system
there is Good and Evil, which are
not the same depending on the
point of view you take, but the distinction
cannot be overcome:
there is no third position that can
surpass the other two.
There is no compromise possible.
Yes, exactly. This is to say, that the colonial
world is a compartmentalised world,
a world of nuances, with watertight
spheres. The settler’s city is a white,
smooth, clean, peaceful city. The native’s
city is a sombre, dirty city
of bad reputation. These are space that do
not overlap at all, and what we
need to note is that natives expelled
from the homeland will amass
at the edge of the colonial city,
hoping to enter it but, in fact,
permanently rejected to the outside,
in shanty towns, waiting to be able
to enter in, not being able to enter.
And it is also here that this situation
generates resentment and violence:
because this frustration first manifests
between the natives. That is to say,
that the violence first manifest between ...
But the violence, it is there.
It is generated by the shame
and hate we were just talking about.
And an outlet is needed for
this violence. So this can be
dancing, because dancing represents
a permissive circle, where you can,
in fact, some sort of superiority,
of some kind, on the part of the native.
There may be the return of terrifying myths
because here we can draw on an assumed or
fantasy culture, or scraps of culture
which remain but which allow
a semblance of identity, which has
been lost due to the dehumanising
glance of the settler, to be rediscovered.
Therefore, and here, it is also
very interesting that Fanon
was a psychiatrist, because, basically,
he describes the colonial city from the angle
of muscular physical troubles
and mental troubles.
And he describes the colonial system,
not as an ideology,
but as a system of internment
that will change both
the deep-set personality of the natives,
but also their psyche.
And all of this while locking them
in one place, confining them,
even if in open air, and when we prepared
this meeting we mentioned the paralle
l that can be made with the situation today,
namely the situation in certain
suburban areas where things can easily
be read in the light, or under the
matrix set out by Frantz Fanon. When urban
violence exists it is
often produced within populations
who themselves are fenced off
among themselves in one geographic zone,
rather than being directed outwards.
When they take this to the institutions
representing the outside that come
to the heart of the territory, and I remind
our students of something that I find edifying
but that we too often forget: “banlieue”,
(the French for “suburb”)
stems from the “lieu du banc”.
The place of banishment, the place
of exclusion. The etymology itself
says everything. So, we see that Fanon has
an eye on the colonised territories,
but that he also shows all the violence
of which the Western system,
the capitalist system, is capable, exerted
on the body, on the most intimate spaces.
Not due to ideology:
within the body, it’s the body that suffers.
And so it is the body that will react
and to call on the violence expressed
by Fanon is to transform this violence,
which is auto-cannibalistic, we eat ourselves,
towards the outside, to reconcile ourselves.
Yes, so this goes even further than
reconciliation. Effectively, in fact,
we can see parallels with other
situations because, in reality, this text
by Fanon is a text about oppression.
Whatever form this oppression may take.
Why does he launch this alarm call?
It’s because he sees this violence,
but he tells himself that this violence
must be organised, it cannot
be efficient, it cannot be
contained. This is what the colonial
administration is trying to do, but
it is not possible.
It must be organised in the battle,
and in the battle, there, in that moment,
for independence.
This is on multiple levels: on the collective
level, for it is this that will also
allow a future nature to be built,
each one being violent, a violent chain
link, violent groups will recognise each
other and the future
nation is therefore united.
This is at the collective level.
And at the collective level we must also,
given this Manichean world we
talked about, we must completely abolish
the colonial sphere, the spheres.
- The spheres of the other, of the foreign.
- Of the foreign. We can only abolish them.
And so, by making this reality explode
through battle, the battle will allow
the flowering of a new reality:
of other unknown facets, in fact,
up to the present of the native,
of reality.
And so the violence is, in reality,
just a means of battle.
But it is completely necessary, it
is fundamental, it is physical,
and it is necessary because it is
via violence that the native will be able
to decode this new reality.
And then, what’s really interesting,
is that Fanon does not just speak
on a collective level, but also
on an individual level. It’s that
the violence will allow the native, that is,
the individual, to free himself
from the inferiority in which he had been
confined by the settler.
This will allow him to escape the glance
that has alienated him
and enclosed him until now.
And this will in turn allow him to raise
himself to the level of leader. That’s it.
So we can clearly see that it’s not
an apologia of violence for violence.
Far from it.
It’s that violence has a function.
So it has been called redemptive but it is
not really redemptive. A function for
creating the new man, and, above all,
the main function is, as Fanon states,
that of decolonising the being. That’s it.
So, this could also be a purifying
function, rather than redemptive.
Yes, in any case, one of reforming,
recreating one’s being,
without, in fact, falling back into tradition.
Because this is also a pitfall
that Fanon sees coming, that is:
okay, we’re based on the values
of the white man, of the settler; 
let’s reject them and rehabilitate
tradition and customs.
Something he finds entirely 
counter-productive. Because for him,
to turn back to the past is the opposite
of building a nation.
It is the opposite of opening you
mind, and it’s also the opposite of
culture for him since, for him, custom
is a deterioration of culture.
When reading the book I wasn’t able to
stop myself making a connection with
the Regime of Terror under the
French Revolution as well. Now, it’s a
reading that could be open to criticism
or criticised. I had the feeling
when reading it that, for him, violence
was the group, the collective tactic
and strategy. That is to say, the short-term,
mid-term, and long-term. And that, in fact,
no emancipation or independence process
could succeed unless it ran
right to the end of its course. And, so,
violence helps it get there.
And the parallel with the Terror is fairly
striking because, for those trying
to rehabilitate the period of the Terror
something I’m not trying to do, this reading
is interesting from the point of view that
if we consider the French Revolution
right up to its conclusion,
people say: it was a way to complete
a revolutionary process which would
otherwise have stayed at the ambush stage.
And with Frantz Fanon we enter another
dimension: it’s the colonised, the native
who speaks and thinks the events
happening around him, this events
of independence that appear.
To see what is threatening these processes
of independence and emancipation
from the inside. And here we are both
struck by it: there is a completely
visionary dimension, as if Fanon almost
perfectly managed to predict the risks
and obstacles that would arrive
in the 60s, 70s, and even 80s.
Entirely. In my opinion, but this is
personal, it is precisely because he
encountered mental problems on an individual
level that he was able to foresee that.
That is to say, truly foresee what
really happened subsequently.
And he really goes far into the concrete aspects
of his fears and recommendations
for avoiding what he predicts.
So, in particular, he
predicts the problematic role of the leader
after independence. That is to say that
the leader, rather than helping the people
and supporting the people in building
the nation, completely fixes things in place.
Expands the power of the national bourgeoisie,
dwells on the magnified history
of the fights for independence, and so
makes the people regress towards the past
instead of leading them towards the future.
And the leader becomes a sort
of transmission built, a facilitator,
in the end, of the petty dealings
of the national bourgeoisie.
Regarding the role of the national bourgeoisie,
too, he very quickly foresees that, panicked,
not knowing what to do in the face
of independence, the national bourgeoisie
will seek the help of the colonial bourgeoisie
 and operate in exactly the same manner.
That is to say, by filling the posts
left vacant by the national bourgeoisie,
creating special privileges, leading to the
emergency of an entirely corrupt system
and continuing to nationalise the economy,
not for the population, but for
their insignificant personal dealings.
So, he sees that too. And what he
fears is the emergence of dictatorship,
and so here this links back up to what
you were saying. The emergence
of dictatorship, and so the role of the party:
what should the role of the party
be in under-developed countries?
And here ... that's where he has
very concrete recommendations.
He says: there, in fact, the priority must
be the back-country, the priority is the
rural masses. The party must not
only be in contact with the population,
rather the party must be the people’s
mode of expression.
So it needs to decentralise, party officers
must be placed in all rural zones...
There you go. This goes quite far.
In the same way,
on the question of the youth, since there too
he predicts that the youth
may well be dispossessed,
since it is more so young people
who work the earth. So this youth
must be brought back to the fields,
to the earth, but also to school,
and not to stages.
This is, indeed, quite strong. So, not
to stages but to the fields
and to school. So he places everything
on the education of the masses, the education
of the youth, because this will
complete the process of creating the new
man, educating him. And he says: the youth
must be politicised. But to politicise
the youth, for Fanon, does not mean
create a political discourse.
It means open the world of the mind.
That’s it. And, in fact, there are several
possible readings of this text
by Fanon because, for me, it is really an
instrumental text with a vast number of
potential analysis de-contextualised,
even from what he is talking about, from
the colonial context, etc. To predict
the mechanisms of violence,
the dictatorial mechanisms, even
the mechanisms of radicalisation.
Yes, I believe that in reading it,
and I invite the students to do that
if they wish, they'll discover a text
that is interesting due to its form
and style -- the number of parallels that
can be made with the current situation ...
So, of course, parallels can always be
a little misleading, but it is
intellectually stimulating to think through
the current era with Frantz Fanon.
- Definitely.
- Thank you Delphine!
Thank you!
