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TAKING FRANTZ FANON AT HIS WORD  
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Sazi Bongwe
September 18, 2024
The Nation
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_ There has been an effort to negate Fanon’s ideas and sever them
from the people of Palestine. But in his work, I find the beginning of
a credible path towards liberation. _

Frantz Fanon at a press conference in 1959., Wikimedia

 

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On a biting day last March, I sought shelter in a basement lecture
hall where I hoped, finally, we would stop beating around the bush. My
social theory survey class had discussed the communist revolution with
Karl Marx, “the revolution that never happened” with Simone de
Beauvoir, and was now turning to the national revolution, convening
for our lecture on Frantz Fanon. By that time, Israel had killed more
than 32,000 Palestinians in Gaza in its brazen campaign of genocidal
bombing and starvation.

We were assigned readings from Black Skin, White Masks and The
Wretched of the Earth. I anticipated our discussion to center the
latter, but Fanon’s anti-colonial treatise, written against the
backdrop of the Algerians’ struggle for independence from France,
was squeezed into the tail end of the two-hour lecture. Our professor
closed with a frantic footnote: “I just want to caution you against
thinking of Fanon as the bloodthirsty celebrator of violence he’s
often made out to be.”

I was disturbed. That same sentiment seems to have made its way to
center stage in the months since October 2023, crowding out an honest,
intellectual reappraisal of Fanon’s work. Most notably, in
“Vengeful Pathologies,” the widely circulated essay by Adam
Shatz—who recently published a new biography on Fanon—the argument
has been advanced: All that is inflammatory in “On Violence,” the
first chapter of The Wretched of the Earth, is to be qualified, viewed
in a larger context, and, ultimately, negated. Fanon must not be taken
at his word.

The argument goes that Jean-Paul Sartre’s infamous, incendiary
preface to The Wretched of the Earth ran away with the book, and
served to associate Fanon chiefly with the glorification of violence.
Indeed, in the context of Algeria, it was Sartre and not Fanon who
wrote: “In the first phase of the revolt, killing is a necessity:
killing a European is killing two birds with one stone, eliminating in
one go oppressor and oppressed: leaving one man dead and the other man
free.”

Outside of the militant left, Sartre’s words were hardly ever
popular: not to Hannah Arendt—who scorned the preface in “On
Violence” (1970)—and not to a sizable crowd who, in the decades
since, have snuffed out even the mere mention of Fanon in reference to
the contemporary world, lest it falsely rile up the left-leaning
youth. In recent months, though, this crowd has gotten louder, and
more forceful. If Sartre fanned the flame, then in these past few
months writers and academics have tried their hardest to extinguish
it.

In recent months, though, this crowd has gotten louder, and more
forceful. If Sartre fanned the flame, then in these past few months
writers and academics have tried their hardest to extinguish it.

This turn doesn’t come out of nowhere. I’d thought the unbearable
violence of Israel’s genocide and its decades-long settler
colonialism would invigorate a closer reading of Fanon, close enough
to give guidance in our obfuscated moment, but I was wrong. The effort
to terminally trouble Fanon’s relationship to violence cloaks a
pernicious move to deny him to the Palestinian people.

If we leave the record at that, I believe we do Fanon—and, indeed,
the people of Palestine—a great injustice.

Just as recent writings on Fanon have sought to neuter him, they also
seem intent on observing and even stretching further the gulf between
Fanon’s Algeria and today’s Palestine, so as to make the two
incommunicable to each other. The so-called “question of
Palestine” is framed as a situation altogether new, an anomaly too
complex to diagnose, let alone solve. The door between Palestine and
any emancipatory project or theory that has come before it is closed,
and left outside is the world Fanon described.

But to read _The Wretched of the Earth _today is to discover that
Fanon comes frighteningly, uncannily close in directing us to think
about the Palestinian quest for liberation.

In October 2003, Tony Judt declared
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two-state solution over. “The Middle East peace process is
finished,” he wrote. “It did not die: it was killed.” Twenty
years later, Abdaljawad Omar, a Palestinian writer, saw October 7
rising out of its ashes, out of “the absence of a clear political
path forward…the exhaustion of political, diplomatic, and legal
avenues.” (And for those who prescribe Gandhi-style nonviolence to
the Palestinians, who could forget Israel’s brutal suppression
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the Great March of Return in 2018–19, with 214 Palestinians killed
and over 36,000 injured?)

What then? If the political road is closed, and the road of
resistance, violent and nonviolent alike, is closed too, what ought
the Palestinian people do to win their freedom?

Fanon, as he wrote _The Wretched of the Earth _in 1961, the year of
his death, was buoyed by the winds of change that had brought
decolonized, independent states into being across Africa. News from
the rest of the continent gave Fanon the optimism to write that “the
peoples of the Third World are in the process of shattering their
chains, and what is extraordinary is that they succeed.” He had one
exception in mind, though: “The truth is that no colonialist country
today is capable of mounting the only form of repression which would
have a chance of succeeding, i.e., a prolonged and large scale
military occupation.”

As Israel uses starvation as a weapon of war in Gaza, it is embarking
on a parallel effort to starve the Palestinian people of hope. Israel,
with the support of the United States, has turned October 7 into the
sole reason for the Palestinian people’s continued suffering and
slaughter. Israel has made it clear that with every bomb it is
teaching a lesson: Resistance is futile; resist at the risk of
annihilation. The Palestinian’s suffering, Israel declares to the
world, is all the fault of the Palestinians for daring to resist.

Fanon understood this, paraphrasing speech he often saw turned against
the colonized: “What aberration of the mind drives these famished,
enfeebled men lacking technology and organizational resources to think
that only violence can liberate them faced with the occupier’s
military and economic might? How can they hope to triumph?”

Fanon acutely approximates the Palestinian predicament. He understood
what it meant for oppressed people to face military might. When
Fanon’s words are belied or neutered at precisely the moment when
Palestinians are calling for the world to help keep them from
annihilation, the implicit message is that the only moral thing for
the Palestinian people to do is stand beneath the falling bombs.

Those who have branded themselves as friends of Palestine
pre–October 7 have often been among the loudest in nullifying
Palestinian resistance since. They affirm the right of oppressed
peoples to resist in the abstract, but insist that Hamas’s attack
was outside the bounds of the right to resist—too inhumane,
depraved, barbaric even. Any attempt to enlist Fanon to argue
otherwise is misguided, vulgar. Seemingly in response to such voices,
Fanon wrote, “During the period of decolonization the colonized are
called upon to be reasonable.”

Though I first came to the text of _The Wretched of the Earth _this
past semester, Fanon was an almost permanent fixture of my upbringing
in a post-colonial, post-apartheid South Africa trying to understand
where it all went wrong. No words were more ingrained into my mind
than those at the beginning of “On National Culture,” _The
Wretched of the Earth_’s fourth chapter: “Each generation must,
out of relative obscurity, discover its mission, fulfill it, or betray
it.”

My question was this: What mission did Fanon identify for himself and
for his generation? I read on: “For us who are determined to break
the back of colonialism, our historic mission is to authorize every
revolt, every desperate act, and every attack aborted or drowned in
blood.”

In the original French, Fanon uses the verb _ordonner_—variously
translated as “authorize,” “sanction,” “ordain.” If we
understand “Colonial War and Disorders” as Fanon attending to the
self-injurious, regrettable implications of gratuitous violence
against the oppressor, then this passage in “On National Culture”
shows him reckoning with those implications. And yet, he insists on
the word “every,” because he believed that familiarity with
colonialism’s horror meant an understanding of the horror that could
(and would) be turned back against it.

Hamas’s vision of liberation and how to achieve it differ from what
mine might be, and I hardly celebrate its government in Gaza, but I
reject the idea that in trying to understand Hamas’s position within
the Palestinian political landscape critically, I’ve discarded my
intellect and merely belong to “a cult of force.”

Fanon did not rejoice at acts of armed struggle he might have found
reprehensible, but he did not condemn them either. He understood where
they came from, and where those who carried them out thought they were
going: the destruction of colonialism. Fanon, too, might have recoiled
at the violence he saw, but his mission was, nonetheless, to authorize
it, because ultimately he wanted every act of violence—that of the
colonizer and the colonized—to end.

What was missing in the lecture I attended, and in this new wave of
writing, is the central purpose of Fanon’s work: the defeat of
colonialism. Fanon was a complex, varied thinker, one who attended to
the ambivalences of the struggle against colonialism. But he did so,
always, as someone struggling against colonialism. He understood, for
instance, that it was indeed possible to read across space and time,
writing, “The great victory of the Vietnamese people at Dien Bien
Phu is no longer strictly speaking a Vietnamese victory. From July
1954 onward the colonial peoples have been asking themselves: ‘What
must we do to achieve a Dien Bien Phu?’”

And he does not shy away from undertaking acts of temporal and
geographical translation. “We should never lose sight of the fact
that this struggle could have broken out anywhere,” he maintains.
“Even today it can break out anywhere where colonialism intends to
stay.”

Fanon was unflinching in his description of the perils of violent
resistance because he wanted us to think imaginatively about the road
to freedom—and to contend with all that it includes. To Fanon, the
implications of the defeat of colonialism were not merely a new nation
but a new man, an entirely new humanism. There are many ways of
thinking that emanate from single lines in _The Wretched of the
Earth. _I’m not sure that any one reader can fully _get _Fanon.
The question is, which view does one put one’s weight behind? How
does one choose to present Fanon? And to what end?

There is fruit in reading Fanon in search of a credible path to
liberation for the people of Palestine. Fanon is worth returning to
for those of us invested in the freedom of the Palestinians in much
the same way that Shakespeare is worth returning to for readers of
literature: the granting of a common language, a common point of
departure. And like all oppressed people, the Palestinians have not
just the right, but also the imperative to resist. They must be
allowed to determine what that resistance looks like. They must be
allowed to ask: What will a free Palestine look like? What must we do
to realize it?

Pages of _The Wretched of the Earth _cannot be ripped out and stuck
in place of a Palestinian emancipatory manifesto, but they exclaim
something crucial: a nation, much like hope, is forged in resistance.

_SAZI BONGWE is a South African writer studying English at Harvard
College._

_Copyright c 2024 THE NATION. Reprinted with permission. May not be
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* Palestine
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* Gaza
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* Israel
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* Frantz Fanon
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* Algeria
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* colonialism
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* liberation struggles
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* armed struggle
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