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ÿþ<titleÿþ>ÿþNew Socialist Magazine, Frantz Fanon: Critic of Colonialism - Interviewÿþ</title>ÿþ
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ÿþ<bÿþ>ÿþFrantz Fanon:
ÿþ<brÿþ>ÿþ Critic of Colonialism
ÿþ<brÿþ>ÿþ</b>ÿþ</font>ÿþ<brÿþ>ÿþ<brÿþ>ÿþ

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ÿþ<iÿþ>ÿþNew Socialist Magazine, November 1996ÿþ</i>ÿþ<brÿþ>ÿþ<brÿþ>ÿþ<brÿþ>ÿþ
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ÿþ<fontÿþ ÿþsize="1"ÿþ>ÿþFrantz Fanon (1925-61) was the most influential and controversial theorist of the anti-colonial revolutions of the post-World War II period. In books such as Black Skins, White Masks; A Dying Colonialism; Toward the African Revolution and The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon explored the psychological effects of colonization and the revolutionary struggle against racism and colonialism. In recent years there has been a renewal of interest in Fanon's writings. New Socialist recently discussed Fanon's life and work with ATO SEKYI-OTU, an expert on Fanon's thought, who teaches social science and African studies at York University in Toronto and is the author of the forthcoming book, Fanon's Dialectic of Experience (Harvard University Press, winter 1997).ÿþ</font>ÿþ<brÿþ>ÿþ<brÿþ>ÿþ

ÿþ<bÿþ>ÿþ Could you briefly sketch Fanon's biography and indicate the main concerns of his work? 
ÿþ</b>ÿþ
ÿþ<brÿþ>ÿþ<brÿþ>ÿþ
Fanon was born in Martinique in 1925, studied with the person who would become the founding figure of the great literary-cultural movement called "negritude," namely Aimé Cesaire. And like anybody growing up then in Martinique, as a child he considered himself completely French, a French loyalist. He volunteered ÿþ&shyp;ÿþ he wasn't drafted ÿþ&shyp;ÿþ to fight for France in the Second World War, and his experiences began to make him wonder about this unquestioned allegiance to France. 

ÿþ<brÿþ>ÿþ<brÿþ>ÿþ
At the end of the war he goes to study medicine in France, specializes in psychiatry -- ironically, because he found surgery and its associations with blood a bit squeamish. He wanted to go and work initially in sub-Saharan Africa after his studies but eventually he went to Algeria and worked in a hospital. He soon became the chief psychiatric resident. All this coincided with the outbreak of the Algerian national liberation movement. Fanon finds himself treating members of the Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN), begins to find his position untenable, and writes in 1956 a famous letter of resignation to the resident French minister saying that he could not work impartially as a psychiatrist and that he will be lending support to the Algerian national liberation movement. So he resigns, helps the FLN in Algeria, in Tunisia, travels around Africa as the ambassador in Ghana. 

ÿþ<brÿþ>ÿþ<brÿþ>ÿþ
In 1954 he wrote his first book, Black Skin, White Masks; then he wrote A Dying Colonialism on aspects of the Algerian experience of social transformation covering issues of gender, family, medicine, the use of the French language, and so on. Eventually he discovered that he had leukemia and was sent to the Soviet Union in 1960 and they advised that he be sent to Bethesda Hospital in Washington with, the rumour goes, the CIA hovering around his sick body - some say delaying his hospitalization which may have had something to do with his early, untimely death. The Wretched of the Earth was published shortly after he died, but not before Jean-Paul Sartre had written a famous Introduction to it. It is largely through The Wretched of the Earth that he was known in most of the 1960s and early '70s, until this new revival which, I think, is largely devoted to his very first book, Black Skin, White Masks. By all accounts he's one of the most important figures of the 20th century both in terms of revolutionary theory and practice. 

ÿþ<brÿþ>ÿþ<brÿþ>ÿþ
ÿþ<bÿþ>ÿþ It's been 35 years since Fanon died, yet there seems to be a resurgent interest in his life and his writings. What explains this? 
ÿþ</b>ÿþ
ÿþ<brÿþ>ÿþ<brÿþ>ÿþ
It's quite a curious phenomenon, largely coming from the North American and English academy. This resurgence is fueled by those looking for other precursors of post modernism, who see in Fanon a sort of precocious ancestor, but one who occasionally betrays their expectations. The very provenance of this revival in the North American academy seems to me to lead to the "othering" of the other Fanon. It is nevertheless a healthy phenomenon that, in looking for figures outside the western canon, Fanon has been resuscitated. 


ÿþ<brÿþ>ÿþ<brÿþ>ÿþ
ÿþ<bÿþ>ÿþ How would you position your own interpretation of Fanon in relationship to some of these searches for ancestors? What for you is most important and enduring about Fanon's work? 
ÿþ</b>ÿþ
ÿþ<brÿþ>ÿþ<brÿþ>ÿþ
I suppose though I live here, in the West, I'm concerned about issues of "the other" with which the current reading of Fanon is predominantly obsessed. I think perhaps Fanon as the analyst, if you want the pathologist, of what has happened in post-independence societies is what concerns me most. And I'm very worried that the Fanon of the important third chapter of The Wretched of the Earth ÿþ&shyp;ÿþ unfortunately mistranslated as "The Pitfalls of National Consciousness" -- is in danger of being forgotten: the Fanon who offered us an analysis of class malformations and their consequences for the sort of repressive post-colonial regimes we've had for the past 30 years. That Fanon is completely forgotten in this almost exclusive emphasis on the dynamics of desire, and otherness, and so on. Ironically that other Fanon is being "othered." The two Fanons are not mutually exclusive because, if you really understand the nature of the colonial condition - the colonizer/colonized relationship -- then you also see the challenges confronting the national liberation movement that was ostensibly mounted to destroy it. 


ÿþ<brÿþ>ÿþ<brÿþ>ÿþ
The consequences of that colonial analysis for post-independence societies seem to have been completely forgotten in these contemporary readings which deal with important issues of race, and have uncovered aspects of Fanon that people are not very comfortable with, like evidences of homophobia in Black Skin, White Masks. But these issues apart, questions of class and the terrible consequences of what has come to be called "flag independence," spearheaded by what he rightly or wrongly called "the national bourgeoisie" -- that story, I think, needs to be recalled. 
ÿþ<brÿþ>ÿþ<brÿþ>ÿþ
ÿþ<bÿþ>ÿþ Most people who know something about Fanon and about The Wretched of the Earth immediately focus on the issue of revolutionary violence. Why is it that this issue has the significance it does for Fanon? 
ÿþ</b>ÿþ
ÿþ<brÿþ>ÿþ<brÿþ>ÿþ
There is a tendency to confuse what Fanon is dramatizing in that chapter of the Wretched of the Earth with what Fanon believes. And that, generally speaking, is the approach I take in my work. I say, "let's read Fanon as a dramatist enacting the drama of the colonial condition and what social agents in this situation do and say." I suggest that Fanon is really enacting what some colonized agents at certain moments of the colonial experience construe the world to be. And what he means by violence is not simply the actual physical violence implemented against oppressed people, but the structure of power in which perhaps the most minimal element of a moral political community does not exist. Apartheid is then a model. 

ÿþ<brÿþ>ÿþ<brÿþ>ÿþ
At this stage in the book Fanon speaks in generic terms about the colonizer and the colonized without issues of class of gender. In a sense it's a portrait of violence; a world which divides a human community between totally polarized groups is one of violence. It is apartheid, apartheid as reality, apartheid as perceived by those who live under it -- it is this that Fanon calls violÿþence at the preliminary stage of his narrative. 

ÿþ<brÿþ>ÿþ<brÿþ>ÿþ
But if you read the text very carefully there are recurrent authorial commentaries saying the world as seen by these people is not simply a bipolar world of absolute difference; that there is more to this world than one sees immediately. He goes so far as to say even in the first chapter that to the lie of the colonial situation, the colonized respond with an equal falsehood. The second and subsequent chapters tell how this very simplified picture of a bipolar world breaks down. And the consequences are quite devastating. He's concerned with how a national bourgeoisie might have transgressed it's class interests and have been concerned with other subaltern classes and summoned them onto the stage of history, and how that might have ushered in a socialist revolution going beyond the limits of the national liberation movement. He's concerned with how all those prospects completely miscarried. So, it's a lament, a lament of auto-centric capitalist development. 

ÿþ<brÿþ>ÿþ<brÿþ>ÿþ
In the second chapter there appears what Fanon calls a "social consciousness" that centers around issues of distribution when, on the eve of independence and immediately after, people begin to discern a ghastly struggle for distributing post-colonial booty. And therefore, Fanon says, we begin to find that not every Arab, or not every Black person is your brother or sister. I take Fanon to be talking of an incipient class consciousness structured around distributive injustice, scandalous injustice. That is the idiom that the language of class takes. But he is also aware that this incipient sense of outrageous inequalities -- and this is very early, way before the IMF and World Bank came to do their thing in town -- might take the form of primitive tribalism. And that's been the story. So the book resonates with bitter disappointment, swear words against the national bourgeoisie, but also some kind of retroactive hope. 

ÿþ<brÿþ>ÿþ<brÿþ>ÿþ
ÿþ<bÿþ>ÿþ What you're saying brings to mind a term that Fanon uses several times in his text ÿþ&shyp;ÿþ "a new humanism." What is Fanon trying to get at with this term? 
ÿþ</b>ÿþ
ÿþ<brÿþ>ÿþ<brÿþ>ÿþ
I think Fanon remains consistent from Black Skin, White Masks until the end that a larger, less restrictive, non-Eurocentric view of humanity, perhaps a sense of human possibilities, is what frames any critique. And here I think Fanon is, contrary to current fashions, a foundationalist; not with a notion of human essence that needs to be restored but with a notion of human possibilities that he thinks the colonial condition and its tragic post-colonial repetition frustrates. Without that, it seems to me, no critique makes any sense. I see his talk in the very first chapter of the Wretched of the Earth, where he talks of the colonial world as a narrow world riddled with prohibitions, not just as a description of what the colonizer stops the colonized from doing, but also as a description of other horizons of the human condition which those who are disciplined by a racialized world have not been allowed to attain. 

ÿþ<brÿþ>ÿþ<brÿþ>ÿþ
So, the new humanism is a visionary notion of human possibilities that we haven't even yet opened our minds to, because a racialized world simplifies all kinds of issues. Coming to see the world as divided between Black and white is precisely such a simplified world-view. To replace a truncated Eurocentric view of the world with an Afrocentric view is simply an inversion which changes absolutely nothing. I think that with the phrase the "new humanism" Fanon is saying that larger questions of the human condition remain to be explored. 


ÿþ<brÿþ>ÿþ<brÿþ>ÿþ
ÿþ<bÿþ>ÿþ It sounds like you're describing Fanon as someone outside the perspective of what we might today call "identity politics," and more as someone who sees the struggle against colonization as a point of departure towards this new humanism. 
ÿþ</b>ÿþ

ÿþ<brÿþ>ÿþ<brÿþ>ÿþ
Yes, but without embracing "homeless cosmopolitanism." There is a vindication of particularity in Fanon because a racialized world discriminates against its victims precisely by obliterating any particular identities. So, he found the affirmation of a human universality to be quite consistent with wanting to build something specific to some national context. For him that's not race; for Fanon culture begins where race ends. The notion of a "Black culture" Fanon would have found a contradiction in terms. Hence his critique of "negritude" as simply taking on the terms of the colonizer, but this time in a more celebratory sense. 

ÿþ<brÿþ>ÿþ<brÿþ>ÿþ
So the new humanism means that the way to affirm one's humanity is to assert something particular. You want to take that project of particularity from nationalism -- which is regressive and resuscitates repressive, largely gendered relations as his work on the veil in Algeria indicates. So he's talking about a post-nationalist program with a post-racialist notion of identities that is open to other communities in the world. So, identity yes, but without the identity politics of an exclusionary type. 

ÿþ<brÿþ>ÿþ<brÿþ>ÿþ
ÿþ<bÿþ>ÿþ Are you saying that people will keep returning to Fanon until the social and political project of a world free of colonialism and oppression remains on the historical agenda? 
ÿþ</b>ÿþ
ÿþ<brÿþ>ÿþ<brÿþ>ÿþ
Absolutely. If you think of a colonized existence in a larger sense, not just in terms of what happened to that part of the world, but of the capturing of human possibilities, placing them in a narrow framework -- the struggle against that remains on the agenda. And most importantly in terms of the male-female relationship. The vocabulary Fanon uses to describe the colonizer-colonized relationship he first uses to describe male-female relationships in the chapters on the veil and the family in the book on Algeria. In a way he sees the male-female relationship -- as Marx did in 1844 -- as a paradigm, as the archetype of a truly humanized world. In his text on the family, Fanon seems to say that it isn't enough for woman to be reborn as citizen-warrior, doing for the "male nationalist project" what it wants her to do. But that it must begin at home, a democratic transformation of relations between parents and children, male and female which perhaps is the signal for a decolonized human existence. So, as long as colonization in this larger sense of the seizure of human capacities and their direction into very narrow confines ÿþ&shyp;ÿþ as long as that larger structure of apartheid exists in spite of its formal abolition - Fanon remains absolutely with us, to be returned to, and remembered. 

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