The Revolutionary Thought of Frantz Fanon (Part 3): By Hassan Abdullah Hamdan ("Mahdi Amel")
Révolution Africaine, No. 71 – June 6, 1964 & No.72 – June 13, 1964
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Finding themselves in total powerlessness to move freely, the colonized dream of action, of leap, of aggression. Unable to truly liberate themselves, they liberate themselves on the plane of the imaginary. But this imaginary liberation only sharpens their real oppression, which at a first moment finds outlet in a displaced outburst of revolt against the brother. This alienated liberation therefore constitutes an imaginary, even magical, destruction of the colonial order, and in fact expresses a genuine collective self-destruction.
The Role of Violence
Thus, the transcendence of the contradiction of the colonial universe (colonizer and colonized) on the imaginary level, far from resolving this contradiction, only sharpens it and renders it even more unbearable. This marks a decisive moment in the history of decolonization, or, what amounts to the same thing, in the history of the destruction of colonialism. This imaginary violence that turned against the colonized was an alienated and alienating violence. Indeed, in the absence of any intentionality or meaning, violence is reduced to a purely absurd and simultaneously ineffective act. Without the meaning that integrates it into history, it effectively becomes a cult and a mystique.
But Fanon's thought is absolutely foreign to this false and even fascist conception of violence. This is one of the fundamental aspects of Fanonian thought that has been deliberately mystified, especially by certain Western critics, including Claude Julien, if I am not mistaken. Certainly, for Fanon, violence plays a primordial role in the construction of its own history by the colonized people. For, in the colonial universe, it is the colonizer who makes history. But this history is in truth only the natural, logical, and necessary prolongation of the history of the metropolis. In other words, it is the internal development of the history of capitalist Western civilization, in its colonialist stage, that necessarily determines the very space for the historical development of the colonized countries.
While the colonized realized history only imaginatively by actually suffering it, the colonizer, the supreme representative of capitalist Western civilization, made the real history which was, in its very essence, merely the radical negation of the history of the colonized. But this same contradiction in the colonial universe, which we now find situated at the level of history, will find its real, and no longer imaginary, surpassing in the violence of the colonized—violence that is truly destructive of the colonial order because it is consciously oriented and directed, because it has meaning, or rather because it becomes the meaning of colonized history. It is solely through this violence that the practical resolution of the colonial contradiction takes place.
It is the colonizer who imposes on the colonized the weapon of the struggle, its level, and its nature. These two violences develop on the same plane and within a single antagonistic unity that, to be resolved, implies the radical annihilation of colonial violence.
For the colonized, life can only materialize from the rotting cadaver of the colonist. This then is the correspondence, term by term, between the two trains of reasoning.
It is therefore only through violence that the colonized destroys the colonial system and thus begins the first act in the constitution of his own history. Up to this point, we have considered violence only from the perspective of history. But now it must be considered from the standpoint of daily life and the changes it brings about in the very personality of the colonized individual.
Birth of Differentiation
We have seen that the colonized man—this modern-day slave, as Fanon calls him—presents himself above all as a radically alienated man, even in his dreams, even in his imagination, and all the more so in his daily, family, or tribal life. For he endured life; he did not shape it. But with the reign of violence—destructive because liberating—everything transforms. The colonized no longer dreams of action or aggression; he has realized his dream. He acts, and in the daily practice of his violence, he frees himself from his obsessions, which are products of the colonial universe he destroys through his constructive act.
“The colonized,” Fanon tells us, “discovers the real and transforms it in the movement of his praxis, in the exercise of his violence, in his project of liberation1” (p. 45).
Thus, violence is defined as consciousness at the level of action. It is consciousness that has become action, and this quotidian, liberating act takes on, in the eyes of the colonized, a universal significance for the first time in their history. For in its violence, which constitutes a new universe, the colonized lives the quotidian on the scale of history. Everydayness disappears, and the quotidian and the historical fuse into one and the same act.
At the individual level, violence is demystification and de-alienation. On the other hand, at the level of the people, liberating violence constitutes the revolutionary praxis of the colonized people. It is essentially totalizing and unifying. It makes the people a single totality, without fissures, and dissolves the tribalism and regionalism secreted and maintained by the colonial universe. It unifies the people by unifying the meaning of their struggle, the direction of their struggle. It is therefore totalizing but not differentiating, as it aims to dissolve the differentiations engendered by colonialism.
But this non-differentiating aspect of violence constitutes only the first phase of its development. As long as the objective—the destruction of the colonial order—was clear and precise, violence was simple and undifferentiated. However, from the moment one approaches the second phase of historical constitution, which is the building of a free society in its development, violence then changes form, direction, and meaning, and becomes, in the very extension of its liberating movement, essentially differentiating. It does not lose its unifying and totalizing dynamism; on the contrary, this dynamism deepens, becoming more complex, less immediate, and less direct. It becomes a movement of unification through differentiation. It differentiates the people to better unify them and distinguishes within them, on one side, the revolutionary masses made up of peasants and proletarians and part of the intellectuals, and on the other side, the national bourgeoisie that refuses to engage in the new direction of historical development.
Official translation doesn’t really capture what Fanon expressed: “The native discovers reality and transforms it into the pattern of his customs, into the practice of violence and into his plan for freedom.”