The Wretched of Palestine: Frantz Fanon Diagnosed the Pathology of Colonialism and Urged Revolutionary Humanism
Dan Dinello 04/08/2024
Chicago (Special to Informed Comment; Feature) – “The colonized took up arms not only because they were dying of hunger and witnessing the disintegration of their society,” wrote the Frantz Fanon in his incendiary book The Wretched of the Earth. “But also because the colonist treated them like animals and considered them brutes. As soon as they are born, it is obvious to them that their cramped world can only be challenged by out and out violence.”
The name Frantz Fanon has become inseparable from both the horrors of colonialization and the history of liberation movements. He inspired generations of militants to fight colonialism. Since the 1961 publication of The Wretched of the Earth, which has been called the “Bible of Decolonialization,” Fanon — the Black West Indian psychiatrist who fought for Algerian independence — has been idealized by activists in the global south and beyond. For them, Frantz Fanon is the uncompromising prophet of revolution.
In The Wretched of the Earth’s infamous first chapter “On Violence,” Fanon described colonialism as a pathological system — the complete imposition of violence by the settler on the natives, who are given a “colonial identity,” ”reduced to the state of an animal,” and thereby dehumanized. The colonist uses a “language of pure violence” and “derives his validity from the imposition of violence.” The colonial system, Fanon emphasized, was itself founded on “genocidal acts of dispossession and repression.”
Since Hamas‘s brutal October 7 attack, Fanon has been frequently invoked, seeming more popular than ever. Quoted in essays and social media posts, Fanon’s provocative ideas have been used by supporters of Palestine to contextualize or justify Hamas’s horrific assault as well as to castigate Israel’s colonial subjugation and genocidal obliteration of Gaza and its people. The Israeli bombardment has slaughtered more than 33,000 Palestinians with uncounted more buried under the rubble and has wounded over 75,000 people while starving the surviving population.
The ongoing calamity for Palestinians is not limited to the besieged Gaza Strip — it also afflicts those in the occupied West Bank, which has been all but shut down since October 7. Road closures, checkpoints, and the increased risk of military and settler violence have kept West Bank Palestinians restricted to their towns and villages. As Israeli soldiers carried out a mission of dispossession, U.N. data showedthat 2023 had been an especially deadly year for Palestinians, with Israeli forces killing more of them — 499 — than in any other non-conflict year since 2005. According to Hamas‘s leaders, this provided motivation for their attack. The pure violence of the Israeli Occupation has never been more clear.
“Colonialism is not a thinking machine,” wrote Fanon. “It is violence in its natural state, and it will only yield when confronted with greater violence.” The way out of colonial oppression and the colonized person’s “inferiority complex and his despairing attitude,” is through the “cleansing force” of violence. Fanon believed that violent resistance would restore the humanity of the colonized, elevate them psychologically to a position of equality, and deliver social justice: “The native discovers that his life, his breath, his beating heart are the same as those of the settler. He finds out that the settler’s skin is not of any more value than a native’s skin.”
Fanon’s concepts have become integral to the rationalization of Hamas‘s terrorism. On X, TikTok, and Instagram, Fanon quotes proliferated after October 7: “Decolonization is quite simply the replacing of a certain ‘species’ of men by another ‘species’ of men” and “Decolonization is an inherently violent phenomenon” among many others.
H/t Wikimedia.
An article in the Middle East Eye declared, “Don’t ask Palestinians to condemn Hamas – they are already condemned to live in hell on Earth” and concluded “those bearing the brunt of the onslaught today aren’t caught up in the semantic trap of condemnation. For Palestinians in Gaza and beyond, for the wretched of our shared earth, as for Fanon, ‘to fight is the only solution.’”
In a statement titled “Oppression Breeds Resistance,” Columbia University students began by mourning “the tragic losses experienced by both Palestinians and Israelis” but concluded with a Fanon quote: “When we revolt it’s not for a particular culture. We revolt simply because, for many reasons, we can no longer breathe.”
Many of Fanon‘s contemporary admirers have apparently not read past the first chapter of The Wretched of the Earth; or, they have ignored the final chapter “Colonial Wars and Mental Disorders” — a series of disturbing case studies that depict the debilitating and long-lasting effects of violence. By regurgitating his provocative phrases alone, Fanon’s devotees portray this complex and challenging thinker as nothing more than a sloganeer of political violence. In a timely new biography — The Rebel’s Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon — author Adam Shatz, an editor at the London Review of Books, rescues Fanon from reduction while still agreeing that he wrote “some of the most memorable catchphrases of the liberation struggle.”
The Rebel’s Clinic elaborates the drama and contradictions in Fanon’s life story and political writings, striving to explain why he is such a compelling figure more than 60 years after his death. Significantly, Shatz points out that Fanon’s “practice as a healer” who pledged to do no harm contradicted his practice as a revolutionary, who advocated violence which is harmful to both the victim and perpetrator.
As a psychiatrist, Fanon believed that the violent struggle of the colonized for liberation was a kind of shock treatment that would “restore confidence to the colonized mind” and “overcome the paralyzing sense of hopelessness induced by colonial subjugation,” but “was only a first step toward the birth of a new humanity.” The Rebel’s Clinic provides a comprehensive perspective on Fanon — one that social media slogans cannot suggest. As for Fanon’s advocacy of violence, Shatz calls it “alarming” at one point but emphasizes the humanist side of Fanon — “a dashing and sophisticated intellectual who earned the admiration of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir.”
Though Fanon would eventually identify with the powerless, he was a child of empire — born into a middle-class family on the island of Martinique, a French colony. A fervent French patriot, Fanon eagerly joined the Free French Army. He fought against the Nazis in North Africa and Europe, even sustaining a shrapnel injury. Experiencing racism in the Army, his relationship to France and his own racial identity underwent a radical change – from French patriot who fought for empire to Black West Indian who rebelled against it. His first book Black Skin White Masks, published in 1952, diagnosed the pathological symptoms of racism in everyday life.
After completing his studies, Fanon directed a psychiatric hospital in colonial Algeria, where he discerned the many ways that French colonialism itself was the main cause of his patients’ psychological ailments. Algerians — like Palestinians today — were violently uprooted, their lands were confiscated, while their culture, language, and religion were denigrated. These experiences of dispossession, violence and alienation constituted a profound psychological trauma. Mental illness could never be divorced from racist social conditions, writes Shatz, so Fanon “approached psychiatry as if it were an extension of politics by other means.”
He turned against French colonialism, joined the revolt orchestrated by the National Liberation Front (FLN) in 1954, and fought for Algerian independence. Subversively, Fanon used the hospital as a hideout for anti-French fighters as well as a treatment center for all walks of colonial Algeria, including FLN militants who had been tortured by French forces.
The Martiniquais philosopher later incorporated his insights and experiences as a psychiatrist and a revolutionary into what would be his final book. The Wretched of the Earth was published in 1961 as Fanon, 36, lay perishing from leukemia in a Maryland hospital in the heart of the American empire he despised as “the country of lynchers.” He would never see a free Algeria, dying three months shy of its liberation in March, 1962. The Wretched of the Earth was the culmination of his thinking about anti-colonial revolution and, writes Shatz, “one of the great manifestos of the modern age.”
The Wretched of the Earth spread across the planet within a few years of its appearance transforming Fanon into a hero among leftwing and developing-world revolutionaries and inspiring radicals in the national liberation movements of the 1960s and 1970s. It was translated widely — Che Guevara commissioned a Cuban version — and “cited worshipfully by the Black Panthers.” Huey Newton, for example, spoke of Black people as an occupied colony in imperialist America whose only option was revolutionary violence. According to Shatz, Fanon’s book helped galvanize the Black Consciousness movement in South Africa, Latin American guerrillas, the Palestine Liberation Organization, the Islamic revolutionaries of Iran, Black Lives Matter activists, and “not least the Palestinian fedayeen in training camps in Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria.”
Helping to propel the book’s proliferation, especially in the West, was Gillo Pontecorvo’s 1966 movie The Battle of Algiers. Though not an adaptation, The Battle of Algiers functioned as a filmic depiction of The Wretched of the Earth. A strikingly realistic, politically radical film that sympathized with the revolutionaries, The Battle of Algiers reconstructs the oppressive colonial social conditions, the French brutality in response to anti-colonial demonstrations, the FLN attacks on French policemen, the torture of Algerian civilians, and the terror bombings that marked the four-year insurgency in the streets of Algiers leading to independence.
Summoning Fanon in support of Hamas implies that the war in Gaza is the battle of Algiers of our time. However, the Gaza catastrophe is less a reenactment of The Battle of Algiers, more Hotel Rwanda or Apocalypse Now. Israel cannot extinguish Palestinian resistance through indiscriminate violence any more than Palestine can win an Algerian-style war of liberation. “Palestine today is not Algeria in 1956,” notesAl Jazeera, “which was Fanon’s most important reference point. There will be no long-fought war of independence resulting in the vast majority of Jews” being evicted “from a reconquered Palestine.”
Further, the outcome in Algeria does not provide a model for a free and democratic Palestine. In The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon stressed that mere violence as an end in itself, disconnected from any wider achievable political and social goal, would only reproduce the power relations of the colonizer. He suggested that liberation movements can become new oppressors once they attain power, thus exchanging one barbarism for another.
Though Fanon did not live to see it, Algeria descended into one-party rule built on state terror and religious fanaticism. Fanon’s warnings about the obstacles to post-colonial freedom: corruption, autocratic rule, religious zealotry, the enduring wounds of colonial violence, and the persistence of underdevelopment and hunger came to pass and still haunt liberation movements today.
“The militant who confronts the colonialist war machine with his rudimentary resources realizes that while he is demolishing colonial oppression he is indirectly building up yet another system of exploitation,” wrote Fanon. “Such a discovery is galling, painful, and sickening. It was once all so simple with the bad on the one side and the good on the other. The people discover that the iniquitous phenomenon of exploitation can assume a Black or Arab face.”
In a passage that none of his latter-day followers have cited, Fanon warned that “racism, hatred, resentment, and the legitimate desire for revenge alone cannot nurture a war of liberation — one does not endure massive repression or witness the disappearance of one’s entire family in order for hatred or racism to triumph.” Fanon — the authentic revolutionary — shows himself more doubtful of violent resolutions than his less courageous social media acolytes, who indulge in easy revolutionary talk from positions of comfort.
The social media application of The Wretched of the Earth to Palestine eliminates the aspirational aspects of his anti-colonial prescription. Fanon’s advocacy of anti-colonial violence cannot be separated from his belief in a revolutionary humanism, emancipated from colonialism and empire. He wrote that the overthrow of the colonial oppressors will inevitably lead to a “new humanism written into the objectives and methods of the struggle.”
Fanon asserted that a violent uprising by the native people would be the first step in a transformative process that would lead to a postcolonial society based on universalist ideas of freedom and equality for all — a society that might very well include the former colonizers. Palestine, however, is a long way from this social transformation that would deliver a political solution rooted in equality, dignity and justice for both Palestinians and Israelis.
The Caribbean thinker perceptively diagnosed the disease of colonialism that Israel continues to propagate as it replicates its primary pathology: the obliteration of Palestinians. As a new UN report states: “Israel’s genocide on the Palestinians in Gaza is an escalatory stage of a long-standing settler colonial process of erasure. For over seven decades this process has suffocated the Palestinian people as a group – demographically, culturally, economically and politically – seeking to displace it and expropriate and control its land and resources.” Fanon, the psychiatrist, did not enunciate a enduring cure for this vengeful colonial pathology.
Surprisingly, Fanon concluded The Wretched of the Earth in the same place as John Lennon in his utopian song Imagine, which conceives of “no wars and a brotherhood of man.” Fanon ended The Wretched of the Earth with an idealistic challenge to imagine a new world: “For humanity, comrades, we must make a new start, develop a new way of thinking, and endeavor to create a new man.” But Fanon did not clarify how we would arrive at this new, more equitable reality.
Despite this apparent disconnect, we read Fanon today for his startlingly prescient analysis of contemporary ills: the enduring trauma of racism, the persistent plague of white supremacy and xenophobia, the scourge of authoritarianism, and the savagery of colonial domination. Poetic, enraged, and insubordinate, Frantz Fanon gave voice to the anguish of the colonized voiceless and his words continue to resonate with a new global “wretched of the earth.”