Graying Fanon

Rastinews — For more than half a century, numerous schools of thought and disciplines have engaged with Fanon, each from its own angle. Interest in him has risen and fallen, yet "the wretched of the earth" has never left the agenda. Some voices keep echoing. Cover your ears, and they still find a crack to seep through.

Interest in Fanon has visibly grown in recent years, and he is once again the subject of essays, books and studies worldwide. That surge is not without reason. To understand it, it helps to look at where these works and debates have found their echo. In Kurdistan and Turkey, too, discussion of Fanon has intensified again, visible not only in published essays and studies but in social media debates as well. What is really being discussed through Fanon is colonialism and anti-colonialism. That points to a renewed rise in anti-colonial debate. And the fact that this debate resonates so strongly in the Kurdish public sphere, in my view, confirms it.

Rather than add another piece to the pile of Fanon literature, in this essay I want to share my thoughts on the general character of the "Fanon readings" now under way in Turkey.

In these debates, Fanon is above all read through the metaphor of "not being able to breathe": "We need Fanon more than ever, because none of us can breathe anymore!" In this line of thought, the word "none of us" deserves as much attention as "cannot breathe." "All of us are more oppressed and exploited than ever; exploitation has spread so wide and oppression has grown so fine-grained that none of us can breathe." That, in short, is the claim. All of us, none of us…

A conceptual confusion runs through these debates, built on equivalence. By equating — even collapsing into one — the exploiter-exploited relationship, the oppressor-oppressed relationship, and the colonizer-colonized relationship, the real issue gets lost. What emerges is, in large part, a 'white' reading. Yes, almost everyone on earth, bar a small minority, is oppressed and exploited in some way. But not every form of exploitation or oppression can be called colonial domination — that hardly needs saying. Women, migrants, workers, gay people, animals, the undocumented, Black people all remain the 'objects' of oppression and exploitation policies across the world. Yet men, heterosexuals, citizens and white people are also oppressed and exploited, under other labels. What must not be missed here is that men, heterosexuals and white people are not oppressed because of those identities. Put concretely: yes, white people are oppressed too, but no one is oppressed for being white; it is also true that most Turks are oppressed, but not for being Turkish. By contrast, Black people are oppressed and exploited because they are Black, and Kurds because they are Kurds. Treating colonialism apart from this context — and treating Fanon apart from the context of colonialism — can only mean veiling the truth, or being veiled against it. The 'white' voice in these readings all but shouts: "We're all Black now, and that's exactly why we need more Fanon!"

Fate winks at us here: the Black man who wanted to turn white is replaced, ironically, by a white man claiming to be Black. Right or wrong aside, this approach clearly sits uneasily with Fanon's own thinking. These readers of Fanon, in fact, ignore that they stand as 'white' before the colonized Kurd. In praising Fanon, in writing about him, they cover up their own whiteness. After all, "we're all Black now!"

This is the point at which it is worth returning to Sartre's famous preface to The Wretched of the Earth.

"This book has absolutely no need of a preface. Least of all one addressed to us. And yet I have written one, to carry the dialectic through to the end: we Europeans, too, are being decolonized — that is, the colonizer that exists within each of us is being cut out in a bloody operation. If we have the courage, let us take a hard look at ourselves and see what we have become … Will we heal? Yes. Violence, like Achilles' spear, can heal the wounds it opens. Today we are chained, humiliated, sick with fear: we are at the very bottom."

Sartre insists on the word "we": "We Europeans, we French." He meets Fanon's challenge, and the struggle for liberation from colonialism, carrying the responsibility of being European and French. He does not resort to the trick of "we are oppressed too, we are exploited too" or "we are all Black." Nor does Sartre praise Fanon. He simply does not run away, and tries, as far as he can, to face up to it — and he calls on the society he lives in, the society he speaks from, to do the same.

When we look at the debate carried on from within Turkish identity, however, we mostly find a shallow reading that detaches itself from any belonging to Turkishness or 'whiteness.' Faced with anti-colonial discourse coming from a Kurdish mouth or pen, it positions itself not as 'a Turk' but as 'a friend' — an 'irresponsible' reading that, instead of taking it personally, interprets it, even tries to lecture on it. Sartre, I think it hardly needs saying, would not have defined himself as a fixed, categorical racist, colonial white man either. Just as he did not define himself as having 'transcended' the matter and bearing no responsibility for it: "the colonizer that exists within each of us…"

Indeed, the preface closes with these words: "But, as they say, that is another story. The story of man. The time is drawing near, I am sure; we will join the ranks of those who make that history."

In such readings, the failure to examine oneself produces, inevitably, a similarly flawed way of examining the world around. We are used, for instance, to seeing Fanon's texts invoked to place side by side George Floyd's "I can't breathe" — spoken as a police officer knelt on his neck and killed him — and the words "We are not rebelling in the name of any particular culture, we are rebelling because we can no longer breathe,"* while eyes turn ten thousand kilometers away and, right next door, those left breathless simply for being Kurdish go ignored. But carrying this 'far-sighted' posture into the reading of Fanon too clearly amounts to caricaturing Fanon and his thought — or, in doing so, inevitably becoming a caricature itself.

Another notable feature of these white readings is that Fanon's thought is treated not through critique but through a simple binary of praise and blame. What stands out is that Fanon is first made praiseworthy, and only then praised. Cleansing Fanon of his 'jet blackness,' or at least graying him into some neutral zone, becomes the precondition for affirming him. Reading Fanon through the lens of one's own worldview, citing him as a reference for one's own opinions, is of course normal enough. But turning him inside out, hollowing him out, or trying to bend him into shape for that purpose is not. To my mind, what makes Fanon Fanon is precisely a clarity that resists this kind of tampering. That clarity has to do with the fact that he was not an elite intellectual producing theory for theory's sake, but a subject who spoke and acted from the field, from inside the fire. That is why his texts can sometimes appear to contradict themselves, affirming certain aspects of a given current while fiercely rejecting others, and stating the truth with a nakedness that 'white' readers find repellent. Because Fanon is a philosopher of action, oriented toward liberation and emancipation, and for him what matters most is what can be lived and experienced. Method is not always necessary; context matters a great deal. As Fanon put it: "Intellectual thought became a form of anguish, because the reality of man as a living, working, self-creating being was replaced by words, by the tensions created by assembled words and their meanings."

If we pay close attention to the graying motivation mentioned above at exactly this point, we find that Fanon is carefully described as not fundamentally pro-violence, nationalist, ethnicist, or essentialist; these traits, it is claimed, function in Fanon at most as tools, while his humanist, universalist, socialist character is emphasized with equal care. In other words, anything in Fanon touching on the local, the national, the nation, or national liberation can only be a tool. And these tools, supposedly, belong entirely to the past. Otherwise, it would be hard for Fanon to pass through the approval of the reasonable, embarrassed 'white' reader.

Let us turn to what these claims actually correspond to in Fanon's texts. Yes, Fanon's thought is undoubtedly humanist in places and oriented toward universality. But Fanon does not speak of a humanism and universality that already exist and that one simply joins. His universality is one to be built; his humanism is a wholly new humanity yet to be created. National consciousness, nation-building, anti-colonial nationalism, and similar concepts are not, as claimed, mere tools in Fanon's thought but indispensable stages of the process of construction. As a philosopher and man of struggle aiming at decolonization, Fanon, in analyzing colonialism and the colonial world, speaks of building step by step the process of creating a new world and a new human being. For him, national liberation is the nation's entry onto the stage of history; without it, speaking of universality is not possible.

"National liberation, far from estranging the nation from other nations, brings it onto the stage of history. Universal consciousness grows and develops precisely within national consciousness. This two-sided development is in fact the unique common ground of all cultures."

As we can see, Fanon speaks not of a tool but of a condition and a stage. Let us listen to Fanon once more on this point;

"Now is the time to unmask some hypocrites. Some say humanity has already passed the stage of nationalist claims, that it is time to build larger political unions, and that therefore old-fashioned nationalists must correct their mistake. We believe, on the contrary, that mistakes with very serious consequences stem from the desire to skip the national stage." Fanon goes on to offer what amounts to a warning: "Self-awareness is not closing the door to communication. On the contrary, philosophy teaches us that communication alone guarantees consciousness. A national consciousness that is not merely nationalist can give us an international dimension." In this way, he points to the necessity not of an inward-turning nationalism but of a national consciousness in communication with the universal.

"No, one does not become a master simply by freeing oneself from slavery. For where there are no slaves, there is no master either."

Among the subjects that most provoke those who look through white eyes is what Fanon says about violence. This is perhaps the area where criticism of Fanon concentrates most heavily. Here too, Fanon is too clear to allow moderate corrections. For the colonizer does not apply violence only through certain instruments; the colonizer's very existence is violence itself. Colonial violence is not merely a naked apparatus of force aimed at controlling a piece of land; it is an institutional curse aimed at destroying the history, culture, geography, consciousness, and soul of the colonized — and one that has, in certain periods of history, largely succeeded in doing so. Faced with this violence, the colonized society or individual has largely lost self-confidence, has had their personality eroded, and has been, in Fanon's words, dehumanized. On the effects of violence, Fanon says: "Colonialism does not merely depersonalize the person it colonizes; it also depersonalizes the entire structure of society at a collective level."

Colonial violence also plants deep seeds of anger and hatred within the colonized person. Although the source of the violence inside the colonized person is colonial violence, the colonized person directs this violence mostly toward people within their own world, having no other option. This turns the colonized person into a carrier and transmitter of colonial violence as well. According to Fanon, the only chance of liberation for the colonized person struggling within this spiral of violence is counter-violence. This violence aims both at repelling the colonizer's violence and at freeing "the colonized person from an inferiority complex, from introversion and despair; it makes them fearless and healthy." This violence is a means of escaping the colonizer's violence and the destruction it has caused. In short, the violence of the colonized is a counter-violence directed both at the slave within and at the master who enslaves them. Fanon says that the colonized society, coming to itself through violence and gaining social consciousness, rises up against all forms of passivity, and adds: "From now on, the work of demagogues, opportunists, and swindlers becomes difficult."

Of course, the point is not, and should not be, to praise and sanctify Fanon; Fanon and his ideas can be criticized, refuted, even condemned. All of this has been done abundantly, and continues to be done. Such debates are as necessary as they are constructive. The problem we are pointing to is the attempt to gray out Fanon through white readings and white touches. Agreeing or disagreeing with Fanon is one thing, but it is equally clear that Fanon is too unambiguous to be grayed out. Because "his pulse beats in the veins of the will and struggle for liberation."

As a final word: although it is said that Fanon has once again met with the "wretched of the earth," his anti-colonial consciousness and spirit have always lived, and continue to live, in the world of us who have been colonized, through this sentence of his: "Since the white man in no way wishes to accept my humanity, I will lean upon his life with all my strength, with all my weight, and show him that he is not dealing with the cannibalized mongrel he keeps picturing in his mind."

* Fanon's statement here does not concern Algeria but Vietnam, and reads precisely as follows: "In Vietnam, the people did not rise up because they wanted to discover and reclaim their own culture. Rather, they rose up because the existing culture created an atmosphere impossible to breathe." (Black Skin, White Masks, p.270, Encore Publishing)

Bibliography

Fanon, Frantz, Black Skin, White Masks, Encore Publishing, 2016.

Fanon, Frantz, The Wretched of the Earth, Versus Kitap, 2018.

-Editor's note: This article, as updated here, was first published on Snhaber.ch on 06.02.2022.