The Fact of Blackness: Frantz Fanon and Visual Representation, Edited by Alan Read. Institute of Contemporary Arts, London; Bay Press, Seattle, 1996
Published: Fuse Magazine, vol.20 No. 3, 1997 (Toronto, Canada)
(Contributors to the book: Homi K Bhabha, bell hooks, Stuart Hall, Lola Young, Kobena Mercer, Françoise Vergès, Renée Green, Isaac Julien, Raoul Peck, Marc Latamie, Lyle Ashton Harris, Ntozake Shange, Mark Nash, Martine Attille, and Steve McQueen.)
Book Review by Julian J. Samuel
IGNORING THE ROLE OF VIOLENCE IN FANON: PLAYING WITH THE BONES OF AN EXHUMED HERO
Frantz Fanon was born in Martinique in 1925, studied psychiatry in France, went to Algeria to head a hospital at Blida where he joined the struggle for Algerian liberation. He wrote about colonialism and the struggle against it from a point of view that tried to understand violence and its role in de-colonialization. Fanon died in 1961 at the age of 36. Many Third World political and intellectual leaders have studied 'The Wretched of the Earth,' which has been translated into many languages including Urdu, (now a native language of England); and, into Farsi, by Dr. Ali Shari'ati, a major influence on the Iranian revolution of 1979.
"To wreck the colonial world is henceforth a mental picture
of action which is very clear, very easy to understand and
which may be assumed by each one of the individuals which
constitute the colonized people."
The Wretched of the Earth, (Grove Press Edition, 1963) pp.
40-41
"...colonialism is not a thinking machine, nor a body
endowed with reasoning faculties. It is violence in its
natural state, and it will only yield when confronted with
greater violence."
The Wretched of the Earth, pp. 61
Algeria's resistance to external and internal imperialism persists decade after decade. When did it all start? Did it start with the surrender of Abd-el-Kadar in 1847? Or with French orchestrated massacre at Setif in 1945, when according to President Bourguiba of Tunisia, upwards of 45,000 people were killed? Or does it start with the war of liberation itself (1954-62), in which one million Algerians were killed, and an additional 3000 politically related deaths ensued in metropolitan France?
Fanon's acts are inseparable from the Algerian war against the French. So, does a possible '90s interpretation of Fanon's thinking start with Alan Read's book? No. Why? Because most of its contributors put profound emphasis on dull '80s style sexual politics seen through Fanon's thrilling and naïve 'Black Skin White Masks,' (1952).
The professors and artists in this book are benightedly disconnected from the many guerrilla movements transpiring throughout the world. Read's contributors do not discuss the tactical violence that the Front de Libération Nationale (F.L.N.) offered French civility. Alan Read keeps the issue
of armed struggle out of a study of Fanon. It is impossible to discuss Fanon without discussing the many violence-laden Algerias today, and to read Fanon in terms of the mere sexual-political trend is futile.
'The Fact of Blackness' records a dialogue that took place at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London via an exhibition: 'Mirage: Enigmas of Race, Difference and Desire,' -- preceded by a conference: "Working with Fanon:
Contemporary Politics and Cultural Reflection' (1995). The conference was sponsored by Toshiba.
Read's effort consists of the work of university professors, some visual artists and filmmakers who have made career improvements by injecting their work with the glorious auras of political activism via a "re-thinking" of the earlier Fanon. When reading the book I wonder whether these anti-
colonialists are doing nothing but maintaining the status quo. Do they offer anything on the many imperialist machines ravaging the Third World? No. Do they show any interest in front-line struggles within the West (IRA), or, for example, in Latin America (MRTA)? No, not at all. Instead, I hear them whispering: I am stuck in a dreamy utopian class-struggle oriented Marxism without the requisite gay and lesbian 'activism'. They just offer uglily written "Theory."
A short note on the current state of cultural studies is appropriate. The emptying of the activist politics from Fanon's works means, of course, that there will be plenty of "committed" yet sloppy thinking. Much of cultural studies is complacent, and careless, these days. Read's work reminds me of the recent Sokal affair. A physics professor at NYU submitted a bogus cultural studies style essay to Social Text, a leading journal in that field. Sokal was trying to prove that cultural studies professors haven't any rigour.
Andrew Ross and the editors of the journal rushed to publish the essay: they were now going to have a physicist "doing" cultural studies in their pages. This would make them look cutting-edge. As soon as his paper was published, Professor Sokal publicly exposed the whole set-up. [For an exhilarating discussion of the inherent and utter falsity of cultural studies postmodernists, please see Paul Boghossian's comment in the 13 December, 1996 issue of the Times Literary Supplement].
Read's collection is a clear example of hazy and complacent "Theory" that so resembles the Sokal set-up. Stuart Hall, the king of cultural studies in the United Kingdom, who does not make the same Rolls-Royce-level salary as his anti-colonialist counter parts in America, writes so "Theoretically" that the word, incomprehension, does not describe the experience of "Reading" him. With clockwork regularity he gives nods of approval to the beacons of Eurocivility: Hegel, Freud, Lacan, Foucault, and the requisite others are noted, and foot-noted, incessantly. I presume, he thinks that these European intellectuals are crucial to political action. Hall's introductory essay gives the impression of someone who is willing to use philosophical references to impress the naive. Action is what counts. Otherwise, why study Fanon? Why not just study Baudrillard and fall fast asleep? With unbridled erudition Hall informs us:
"Let us put it simplistically ...For, if this text is 'where Lacan makes his interruption into colonial discourse theory', as Gates asserts, it is also where Fanon 'reads' Lacan in the light of his own preoccupations. In the long footnote on the 'mirror phase', it is Fanon's appropriation of Lacan which strikes us most vividly. First, the 'Other' in this transaction in raced: ('...the real Other for the white man is and will continue to be the black man. And conversely'). It is difficult not to agree that he writes here as if 'the real Other' is indeed 'a fixed phenomenological point'." pp. 26
Fortunately, this swishy stylistic complexity is far outdone by Homi Bhabha, who sometimes does do good work, I think. However, in Read's book, Bhabha constructs sentences that are so magnificent that one has to appreciate them as ink marks on the page, as a kind of finger painting in minutiae. Listen to this unadulterated Gayatri-Chakravorty-Spivakese:
"Fanonian 'continuance' is the temporality of the practice of action: its performativity or agency is constituted by its emphasis on the singularity of the 'local': an iterative structuring of the historical event and political pedagogy and an ethical sense constructed from truths that are partial, limited, unstable. Fanon's dialectic of the everyday is, most significantly, the emergency of a new historical and theoretical temporality generated by the process of revolutionary transience and transformation."
pp. 190
Bhabha implies that complex-sounding prose is needed to interpret and understand Fanon. Clarity, brevity, and historical analysis are not needed.
This book is born of a massive pre-Oedipal-post-Foucaultian-pre-Hegelian-Electra-inferiority-complex in the contributor's attempts to out do the colonial masters at the game of words, and not at the game of gaining political ground. Western "radicals," argues Michael Neumann in 'What's Left: Radical Politics and the Radical Psyche,' (1988) are addicted to "Theory" and not to political success. To actually engage in projects that make political gains is a fate worse than death.
Read's contributors offer attacks on Fanon's correctable homophobia, misogyny, and sexism. Moreover, these charges are made without fair reference to historical context, and are amplified to drown out Fanon's understanding of violence. Violence is the only thing the masters listen to.
Nothing else. But political violence may not be a good companion to cultural and sexual politics; indeed, it may be bad to support it when trying to become a tenured high priest of cultural studies.
Here is the thinking of the completely delirious American bell hooks -- another super-salaried anti-colonialist: "In love. I was thinking a lot about the place of empathy in any kind of ethic of care and the notion that part of how one embraces that larger you - that you that Fanon uses - is through the capacity to embrace the other in some way. What does it mean if Fanon is unable to embrace the black female -- what part of himself remains unembraced? How does the possibility of love or an ethic of care chart the path to this humanism that he poses as redemptive?"
pp. 106
Are these consequential and serious psychological insights? Is there anything at all to be gained from "thinking" about bell hook's words? No. (This passage reminds me of the smell of an epoch when people used to smear on patchouli oil). Need one really embrace questions of academic freedom of speech and tenure? These passages offer sufficient proof that activists who have anything contestory to say are not
permitted anywhere near the university or art institutions. Tenure protects complacent luminaries.
Read's book is a quintessential dead end. There is no human liberation here. It begins where Fanon began, not where Fanon left off. It is boring to see sloppy professors and artists toying with Fanon's bones in the old-fashioned world of sexual politics, and in the wordy flatulence of "Theory" devoted to more "Theory" and to more "Theory".
*
"Fanon for Beginners'," Written and illustrated by Deborah Wyrick,
Writer and Readers Publishing, Inc. New York, 1998, 188 pages, $15.95
published: The Montreal Gazette, 13 June, 1998
In the current age of "Cultural Studies", "Postcolonial Studies", and "Postmodernism," when preference is given to incoherent writing and thinking, Dr Wyrick's 'Fanon for Beginner's' is a lighthouse in a sea of self-promoting nonsense. She clearly introduces Frantz Fanon's rich understanding of the psychosis of colonized people and colonizers to anyone no matter what their educational background happens to be; readers with just high school diplomas to the loftiest of logicians will learn something from this book. And her illustrations are cheekier than the Gazette's Aislin. They are twisted, hilarious, vaguely recalling the images of James Ensor and the wry wit of cartoonist Ralph Steadman.
Has Fanon's influence waned since his death thirty-seven years ago? No. His books are used throughout not only the Third World, but by many institutions of higher learning in America and Europe. Third World leaders of liberation movements, and most Québec's separatists (some of whom ought to re-read Fanon's views on racism) are familiar with his ideas.
Fanon was born in Martinique in 1925, studied psychiatry in France, went to Algeria to head a hospital at Blida where he joined the struggle for Algerian liberation (1954-62). In 'The Wretched of the Earth,' he exposes the violence of the colonialist and sides with the counter-violence of its victims. This work has been translated into 25 languages including Urdu, (now a native language of England); and, into Farsi, by Dr. Ali Shari'ati, a major influence on the Iranian revolution of 1979. Fanon died in 1961.
Wyrick's book leads to a deeper understanding of popular culture, geopolitics, the psychological basis of racism, colonialism and is free of sleazy political correctitude. Fanon's thinking on homosexuality et cetera is dated, those easily wounded should read 'Foucault for Beginners' instead. However, Fanon does explain the radical participation of Algerian women in their war against France with rigour and elegance.
Wyrick traces Fanon's development through his books. 'Black Skin, White Masks,' (1952), details sex and politics: "When my restless hands caress those white breasts, they grasp white civilization and dignity and make them mine." (black skin white masks, 63) And fear: "The Negro is an animal, the Negro is bad, the Negro is mean, the Negro is ugly...The Nigger is shivering with cold, that cold goes through your bones, the handsome little boy is trembling because he thinks that the Nigger is quivering with rage, the little white boy throws himself into this mother's arms. Mama, the nigger is going to eat me up." (bs 113-14)
In 'A Dying Colonialism' (1970) Fanon devotes many pages to the veil and its political importance: "For the tourist and the foreigner, the veil demarcates both Algerian society and its feminine counterpart." (a dying colonialism, 35-36 {l'an cinq de la rev algerienne)
Here Wyrick offers us the complexity of the role of the veil in the Algerian revolution: "...European bosses tried to reacculturate their male Algerian employees, demanding that they bring their wives to company functions. Algerian men were caught in a double bind: if they agreed, they violated cultural prohibitions against women being on display; if they refused, they risked losing their jobs."
She shows how Fanon looks at this question from many points of view; he says: "The rape of the Algerian woman in the dream of a European...is always preceded by a rending of the veil." (dc 45)
Wyrick does not show whether Fanon saw the few so-called modernizing effects of colonialism: what for example was the position of the average colonialist regime on clitoridectomy?
When discussing 'The Wretched of the Earth' (1963), Wyrick deals with Fanon's controversial views of anti-colonial violence by showing the very concrete link between the devouring colonizer and the terror he imposes. Conservative commentators on Fanon have intentionally deformed his reading of counter-violence. The Globe and Mail's Robert Fulford recently wrote this about Fanon: "God knows how many deaths his madness helped justify." (22 April, 1998). Fulford, in his youth, may have fallen under the influence of Time Magazine: "Fanon ... an apostle of violence...a prisoner of hate..." (April, 1965).
Fanon's words are: "The practice of violence binds [colonized people] together as a whole, since each individual forms a violent link in great chain, a part of the great organism of violence which has surged upward in reaction to the settler's violence in the beginning..." (the wretched of the earth, 93 )
Richard Nixon, George Bush, Saddam Hussein and Benazir Bhutto are not scented replicas of Florence Nightingale. Would it not be naive to expect Third World populations to lie down and hand over raw materials, oil, postcolonial sex tourism, and cheaply made running shoes free of charge?
"Fanon for Beginners" could be terrifically useful: think of all the dinner parties you've gone to where you have felt inadequately informed on the colonised world. Reading this book will get you solidly grounded in these matters, and you will be able--if you feel like it--to use verbal violence against people whose arguments you've found inadequate, smug or mildly schizophrenic.
*
French translation:
Fanon for beginners, écrit et illustré par Deborah Wyrick, Writer and Readers Publishing, Inc., New York, 1998, 188 pages
Par Julian Samuel, auteur de Passage to Lahore (De Lahore à Montréal)
À notre époque qui fait la part belle aux études « culturelles », « postcoloniales » ou « postmodernes » et où l'on accorde tant de crédit à des idées et des écrits incohérents, le livre de Wyrick, Fanon for Beginners est un phare au milieu d'un océan de verbiage narcissique. Peu importe le niveau d'études du lecteur, elle lui propose une analyse limpide de la psychose des peuples colonisés et des colonisateurs. Tous, du détenteur d'un simple secondaire V au plus pointu des logiciens, apprendront quelque chose dans ce livre. Et les illustrations de l'auteur sont plus délicieusement hardies que les caricatures d'Aislin. Elles sont marrantes, impertinentes et rappellent vaguement les dessins de James Ensor ou l'humour décapant de Ralph Steadman.
L'influence de Fanon a-t-elle décliné depuis sa mort survenue il y a trente-sept ans ? Pas du tout.
Ces écrits sont encore utilisés non seulement dans le Tiers-monde mais par beaucoup d'établissements d'enseignement supérieur en Amérique et en Europe. Les leaders de mouvement de libération dans le Tiers-monde et bien des séparatistes québécois (qui pour la plupart devraient se familiariser avec les vues de Fanon sur le racisme) connaissent bien sa pensée.
Fanon est né en Martinique en 1925. Il a étudié la psychiatrie en France pour ensuite se rendre en Algérie où il a dirigé un hôpital à Blida. Il s'est engagé auprès des Algériens dans le mouvement de libération nationale (1954-1962). Dans son livre Les Damnés de la terre, il traite de la violence du colonisateur qu'il compare à la violence exprimée en retour par les victimes de celui-ci. Cet ouvrage a été traduit en 25 langues y compris en urdu (désormais une langue couramment parlée en Angleterre) et en farsi par Ali Shari'ati, cet homme qui a grandement influencé la révolution iranienne de 1979. Fanon est mort en 1961.
Le livre de Wyricks nous permet de mieux comprendre la culture populaire, la dimension géopolitique et les bases psychologiques du racisme, du colonialisme et de sa sordide rectitude politique. Les opinions de Fanon sur l'homosexualité etc. sont surannées de sorte que les coeurs sensibles préféreront lire Foucault pour les débutants. En revanche, Fanon aborde la question de la participation radicale des femmes algériennes à leur guerre de libération avec rigueur et élégance.
Wyrick suit l'évolution de Fanon dans ses écrits. Peau noire, masque blanc (1952) aborde en détails le rapport entre politique et sexualité. Dans ces seins blancs que mes mains ubiquitaires caressent, c'est la civilisation et la dignité blanches que je fais miennes... Et la peur : Le nègre est bête, le nègre est mauvais, le nègre est méchant, le nègre est laid ; (...) le nègre tremble de froid, ce froid qui vous tord les os, le beau petit garçon tremble parce qu'il croit que le nègre tremble de rage, le petit garçon blanc se jette dans les bras de sa mère : maman, le nègre va me manger.
Dans L'An V de la révolution algérienne (1970) Fanon consacre plusieurs pages au foulard islamique et à son importance politique : quand les Européens rêvent au viol d'une Algérienne, le foulard islamique est toujours mis en pièces avant l'agression. Wyrick aborde le rôle complexe du voile dans la société algérienne : les patrons européens tâchaient de remodeler la culture de leurs employés mâles en demandant à ceux-ci d'être accompagnés de leurs femmes aux soirées organisées par la compagnie. Ces Algériens se trouvaient donc dans une impasse : en acceptant, ils violaient le code social interdisant aux femmes ce genre d'activités ; en refusant, ils risquaient de perdre leur emploi. Wyrick montre comment Fanon a pu aborder cette question sous différents angles, par exemple, pour le touriste et l'étranger, le foulard islamique institue une frontière tant avec la société algérienne dans son ensemble qu'avec sa portion féminine. Wyrick ne s'intéresse pas à la question de savoir si Fanon a constaté ou non les effets soi-disant
modernisateurs du colonialisme : quel était, par exemple, le point de vue du colonisateur moyen sur la question de l'excision?
Wyrick examine dans Les damnés de la terre (1963) le point de vue controversé de Fanon sur la violence dirigée contre le colonisateur, point de vue qui établit le lien très concret existant entre le colonisateur avide de pouvoir et la terreur qu'il impose.
Certains critiques schizophrènes sur les bords ont délibérément déformé la vision de Fanon portant sur une contre-violence. Robert Fulford du Globe & Mail a écrit à son sujet : « Dieu seul sait combien de morts sa folie aura permis de justifier. » (22 avril 1998). Fulford a peut-être subi
dans la jeunesse l'influence du magazine Time : « Fanon... apôtre de la violence... prisonnier de la haine... » (avril 1965).
Selon les termes mêmes de Fanon, cette praxis violente est totalisante, puisque chacun se fait maillon violent de la grande chaîne, du grand organisme violent surgi comme réaction à la violence première du colonialiste. (Les Damnés de la terre)
Richard Nixon, George Bush, Saddam Hussein et Benazir Bhutto ne sont pas les émules parfumés de Florence Nightingale. Ne serait-il pas naïf de s'attendre à ce que les peuples du Tiers-monde se prosternent devant l'Occident et lui fournissent sans rien demander en échange des matières premières, du pétrole, du sexe postcolonial pour touristes et des baskets fabriqués pour des prunes ?
Fanon for beginners peut s'avérer très utile : songez à tous ces dîners où vous avez eu le sentiment d'être mal informés sur le monde colonisé... Vous trouverez dans ce livre de solides rudiments d'analyse en la matière et vous pourrez si cela vous chante faire usage de violence verbale contre tous ceux dont les opinions vous sembleront erronées, confuses ou le moindrement disjonctées.
