Frantz Fanon. Christopher J. Lee

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ to Algeria’s, with Fanon expressing the sentiment of being “violently shaken” by recent events in the place of his birth.¹⁴

      The decline of Fanon’s memory in Algeria poses equally difficult questions. One answer for this absence was his lack of a top leadership position within the anticolonial National Liberation Front (Front de Libération Nationale or FLN) and his consequent marginalization within the pantheon of Algerian nationalists. The nature of the Algerian struggle itself stressed the role of the popular masses—one slogan being “Only one hero: the People”—over the importance of individual leaders. Authority within the FLN was also no guarantee, as the party was wracked by internal divisions during and after the war—the untimely removal of Ahmed Ben Bella (1916–2012), Algeria’s first president, in 1965 being a case in point. More significant, however, was the perception of Fanon as a foreigner in Algeria, despite his political allegiance to the FLN and his burial in the eastern part of the country. It is a view that has never diminished. Although his name marks the hospital where he once worked, as well as a school and a street in Algiers, Fanon has remained an outsider, his personal history in Algeria being fixed to a specific period. At the same 1978 UN meeting, Mohamed Bedjaoui, the Algerian ambassador to France, tacitly captured this ambiguity, saying Fanon was “still alive in our hearts” seventeen years after his death, though Bedjaoui would not “give way to the very strong temptation to claim him for Algeria, because that most certainly would narrow the scope of a man whose only frontiers were the boundaries of freedom, of justice and of dignity.”¹⁵ Fanon himself began to think beyond Algeria toward the end of his life, with The Wretched of the Earth outlining a broader political geography that encompassed the rest of Africa and the rising Third World. But the political language he articulated has also had, arguably, less utility and declining meaning over the past fifty years for Algerians, given its strident critique of French colonialism. The paradigms of thought that his work confronted—including Négritude and ethno-psychiatry, in addition to French racism and colonialism—appear to be a world apart for generations of Algerians born since the revolution.

      This book is written against this perception of irrelevance. Following the lead of other scholars, it argues for Fanon’s continued significance based on his enduring insights. He was not only a critic of colonialism but an early critic of postcolonialism, with hard-won assessments that still apply to present-day Algeria and elsewhere. This book further makes this case for Fanon’s importance through the example of his life. In particular, this book stresses the form of political engagement Fanon cultivated—what I call radical empathy. Radical empathy is not an expression that he used. I introduce it in this book to reinterpret his concerns and to capture the individual, rather than national or anticolonial, politics he defined and exemplified. Indeed, Fanon ultimately declared himself Algerian, exemplifying a revolutionary transformation in his own subjectivity. But radical empathy provided a first step. As a concept and practice, it seeks to move Fanon away from textual abstraction by outlining a personal and more affective dimension to his political commitments. Grounded in his medical work and his strong identification with the Algerian struggle, it outlines a political ethic beyond the antiracism and anticolonial violence he famously promoted, though this practice of moral engagement emerged from these better-known positions. Fanon’s politics were not purely contrarian. They equally sought new forms of connection and solidarity.

      This approach thus not only seeks to provide an alternative understanding of his life. It intends to make him more accessible—less a myth, and more human. Since his death in 1961, Fanon’s thought has influenced activists across the world, from civil rights struggles in the United States to the Black Consciousness Movement in South Africa. More recently, the Arab Spring that swept North Africa and the Middle East in 2011 recalled earlier histories of regional political dissent, of which Fanon was a vital part. Controversy over Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank has also revived Fanonian views toward settler colonialism. Fanon presents a genealogy of twentieth-century activism different from figures like Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr. (1929–1968), and Desmond Tutu (1931–present), each of whom espoused nonviolence as a means for achieving political change. Similar to figures like Mao Tse-tung (1893–1976), Ernesto “Che” Guevara (1928–1967), and Amílcar Cabral (1924–1973), Fanon instead advocated certain forms of violence as a political necessity, reflecting an extended period of armed struggle during the 1950s and 1960s that included the First Indochina War (1946–54) against French rule in Southeast Asia, the Mau Mau Uprising (1952–60) in British colonial Kenya, the Cuban Revolution (1953–59) led by Fidel Castro (1926–present) and Guevara, and the turn of South Africa’s antiapartheid struggle to armed resistance, most notably through the Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK), a military organization founded in 1961 by the African National Congress and the South African Communist Party.

      Violence remains the most controversial issue regarding Fanon—an intrinsic, yet polarizing, dimension of his work that has strengthened his critics and been an inconvenient topic for his admirers. It arguably explains the greater popularity of Black Skin, White Masks over The Wretched of the Earth—the latter outlining his argument for violent struggle. It is an issue that still deserves debate. But to mark this embrace of violence as the singular feature of Fanon’s politics is too reductive. Violence remained a strategic choice. It was historically situated for Fanon—a response to the pure violence of colonialism. Armed struggle did not apply universally across time and place. Indeed, this prevalent critical perspective on Fanon, popularized by other intellectuals such as Hannah Arendt (1906–1975), often elides his experience as a psychiatrist who treated victims of torture and violence during the Algerian War.¹⁶ Fanon did not categorically promote violence for this reason. Unlike Mao, Guevara, and Cabral, he did not pick up a gun and find a permanent place on the battlefield of revolution. Though he argued for its tactical necessity and cathartic potential, Fanon recognized its traumatic impact from firsthand experience.

      His greater political legacy—still relevant today—is the form of political empathy he nurtured in Algeria and Tunisia, while active with the FLN. Fanon was neither Algerian, nor an Arab, nor a Muslim by birth. Unlike many anticolonial leaders and activists, he did not participate in a struggle located in his country of origin. His arrival in Algeria was based entirely on professional contingencies. Fanon’s identification with the Algerian struggle, however, ultimately rested with his own experience with French colonialism, the self-knowledge he gained with Black Skin, White Masks, and his consequent ability to empathize with the Algerian people and their situation as depicted in A Dying Colonialism and The Wretched of the Earth—despite his own experiences of discrimination by Algerians, despite class and cultural distinctions between himself and those he sought to represent, despite lack of fluency in Arabic, despite being considered a foreigner.

      Josie Fanon, his wife, once said that people “have often wondered why he should have taken part in the liberation of a country which was not his originally.” Her reply was that only “narrow minds and hearts” for whom race or religion “constitutes an unbridgeable gulf” fail to understand—there was no contradiction or dilemma for Fanon, only necessity.¹⁷ Fanon achieved this kind of transcendence of identity only through the intense self-reflection that characterized his intellectual life, combined with the personal mobility and expansive geography that his life eventually encompassed, granting him a perspective he would not have attained otherwise. Yet radical empathy is not synonymous with cosmopolitanism. It is a political outcome of cosmopolitanism. It is a civic effect of his transcolonial experiences in Martinique and Algeria, as well as his postcolonial experiences in Tunisia, Morocco, Ghana, and Mali. Radical empathy is one struggled-for result of the “total understanding” Fanon sought and first identified in Black Skin, White Masks, as cited in the opening epigraph. It is a mechanism for the new humanism he aspired to at the end of The Wretched of the Earth. His internationalism and political evolution were firmly interwoven.

      This book therefore does not propose an uncritical nostalgia for Fanon, renouncing the present and the future to reclaim a mystical past, to paraphrase his own words.¹⁸ Instead, this short book seeks to humanize Fanon—to reclaim his life and make his work immediate, as he himself sought. A historical approach is vital in this regard. СКАЧАТЬ