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Abstract
Frantz Fanon's revolutionary text The Wretched of the Earth has had a major impact on English-speaking readers since it first appeared in translation in 1963. This article charts the shifting contextualization of the book as it has framed subsequent editions, culminating in an exploration of the most recent translation by Richard Philcox. By contrasting this translation of the book with previous versions, and also by critically examining the new forward by Homi K. Bhabha, the author explores Fanon's relevance to the current social and political world. He finds continued relevance for The Wretched in Fanon's quest to get beyond the manicheanism that characterises the colonial and anti-colonial periods as well as the contemporary rhetoric of Bush and Bin Laden. The author argues that our engagement with Fanon should begin from his most critical insights into the postcolonial period and in his critique of the national bourgeoisie and postcolonial petit bourgeoisie, which is grounded in an engagement with Fanon as a living thinker.
Acknowledgments
The author would like to thank Katie Hunt, Kate Josephson, Richard Pithouse and especially Sox Serizawa for their critical comments and advice.
Notes
1. ‘Philosophy, which once seemed obsolete, lives on because the moment of its realization was missed’ (Adorno, Citation1973, p. 3). Translation slightly altered. Fanon's French is fairly straightforward especially in contrast to translating Adorno's German.
2. ‘The explosion will not happen today. It is too soon … or too late’, Black Skin White Masks, translated by Charles Lam Markmann, 1967, p. 7. Future citations will be in text as BS.
3. In text citations (D) will be to the 2002 La Découverte edition.
4. In text citations to the Farrington translation (CF) will be to this edition. RP designates the Philcox translation.
5. Because ‘ideology’ is often considered a swear word, rather than connected to ideation, I prefer Farrington's less literal translation which nuances the power of the mind. Certainly by the term ideology Fanon had in mind a critique which involved thought, a clarification, enlightenment and consciousness. On Fanon's notion of ideology, see Gibson, 1999, pp. 337–64.
6. This is a good example of Farrington's awkwardness in contrast to the simplicity of Philcox's translation.
7. Ballantine Books (in an arrangement with Grove) put out an edition in 1973 calling The Wretched ‘The handbook of the third world revolution’. I don't know if there were any other editions; I am working with what I have in my own library.
8. ‘The writings of Malcolm X or Elridge Cleaver or Amiri Baraka or the Black Panther leaders reveal how profoundly they have been moved by the thoughts of Frantz Fanon.’
9. In mainstream postcolonial studies, more often than not, Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks is usually considered his master work, while The Wretched is reduced to an excerpt of ‘Concerning violence’ and ‘On national culture’. This has begun to change. See, for example, Young, Citation2001.
10. For example, she translates ‘masquer cette régression’ (D, p. 160) as ‘mark this regression’ (CF, p. 165) rather than ‘mask this regression’ (RP, p. 111).
11. ‘Lisez Fanon: vous saurez que, dans le temps de leur impuissance, la folie meurtrière est l'inconscient collectif de colonisés’ (D, p. 26).
12. I must note Raymond Geuss’ comment to me that if Sartre was born anything, it was a Cartesian! And perhaps Fanon's critique of Sartre's privileging of the intellect at the expense of lived experience is ultimately critiquing the Descartes in Sartre.
13. Fanon's conception of absolute is thus one of absolute diremption rather than synthesis. For example, decolonization as it is described on the very first page of The Wretched creates total disorder and thus is always violent because it creates a new consciousness out of nothing. That is to say, the non-being becomes being through action. The non-being becomes an historical protagonist through the transforming process of struggle. Through this process, the historical protagonists take on more nuanced views as they face ‘the pitfalls’ and ‘misadventures’ of national consciousness.
14. On the issue of guaranteeing authorial authenticity, see Stepto, Citation1991.
15. Homi Bhabha published an adaptation from his foreword to The Wretched entitled ‘Is Frantz Fanon still relevant?’ (2005). An excerpt of the Chronicle of Higher Education article can be found on the History News Network, hnn.us/roundup/entries/10762.html. Bhabha's foreword to The Wretched is cited in text as ‘B’.
16. Bhabha has an easier time writing of ‘Fanon for other times and places’, such as the Black Panthers, Steve Biko, Bobby Sands (B, pp. xxviii–xxix) before his ‘street fighting days came to an end in the 1970s and 1980s’ (B, p. xxxi).
17. Later Bhabha speaks quite differently, not of the ‘transformation’ of economic terms but of Fanon's ‘extension’ of ‘Marxism toward a greater emphasis on the importance of psychological and cultural liberation’ (B, p. xxix).
18. Contrast this to Bhabha's (2002) insistence in ‘Terror and after …’ that ‘the decision to implement and administer terror is a political decision not a civilizational or cultural practice’.
19. In this case, perhaps Farrington's translation is closer to Fanon's meaning, since Fanon does not use the word ‘perfection’ and a royal pardon does not imply perfection.
20. Contrast the international silence of the horrific suffocation of thousands of Algerians people in mountain caves in the 1840s under the orders of French ‘civilizer’ Field-Marshal Bugeaud (who had said, ‘if the scoundrels retreat to their caves … smoke them out mercilessly, like foxes) with Fanon's point in 1961 that at a certain moment the beating up of people in Salisbury becomes an international event (see Djebar, Citation1993).
21. As ‘Fellaheen’ it was used in a derogatory way by French to refer to partisans.
22. Interestingly Fanon uses the same quote from Césaires ‘Les armes miraculouse‘ (Et les chiens se taisaient) ‘And the dogs were silent’ (RP, p. 44) that he had in Black Skin (BS, p. 198) arguing that having killed the white master within himself, the Rebel killed the master ‘after having driven himself to the limit of self-destruction, the Black is about to leap into the “black hole”,’ and shake the pillars of the world (BS, p. 199).
23. That is to say, the Mau Mau oath was a secret yet social pledge to strike at the oppressor, to reclaim land, to put an end to the total atmosphere of violence that is colonialism. Indeed it was neither as thoughtless nor as brutal as the colonists made out. On the brutality of the British, see Elkins, Citation2004.
24. In this context one must take into consideration Fanon's chapter four of The Wretched, ‘Colonial war and mental disorders’.
25. See BS p. 100 and the introduction to ‘A dying colonialism’.
26. ‘Primitive accumulation’ remains the rule under neoliberal structural adjustment. State-centric schemes of import-substitution which relied on cash crops and the expropriation of the peasantry and farm laborers also tended to provide basic health care and education. On the other hand, structural adjustment has seen the ending of all ‘subsidies’ and an open market which has meant increasing poverty and exploitation.
27. As can be seen from the massive removals in Zimbabwe last year (2005) which are simply a local expression of a global phenomenon. The common justification for the ‘forced removal’ is to fight crime and disease. Other events justify a ‘clean up’ just as the removal of residents in Hatcliffe Extension, West of Harare, in 1990 before a visit by Queen Elizabeth II. In South Africa, the forthcoming World Cup will ‘justify’ further removals. See Davis, Citation2006, pp. 111–14.
28. The simple truth expressed by poor is expressed by King in Chris Abani's novel Graceland set in Lagos’ sprawling shantytown:
De Majority of our people are honest, hardworking people, but they are at the mercy of dese army bastards and dose tiefs in the IMF, de World Bank and de US … Let me tell you how the World Bank helps us. Say dey offer us a ten-million dollar loan for creating potable and clean water supply to rural areas … First dey tell us dat we have to use de expertise of their consultants, so dey remove two million for salaries and expenses. Den dey tell us dat de consultants need equipment to work, like computer, jeeps or bulldozers, and for hotel and so on, so dey take another two million. Den dey say we cannot build new boreholes but must service existing one, so dey take another two million to buy parts. All dis money, six million of it, never leave de US. Den dey use two million for de project, but is not enough, so dey abandon it, and den army bosses take de remaining two million. Now we, you and I and all dese poor people, owe de World Bank ten million dollars for nothing. Dey are all tiefs and I despise them—our people and de World Bank people. (Abani, Citation2004, p. 280)
29. Philcox's translation reads ‘Self-awareness does not mean closing the door on communication. Philosophy teaches us on the contrary that it is its guarantee’ (p. 179).
30. For example, see the criticisms of Fanon in Miller (Citation1990) and LeSueur (Citation2002).
31. For example, Fanon's essay ‘Algeria's European minority’ in his Dying Colonialism, a book completed just over a year before Fanon started work on The Wretched, discusses the ‘multiracial reality of the Algerian Nation’ in terms of language and religion. Of Algeria's Jewish minority, Fanon wrote, ‘today, the Jewish lawyers and doctors who in the camps or in prison share the fate of millions of Algerians attest to the multiracial reality of the Algerian nation’. He quotes from a manifesto of one Jewish group in Constantine, ‘one of the pernicious maneuvers of colonialism in Algeria was and remains the division between Jews and Moslems. The Jews have been in Algeria for more than two thousand years; they are an integral part of the Algerian people’, A Dying Colonialism, 1965, pp. 155, 157. See Turner, Citation2001, pp. 37–46.
32. Reprinted in Gibson, 1999, p. 191.
33. Indeed, the ‘colonization of the mind’ was uneven beyond a small number of colonized elite and the colonizing mission was quite different in rural areas where colonialism supported ‘customary rule’. On the issue of the legacy of late colonial rule see Mamdani (Citation1996). Mamdani argues that the decolonization movements deracialized urban society but did little to undermine the legacy of ‘indirect rule’, namely the ‘despotism’ of customary rule in the rural areas.
34. For example, see Bond (2005) which could have taken the title of another of his books, Fanon's Warning. Contemporary engagements with Fanon in South Africa include Richard Pithouse (Citation2003a), (2003b) and (2006). See also Gibson, Citation2005, pp. 89–118.
35. Fanon's dialectic of The Wretched is not a teleology toward certain freedom; even if Fanon believes that freedom is possible, it is not inevitable but in fact very difficult, and the African nation, in Fanon's words, is ‘fragile and in permanent danger’ (CF, p. 247).
36. This is incorrectly noted as p. 122 in Bhabha's text. A similar mistake is made with note number 101 which is to page 145 but is noted as page 132.