Ahmad Jaradat : Alternative Information Center-Palestine
Frantz Fanon, the activist and the intellectual against the colonization, 50 years after the publication of « The wretched of the earth » and 50 years after his death
While colonization is roosting, “The wretched of the earth” still resist
“For a colonized people the most essential value, because the most
concrete, is first and foremost the land : the land which will bring them bread
and above all dignity”. (The Wretched of the Earth, Frantz Fanon).
In the 50th year of his publication « The wretched of the earth » and in the
50th year of the death of Frantz Fanon, a great struggler and revolutionary
thinker, the current importance of his work is in front of us : he fixed his
experience taking part in the real struggle against the colonization
movement, in the middle of the last century. Concretely, he inspired his life
with the grassroots resistance, through a deep analysis of the Algerian
liberation movement against the French long-term colonization. The core of
Fanon’s value is the direct participation on the struggle, recording his
humanity experience on behalf of Algerian people and against his own
country : Fanon didn’t confine his studies inside a room or a university, he
decided to be directly involved in the resistance against the colonizers who
usurped the independence and the freedom of Algerian people. This is the
main reason to understand why Fanon’s thinking is still alive today : in his
mind, humanity and revolutionary values can’t accept any solution in the
middle, any compromise or weak balance. Such an experience, concrete on
the ground and theoretical on his thinking, was able to reach the academic
debate and to push the intellectual world to face the issues of colonization
and struggle for the liberation.
The Fanon’s critical vision has the aim to clarify the strict relation
between the colonization and the nation under occupation, underlining the
contradictions based on this connection. The colonization violence creates the
revolutionary violence, the only way in the hands of the occupied people to
reach the final liberation. Fanon is deeply convinced that the colonizer’s
presence is the reason for the uprising and the armed resistance : any kind of
struggle against the colonization has to be violent, because violence is the
only language the colonialism can understand. In Fanon’s view, a coexistence
is not possible at all : each side should defeat the other, the enemy.
“It is clear that in the colonial countries the peasants alone are
revolutionary, for they have nothing to lose and everything to gain. The
starving peasant, outside the class system is the first among the exploited to
discover that only violence pays. For him there is no compromise, no possible
coming to terms ; colonization and decolonization a simply a question of
relative strength” (The wretched of the Earth, Frantz Fanon)”.
This thinking can’t accept any discussion or equivocation : the original
nation has the right to be involved in the struggle against colonization. This
kind of struggle is a right of a people under occupation, according to the
international law that allows an occupied country to fight the colonizer power
with any kinds of instruments, armed or not armed resistance.
The central points of Fanon’s analysis are raised and clarified in his most
famous book, “The wretched of the Earth”, where the thinker is dealing with
the Algerian experience against the French occupation. In the 50th anniversary
of his death, our aim is to enlighten the core of Fanon’s thinking, considered a
backbone of the concrete and theoretical analysis of the concepts of
colonization and liberation. This book is a beacon that can guide the freedom
strugglers toward the emancipation and spaces of wider life : the struggle
should be directed to the destruction of all the constraints imposed by the
colonialism, in order to achieve dignity and freedom from misery and slavery.
As a psychiatrist, Fanon analyzed the psychological effect of colonization on
the individual mind and on the collective mind, the psyche of the nation. In
Fanon’s view, the indirect colonization continues after the end of the direct
one in the cultural and psychological levels.
Such an analysis becomes actual and present now, here, during the Arab
springs and inside Palestine : Fanon’s view is able to uncover and reveal the
similarity between the traditional kind of colonization, in all its old forms, and
the new and current one. Where are the similarities ? The analogy can be
found in the forms that the resistance assumes against the colonization
power and in the essence of the conflict between the two sides and their
internal contradictions. In this path, the traditional colonization and the new
one control the capabilities of the occupied people regardless on the form of
this occupation, direct or indirect. The latter is the new form the colonization
assumes now, after the end of the traditional colonialisms and the obtaining
of the independence by the States in Africa and Middle East. Using Fanon’s
analysis, that considered the struggle still alive, we can underline the change
occurred in the last decades : the physical colonization turned into a cultural
colonization.
“The claim to a national culture in the past does not only rehabilitate
that nation and serve as a justification for the hope of a future national
culture. In the sphere of psycho-affective equilibrium it is responsible for an
important change in the native. Perhaps we haven’t sufficiently demonstrated
that colonialism is not satisfied merely with holding a people in its grip and
emptying the native’s brain of all form and content. By a kind of perverted
logic, it turns to the past of the oppressed people, and distorts, disfigures,
and destroys it. This work of devaluing pre-colonial history takes on a
dialectical significance today”. (The Wretched of the Earth, Frantz Fanon)
This is the mainly heritage of Fanon’s thinking : he predicted this change
and the fake end of colonialism. Even if the occupied powers left their
colonies, the indirect colonization is still going on through maintaining their
culture, their model of institutions and social classes, their local bodies and
groups. The real independence is never reached, the cultural and
psychological dependence is resisting into the entire society. The Fanon’s
prediction about the no-end of the colonization and the emphasizing of the
cultural and social occupation is the greatest value of his analysis : the
colonization roosts and exists through local bodies and classes.
In this meaning, the colonization resists controlling and taking over the
resources of the occupied nation and creating its system of intellectual and
cultural tools in order to develop and support its interests and needs. The
same aim was reaching in the past, during the traditional colonialism, through
domination, exploitation, military control and repression. It’s easy to find in
the war against terrorism launched by United States after 11th September
2001 and supported by Western countries this new kind of colonization, a war
and a occupation justified by the security needs and the development of the
Western democracy. Fanon’s view leads us to deeply understand the features
of the modern colonization, in countries like Iraq and Afghanistan : hundreds
of thousands of deaths, high rates of unemployment, high levels of poverty
and misery, lack of infrastructures, water, electricity, schools and health
service and loss of the control of natural resources. If Iraq and Afghanistan are
facing a direct occupation, the indirect one is affecting the rest of the
countries in the same region.
As Fanon explained in his book, the indirect colonization is going on
through political and cultural tools and is perpetrated by local lobbies and
groups, grown up during the colonialism era and allowed now to preserve the
people in poverty, ignorance, alienation. As result, this people feel themselves
as stranger inside their own country and try to get out of the situation using
the tool of immigration, even if it can cause suffers, sorrows and risks of
deaths. This is the birth of a new reality, where people are forced to face hard
conditions of life, looking for daily food, moving to the big cities, working in
harsh and dangerous environment. The new reality inside those countries is in
contradiction of a health and balanced development : around the big cities,
blocks of new and poor constructions grow and pile up on each other,
without space for privacy and normal life, in miserable conditions and harsh
alienation. Those people become invisible to the colonialism and capitalism
eyes, that control the country and its resources, usurped by the legitimate
owners. The international capitalism finds in the local neo-liberalism and in
the transnational companies the main tool to maintain its hands on those
countries, under the shadow of globalization and open market policy.
The conclusions reached by Fanon more than fifty years ago are actual
until now : we can easily apply them to the current situation in the Arab world.
The ongoing Arab reality is the perfect pattern to understand Fanon’s
prospective and to realize how our countries are stuck under the capitalism
and colonization powers. Among the pages of his book, we can find the
answer to the current situation in order to clarify the contradictions faced by
the revolutionary movements. Movements that are representing the struggle
for justice and freedom, to satisfy the needs of the Arab people. The struggle
is necessary in order to rescue the Arab world from the compulsions of the
political, economical and cultural neo-colonialism. In the impossible
coexistence between the two sides and in the inevitability of the conflict, we
can understand the deep value of Fanon’s thinking : the role of the struggle in
order to defeat the colonialism power in its direct and indirect forms. The
struggle is the only way to obtain a concrete decolonization, to free the
individual and collective minds from the cultural and psychological
occupation.
Since the beginning and the outbreak of the struggle, the central issues
in Fanon’s view are the aim and the tools of the resistance : to smash the
colonization and liberate people under oppression through collective
movements. Emancipation and freedom can be reached just with the final
victory on the colonialism power. This kind of movements is not random and
unconscious, but solid and balanced. They are dependent on the deep
reading and understanding of the current conditions : there isn’t alternative
for the struggle in its sense of tool of liberation. The main value in Fanon’s
analysis is the importance of the decision of a nation or a people to fight in
order to defeat the colonization and to gain freedom. The direction chosen by
oppressed people is evident in the newborn movements and in their aim : to
move from the situation imposed by the long term colonization to a new one.
This is the struggle dialectic that Fanon underlined in his thinking, the
confrontation faced by the revolutionary movement in order to obtain a
concrete change.
And the change will be visible in the rebuilding of the nation and in the
birth of new human beings from the ruins of the colonization. This kind of
transformation will lead to remove misery, ignorance, suffering. So, the
struggle will be the necessary tool to produce a new efficiency. In Fanon’s
view, this step isn’t only possible, but it’s essential to produce the new
humanity through the struggle for the liberation. The new human beings born
from the past, achieving themselves from a bad past : the future will be built
on the ashes of what happened before, as a phoenix.
Such an analysis should be applied to the present of the Arabic
countries, especially Palestine. As Fanon explained, there isn’t liberation
without sovereignty : the freedom of the people is dependent on the freedom
of their country, the collective liberation passes for the independence of the
State. In Fanon’s view, it should be the core of the path to freedom : he
predicted the new future State after colonization as a dependent country,
dependent from the cultural and political colonialism. The concrete
colonization power leaves physically the colony, but still resists through social
and cultural instruments. The consequence is visible on the continuation of
the struggle, in a different form.
In the Arab world and in North Africa, where Fanon spent his life and
formed his prospective, closed to the reality on the ground, it’s possible to
find the concrete features of the Fanon’s theoretical model : after several
decades from the end of the direct colonization, the cultural and social
instruments are still working on the ground, the people dignity is still under
control, while poverty, ignorance and oppression are affecting daily life. And
after decades, the Arab world has finally raised, in a new form of the struggle.
Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen are some of the examples of this new uprising. The
slogans chanted in Tunisia and in Tahrir Square in Cairo are talking about
dignity, liberation and independence from humiliation, misery and control.
Those slogan represent the answer not only to the regimes, but also to the
Western countries that for years maintained their strict control through
diplomatic, economical and political relations with the dictatorships.
Further, the Fanon’s analysis is found on the Palestinian cause. Here, the
colonization is still concrete. It didn’t change on an indirect form : the
occupation is touchable, it’s daily life. In Palestine, the grassroots struggle is
going on against the Zionist project and settlements expansion in West Bank.
As observer and expert of the settlers violence all around West Bank, I am
facing every day the concrete consequences of the ongoing Israel
colonization : violence perpetrated by settlers and by the Army, land
confiscations, exploitation of the natural resources for the settlements project,
deportation policy, quiet transfer of Palestinian people. A transfer that is still
working, every Palestinian is a potential new refugee. The peak of the
deportation was reached in 1948, the Nakba, the catastrophe for the
Palestine : collective transfers and massacres ripped people from their own
lands, their own villages, their own cities. The final destinations were the
refugee camps, all around the Arab world : Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq. For
more than 750.000 Palestinian the independence of Israel became the loss of
their life.
But the transfer isn’t finished. It’s still going on, changed into a silent
transfer : confiscations of lands and demolitions of houses are the new tools in
the Zionist hands to push Palestinian people to move from their country. The
oppression and colonization policy is damaging our dignity and our
humanity : the Israel occupation makes us feel that we aren’t anymore human
beings. We aren’t human beings in the checkpoint, piled in long queue,
waiting for hours to cross the barrier, as chicken in a cage. We aren’t human
beings when we are forced to face guns and rifles of the soldiers on the road
checkpoint, along West Bank. We are not human beings when we aren’t
allowed to use Shuhada street in the hearth of Hebron, closed by electronic
and iron gates. We aren’t human beings when we are forced to walk for
kilometers to reach our schools, our houses, our shops because the main road
is reserved for the Israeli settlers. We aren’t human beings when the settlers
attack our shepherds and our children, in their way for work or for school. We
aren’t human beings when the Israeli Army enters our fields and uproots
hundreds of our olive trees, our ancient and present wealth. By Struggle we
will get back our humanity and achieve out self.
Walking in West Bank, we can face the occupation, visible concretely in
more than two hundred Israeli settlements, spots in our lands that spread like
a cancer. And beside the rich settlements, with their gardens and swimming
pools, we see the misery of the Palestinian villages, without water and
electricity, facing the lack of schools and health services. As the settlers are
living on the top of the hills, the Army control Palestinians from the top of
barriers and walls : the occupation and the colonization look at Palestine from
above, to underlined their superiority : “You don’t deserve to be at my same
level”, this the message of the Zionist project.
In this kind of reality, it’s easy to discover Fanon’s analysis : meanwhile
the colonization is going on, the struggle resists on the ground, on the daily
life. The diplomatic and political process to reach the peace failed, unable to
end the occupation. And after 50 years, meanwhile his analysis influenced
anti-colonial and national liberation movements all over the world (especially
leaders like Ali Shariati in Iran, Steve Biko in South Africa, Malcolm X and
Ernesto Che Guevara in Cuba) we can understand again the value of Fanon’s
thinking, that became during the time an inspiration for the Palestinian
popular resistance. Among Palestinian people his name is familiar, his name is
respected. Inside and outside the universities, students and professors discuss
about his analysis and apply his prospective to the Palestinian case. His
speech is still alive inside the Israeli prisons, where the Palestinian political
prisoners compare their ideas about oppression and liberation from the
pages of his books.
The real value of Fanon’s experience is the capacity to mix the
theoretical analysis to the concrete life. Frantz Fanon was an intellectual and a
freedom fighter. He took part on the Algerian struggle for liberation, side by
side with Algerian people and against his own country. Fanon was activist and
thinker at the same time. And this feature makes his prospective deep and
concrete : he analyzed the structure of the colonization and the characters of
the popular struggle on the ground, and not from a desk in a room far from
the people.
With his speech, Frantz Fanon took hope from the people involved on
the resistance against the occupation and the colonization, in its direct or
indirect form.
hile liberation, freedom and human dignity will be fulfilled.
