Alex's review of The Wretched of the Earth (original) (raw)

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Alex's Reviews > The Wretched of the Earth

The Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon

The Wretched of the Earth
by

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Deep in the bowels of libraries, past the celebrity memoirs and adventure stories, tattered in the stacks, there are dark things: books that are actively, overtly dangerous. Here's one now.

Frantz Fanon's 1961 classic The Wretched of the Earth is about violence; it champions violence. It's a manual on how to be violent. Fanon is a genius, so it's seductive. It's like The Prince for African revolutionaries: concerned not with your bourgeois "morals" but with results. Here, let's summarize it with a Game of Thrones gif. (That's what the kids are doing, right?)

This is a little bit of an oversimplification, some recent defenders say. Fanon (France FAN-un, less difficult than I thought it would be) isn't advocating violence for violence's sake; he wouldn't choose violence if he thought there was another option. He just thinks nonviolence is absurd. He sees violence as an inevitable response to colonialism, which is by definition violent. It's not that he's rooting for it; it's that he sees it. "The exploited realize that their liberation implies using every means available, and force is the first."

And yet. When someone writes as eloquently and convincingly that violence is the first option, he is championing it. "Decolonization reeks of red-hot cannonballs and bloody knives," he says. "For the last can be the first only after a murderous and decisive confrontation between the two protagonists."

Mandela in South Africa would show, decades after Fanon's death in 1961, that nonviolence can (sortof) work*. Fanon was dismissive of leaders like Mandela. “The unpreparedness of the educated classes, the lack of practical links between them and the mass of the people, their laziness, and, let it be said, their cowardice at the decisive moment of the struggle will give rise to tragic mishaps,” he said, inaccurately. He was all prole, all the time. "In the colonial countries only the peasantry is revolutionary. It has nothing to lose and everything to gain. The underprivileged and starving peasant is the exploited who very soon realizes that only violence pays.” But peasant-led revolutions have not always worked out super well either.

Fanon, who fought for the native Front de Libération Nationale in Algeria's revolution, knew first-hand how quickly violence turns on itself. He found himself accusing the French of massacring 300 civilians in 1957; his own FLN was in fact responsible. It's unclear whether he knew that at the time. When you plunge your hands into blood, they get bloody.

Jean-Paul Sartre, a supporter who wrote the preface to this book, says it baldly:

“Get this into your head: if violence were only a thing of the future, if exploitation and oppression never existed on earth, perhaps displays of nonviolence might relieve the conflict. But if the entire regime, even your nonviolent thoughts, is governed by a thousand-year old oppression, your passiveness serves no other purpose but to put you on the side of the oppressors.”

This is not true, but it describes a truth. Some people, faced with violence, will respond with violence. It's okay to get all judgey about that, as long as you were even more judgey about the original violence. If you weren't pissed off about that, you should ask yourself which side you're on.

And if you choose violence yourself, here are your operating instructions. They're dangerous.

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Reading Progress

November 28, 2016 – Shelved

November 28, 2016 – Shelved as:to-read

November 28, 2016 – Shelved as:africa

February 28, 2017 –Started Reading

March 1, 2017 –Finished Reading

March 7, 2017 – Shelved as:2017

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