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xxivFOREWORDAt the level of the unconscious, therefore, colonialism was notto perceived as a sweet, kind-hearted mother who protects herfrom a hostile environment, but rather a mother who constantlyprevents her basically perverse child from committing suicide or givingfree rein to its malevolent instincts. The colonial mother is protectingthe child from itself, from its ego, its physiology, its biology, and itsmisfortune. 46'French colonial policy acknowledges the naked right of thecolonized as individual-divested of cultural differences-to beidentified as a citizen ofthe republic. But there exists, at the sametime, a discriminatory denial or disavowal ofthe colonized citizen'sright to be represented and recognized as a culturally clothedsubject who may not conform to the norms and practices of Frenchcivil society. Without the rights of representation and participation,in the public sphere, can the subject ever be a citizen in thetrue sense of the term? If the colonized citizen is prevented fromexercising his or her collective and communal agency as a full andequal member of civil society, what kind ofshadow does that throwon the public virtue of the French republic? This does not merelymake an ass of the law of assimilationist colonialism; it createsprofound ethical and phenomenological problems of racial injusatthe heart of the psycho-affective realm of the colonial relation.As Sartre perceived the problem, "One of the functions ofracism is to compensate the latent universalism of bourgeoiseralism: since all human beings have the same rights, the Algerianbe made a subhuman."47 It is this anomalous and ambivalentsituation of universality-with-racism, and formal citizenshipwithout-equality,that is an unresolvable embarrassment withinthe ideals and ideologies ofthe civilizing mission. I use theembarrassment advisedly, to return to the question of colonial"instability" and my discussion of the psycho-affective sphereThe Wretched ofthe Earth.46 WE, 149.47 \:nrh= 45.FOREWORDxxv"On Violence" describes the struggle between brute realitiesand resistant bodies in a prose that rises off the page to take youthe hand, "to touch my reader affectively, or in other wordsirrationally or sensually. For me words have a charge. I findmyself incapable of escaping the bite of a word, the vertigo ofa question-mark."48 The colonialist declares the native to be"a corrosive element ... distorting everything whichaesthetics or morals ... an unconscious and incurable instrumentof blind forces."49 Such an ontological obliteration of the"other" results in "the colonised's affectivity lbeing put1on edgelike a running sore flinching from a caustic agent,"50 as the psycheretreats into muscular spasms and hysterical symptoms. Treatthenatives as something less than human-settler vigilantegroups called their wanton killing of Muslim Algerians "rathunts"51-resultsin a process of depersonalization that createsa sense of bodily memory and a violent corporeal agency:shanty-town is the consecration of the colonised's biological decisionto invade the enemy citadel at all costs, and if need be, bythe most underground channels" (my emphasis).52 These violentaspects of the realm of psycho-affective conflict and defensedo not, however, tell the whole story to be found in The Wretchedofthe Earth.Much of the book is devoted to exploring the processes bywhich decolonization turns into the project of nation building;and by delving into the "bubbling trepidation"53 that exists in themoment of transition, The Wretched ofthe Earth opens up possiforpositive and productive psycho-affective relations. "Reclaimingthe past does not only rehabilitate or justifY the promiseof a national culture," Fanon writes, "it triggers a change48 Macey, 159. 49 WE, 6. 50 WE, 19. 51 Bulhan, in Gibson, 155. 52 WE, 81. 53 WE, 161.