wretched-of-the-earth-frantz-fanon

".~~....."'""".=,~_ + ............ '"_......"'.~~'"'•.L .•j.'.• "xxviiiFOREWORDPOREWORDxxixdispossessed subjects of globalization. Caught up in this spiral ofhistory, the wretched of the earth, in our time and Fanon's, enterthe zone of psycho-affectivity and echo the horrifying call tolence. Fanon for ourAnd Fanon for other times and places ...* * *In 1966, Bobby Seale and Huey Newton read The Wretched oftheEarth in a house in Oakland, and -so the story goes 60 - when theywere arrested some months later for "blocking the sidewalk," thetext provided foundational perspectives on neocolonialism andnationalism that inspired the founding of the Black NationalistParty. In A Panther Isa Black Cat, written in 1971, Reginald Major(Kelley) acknowledges Fanon's influence on the Panthers.a sexist swagger that was part of the macho style of the times, Majorpraises Fanon's analysis of the colonial mentality in understandingthe yardstick of"whiteness" that devalues black consciousness andresults in a "cultural and psychic genocide"61 that leads to theinadequacy ofblack manhood. Gillo Ponte corvo' s Battle ofAlgiersbecame a cult film among the Bay Area Panthers because it was"Fanon-linked," and young revolutionaries attentively watchedDiction of terrorist acts and the organization of covert cells.found satisfaction in the flick. The natives won."62* 0;< *In the early seventies, Steve Biko's room in the student residenceat the University of Natal became the meeting place for membersof the South African Students Association; it was also theintellectual center of the black consciousness movement. Thatroom in Durban was the place where Biko, "the personwho bro'ught ideas,"63 first circulated The Wretched of the Earthto his friends and comrades-writers, activists, community workers,actors, students-who were also conversant with the poetryand the politics of the Black Panther movement. Fanon's singucontributionto the theoretical understanding of the blackconsciousness movement lay in his extension of the economistictheories ofMarxism toward a greater emphasis on the importanceof psychological and cultural liberation - the psycho-affectiverealm of revolutionary activism and emancipation.* * *In a prison cell in the notorious H-Block of Belfast prison, sometimeafter 1973, a young apprentice coach builder and memberof the Irish Republican Army, Bobby Sands, first read Fanon'sThe Wretched of the Earth, of which there were multiple copieson the H-Block shelves. A historian of the lRA64 suggests thatFanon's incendiary spirit may have set alight IRA passions becauseof passages like this:last shall be first and the first last." Decolonisation is the puttinginto practice of this sentence .... For if the last shall be first, this willonly come to pass after a murderous and decisive struggle betweentwo protagonists. That affinned intention to place the last at the headthings ... can only triumph if we use all means to turn the scale,including, of course, that of violence.* * *Shiite revival ofthe 1960s and 1970s, which developed intothe Iranian revolution led by Ayatollah Khomeini, was based ona revision of Shiite doctrine influenced bv Marxism and com­60ed.,AfricanAmerican Culture MI: Gale Research,1996), 50-51.61 Reginald Major, A Panther Is a Black Cat (New York: William Morrow,1971),138-39.62 Ibid.63 N. Barney Pityana, M. Ramphele, M. Mpumiwana, and 1.. Wilson,Bounds ofPossibility: The Legal.')' ofSteve Biko and Black Consciousness (CapeTown, South Mrica: David Phillip, 1991),28-29,109,147.64 Richard English, Armed Struggle: The History of the IRA (New York:Oxford University Press. 2003), 197-99,234-35.