wretched-of-the-earth-frantz-fanon

242 ON RETRANSLATING FANON, RETRIEVING A LOST VOICEThis was the world 1 was destined to work in, live in, and playin, and the other sector, the "native" sector, could only beglimpsed through the windows ofthe embassy's chauffeur-drivencar or perhaps when we strayed on our mopeds into areas wherefriends working for the American Peace Corps used to live. Andwhep. at embassy receptions or dinner parties the conversationwould inevitably revolve around "them," the others, it was, asFanon says, often couched in zoological terms, referring to theodors, the stink, the hordes, the swarming, seething, sprawlingpopulation vegetating under the sun.The year was 1968 and, true to the assimilation of a Frenchcolony, Senegal mimicked the events of May 1968 in France.Except they lasted for an entire year and both school pupils anduniversity students deserted their classrooms in a vague attemptto ~hange the order of their world and forge ahead with a genuinedecolonization. But this was no revolution in the Fanoniansense and the students were content merely to sit and wait, insteadof "blowing the colonial world to smithereens" and creatingan agenda for total disorder. Just south of Senegal's border,inGuinea, Sekou Toure's resounding "No" to France, which metwith admiration and applause from Third World revolutionaries,~vidently had little chance of repeating itself in Senghor'sSenegal.My second encounter with Fanon must have been on my returnto France in 1971. One year before Britain joined the Commop.Market 1 was not only forced to apply for a work permit,but also undergo a series of medicals, mandatory for immigrantsfrom nonmember European Union countries. Most of the immigrants,of course, were from North Mrica, and Algeria in particular.And it was here 1 witnessed that very special relationship,based on humiliation and contempt, that exists between theFrench and the Algerians. We were all made to line up in frontof a nondescript building near the boulevard peripherique andonce inside, submitted to a series of humiliating medical examinationsthat would allow us to apply for a work permit at anotherON RETRANSLATING FANON, RETRIEVING A LOST VOICE 243line at the Paris Prefecture. It was obvious that all the cliches aboutthe Algerian's criminal impulsiveness, his indolence, his thefts, hislies and rapes, which had been inculcated into the French bureaucrats'minds before, during, and after the Algerian war, rose to thesurface and treatment was dealt out accordingly. There was a longway to go before that colossal task, described by Fanon, of reintroducingman into the world, a man in full, could be achievedwith the crucial help of the European masses who still ralliedbehind the position oftheir governments and media on colonialIssues.My third encounter with Fanon came with my many visitsto Martinique and Guadeloupe, the island contexts that were toshape and mold the young Fanon. The sheer assimilation toFrance's cultural, educational, and political penetration not onlyturned him into a French intellectual (The New York Review ofBooks in 1966 described him as a "Black Rousseau ... His callfor national revolutions is Jacobin in method, Rousseauist inspirit, and Sartrian in language-altogether as French as canbe.") but also forced him to question and challenge the verynature of the colonized subject. The alienation of his blackskinned,white-masked fellow islanders made him realize that ifcolonialism was not fought and defeated, then the islands ofMartinique and Guadeloupe would disappear, swallowed up bythe tide of assimilation. He somehow sensed that the bravado ofthe Martinicans was a lot of hot air, that they would never riseup against their colonizers and he'd do better to put his ideasinto practice in the French departement of Algeria where themen had the guts of their convictions. On his return from hisfinal visit to Martinique in 1951, Alice Cherki (Frantz Fanon:Portrait, Paris: Editions du Seuil, 2000) quotes him as saying, "Imet more milquetoasts than men." Commenting on the tragicevents of 1959 in Martinique to his friend Bertene J uminer whilein Tunis, he told him: "Let them pick up their dead, rip theirinsides out and parade them in open trucks through the town ....Let them yell out: 'Look what the colonialists have done!' But....____..t..~\F"' ·d,-l.i"