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248 ON RETRANSLATING FANON, RETRIEVING A LOST VOICEword rehabilitated by the black intelligentsia of the time andthrown back at the European as the supreme weapon. One ofthe great achievements of Cesaire's epic poem "Notebook of aReturn to My Native Land" is to reappropriate the negative termand give it a positive meaning. In Pour la revolution africaine(Toward the African Revolution), in the chapter "Antillais etMricains" Fanon describes how the word negre was used for theMricans by both Europeans and French Caribbeans alike. Hequotes the example of a boss in Martinique demanding toomuch from his employee and getting the response: "Si vousvoulez un wzgre, aUez Ie chercher en Afrique" ("If you're lookingfor a nigger, go and find him in Mrica"). To quotc a more modernexample of this, we only have to look at the opening linesof Chris Rock's signature skit: "I love black people, but I hateniggers.... Every time black people want to have a good time,niggers mess it up." It wasn't until Cesaire came along that "forthe first time, we saw a lycee teacher, and therefore an apparentlyworthy man, simply tell West Indian society that it is 'goodand well to be a nigger.' Of course it was a scandal." And Fanonends his chapter on national culture with the words: "There canbe no such thing as rigorously identical cultures. To believe onecan create a black culture is to forget oddly enough that 'Negroes'are in the process of disappearing, since those who created themare witnessing the demise of their economic and cultural supremacy."Now that the vocabulary has evolved it places thetranslator in a twenty-first-century predicament. I have updatedthe word Negro, when he refers to the peoples of Mrica or thediaspora, to black, and used nigger when it is the colonizer referringto the same. In some cases, I have left Negro in its historicalcontext. But I have lost something in the translation ofthe word negre, for it has both a sting and an embrace, and thatis irretrievable. I have modernized the word indigene to colonizedor colonized subject, ridding it of today's pejorative sense of nativealthough Fanon, in keeping with the colonial vocabulary ofhis time, uses both terms indifferently in the very same paragraph.ON RETRANSLATING FANON, RETRIEVING A LOST VOICE 249So how relevant is Fanon today? I ean remember going intothe FNAC bookstore in Paris last year to buy an edition of LesDamnes de La Terre and being asked: Fanon? How do you spellOh yes, here we are, as the girl consulted her computer, Lesdames de la terre! Fanon obviously hasn't left his mark here, Ithought, and moved on. But how far ean we move on and forgethim? We cannot forget the martyrdom of the Palestinians whenwe read in Fanon's chapter "On Violence": "At the individuallevel, violence is a cleansing force. It rids the colonized of theirinferiority eomplex, of their passive and despairing attitude. Itemboldens them and restores their self-eonfidence." We eannotforget the lumpenproletariat, the wretched of the earth, who stillstream to Europe from Afriea, Iraq, Mghanistan, and the countriesof the former Eastern bloe, living on the periphery in theirshantytowns and refugee centers, waiting for a better life. Thebourgeoisie in Africa still unreservedly and enthusiasticallyadopt the thinking mechanisms characteristic of the West, stillhas alienated to perfection its own thoughts and grounded itsconsciousness in typically foreign notions, still turns its backon the majority of its population, vacationing on the FrenchRiviera and building colossal palaces for prestige sake, joininghands in "this huge caravan of corruption" and becoming, asFanon says: "a bourgeois bourgeoisie that is dismally, inanely,and cynically bourgeois." And his thoughts on culture differentiatingAfrica from the Americas, visioning the disappearanceof black culture in favor of national cultures, regarding traditionsbasically stifling whereas a culture is constantly changing,modernizing, and penetrated by other influences. waswrong of course on many points, especially pan-Africanism, therole of the peasantry in leading a revolution, and the fate ofAlgeria. But at the time, his analyses of alienation and decolonizationwere extraordinary eye-openers, not only for a complacentEurope but for his fellow islanders, blinded to reality. It ishis anger, conviction, and humanism that will always remainwith us.