wretched-of-the-earth-frantz-fanon

PREFACEPREFACElicrime, they lay down the principle that the colonized subject isnot a fellow man. Our military forces have received orders tochange this abstract certainty into reality: orders are given to reducethe inhabitants of the occupied territory to the level of asuperior ape in order to justify the colonist's treatment of them asbeasts of burden. Colonial violence not only aims at keeping theseenslaved men at a respectful distance, it also seeks to dehumanizethem. No effort is spared to demolish their traditions, to substituteour language for theirs, and to destroy their culture withoutgiving them ours. We exhaust them into a mindless state. III fedand sick, if they resist, fear will finish the job: guns are pointed atpeasants; civilians come and settle on their land and force themto work for them under the whip. If they resist, the soldiers fire,and they are dead men; if they give in and degrade themselves,they are no longer men. Shame and fear warp their character anddislocate their personality. Such a business is conducted brisklyby experts: psychological warfare was not born yesterday. Nor wasbrainwashing. And yet despite all their efforts, nowhere have theyachieved theit aim; no more in the Congo where they cut offthe hands ofthe blacks than in Angola where quite recently theypierced tlle lips ofthe malcontents in order to padlock them. AndI am not saying it is impossible to change a man into an animaLI am saying they can't do it Witllout weakening him considerably:beating is never enough, pressure has to be brought byundernourishing him. That's the problem with servitude: whenyou domesticate a member of our species, you lower his productivity,and however little you give him, a barnyard being ends upcosting more tllan he's worth. For tllis reason the colonists areforced to stop breaking Mm in halfway. The result: neither mannor beast, but the "native." Beaten, underfed, sick, and frightened,but only up to a certain point, yellow, black, or white he alwayshas the same character traits-lazy, sly, and thieving, who liveson nothing and understands only the language of violence.Poor colonist: his contradiction has been unmasked. He oughtto kill those he plunders, like they say the djinns do. But that isnow out ofthe question. Doesn't he have to exploit them as well?Failing to carry the massacre to the point of genocide, and servitudeto a state of mindlessness, he cracks up, the situation is reversed,and an implacable logic leads to decolonization.Not right away. First of all the European reigns: he has alreadylost but doesn't realize it; he does not yet know that the "natives"are false "natives." He has to make them suffer, he claims, inorder to destroy or repress the evil they have inside them; afterthree generations, their treacherous instincts will be stamped out.What instincts? Those that drive the slaves to massacre theirmasters? How come he cannot recognize his own cruelty nowturned against him? How come he can't see his own savagery asa colonist in the savagery of these oppressed peasants who haveabsorbed it through every pore and for which they can find nocure? The answer is simple: this arrogant individual, whose powerof authority and fear of losing it has gone to his head, has difficultyremembering he was once a man; he thinks he is a whipor a gun; he is convinced that the domestication of the "inferiorraces" is obtained by governing their reflexes. He disregards thehuman memory, the indelible reminders; and then, abovethere is this that perhaps he never knew: we only become whatwe are by radically negating deep down what others have doneto us. Three generations? As early as the second, hardly had thesons opened their eyes than they saw their fathers being beaten.In psychiatric terms, they were "traumatized." For life. But theseconstant acts of repeated aggression, far from forcing them intosubmission, plunge them into an intolerable contradiction,which sooner or later the European will helVe to pay for. Afterthat, when it is their turn to be broken in, when they are taughtshame, pain, :md hunger, we will only be fueling in their bodiesa volcanic fury whose power matches the pressure applied tothem. They only understand the language of violence, you weresaying? Of course; at first the only violence they understand isthe colonist's, and then their own, reflecting back atus like ourreflection bouncing back at us from a mirror. Don't be mistaken;