wretched-of-the-earth-frantz-fanon

IxPREFACEPREFACElxi~, 'f'f!,can see, Europe leaks like a sieve. What then has happened?Quite simply this: we were the subjects of history, and now we arethe objects. The power has been reversed, decolonizationis in progress; all our mercenaries can try and do is delay itscompletion.But in order to do that, the former metropolises would haveto pull out all the stops and commit all their forces to a battIein advance. That old colonial brutality that made Bugeauda dubious hero, here it is at the end of the colonial venture appliedtenfold yet still insufficient. The troops are dispatched toAlgeria where they have held out for seven years with noThe violence has changed direction; victorious, we enforced itwithout it ever seeming to affect us; it dislocated the other,whereas our humanism as men remained intact. United by profit,metropolitans baptized their commonwealth of crimes FraandLove. Today, the very same violence, blockaded everywhere,comes back to us through our soldiers, internalizes itselfand possesses us. Involution begins: the colonized reintegratethemselves, and we, the reactionaries and the liberals, thenists and the metropolitans, disintegrate. Fury and fear areready stripped naked: they are laid bare in the brutal punitiveraids in Algiers. Where are the savages now? Where is the barbarity?Nothing is missing, not even the drums: the car hornshammer out, "Algeria for the French," while the Europeans burntIle Muslims alive. Not so long ago, Fanon recalls, a ofpsychiatrists deplored Algerian criminality: these people are killingthemselves, they said, it's not normal; the cortex of the Algerianmust be underdeveloped. In Central Africa others establishedthat "the Mrican uses his frontal lobes very little." These scientistswould do well to pursue their research in Europe, and espe­cially among the French. For we, too, must be affected by frontalidleness for some time now: our patriots have been assassinatingtheir fellow countrymen, and if they find no one home, they blowup the concierge and the house. This is only the beginning; civilwar is predicted for autumn or next spring. Our lobes, however,seem perfectly normal: couldn't the reason be rather that, powerlessto crush the "native," violence turns inward, bottlesup deep inside us, and seeks an outlet? The unity of the Algerianpeople produces the disunity ofthe French: throughout theterritories of the ex-metropolises the tribes are dancing and preparingto fight. Terror has left Mrica to settle here; for there arefanatics who want to make us pay with our blood for theshame of having been beaten by the "native," and then there arethe others, all the others, the liberals, the hardliners oftheless Left who are just as guilty (after Bizerta, after the Septemberlynchings, who took to the streets to shout "Enough is enough"?),but more composed. The fever is mounting in them, too, as wellas spiteful anger. But they're scared stiff! They conceal their ragebehind myths and complicated rituals. In order to delay the finalreckoning and the hour of truth, they have given us a GrandMagician as our leader whose function is to keep us in the darkat any cost. To no effect; hailed by some, rejected by others, violencegoes round in circles: one day it explodes in Metz, the nextday in Bordeaux; now it's here, then it's there, like the gamepass the slipper. Slowly but surely it is our turn to head downthe road to "native" status. But in order to become genuine "natives"our territory would have to be occupied by the formerlycolonized and we would have to be starving to death. This willnot be the case; no, it is the demise of colonialism that possessesus; we shall soon be mounted by it in all its arrogance and senility;that is our zar, that is our loa. And you will be convinced onreading Fanon's last chapter that it is better to be a "native"the pit of misery than an erstwhile colonist. It is not right that apolice officer should be obliged to torture ten hours a day: atrate his nerves will go to pieces, unless torturers are forbidden towork overtime in their own interest. When you want to safeguardthe morale of the nation and the army under the rigor of the law,it is not right for the latter to systematically demoralize the former.Nor for a country with a republican tradition to entrust its youngmen by the hundreds of thousands to putschist officers. It is not