wretched-of-the-earth-frantz-fanon

20 THE WRETCHED OF THE EARTHON VIOLENCE21circle. It protects and empowers. At a fixed timc and a fixed datemen and women assemble in a given place, and under the solemngaze of the tribc launch themselves into a seemingly disarticulated,but in fact cxtremely ritualized, pantomime where theexorcism, liberation, and expression of a community are grandioselyand spontaneously played out through shaking of thchead, and back and forward thrusts of the body. Everything ispermitted in the dance circle. Thc hillock, which has beenclimbed as if to get closer to the moon, the river bank, whichhas been descended whenever the dance symbolizes ablution,washing, and purification, are sacred places. Everything is permitted,for in fact the sole purpose of the gathering is to let thesupercharged libido and the stifled aggressiveness spew out volcanically.Symbolic killings, figurative cavalcades, and imaginedmultiple murders, everything has to come out. Thc ill humorsseep out, tumultuous as lava flows.One step further and wc find ourselves in deep possession. Inactual fact, these are organized seances of possession and dispossession:vampirism, possession by djinns, by zombies, and byLegba, the illustrious god of voodoo. Such a disintegration, dissolutionor splitting of the personality, plays a key regulating rolein ensuring the stability ofthe colonized world. On the way therethese men and women were stamping impatiently, thcir nerves"on edge." On the way back, the village returns to serenity, peace,and stillness.During the struggle for liberation there is a singular loss ofinterest in these rituals. With his back to the wall, the knife athis throat, or to be more exact the electrode on his genitals, thecolonized subject is bound to stop telling stories.After years of unreality, after wallowing in the most extraordinaryphantasms, the colonized subject, machine gun atthe ready,finally confronts the only force which challenges his very being:colonialism. And the young colonized subject who grows upan atmosphere of fire and brimstone has no scruples mockingzombie ancestors, two-headed horses, corpses woken from thedead, and djinns who, taking advantage ofa yawn, slip inside thebody. The colonized subject discovers reality and transforms itthrough his praxis, his deployment of violence and his agendafor liberation.We have seen that this violence throughout the colonial period,although constantly on edge, runs on empty. We have seen itchanneled through the emotional release of dance or possession.We have seen it exhaust itself in fratricidal struggles. The challengenow is to seize this violence as it realigns itself. Whereas itonce reveled in myths and contrived ways to commit collectivesuicide, a fresh set of circumstances will now enable it to changedirections.From the point of view of political tactics and History, the liberationof the colonies poses a theoretical problem of crucialimportance at the current time: When can it be said that thesituation is ripe for a national liberation movement? What shouldbe thc first line ofaction? Because decolonization comcs in manyshapes, reason wavers and abstains from declaring what is a truedecolonization and what is not. We shall see that for the politicallycommittcd, urgent decisions are needed on means andtactics, i.e., direction and organization. Anything else is but blindvoluntarism with the terribly reactionary risks this implies.What are the forces in the colonial period which offer newchannels, new agents of empowerment for the violence of thecolonized? First and foremost, the political parties and the intellectualand business elite. However, what is characteristic ofcertain political groups is that they are strong on principles butabstain from issuing marching orders. During the colonial periodthe ,activities of these nationalist political parties are purely forelectioneering purposes and amount to no more than a series ofphilosophic-political discourses on thc subject of the rights ofpeoples to self-determination, the human rights of dignity and