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Over six decades later, Fanon’s words can be applied directly to Israel’s colonisation and occupation of Palestine, and its enduring practice of Apartheid. Israel is a settler colonial entity founded on the erasure of Palestinian people, spaces and culture, and it is sustained entirely through ‘brute force,’ which is its core political structure.
By BHAKTI SHRINGARPURE
We are all Fanonian now.
Twenty-one months into an epoch, this obstinately colonial project, driven by violent hatred towards Palestinians, has made it clear that only Frantz Fanon’s words on violence make sense today.
Fanon would have been 100 years old this year, a cause for sombre commemorations at a time when his words feel prophetic and empowering, yet devastating at the same time.
Born in Martinique on July 20, 1925, Frantz Fanon was a psychiatrist whose work engaged with the effects of colonialism upon the colonised. During his time, as the head of Blida-Joinville psychiatric hospital in Algeria, he became an active member of the Algerian struggle for independence against French colonialism, travelled all over the world as a representative of the provisional government of Algeria and, all the while, remained a prolific writer with a large output of scholarship, journalism, reflections, manifestos and essays about colonialism, decolonisation, revolution, resistance, race and psychiatry.
His life was cut short when he was only 36 years old.
In 1961, as Fanon lay on his deathbed suffering from leukaemia, he wrote a set of essays that would become his most controversial book, titled Les Damnés de la Terre. Literally translated as the ‘damned’ of the earth, it has come to be called The Wretched of the Earth in English. But I prefer ‘damned,’ which has always carried the power of a vituperative, cursing outburst of the colonised being condemned to hellish punishment. It is much stronger than the subjugated and limp despair of the term ‘wretched.’
In particular, it is Fanon’s first chapter, ‘De la violence’ (On Violence), that has led to debate and hand-wringing since the moment of its publication 64 years ago. The chapter first unpacks the core violence of a settler colony. Fanon makes no bones about the totalising violence of colonialism, whether enacted upon the bodies of the colonised, upon the spaces of the colonised, or upon the culture of the colonised. More importantly, Fanon claims that the physical, psychic, spiritual and political liberation of the colonised subject can only happen through violent means.
Fanon explains how settler colonialism is born and sustained: through violence. The colony is settled and occupied through violence; colonial governance is administered through violence; and colonial power is sustained through violence that seeps into every single aspect of the life of the colonised ‘native.’
Fanon writes that in the ‘capitalist countries’ in Europe or North America, there are ways in which the hierarchy between the ruler and the ruled, the exploiter and the exploited, or the governing class and the governed is obscured as ‘a multitude of moral teachers, counsellors and “bewilderers” separate the exploited from those in power.’
But this is not the case in the colony where, ‘on the contrary, the policeman and the soldier, by their immediate presence and their frequent and direct action, maintain contact with the native and advise him by means of rifle butts and napalm not to budge. It is obvious here that the agents of government speak the language of pure force. The intermediary does not lighten the oppression, nor seek to hide the domination…’
Over six decades later, Fanon’s words can be applied directly to Israel’s colonisation and occupation of Palestine, and its enduring practice of Apartheid. Israel is a settler colonial entity founded on the erasure of Palestinian people, spaces and culture, and it is sustained entirely through ‘brute force,’ which is its core political structure. Israel is a heavily militarised society with forced conscription and absurdly high rates of incarceration of Palestinians. Torture during interrogation is legal in Israel, and child detention is rampant. There is no realm of existence for the colonised Palestinian that is untouched by Israeli brute force. Indeed, as Fanon says, there is no lightning of the oppression nor any desire to hide it.
Mohammed El-Kurd brings Fanon’s thinking into Palestine today with clarity: ‘Our world is built by the settler, for the settler…The settler holds the gavel, the baton, and boasts a divine decree. The settler controls our groundwater, seas, and rain, and bills us for them, even criminalises our thirst. After drawing the borders, he now dominates the borders. He controls our roads and what passes through them. He can, and does, clog the arteries of our nation.’
But Fanon’s already explosive truth-telling becomes controversial because of his clear-eyed assertion that the colonised can only counter, resist and achieve decolonisation through violent means. This idea has provoked much anxiety in the last six decades. Even considered more scandalous has been Fanon’s statement that violence becomes a ‘cleansing force.’ The exact sentence is, ‘At the level of individuals, violence is a cleansing force. It frees the native from his inferiority complex and from his despair and inaction; it makes him fearless and restores his self-respect.’ Furthermore, the violence channelled into decolonisation fundamentally alters the colonised and brings forth a new language, new men and new humanity into existence.
Fanon’s ideas about the emergence of new, liberated, awakened and freed humans born of the cleansing force of violence are not casual, throwaway observations. They emerge out of a long, structured argument that illustrates the extent to which colonial violence has completely taken over the lives of the colonised. And that after years and years of knowing only brutality – and grasping fundamentally that peaceful and diplomatic solutions have yielded neither liberation nor refuge from violence – the colonised finally channel their repressed fury into violent resistance. Fanon’s years as a psychiatrist in Blida brought him face to face with the Algerians who were tortured and brutalised by the French, and gave him insight into what he calls their ‘muscular’ fantasies of wresting back power from the coloniser.
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Importantly, Fanon proves over and over that it is, first and foremost, the coloniser that is ‘the bringer of violence into the home and into the mind of the native’ – that the native colonised has not been exposed to any other expression of power. To gain power, to feel powerful, violence becomes the only way. It has been made to become the only way.
After the Hamas attacks of October 7, governments, institutions, and the media have insisted on complete amnesia. Facts and truth have been twisted and gutted so much that the concept of history itself has become something of a hallucination. Feigning innocence and victimisation, and behaving as if the Hamas attacks lacked any historical context, is the norm.
Demanding why Palestinians don’t adhere to non-violent resistance even as they are massacred on an hourly basis is the pinnacle of good rhetoric these days. Not only is this a ridiculous question given the powerful and impactful anti-Apartheid Boycott, Divest, Sanction (BDS) movement that is fundamentally peaceful, but it is a ridiculous question because it is a delusional framing of non-violent resistance.
Leaders like Gandhi and MLK certainly evoked non-violent action to organise strikes, boycotts and marches, and to inspire civil disobedience to unify the masses. But the colonisers and white supremacists never stopped pulling out their guns, whips, batons and bombs, and despite small sporadic victories, there is no resounding proof that non-violence has actually worked as a singular ideology or movement. Non-violent means have always had to work alongside violent ones, and non-violent activists will almost always be met with violence.
Stokely Carmichael said that ‘in order for nonviolence to work, your opponent must have a conscience.’ I think if it has not been clear for the past hundred years, it is pretty clear today that neither Israel nor the United States nor Europe will ever grow a conscience. They never have, they never will. Arundhati Roy has rightly asked why non-violence is preached to individuals, but not to the state. As nation-states deploy their sovereign powers to obliterate an entire population while brandishing a fake interest in non-violence, Fanon’s declarations about violence become crystal clear.
The question, ‘Do you condemn Hamas?’ has also become a refrain for any commentator deemed pro-Palestinian. The violent means of resisting Israeli occupation deployed by Hamas have to be condemned over and over so that the commentator could maybe attempt to condemn Israel’s genocidal war, which is much older and has been at least a million times more violent than any damage Hamas has caused. Perhaps some people sincerely did condemn Hamas at the start of it all, but today, two years later, every single aspect of these theatrics has been unmasked. For a while, there was no mainstream consent to actually engage with, or even marvel at, Hamas’ strategic, secret planning over the years, the execution of the attacks, the actions of the militants, or the broadcasted clip of Yahya Sinwar, mid-combat, minutes before his death.
Recently, Irish rappers Kneecap and English punk rocker Bob Vylan chanted ‘Death, death to the IDF.’ Governments, institutions and the media were quick to condemn and censor them. The police are investigating, and the musicians are being dropped from various festivals.
El-Kurd articulates this hypocrisy best when he writes about how the ‘semantic violence’ of words is somehow made to ‘dwarf’ decades of systemic and material violence enacted against Palestinians by Israelis. Language is a bigger violence than actual violence. ‘Using the wrong words has the magical ability to make objects disappear; the boots, bullets, batons, and bruises all become invisible if you say the wrong words, in jest or in fury.’
But at the concert, the crowds got it. Everyone gets it. These musicians’ chants of fury finally gave consent to express two years of pent-up anger and powerlessness. They were fantasies of hatred towards a brutal, utterly savage, genocidal Israeli army. Fanon writes that the dreams of the native ‘are always of muscular prowess; his dreams are of action and of aggression.’ And these were curses articulated only in words; no actual weapons came into play.
It has taken so long, but the consent to express the seething violence inside is now here. It has been unleashed. Because finally, we all understand what Fanon meant.
We are all Fanonian now.
Bhakti Shringarpureis a writer, editor and academic, who is the creative director of the Radical Books Collective and the founding editor of Warscapes online magazine.
- This article was first published by the Radical Books Collective. Republished with permission from Amandla! Magazine.
