Frantz Fanon: Concerning Nationalism

Devoting one’s life to the freeing of an oppressed people must include some precursor that would make this avenue the most desirable one to follow. Being born on a Carribean island claimed by the French, Martinique, Frantz Fanon’s familial background consists of a lineage descended from former slaves and illegitimate, mixed births. The climate in which Fanon found himself growing up, though, didn’t dissuade him from harboring some nationalistic impulses towards France. And after the German occupation began and as portions of the French Navy was ostensibly stuck on Martinique raping, stealing and otherwise violating the human rights of the native peoples, Fanon saw fit to join the Free French Forces.

In his military service Fanon found himself in the north of Africa. But as the war came to a close, he removed himself to Lyon, where he studied psychology. And after completing his studies as well as his first book, Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon returned to Algeria, where he was stationed during the war. And while his upbringing in addition to the time he spent in France had already solidified the way in which he perceived colonialism and its affects on the psyche, Fanon’s time in Algeria would further inspire him to explicate in detail a potential way by which to end colonialism.

His moving about, living on three different continents, is easily figured by Fanon when he states, “In the world through which I travel, I am endlessly creating myself.” And using this as a sort of hypothesis, Fanon’s second book – the final one of his life time – The Wretched of the Earth – the psychologist continues his dissection of the colonized’s perception of life. Of course, a great deal of this is reductive, but Fanon’s work in platitudes does have more than a whiff of credence.

Through acquiring a post at Blida-Joinville Psychiatric Hospital, Fanon interviewed countless French men charged with torturing Algerians as well as those colonized subjects who went through the pain inflicted by the colonists. The resulting belief that a simplistic European view of not just Algerian culture, but all cultures of the third world and the colonized, was not only false, but being used to commit genocide.

The suppression of authentic national culture gets a good working over in The Wretched of the Earth with an eye set on what nationalism actual can be defined as. What the post-colonial theorist decides is that the colonized have lived under the auspices of European thought for long enough to have its own culture re-defined for them, thus making the colonized believe that their enfeebled existence is as a result of physiological shortcomings as opposed to a general oppression of mind, body and spirit.

Perhaps Fanon’s most interesting conclusions about the revolution and how it could actually be achieved are related to the urban classes of the colonized – the colonized intellectual, bourgeoisie and urban workforce. All of these folks are dependent on the systems set up by the colonizer for one reason or another and thusly, not pressed for some great need to change the situation. The rural colonized, apparently, are ones primed for revolt. And although Fanon only lived to the age of 36, his writings went on to inspire renewed consciousness around the globe.