by BHAKTI SHRINGARPURE
Frantz Omar Fanon (20 July 1925 – 6 December 1961) was a Martinique-born Afro-French psychiatrist, philosopher, revolutionary, and writer whose works are influential in the fields of post-colonial studies, critical theory, and Marxism.[1] As an intellectual, Fanon was a political radical, and an existentialist humanist concerning the psychopathology of colonization, and the human, social, and cultural consequences of decolonization.[2][3] PHOTO/TEXT/The Guardian & Wikipedia, respectively
Concerning Violence, the latest documentary from Swedish filmmaker Göran Hugo Olsson, has been screening to packed audiences on the film festival circuit.
Olsson’s claim to fame, at least in the US, was a recent documentary – Black Power Mixtape – that brought together dormant archival footage from the Black Power movement. This documentary was appreciated partly because of the ease with which the material could be digested and the straightforward collage approach to the narrative.
Concerning Violence is a completely different beast.
Relying yet again on possibly forgotten footage from Swedish archives, the film has been anchored in Martinican psychiatrist and anti-colonial thinker Frantz Fanon’s controversial essay, Concerning Violence, from his 1961 book The Wretched of the Earth. I had the impression that we were being provided with a visual exegesis on Fanon’s famous, misunderstood, and over-read text about violence, and that the images, in fact, served to bolster, or rather, offer, a kind of choreography to the text.
…
Though Fanon was a spokesperson for Algeria’s National Liberation Front (FLN), an ardent radical writer for the revolutionary Algerian newspaper El Moujahid, a psychiatrist for fighters and tortured combatants and a staunch critic of the French left, his posthumous fame became focused on his one singular observation about violence during decolonisation.
He wrote that decolonisation “fundamentally alters” the colonised man’s sense of self: “It infuses a new rhythm, specific to a new generation of men, with a new language and new humanity. Decolonisation is truly the creation of new men.”
This observation about the new men formed through the use of violence has been consistently viewed as a detrimental and dangerous idea. The Wretched of the Earth was banned in France as soon as it came out and copies were seized from bookstores. Prominent French left-leaning intellectuals of the time, such as Jean Daniel, author of La Blessure, and Jean-Marie Domenach, editor of Espirit, were disgusted by Fanon’s theories on violence and felt that they reeked of revenge.
But according to Fanon, colonial violence begins with the coloniser, who “does not alleviate oppression or mask domination. He displays and demonstrates them with the clear conscience of the law enforcer, and brings violence into the homes and minds of the colonised subject.” During decolonisation, it is this unchecked, destructive and tireless violence that is “appropriated” by the colonised.
Using a generalised psychological analysis for colonised people (a population he frequently treated as a psychiatrist and knew intimately), Fanon explains the process that leads an oppressed individual to employ violence. He creates an emblematic portrait of the colonised man living in an atmosphere where a reservoir of repressed fury is beginning to manifest itself consciously, and the desire to be a “man” instead of the “thing colonised” is omnipresent.
He writes: “The muscles of the colonised are always tensed. It is not that he is anxious or terrorised, but he is always ready to change his role as game for that of hunter. The colonised subject is a persecuted man who is always dreaming of becoming the persecutor.” In fact, even the dreams of the colonised are infused with a physicality, action and “aggressive vitality”. Through these, he unconsciously frees himself.
The Guardian for more