Tag Archives: liberation

Intersections, Struggle & Movement

Freire: the role of struggle in becoming human

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Paolo Freire - Pedagogy of the OppressedPaulo Freire — such a hero of mine for so many many years, and I am finally working on writing something more thoughtful about popular education and struggle, so upcoming posts will look at Freire, Myles Horton, Julius Nyerere, Ella Baker and Septima Clark, maybe some Erich Fromm, maybe some others — exciting stuff.

An intertwined thread I am also working on is violence (oppression is violence in many varied forms after all), its genesis and how we respond to it. I’ve already written about that in Freire’s thinking more fully here.

A recap and summary of Freire’s belief in the nature of radical change and how it takes place:

The pedagogy of the oppressed, as a humanist and libertarian pedagogy, has two distinct stages. In the first the oppressed unveil the world of oppression and through the praxis commit themselves to its transformation. In the second stage, in which the reality of the oppression has already been transformed, this pedagogy ceases to belong to the oppressed and becomes a pedagogy of all people in the process of permanent liberation…. In the first stage this confrontation occurs through the change in the way the oppressed perceive the world of oppression. In the second stage, through the expulsion of the myths created and developed in the old order, which like specters haunt the new emerging from the revolutionary transformation. (54-55)

This book is so rich, I’ve been struggling with how to think more deeply about it in smaller pieces. Roughly, I’ve come up with this starting point, about what Freire believes to be the point of being human, and how our current systems and structures strip away our capacity to fully realise our humanity. With this as a goal for our efforts, the other two sections elaborate how we get there — the importance of people speaking for themselves, of genuine dialogue leading to action, reflection, dialogue, further action. And finally, the role of those of us who choose this path towards a better future, activists perhaps, teachers, writers.

So, to begin with, the meaning of life in a very long quote.

But while both humanization and dehumanization are real alternatives, only the first is the people’s vocation. This vocation is constantly negated, yet it is affirmed by that very negation. It is thwarted by injustice, exploitation, oppression, and the violence of the oppressors; it is affirmed by the yearning of the oppressed for freedom and justice, and by their struggle to recover their lost humanity.

Dehumanization, which marks not only those whose humanity has been stolen, but also (though in a different way) those who have stolen it, is a distortion of the vocation of becoming more fully human. The struggle for humanization, for the emancipation of labor, for the overcoming of alienation, for the affirmation of men and women as persons … is possible only because dehumanization, although a concrete historical fact, is not a given destiny but the result of an unjust order that engenders violence in the oppressors, which in turn dehumanizes the oppressed.

Because it is a distortion of being more fully human, sooner or later being less human leads the oppressed to struggle against those who made them so. In order for this struggle to have meaning, the oppressed must not, in seeking to regain their humanity (which is a way to create it), become in turn oppressors of the oppressors, but rather restorers of the humanity of both.

This, then, is the great humanistic and historical task of the oppressed: to liberate themselves and their oppressors as well. (44)

I struggle with this last sometimes. It is a bit of an unfair burden, no? But at the same time, the older I get the more I believe it to be true. No one can speak for you, liberate you, that is something you must do for yourself. And those with power and privilege in our system, they are so enmeshed in it, that the likelihood of their being able to fully seek such liberation, to strip away every privilege, every bias, every unquestioned belief to see reality stark as it is, is almost zero. To get anywhere they will need a whole lot of help. All of us are along this spectrum of blindness, and this is where understandings of intersectionality are so important. Ability to recognise where we experience oppression and where we do not, where we must learn and where we must stand firm against those who would try to belittle or pick away at the validity of hard-won understandings of the world…this is really hard. It is only in solidarity with each other, with respect and love and dialogue that any of us can realise our own humanity. This is the foundation.

This book will present some aspects of what the writer has termed the pedagogy of the oppressed, a pedagogy which must be forged with, not for, the oppressed (whether individuals or peoples) in the incessant struggle to regain their humanity. This pedagogy makes oppression and its causes objects of reflection by the oppressed, and from that reflection will come their necessary engagement in the struggle for their liberation. And in the struggle this pedagogy will be made and remade. (48)

This is so vital because all of us have been beaten and broken by the world we live in, and it works in a particularly brutal way against those groups who are oppressed. Part of the struggle must always be healing these wounds through struggle itself:

The oppressed have been destroyed precisely because their situation has reduced them to things. In order to regain their humanity they must cease to be things and fight as men and women. This is a radical requirement. They cannot enter the struggle as objects in order later to become human beings. (68)

So much of what Freire writes about the damage done by colonial, patriarchal, capitalist systems and how it can be undone echoes that of Fanon, Cesaire, Frederick Douglass, many others:

The oppressed, having internalized the image of the oppressor and adopted his guidelines, are fearful of freedom. Freedom would require them to reject this image and replace it with autonomy and responsibility. Freedom is acquired by conquest, not by gift. It must is not an ideal located outside of man; nor is it an idea which becomes myth. It is rather the indispensable condition for the quest for human completion.

To surmount the situation of oppression, people must first critically recognize its causes, so that through transforming action they can create a new situation, one which makes possible the pursuit of a fuller humanity. But the struggle to be more fully human has already begun in the authentic struggle to transform the situation. (47)

And this:

The oppressed suffer from the duality which has established itself in their innermost being. They discover that without freedom they cannot exist authentically. Yet although they desire authentic existence, they fear it. They are at one and the same time themselves and the oppressor whose consciousness they have internalized. The conflict lies in the choice between being wholly themselves or being divided; between ejecting the oppressor within or not ejecting them; between human solidarity or alienation; between following prescriptions or having choices’ between being spectators or actors; between acting or having the illusion of acting through the action of the oppressors; between speaking out or being silent, castrated in their power to create and recreate, in their power to transform the world. This is the tragic dilemma of the oppressed which their education must take into account.

He continues with what I think is the key point — this is hard, painful, troubling, conflictual, and also wondrous.

Liberation is thus a childbirth, and a painful one. The man or woman who emerges is a new person, viable only as the oppressor-oppressed contradiction is superseded by the humanization of all people. Or to put it another way, the solution of this contradiction is born in the labor which brings into the world this new being: no longer oppressor nor longer oppressed, but human in the process of achieving freedom. (49)

What I love, too, is that this is never abstract. It is achieved through work, through action. On both sides.

The oppressor is solidary with the oppressed only when he stops regarding the oppressed as an abstract category and sees them as persons who have been unjustly dealt with, deprived of their voice, cheated in the sale of their labor — when he stops making pious, sentimental, and individualistic gestures and risks an act of love. True solidarity is found only in the plenitude of this act of love, in its existentiality, in its praxis. To affirm that men and women are persons and as persons should be free, and yet to do nothing tangible to make this affirmation a reality, is a farce. … the concrete situation which begets oppression must be transformed. (50)

Above all it recognises that we produce our own realities — the ways in which we do this is uncovered through collective dialogue and collective action. Because it is socially produced, it can be changed. This is the hope of struggle, and always the goal of praxis.

If humankind produce social reality (which in the “inversion of the praxis” turns back upon them and conditions them), then transforming that reality is an historical task, a task for humanity.

One of obstacles to the achievement of liberation is that oppressive reality absorbs those within it and thereby acts to submerge human beings’ consciousness (6) Functionally, oppression is domesticating. To no longer be prey to its force, one must emerge from it and turn upon it. This can be done only by means of the praxis: reflection and action upon the world in order to transform it. (51)

It is in trying to understand how oppressive realities absorb those within, generate new forms of domestication, that I find Stuart Hall and Gramsci so useful, also because I think both operated with similar understandings of the need for people themselves to work towards their own liberation. Freire’s descriptions of why we must find voice, and how we understand praxis is the subject of the next post, and the final post engages with the role of intellectuals, and more of Freire’s theory around the nature of what we are up against and how radical practice stands opposed to it.

Other posts on Freire:

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Empire, Fiction

Language and Violence — The Meursault Investigation

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The Meursault InvestigationI quite loved The Meursault Investigation, an evocative and angry wrenching away of anonymity from those murdered under colonial rule. A stinging refusal to allow the focus to remain on the problems and tragedies of the murderer to search them out instead in the man murdered, the hole he left behind, the impact of those who we were close to him. The very power of Camus’s words rendered the violence he inflicted on the stranger all the greater.

It’s simple: The story we’re talking about should be rewritten, in the same language, but from right to left. That is, starting when the Arab’s body was still alive, going down the narrow streets that led to his demise, giving him a name…So one reason for learning this language was to tell this story for my brother, the friend of the sun. Seems unlikely to you? You’re wrong. I had to find the response nobody wanted to give me when I needed it. You drink a language, you speak a language, and one day it owns you…(7)

The Meursault Investigation is about how we understand things, how we construct naratives around events. How European narratives erase non-whites, push them into the background, into the scenery, into simple provocations or plot twists that facilitate the drama experienced by white males.

The way counter-narratives must be constructed.

Without realizing it, and years before I learned to read, I rejected the absurdity of his death, and I needed a story to give him a shroud. (21)

There is so much here about language, the differences between Arabic and French, the limitations and liberations of each. In this it shares space with Assia Djebar, though from such different perspectives I love how they each grapple with the same questions.

Language and the construction of narrative.

For a long time, not a year passed without my mother swearing she’d found Musa’s body, heard his breathing or his footstep…And for a long time, that would make me feel impossibly ashamed of her–and later, it pushed me to learn a language that could serve as a barrier between her frenzies and me. Yes, the language. The one I read, the one I speak today, the one that’s not hers. Hers is rich, full of imagery, vitality, sudden jolts, and improvisations, but not too big on precision. Mama’s grief lasted so long that she needed a new idiom to express it in… I had to learn a language other than that one. To survive…Books and your hero’s language gradually enabled me to name things differently and to organize the world with my own words. (37)

She tells and retells, invents and reinvents narratives around his brother — they are so strong they smother him, contain him so that he cannot be himself, must always live in his brother’s shadow. One aspect of the violence of language, brought to life through loss and longing and obsession.

This explores another violence that can be found in words, in silences, in storytelling:

But Musa’s body will remain a mystery. There’s not a word in the book about it. That’s denial of a shockingly violent kind, don’t you think? As soon as the shot is fired, the murderer turns around, heading for a mystery he considers worthier of interest than the Arab’s life. (46)

A violence possible only through the construction of other, through conquest. What the colonised share in common around the world conquered by whites:

Arab. I never felt Arab, you know. Arab-ness is like Negro-ness, which only exists in the white man’s eyes. In our neighbourhood, in our world, we were Muslims, we had given names, faces, and habits. Period. The others were “the strangers,”… (60)

These strangers for the narrator are the Meursaults, the numberless faceless figures of occupation and oppression.

And reminiscent of Fanon, there is yet another kind of violence, what could be a redemptive violence:

On that hot night, nothing had suggested that a murder was about to happen. You’re asking me what I felt afterward? Huge relief. A kind of worthiness, but without honor. Something deep inside me sat down, curled up into a ball, took its head in its hands, and sighed so profoundly that I was touched and tears sprang to my eyes. Then I raised them and looked around me. Again I was surprised by the extent of the courtyard where I had just executed an unknown person. It was as if perspectives were opening up and I could finally breathe. Whereas I’d always lived like a prisoner until then, confined within the perimeter established by Musa’s death and my mother’s vigilance, I now saw myself standing upright, at the heart of a vast territory: the whole nocturnal earth, the gift of that night. When my heart regained its place, all other objects did the same. (78)

But it is not that simple of course, just as the competing narratives, the claims on identity, the nature of family, the complexes existing between a man and his mother, nothing is simple.

Well, after I’d killed a man, it wasn’t my innocence I missed the most, it was the border that had existed until then between my life and crime. That’s a line that’s hard to redraw later. The Other is a unit of measurement you lose when you kill. (90)

After the murder he is imprisoned, will possibly be executed through the new state’s state-sanctioned violence for killing outside of the liberation struggle he is despised for not having joined.

Algeria lives in a different way in this story, Algiers both concrete and abstracted:

…but I loved the virile, almost comforting roar of the engine that was snatching us, my mother and me, out of an immense labyrinth made up of buildings, downtrodden people, shantytowns, dirty urchins, aggressive cops, and beaches fatal to Arabs. For the two of us, the city would always be the scene of the crime, or the place where something pure and ancient was lost. (21)

Funny the way that this is specific and yet non-specific, belonging to a national and urban geography, yet individuals have been erased from them.

…there’s no point inn your going to the cemetery, or to Bab-el-Oued, or to the beach. You won’t find anything… This story takes place somewhere in someone’s head, in mine and in yours and in the heads of people like you. In a sort of beyond.

Don’t do any geographical searching — that’s the point I’m trying to make. (57)

There is much more to The Meursault Investigation, more on language and identity, sexuality and relationships, nation and colonialism and struggle. Much of it is not at all subtle. A book that repays rereading I imagine, a good book for teaching. At the same time it has an intellectual feel, an abstracted feel not entirely due to the form of tales told a researcher in a bar. I am not quite sure why, in some ways the violence is as abstract as it is for Camus, as removed. It does not have the emotional power of Djebar’s Algerian White, cannot touch Mouloud Feraoun’s recollections before his assassination, or even the more rigorous incandescence of Fanon.

[Daoud, Kamel. 2015. The Meursault Investigation. London: Oneworld Publications.]

 

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Books, Empire, Intersections, Struggle & Movement

Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth

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Fanon - The Wretched of the EarthThe Wretched of the Earth (1961) had such a huge impact on me when I first read it. It was a pleasure to come back to it, and get more far more from it this time around after more years of experience, and also reading Black Skin, White Masks and much more about colonialism and struggle. I had forgotten quite what an anguished call for revolution and redemption it is, and can see why looking back I loved it so much. I was in need of those things myself, though my own need barely deserves to sit within the same paragraph as all that Fanon theorises.

For those not already favourable to Fanon’s works, I think the key point is this:

The masses battle with the same poverty, wrestle with the same age-old gestures, and delineate what we could call the geography of hunger with their shrunken bellies. A world of underdevelopment, a world of poverty and inhumanity. But also a world without doctors, without engineers, without administrators. Facing this world, the European nations wallow in the most ostentatious opulence. The European opulence is literally a scandal for it was built on the backs of slaves, it fed on the blood of slaves, and it owes its very existence to the soil and subsoil of the underdeveloped world. Europe’s well-being and progress were built with the sweat and corpses of blacks, Arabs, Indians, and Asians. This we are determined never to forget. (53)

This is what is always forgotten. The second thing is this:

Antiracist racism and the determination to defend one’s skin, which is characteristic of the colonized’s response to colonial oppression, clearly represent sufficient reasons to join the struggle.  But one does not sustain a war, one does not endure massive repression or witness the disappearance of one’s entire family in order for hatred or racism to triumph. Racism, hatred, resentment, and “the legitimate desire for revenge” alone cannot nurture a war of liberation.

…hatred is not an agenda…. (89)

The violence described by Fanon as part of the struggle for liberation is not fueled by hatred, it is necessary to break the psychological controls over one’s own mind, to claim a different worldview, set of values and above all a different way of life and a different future than that being imposed through the deeper violence of colonialism. This is why he writes:

National liberation, national reawakening, restoration of the nation to the people or Commonwealth, whatever the name used…decolonization is always a violent event.

…proof of success lies in a social fabric that is has been changed inside out. This change is extraordinarily important because it is desired, clamored for, and demanded. The need for this changes exists in a raw, repressed, and reckless state in the lives and consciousness of colonized men and women. But the eventuality of such a change is also experienced as a terrifying future in the consciousness of another “species” of men and women: the colons, the colonists. (1)

Violent because it involves people standing up to reclaim what has been stolen violently from them and change everything, turn everything upside down — and that change, that reclaiming is fought tooth and tail with an immensity of fear by those who stole it.

On Violence:

Decolonization, which sets out to change the order of the world, is clearly an agenda for total disorder…it can only be understood, it can only find its significance and become self coherent insofar as we can discern the history-making movement which gives it form and substance. Decolonization is the encounter between two congenitally antagonistic forces that in fact owe their singularity to the kind of reification secreted and nurtured by the colonial situation. (2)

The distance between the violence of capitalist and colonial regimes

In capitalist countries a multitude of sermonizers, counselors, and “confusion-mongers” intervene between the exploited and the authorities. In colonial regions, however, the proximity and frequent direct intervention by the police and the military ensure the colonized are kept under close scrutiny, and contained by rifle butts and napalm. We have seen how the government’s agent uses a language of pure violence . The agent does not alleviate repression 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 colonized subject.  (4)

— though arguably in the US at least, people of colour know more of the second than the first. The results:

So the colonized subject wastes no time lamenting and almost never searches for justice in the colonial context. (43)

During the struggle for liberation their is a singular loss of interest in these rituals. With his back to the wall, the knife at his throat, or to be more exact the electrode on his genitals, the colonized subject is bound to stop telling stories. (20)

Violence become creative appropriation, a declaration that another way is possible after the old ways of enslavement and exploitation are smashed:

The violence which governed the ordering of the colonial world, which tirelessly punctuated the destruction of the indigenous social fabric, and demolished unchecked the systems of reference of the country’s economy, lifestyles, and modes of dress, this same violence will be vindicated and appropriated when, taking history in their own hands, the colonized swarm into the forbidden cities. To blow the colonized world to smithereens is henceforth a clear image within the grasp and imagination of every colonized subject.

**

Challenging the colonial world is not a rational confrontation of viewpoints. It is not a discourse on the universal, but the impassioned claim by the colonized that their world is fundamentally different. (6)

Resisting the violence of white supremacy and denigration of all others:

Now it so happens that when the colonized hear a speech on Western culture they draw their machetes or at least check to see if they are close to hand. The supremacy of white values is stated with such violence, the victorious confirmation of these values with then lifestyle and beliefs of the colonized is so impregnated with aggressiveness, that as a counter measure the colonized rightly makes a mockery of them whenever they are mentioned. (8)

Race and Marxism:

A topic very close to my heart

In the colonies the economic infrastructure is also a superstructure. The cause is effect: You are rich because you are white, you are white because you are rich. This is why a Marxist analysis should always be slightly stretched when it comes to addressing the colonial issue. It is not just the concept of the precapitalist society, so effectively studied by Marx, which needs to be reexamined here…It is not the factories, the estates, or the bank account which primarily characterize the “ruling-class.” The ruling species is first and foremost the outsider from elsewhere, different from the indigenous population, “the others.” (5)

Race used justify conquest and then exploitation, not just to maintain, but to increase those inequalities in service to an oppression of many races by white Europeans in ways that stretch to an older past:

As if to illustrate the totalitarian nature of colonial exploitation, the colonist turns the colonized into a kind of quintessence of evil. (6)

It’s “them or us” is not a paradox since colonialism, as we have seen, is precisely the organization of a Manichean world, of a compartmentalized world. (43)

how these new colonial and capitalist relations have shifted over time:

Capitalism, in its expansionist phase, regarded the colonies as a source of raw materials which once processed could be unloaded on the European market. After a phase of capital accumulation, capitalism has now modified its notion of profitability. The colonies have become a market. … A blind domination on the model of slavery is not economically profitable for the metropolis. The monopolistic fraction of the metropolitan bourgeoisie will not support a government whose policy is based solely on the power of arms. (27)

Another interesting aside on the nature of work and slavery:

They very quickly realized that work is not a simple notion, that slavery is the opposite of work, and that work presupposes freedom, responsibility, and consciousness. (133)

Tactics:

You do not disorganize a society, however primitive it may be, with such an agenda if you are not determined from the very start to smash every obstacle encountered. (3)

For us who are determined to break the back of colonialism, our historic mission is to authorize every revolt, every desperate act, and every attack aborted or drowned in blood. (146)

You must be ready to go all the way (and much as I value this work, much of this rhetoric does strike me as a very masculine position — there is little here on how to build and create though the need is acknowledged.). How much there is that can only be learned through struggle — and the necessity of struggle for learning it:

The colonized intellectual learned from his masters that the individual must assert himself. The  colonialist bourgeoisie hammered into the colonized mind the notion of a society of individuals where each is locked in his subjectivity…Involvement in the organization of the struggle will already introduce him to a different vocabulary. “Brother,” “sister,” “comrade” are words outlawed by the colonialist bourgeoisie because in their thinking my brother is my wallet and my comrade, my scheming. In a kind of auto-da-fe, the colonized intellectual witnesses the destruction of all his idols: egoism, arrogant recrimination, and the idiotic, childish need to have the last word. this colonized intellectual, pulverized by colonialist culture, will also discover the strength of the village assemblies, the power of the people’s commissions…(11)

How much intellectuals have to learn…

For a colonized people, the most essential value, because it is the most meaningful, is first and foremost the land: the land which must provide bread and, naturally, dignity. (9)

The people, on the the other hand, take a global stance from the very start. “Bread and land: how do we go about getting bread and land?” And this stubborn, apparently limited, narrow-minded aspect of the people is finally the most rewarding and effective working model. (14)

He writes again:

One of the greatest services the Algerian revolution has rendered to Algerian intellectuals was to put them in touch with the masses, to allow them to see the extreme, unspeakable poverty of the people and at the same time witness the awakening of their intelligence and the development of their consciousness. (130)

The people themselves also have much to learn alongside intellectuals, for both

But political education means opening up the mind, awakening the mind, and introducing it to the world. It is as Cesaire said: “To invent the souls of men.” (138)

There is much in here that echoes Cesaire. Education and struggle are necessary because colonization works actively to deform the colonized so as to better control them, and these deformations deepen as the colonized do what they must to survive. A few examples of how insidious colonialism is and how it shapes everyday behaviours:

The question of truth must also be taken into consideration. For the people, only fellow nationals are ever owed the truth. No absolute truth, no discourse on the transparency of the soul can erode this position. In answer to the lie of the colonial situation, the colonized subject responds with a lie. (14)

The first thing the colonial subject learns is to remain in his place and not overstep its limits (15)

So one of the ways the colonized subject releases his muscular tension is through the very real collective self-destruction of these internecine feuds. Such behavior represents a death wish in the face of danger, a suicidal conduct which reinforces the colonist’s experience and domination and reassures him that such men are not rational. (17-18)

The treatment of the colonized is to brutalize, oppress into silence, and to push into the natural world so that for the colonizers they are not a troubling presence:

Under the French occupation the Germans remained human beings. In Algeria there is not simply domination but the decision, literally, to occupy nothing else but a territory. The Algerians, the women dressed in haiks, the palm groves, and the camels form a landscape, the natural backdrop for the French presence. (182)

Yet for the colonized?

We believe that in the cases presented here the triggering factor is principally the bloody, pitiless, atmosphere, the generalization of inhuman practices, of people’s lasting impression that they are witnessing a veritable apocalypse. (183)

For colonialism has not simply depersonalized the colonized. The very structure of society has been depersonalized on a collective level. (219)

Key for Fanon is violence as a tactic of self-liberation — it is part of a necessary process to become truly free of the colonial relationship — a physical struggle but more importantly a psychological one:

only the armed struggle can effectively exorcise these lies about man that subordinate and literally mutilate the more conscious minded among us (220)

The colonized man liberates himself in and through violence. (44)

At the individual level, violence is a cleansing force. It rids the colonized of their inferiority complex, of their passive and despairing attitude. It emboldens them, and restores their self-confidence. Even if the armed struggle has been symbolic, and even if they have been demobilized by rapid decolonization, the people have time to realize that liberation was the achievement of each and every one and no special merit should go to the leader. Violence hoists people up to the level of the leader. (51)

For Fanon, the party (as opposed to the government) was the organising force of the struggle, he writes:

A country which really want to answer to history, which wants to develop its towns and the minds of its inhabitants, must possess a genuine party. The party is not an instrument in the hands of the government. Very much to the contrary, the party is an instrument in the hands of the people. It is the party which decides on the policy enacted by the government. (127)

The role of the intellectual:

In Algeria especially, Horne’s A Savage Peace, and to a lesser extent Feraoun’s journals and Djebar’s writings, show just how implicated French intellectuals were in the occupation of the country, particularly sociologists.

Experts and sociologists are a guiding force behind these colonialist maneuvers and conduct numerous studies on the subject of complexes…attempts are made to disarm him [the colonized subject] psychologically and, naturally, with a few coins. (90)

To counter this, another kind of intellectual is needed, another task required, though for Fanon this is always dialectical, never one way. Struggle and the will of the people fighting for liberation and the ideology of the movement are at all times educating and shaping each other:

The task of bringing the people to maturity is facilitated by rigorous organization as well as the ideological level of their leaders. The power of ideology is elaborated and strengthened as the struggle unfolds, taking into account the enemy’s maneuvers and the movement’s victories and setbacks…The insurrection proves to itself its rationality and demonstrates its maturity every time it uses a specific case to advance the consciousness of the people. (95)

Totally irresponsible yesterday, today they are bent on understanding everything and determining everything. Enlightened by violence, the people’s consciousness rebels against any pacification. (52)

These intellectuals work together with the party, to critique it and ensure it is remaining true to the struggle and to the people:

some of the intellectual elements who have made a thorough analysis of the colonial reality and the international situation, begin to criticize the ideological vacuum of the national party and its dearth of strategy and tactics. They never tire of asking the leaders the crucial questions “What is nationalism? What does it mean to you? What does the term signify? What is the point of independence? And first how do you intend to achieve it?” while at the same time demanding that methodological issued be vigorously addressed (77)

An interesting note on language and relationship to movement — perennially under discussion

Resorting to technical language means you are determined to treat the masses as uninitiated. Such language is a poor front for the lecturer’s intent to deceive the people and leave them on the sidelines. Language’s endeavor to confuse is a mask behind which looms an even greater undertaking to dispossess. The intention is to strip the people of their possessions as well as their sovereignty. You can explain anything to the people provided you really want them to understand. And if you think they can be dispensed with, that on the contrary they would be more of a nuisance to the smooth running of the many private and limited companies whose aim is to push them further into misery, than there is no more to be said. (131)

An awareness of the larger political context is also required, just as the anti-fascist fight and the US desire to become a leader of the free world after WWII played a key role in ensuring African American organising and struggle had levarage, so the context of this period must be taken into account:

Although the citadel is invincible against knives and bare hands, its invincibility crumbles when we take into account the context of the cold war. (38)

And for the future?

Each generation must discover its mission, fulfill it or betray it, in relative opacity. (145)

On Culture:

Because it is a systematized negation of the other, a frenzied determination to deny the other any attribute of humanity, colonialism forces the colonized to constantly ask the question: “Who am I in reality?” (182)

Culture provides an answer.

National culture is no folklore where an abstract populism is convinced it has uncovered the popular truth. It is not some congealed mass of noble gestures, in other words less and less connected with the reality fo the people. National culture is the collective thought process of a people to describe, justify, and extol the actions whereby they have joined forces and remained strong. National culture in the underdeveloped countries, therefore, must lie at the very heart of the liberation struggle… (168)

We believe the conscious, organized struggle undertaken by a colonized people in order to restore national sovereignty constitutes the greatest cultural manifestation that exists… After the struggle is over, there is not only the demise of colonialism, but also the demise of the colonized.

This new humanity, for itself and for other, inevitably defines a new humanism. (178)

Conclusions

And I shall let Fanon’s conclusions speak for themselves, they are splendid. I have such trouble, myself, writing conclusions. This is why I should try harder.

Now, comrades, now is the time to decide to change sides. We must shake off the mantle of night which has enveloped us, and reach for the light. The new day which is dawning must find us determined, enlightened and resolute.

We must abandon our dreams and say farewell to our old beliefs and former friendships. Let s not lose time in useless laments or sickening mimicry. Let us leave this Europe which never stops talking of man yet massacres him at every one of its street corners, at every corner of the world. (235)

When I look for man in European lifestyles and technology I see a constant denial of man, an avalanche of murders.

**

Let us decide not to imitate Europe and let us tense our muscles and our brains in a new direction. Let us endeavour to invent a man in full, something which Europe has been incapable of achieving.

Two centuries ago, a former European colony took it into its head to catch up with Europe. It has been so successful that the United States of American has become a monster where the flaws, sickness, and inhumanity of Europe have reached frightening proportions. (236-237)

yes, the European spirit is built on strange foundations…A permanent dialogue with itself, an increasingly obnoxious narcissism inevitably paved the way for a virtual delirium where intellectual thought turns into agony since the reality fo man as a living, working, self-made being is replaced by words, an assemblage of words and the tensions generated by their meanings. (237)

Last sentence:

For Europe, for ourselves and for humanity, comrades, we must make a new start, develop a new way of thinking, and endeavour to create a new man. (239)

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