"The Unifying Potential of a Manichaeistic Worldview" | An Unpromising Hope

 

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This classic text (prefaced by the likes of Jean Paul Sartre and Homi Bhabha) took on a life of its own after its publication, inspiring and augmenting liberative and revolutionary movements worldwide, including and especially the Black Panthers in the US, who regarded it as something of a bible. Both its call for the last to become first, as well as its embrace of any means (which had tactically been a taboo idea, especially in the US during early movements for desegregation and Black Civil Rights) offered a framework and a fire for the revolutionary spirit as it was already being stoked worldwide in the 1960s and 1970s.

Perhaps most notable in Fanon's Wretched of the Earth, is Fanon's own relative (if cautious) comfort embracing a dualistic worldview. This worldview, indeed, is the one that had named Fanon himself as colonized, a worldview which clearly sought both to dehumanize him, and to reinforce the subjugation of his people by the colonizer. This, of course, Fanon stated himself. Nonetheless, it is not the dualism (which Fanon aptly refers to as Manichaeism) that Fanon loves. He does not. Fanon notes these damages, time and again. Both society and the human spirit are diminished by this polarizing heresy. Colonial Manichaeism reduces the colonized to enemies, "bad guys," "poisoners of values," "threats," and ultimately animals.

Anyone who is not "us" is the evil other. It is dehumanizing to the end. This is to be sure, even for Fanon.

However, knowing this truth, the fact remains for Fanon that this Manichaeistic world is the world as it is. It is the world which Fanon received by birth, and the one he must struggle within. Choosing not to believe in it will not make it magically go away. This dualism categorizes and kills, yes. However, and this is what Fanon appreciates, in embracing this Manichaeistic outlook, the colonized people do actually gain one thing. What they gain is the opportunity to be the colonized. That is, as the colonized becomes the name of a once multiplicitous people, so there emerges an identity of the colonized. With a common identity, the colonized have a better chance at unifying, at uniting against the colonizer, at overthrowing him: The colonized, unite!

In receiving and adopting this imposed label, the colonized are given a name with which they might rise up and assert their humanity against those who would rob them of it and in turn create a world where their lives are truly valued. To adapt a phrase made famous by Audre Lorde, Fanon takes the colonizer's tools and does turn them back on the colonizer in order to dismantle the colonizer's house. The fight for liberation is a fight for the humanization of the colonized, and a more humane world for the colonized. In a world that turns one into an animal, even a caged animal, and even a caged work horse, this is not simply counter-cultural, but, rather, revolutionary work.

We must remember in any case that a colonized people is not just a dominated people. Under the German occupation, the French 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.

A hostile, ungovernable, and fundamentally rebellious Nature is in fact synonymous in the colonies with the bush, the mosquitoes, the natives, and disease. Colonization has succeeded once this untamed Nature has been brought under control. Cutting railroads through the bush, draining swamps, and ignoring the political and economic existence of the native population are in fact one and the same thing.

Colonization turns humans into landscape. Into animals. Into subhuman background characters in a movie that is about someone else, a movie which they will never direct, play a lead role in, and for which they will never receive compensation. Yet, says Fanon, "the colonized . . . roar with laughter every time they hear themselves called an animal by the other. For they know they are not animals. And at the very moment when they discover their humanity, they begin to sharpen their weapons to secure its victory." Again: for Fanon, "weapons" is very seldom a figure of speech.

Thomas R. Gaulke, An Unpromising Hope: Finding Hope Outside of Promise for an Agnostic Church and for Those of Us who Find it Hard to Believe (Eugene: Wipf & Wipf and Stock, 2021).