Earthly Encounters by Stephanie D. Clare

Author:Stephanie D. Clare [Clare, Stephanie D.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Feminism & Feminist Theory, Philosophy, Movements, Phenomenology, General
ISBN: 9781438475899
Google: LLCrDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: SUNY Press
Published: 2019-08-23T03:18:14+00:00

Decolonization, Appropriation, and the Psyche

The process of appropriation is key to understanding Fanon’s psychic materialism as well as his understanding of life. In a critical, underread passage of The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon writes, “for a colonized people, the most essential value, because it is the most meaningful, is first and foremost the land.”53 This value given to land replaces Western values that, Fanon explains, are violently hailed by colonists during decolonization as part of a “rearguard campaign.”54 The colonized reject these Western values (such as rational discourse and truth). They “thumb their noses at these very values, shower them with insults and vomit them up.”55

A first approach to this passage could read the valorization of land as a particular moment in the process of decolonization. This reading would draw on Ato Sekyi-Otu’s approach to Fanon’s text as a “dramatic dialectical narrative.”56 It would insist that, much like Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit describes the development of self-consciousness, in this case, The Wretched of the Earth describes the process of decolonization. In Sekyi-Otu’s terms, this implies that “rhetorics of the human situation evoked at determinate moments of Fanon’s text” do not always “commit him to a conclusive and unambiguous endorsement of such pictures and rhetorics.”57 Thus, when Fanon writes that “for a colonized people, the most essential value […] is land,” we could argue that this is not Fanon’s own valuation, but rather his description of what the colonized, during the process of decolonization, value. In other words, land is not a universal, ahistorical value for Fanon, but rather valuable in this particular moment.

And yet Fanon does not only describe and critique what is, he also makes a case for what he believes ought to be. While the valuation of land comes at a particular moment in the process of decolonization, Fanon does not leave it there. Fanon links land to life itself through the production of food in the figure of bread. Land, he writes, is the “most essential value,” because it “must provide bread and, naturally, dignity.”58 A later passage in The Wretched of the Earth elaborates.

Under a colonial regime, man’s relationship with the physical world and history is connected to food. In the context of oppression like that of Algeria, for the colonized, living does not mean embodying a set of values, does not mean integrating oneself into the coherent, constructive development of a world. To live simply means not to die. To exist means staying alive. Every date grown is a victory. Not the result of hard work, but a victory celebrating a triumph over life.59

Fruit is not the product of work but rather that which, through its consumption, fosters life. The date is a triumph because it allows for the continued simple fact of staying alive. Dignity is not about “embodying a set of values.” It has “nothing to do with ‘human’ dignity.”60 The colonized, Fanon argues, have “never heard of such an ideal. All he has ever seen on his land is that he can be arrested, beaten, and starved with impunity.

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