Black Bodies, White Violence

The 'object' has grown up in front of a splendid painting. He has searched for a mirror his entire life to show him his true reflection but all that stands in front of him is a painting. Created by the 'subject' from his own imagination. His interpretation of his skin and what lies inside it. His thoughts, feelings and desires detailed out in front of him as a masterpiece. The savage brutality of the slave painted by the master. This is the object's only image, only identity. Until one day, he lashes out and tears it up. This is how Heigel's master-slave dialect plays out in Fanon's 'Wretched of The Earth'. Anger is the mechanism through which the object becomes subject, slave becomes master. However, is it tragedy or triumph? Is anger the perpetuation of the cycle the subject is born into or is anger a way to break the cycle?     To Fanon, anger is the only rational response left to the colonized. They have internalized it from their birth. Indeed, the birth of their own nation was carved out by the colonizers through anger. Africa was torn up by Europe and each nation was given dominion of aggression over its ‘property’. The people of Africa were included. Anger is the only medium of communication they were exposed to. Aggression was the language of Africa, the language of the colonized. But it was not theirs to begin with. As Sartre says, “the world is divided into those that possess the word and those that borrow from it". Anger was the language of the colonizer but it was adopted by the colonized. It became their words - the only means to express what they were familiar with. And thus, they rose up, enacted acts of violence that were almost poetic in nature and wrote the song of their emancipation: a wretched cry, for the wretched of the earth.      The story doesn’t end here though. As painful as birth is, it is only the beginning. In the search for one’s own identity, the colonized tears the picture of savagery and barbarity that was constructed by the colonizer, but in doing so, he becomes the painting itself. In order to escape the claws of aggression, he must carry out aggression himself. He becomes the beast that the master dreamed of. The dangerous creature that Europe feared, the uncivilised man that wreaks havoc in the world. He has torn up the painting, but the mirror shows the same image. The ‘savage’ jumps from imagination to reality in through the medium of anger. So the question remains, has he truly won?      Fanon insists that we must never become a mirror of Europe in order to succeed, however, is it ever possible to escape the circle of violence? The African has internalized violence and speaks only its tongue. In that scenario, is it really the end of colonisation? Or is it simply a shift from one object to the other? If anger creates the master, who’s the new slave? Fanon does not have an answer to this question, and honestly, neither do I. But if colonisation is nothing but anger, then the final act of the colonizer is to pass it to its property. Can the enactment of anger ever truly be decolonisation? The conflict that still grips the post colonial states suggest otherwise. Thus, the best colonial legacy by far is Europe’s anger. The white man’s true burden, carried on bent shoulders and burnt black backs forever.  As Nietzsche said “Battle not with monsters lest you become the monster. If you gaze into the abyss the abyss gazes into you”.