Dissecting Violence

Amongst the manifold explanations of colonialism, Fanon offers one with an extreme amount of bluntness. For him, the mediating relationship between a coloniser and the colonised is one of violence. Fanon turns the idea of the “native” being inherently violent on its head. Hence, it is not the colonised who is seeking violence, but it is the white man’s hegemony that is being maintained by using brute force. He blames no one but the white man for bringing “violence into the home and into the mind of the native”. He maps the steps of violence which begin with the “natives” inflicting violence on each other before channelling it to their masters. Therefore, as Satre put it in his preface, the violence does not stem from the native. It is white violence that accompanied these white voyagers to African soil.

It is the misunderstood work of Fanon that led to the conception that he was nothing more than a propagator of violence. However, in reality, he is providing a common-sense analysis of reactional violence that the colonised displays after suffering through years of degradation and dehumanisation. One way to perceive the violence returned by the “native” is to understand it as something that transcends all ideas of rationality. These include acts of denial, vengeance or self-defence. But Fanon does not want his reader to understand violence in this manner. The native’s violence is one that is almost automatic or reactionary to the torments of colonialism.

Satre sums Fanon’s psychiatric analysis by stating that the “native cures himself of colonial neurosis” by returning violence. The colonised people are robbed of their land, dignity and sometimes life. These victims have little space for a rational analysis of inflicting violence on to each other or the coloniser. Violence, for them, comes out as nothing but a natural response to the environment created around them. Naturally then, the “object” speaks back to the “subject”, reclaiming its place as a subject.

Violence is also perceived as a cleansing force. Fanon holds decolonisation as an act of emancipating one’s body and returning to be your authentic “self”. Hence, decolonisation is a story of homecoming, and in this process of restoration, violence is serving as a cleansing force. Fanon’s analysis is explained further in one of his earlier books “black skins, white masks”. He pitches the idea of a “collective catharsis” where violence is seen as an outlet for society to let its aggression out.

Finally, the process of getting in tune with the present is much more than violence, and Fanon is cognisant of this. Violence is not merely the end goal for him as he realises that the violent process of decolonisation will lead to a system that will be equally worse, if not more. He states that the militant who faces the colonialist war machine with the bare minimum of arms realizes that while he is breaking down colonial oppression he is building up yet another system of exploitation. Hence, Fanon’s violence is not impetuous. He wants the already dissatisfying process of decolonisation to ensure the inclusion of all its subjects equally. Otherwise, the violence alone would go in vain as it would just be recreating the system of exploitation that the colonised wished to escape.