On Anger (both mine and Fanon's)

I have felt a strange anger before. Anger that was unwarranted but at the same time so natural that I am still in the process of unlearning it. My English friend Nicola was visiting Pakistan and I could not help but feel a weird aggression towards her and in particular her whiteness. Something I had never had an issue with before she appeared in my home country, looking at it with impersonal eyes. A colonist's gaze taking in the remnants of a pillaged culture. That's how it felt at least, when the tour guide at Lahore Fort pointed out the negative space that used to be filled with inlaid precious stone. Stones that now reside in the British Museum. I felt anger because I blamed Nicola, when these events had nothing to do with her or me. My reason for being upset can be summarized by Fanon's description of how wealth is extracted from a colonized state "to meet the needs of the mother country's industries, thereby allowing certain sectors of the colony to become relatively rich. But the rest of the colony follows its path of under-development and poverty, or at all events sinks into it more deeply." 

 

I was upset at the lack of acknowledgement of how we are still impacted by colonization, but they have simply moved on and forgotten all the damage they caused. Nicola and I are the same age, both born in the era of "post"-colonialism and still I am impacted negatively by our historic relationship, but she has the luxury of being immune. This anger seems to be a lesser version of the sort of instinctual reaction Fanon described in The Wretched of the Earth. He says that the colonized react with violence at the time of decolonization; “once their rage explodes, they recover their lost coherence, they experience self-knowledge through reconstruction of themselves; from afar we see their war as the triumph of barbarity; but it proceeds on its own to gradually emancipate the fighter and progressively eliminates the colonial darkness inside and out". This anger and violence is purposeful but not vengeful. It is an acknowledgement of the trauma suffered and it is the reclamation of our future.

 

Fanon also points out that we must remember “the wealth of the imperial countries is our wealth too". "The wealth which smothers her is that which was stolen from the underdeveloped peoples" and somehow, we are expected to recover from centuries of lost wealth and play catch up to Europe in the span of a few decades. That is why Fanon is angry. Because we are left to inherit a broken mess in terms of culture, politics, economics, and even our own identity. It is difficult to feel anything but helpless as the exhilaration of liberation wears off. This is true especially in the current economic state of most post-colonial developing nation and our dependency on foreign aid. No matter how many times Fanon can say "when we hear the head of a European state declare with his hand on his heart that he must come to the aid of the poor underdeveloped peoples, we do not tremble with gratitude. Quite the contrary; we say to ourselves: 'It's a just reparation which will be paid to us'” I just don't feel like that is the reality. Because as long as the West drives the narrative regarding what is economic success and what they "owe" us, even if we feel this foreign aid is just reparation that is not enough; it has to be universally acknowledged for it to become so. 

 

I am ashamed of the anger I felt because Nicola did not deserve it. But I also recognize that anger comes because we have not yet healed from the trauma of colonization, but the colonizers have long forgotten their part. That is why it is called foreign aid and not reparations when they help us out of a pit they forced us to dig in the first place. Colonization was not fair while it was in full force and it’s still not fair because we are still not on equal footing and so we cannot help but be angry.