On Anger

Often times I struggle with words. I struggle with expressing what is consuming my mind and heart and soul in its entirety, yet I fail to draw it out in words which don’t make a mockery out of the complex ideas I want to express and make sense of. But then sometimes it happens that this anger, this fury of my own inability, almost desperation, boils over a certain level, and I just sit down to write without any prior idea or structure, and let it flow. The resulting sentences and ideas are convoluted, they can’t be easily distinguished from each other, they often attempt at making sense of images and ideas more vivid than any word could possibly be, but they are mine and they do make sense to me. And most importantly, they often envision an understanding of what I want to express in a way much better than what my conscious effort could ever harbor. That’s what struck me foremost in Fanon. A form of creative anger which results not only from external circumstances of oppression and subjugation which Fanon so intensely abhorred, but also one which was stemming from deep inside himself, his resentment on his inability to clearly name what ailed him. An anger devoid of creativity is an incomplete emotion because it fails to create out of that discomfort something which has potential to give comfort. In this regard, I believe Fanon succeeded. Probably for himself too, but definitely for the many people from 1961 to this day, including me, who read his word and fell into its trance and beauty.

My first response to Wretched of the Earth was of awe. How come this man so clearly express what he wants to say without any regards for the turmoil it may cause (which it did)? But as the book progressed, I found plenty of abrupt jumps between ideas, convoluted sentences which took me multiple efforts to grasp even the slight gist of it, among many other such things which reeked of confusion, exasperation and discomfiture. This brought me to a new understanding, one which allowed me to appreciate Fanon not only as some decolonial thinker, or a revolutionary who employed psycho-analytical devices to understand the colonial (and post-colonial subjects), but as a person foremost engrained and immersed in his own cognition and emotions. The way I had imagined non-fiction writers and thinkers had been of them formulating their theories in an abstract, impersonal manner. At most, they could be inspired from something personal, but their book was to be somewhat detached from the personal, especially the emotive tangent of it. Fanon shattered this image outright. Even in prose, without the performative element of speech (with its rhetorical and other emotive devices) present, one can sense his immense eagerness to just express what he is thinking. The reader outright knows that this process of thinking which has been laid out in Wretched of the Earth is personal. When he writes about ‘muscular phantasms’ or the ‘native and european sectors’, I found myself automatically imagining Fanon standing high above the Algerian society, carving into each and every intimate detail of the colonial experience and absorbing it deep into himself. If this wasn’t guided by his immense psychological and emotional involvement into the whole scene, if this wasn’t out of sheer anger and exasperation of the colonial episode, I can’t think of any prose or non-fiction piece which can be called so.

Just as I found Fanon and how I often find my own musings, convoluted and confused, does this blog seems to me in retrospect. I don’t even think that this blog is directly tied to today’s prompt ‘On Anger’. But I still wrote it in the way it is written, because the way I saw it, Fanon employs the extreme emotion of anger and takes it to its creative best. He constructs out of that anger an understanding which is more far reaching than most academic or other non-fiction works. Because this understanding is not shy to reveal its emotive underlining and its passionate vulnerability, and successfully envisions a path for everyone who seeks to express their ideas, not only about politics or psychology, but about anything which ails them. Fanon teaches me that writing is power, and it is extreme emotions such as anger which drives it.