On Spontaneity

What is striking about Fanon’s writing is his insight into the psychological aspect of individuals and how individuals processed colonialism and translated that into their reality. Fanon’s expertise in psychiatry set the backdrop for his analysis of colonialism and decoloniality as a process intrinsically linked to the mind and psychology. An interesting aspect about the Wretched of the Earth is the contrast between the idea of violence as being a spontaneous, impulsive reaction to colonialism and the cultural reaction to colonialism which undergoes a three step process, thus adhering to a particular sequence and a particular stream of thinking as opposed to being impromptu. 

Fanon, in his chapters “On Violence” and “Grandeur and Weakness of Spontaneity” sees colonialism as violence and the means to mediate between the “Manichean World” that is highly compartmentalized and divided between the settlers’ town and the natives’ quarters, between the black and the white, between civilization and barbarity, “a world divided into compartments, a motionless, Manicheistic world”. The colonized react to this colonization and violence through violence. This violence is not something that is planned, nor is it carried out with an agenda like self-defence or vengeance. It is a psychological, muscular, neurological reaction that is impulsive and impromptu in nature and occurs in the spur of the moment, “Thereupon the accumulated, exacerbated hate explodes…The peasantry spontaneously gives concrete form to the general insecurity”. Thus, violence is not something that is rationalized in the minds of the colonized, but is something that does not have to make sense. This spontaneous, senseless and impetuous reaction, in fact, turns out to be cathartic and “at the level of individuals, violence is a cleansing force” and a means of liberation and redemption. 

This spontaneity of violence can be contrasted with the aspect of cultural reaction. Fanon describes a three step process whereby the colonized responds to the imposition of the colonial culture and reacts through different cultural responses. In this sequence, the colonized first adopts the colonial culture, then reacts against this in the second stage as they are made to feel out of place and alienated, and finally moves towards a fight towards liberation and against the colonizer and their culture. This three stage process is different from the spontaneity of violence as firstly, it generalizes the thinking process of all the colonized people which is interesting because the reactions and understanding of colonialism can be various for various different people. Secondly, since Fanon’s ideas depict that the colonized are unable to make sense of the colonial experience and react spontaneously in terms of violence, “The colonized man will first manifest this aggressiveness which has been deposited in his bones against his own people”, the cultural reaction going through such a streamlined process of stages, and also involving a sort of understanding and rationalizing of the colonial experience, for me, stands in contrast to the ideas on violence set by Fanon.