The Half Baked Man: Concerning Fanon
In A-Levels, we had to read a book for our literature exam: The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga. In the book, there was this concept of a half baked man. A half baked man is a man that has not received a proper education, but has heard of ideas as he grows up, so he knows things but not really. Adiga talks about drivers, cooks and watchmen -who overhear snippets of important conversations and fill in the rest with their imagination. So a cook might know something about how brakes are made and by that logic understand how entire cars are made. Half baked men, like half baked clay -heads full of half ideas and half made-up facts.
Fanon's book reminded me of the half baked man in a couple of ways. It reminded me of the colonized intellectual as the half baked man. While the colonized intellectual has proper ideas and education, the very education and its purpose turns him into a man that looks like a certain kind of man but has the brain of another. The colonized is not to be able to look at himself and diagnose his condition, the root of his condition and what he can do to make things better! This turns him into a half baked man as the very words "colonized intellectual" refer to two separate identities meshed together. The colonized might not trust him for he is an intellectual now, and the intellectuals will not trust him for the color of his skin. Fanon's book is the book of a black man who writes and diagnoses his own condition, the condition of the colonized and proposes the three step plan to decolonization. Just the act itself kind of reminded me of the half baked idea -it's a man using devices (knowledge) that was created to subjugate him to create devices (knowledge) that will help him and others like him fully human with hopes, aspirations and desires. It's a half baked man creating pure clay for himself.
Another way it reminded me of the half baked man was in the way the decolonizing world treats his text. The decolonizing world treats his text as a scripture, as a gospel that was revealed rather than written by a specific man in a specific condition in a specific time. In Sarte's preface, he constantly justifies the anger of Fanon and feeds into the image that Frantz Fanon has as this prophet of violence. We have immortalized and condemned a text to be relevant in a very limited way that in popular readings only allows us to look at decolonization as a violent act. That is the popular reading of Wretched of the Earth, and of Fanon's message. To me, this reading turns Wretched of the Earth as half baked clay. It's context: subtracted. The condition in which Fanon was writing: subtracted. His words lifted from his context, from the condition in which he was writing. With these gaping holes, the text is like half baked clay, and the soft clay is onto which the decolonizing world fills in Fanon's message of violence and anger. Yes, he's anger. Yes, he calls for violence. But there's more and that more is obscured by what we fashion for ourselves from the soft clay of Wretched of the Earth.
Fanon's book reminded me of the half baked man in a couple of ways. It reminded me of the colonized intellectual as the half baked man. While the colonized intellectual has proper ideas and education, the very education and its purpose turns him into a man that looks like a certain kind of man but has the brain of another. The colonized is not to be able to look at himself and diagnose his condition, the root of his condition and what he can do to make things better! This turns him into a half baked man as the very words "colonized intellectual" refer to two separate identities meshed together. The colonized might not trust him for he is an intellectual now, and the intellectuals will not trust him for the color of his skin. Fanon's book is the book of a black man who writes and diagnoses his own condition, the condition of the colonized and proposes the three step plan to decolonization. Just the act itself kind of reminded me of the half baked idea -it's a man using devices (knowledge) that was created to subjugate him to create devices (knowledge) that will help him and others like him fully human with hopes, aspirations and desires. It's a half baked man creating pure clay for himself.
Another way it reminded me of the half baked man was in the way the decolonizing world treats his text. The decolonizing world treats his text as a scripture, as a gospel that was revealed rather than written by a specific man in a specific condition in a specific time. In Sarte's preface, he constantly justifies the anger of Fanon and feeds into the image that Frantz Fanon has as this prophet of violence. We have immortalized and condemned a text to be relevant in a very limited way that in popular readings only allows us to look at decolonization as a violent act. That is the popular reading of Wretched of the Earth, and of Fanon's message. To me, this reading turns Wretched of the Earth as half baked clay. It's context: subtracted. The condition in which Fanon was writing: subtracted. His words lifted from his context, from the condition in which he was writing. With these gaping holes, the text is like half baked clay, and the soft clay is onto which the decolonizing world fills in Fanon's message of violence and anger. Yes, he's anger. Yes, he calls for violence. But there's more and that more is obscured by what we fashion for ourselves from the soft clay of Wretched of the Earth.
Comments