What I Learnt

Coming into this course, I was a bit disappointed when I first learnt that we would only be engaging with African decolonization and black radical tradition. What I had wanted to learn about primarily was the history of decolonization in my own South Asian context and the debates surrounding it; to get to understand my own history better. Yet, starting the day we first read and discussed Fanon, I realized the course was more about me than I had previously thought. In fact, it was completely about me. Fanon saw through me in a way no poet had. Memmi literally wrote about me. Malcolm personified who I aspired to be. Muhammad Ali taught me how to dream. MLK showed how I was to live a life. And through them all, I took the first step of a long road to understand myself. Perhaps that’s the most compelling thing about studying humanities, the moment where you realize ‘study’ is just a tiny dot of what you really are supposed to do. It is never about something external and alien you can separate yourself from, something you can ‘objectively’ and ‘dispassionately’ learn about. Instead it is something personal, embedded in your very being with every word you read, every idea you contemplate.

For this blog, I will focus on just three most compelling things I learnt from the black radical tradition. Firstly, and personally most important, was the determination of these thinkers to try to identify and name what ailed them, and to craft a response to it for everyone who felt the same. Secondly, what struck me was the very ethic which made the tradition prophetic too: the unapologetic commitment to truth, and to it only. Lastly, it was the ability of these thinkers to learn and grow continuously, even when they had held a view for a very long time and people threatened to kill (and actually killed) them if they changed their ideas.

About the ability to write and explore what ailed them, I have written this in a previous blog too, but I am writing this again because of how true it is. Struggling with expression myself, I had been experiencing a multitude of ambivalent, contradictory and unsettling feelings, yet was unable to name them or move past them. When I read Wretched of the Earth, I was genuinely awestruck by the narrative form of the book. Here was some pure anger I could feel just by reading his words, (later in class I found out it was literally Fanon walking in his room rambling while someone wrote it down). The important thing for me was the ability to channel his anger and inability to express into something which actually did express all (or most) of what he wished to express. And that made all the difference. If Fanon, Du Bois, MLK, Muhammad Ali could, I could do it too.

What Fanon, Cesaire, MLK and Malcolm (among all others too) stood for was what they saw as the unapologetic truth. Dr. King saw only non-violent means as justifying the end the black radical tradition should strive for, and so he kept consistent to it throughout his life. This was the truth he lived for and believed in, and even when those around him failed to acknowledge it, he didn’t adopt a pragmatic approach and change his position. Instead he remained steadfast to the principle he so firmly believed in, and remained consistent in the most challenging of times.

What was even more interesting was how they were forever ready to change and evolve when they found out that the truth they had committed to didn’t hold true for them anymore. Take Malcolm for example, who believed passionately (still a small word) all his life about the rightness of Elijah’s method, and the idea of black redemption through separation and violence. Yet when he went on his pilgrimage to Mecca and realized rather in the universality of humanity and how every person and race is redeemable and equal before God, he didn’t take long to rebuke his old beliefs, because his commitment wasn’t to any ideology or organization, but to God and truth itself. This cost him his life, and he well knew it, but never once did he forego the truth he believed in, remaining loyal to it till an assassination took away his life. This level of intellectual humility and readiness to evolve looks increasingly a tale of the past in today’s world.

They became an example not only of steadfastness, but also of righteousness. And while encountering them, through their prism of truth and courage, they allowed me to look at the problems around myself and within myself. It was an acceptance of vulnerability by an acknowledgment of the context and its shackles. And it made me aware that it was an honest vulnerability to change which mattered on one hand, and an unshakable belief in the truth of the heart which mattered on the other.