Words, Maybe Too Many

The Black Radical Tradition to me has been the entirety of this course. Starting from writers like Aime Cesaire to ending with Toni Morrison, they have all dared to think differently. They have all dreamed of what has maybe been dreamt multiple times, but has never been recognized as something worthy. For this blog, I will narrow down on three writers (although all of them deserve praise): Saidiya Hartman, Frantz Fanon and a short note on Malcolm X. I hope this final blog is able to in some way convey the gratitude I feel for having learned through so many wonderful thinkers. Maybe my words cannot and maybe never will do justice to this thankfulness. Nonetheless, here is an attempt.

In Lose Your Mother, I was exposed to a method of history writing completely new and fascinating. It was a radical way to recall the past, long for the past and to understand it as a concept. Of wanting to know her ancestry Hartman writes that she has seen this “ache in others too.” This is perhaps true of all of us, that we all have a “hunger for the past”. This is why I often find myself rummaging through old family photographs. All of these tend to be from my mother’s side. I think I only once chanced upon a picture of my paternal family. I draw a lot of my features from them. This history has always been painful to ask my father about (perhaps because it is marred by so many losses) and so I know it only in “fragments of stories and names.” I do not mean to equate my own life to Hartman’s, it is just that reading her returned me to many of my own sentiments. Moving on, there is a kind of attachment and detachment that I see in her writing too. In one way Hartman sees that she has “yet to make a home”. She understands that she does not always have to “return” and that “there is no going back to a former condition”. This confession has stayed with me. It is a strength, and one I have seen in other writers too, that allows them to imagine a future full of “alternate presents”. There are indeed things we have “never enjoyed” because of the shapes our pasts have settled into. But this truth only “inaugurates” our existence.

“I will impose my whole weight as a man…”

When I read the conclusion to Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, this particular sentence made me deeply emotional. I don’t know what it was. Perhaps reading it helped me to feel my own weight as a person. For what could have been the first time, the rootedness of my own being became clear. I had never felt my presence as easily as I had then. When thinking about the concept of negritude Fanon emphasizes that he is not a “prisoner of history”. The “eternal brilliance of the world” for him lies in “the open door of every consciousness”. That is, he believes in giving a space to new ways of thinking and of being, based on ones “own foundation.” It is natural to yearn for the knowledge of where we have come from, but it should not consume us so that we only see ourselves in longing. Fanon bravely rejects this kind of person-hood. He wants to be known as himself. Nothing more, and nothing less. He wants to be able to claim his actions as his own choices, undetermined by any other story. This too, is a radical way to look on at life. The tragedies of the past can be remembered with grief, but they should not lead to a faithlessness. They mold us in one way or another, yet, they must not shackle us so that the future seems pointless.

Finally, Malcolm X. Much can be said about him. His influence on liberation movements, ideas of unity, freedom and love has been immense. But it has been Malcolm’s unending quest to be better that has stuck with me. This is perhaps one promise life never breaks: to improve and to rework what we know. “Radical alteration” signifies Malcolm X to me. In a society where people are often cast away and “cancelled”, his message reminds me that human beings are not rigid entities. We are capable of changing, of learning and in turn also growing. This is what all these thinkers too, have written about. It is most interesting to realize how connected all of them are. As we pointed out in class: when simplified, the messages have been the same. Only the experiences from which they have come seem to have varied. Perhaps I too can then live in a way that is inspired by them. This is the generosity of the tradition. It lends itself as a friend, open to conversation so that we end up finding parts of ourselves along the way.