One thing remarkable about Fanon's chapter "On Violence" is the intense violence of the writing itself. Unlike "A Passage to India" or Levine's study of colonialism which show how both colonised and coloniser are multifaceted entities resisting a single interpretation or representation, Fanon has no qualms about illustrating (reductively) three essential 'camps': the coloniser, the colonised, and the 'colonised intellectual'. The first two camps are both characterised by the use of violence; the last group calls for non-violence in a selfish attempt to preserve the position they have gained under the colonial enterprise.
Fanon seems to suggest, in my reading, that the colonial enterprise is fundamentally doomed because the violence needed to sustain it - through 'petrifying' the colonised in a dream-like state of submission - eventually leads to the colonised taking up this experience of violence as a unifying factor that focuses their own violence into an overthrow of the colonist.
Yet the colonist can speak nothing apart from this "language of pure violence": all his ideals and claims to civilisation are merely ideologies enforced by "the barracks and the police stations".
An implication of this is that the violence perpetuated by the colonist appears necessary for the colonised to cohere: Fanon's interpretation of nationalist activities seems to characterise them as alternative outlets for violence and thus more a distraction from the 'proper work' of overthrowing the colonists. Forster's description of Aziz as a nationalist intent on finding a "real India" seems to support Fanon's theory: poetry and ethics are a hinderance towards the real work of de-colonialisation, as they distract from the "true nature" of the colonised who are essentially united by an experience of colonial violence.
But this premise seems to lead into a problem towards the end essay where he speaks of the situation after decolonisation: the colonised country now becomes "economically dependent" because its infrastructure has been formed only with a view of exporting raw materials. Fanon recognises this, but the only solution he seems to offer is for the capitalist countries to "pay up" and to stop being "irresponsible".
If these countries are truly as one dimensional as Fanon suggests, with no other attitudes towards the colonised other than violent exploitation, why should they bother with reparation? Yet, if one admits that perhaps there was some sincerity to the colonists ideals, and that colonisation is more complex than the mere use of violence, then the violent process of decolonisation that Fanon has previously described seems less necessary than he sets it out to be. Either way, Fanon provides a compelling but incomplete, it seems to me, critique of the phenomena of colonialism.
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Very interesting ideas Xinwei. Some questions... why do you think poetry etc. would definitely be opposed to a form of violence? Can you think also about violence in terms of aesthetics?
well. perhaps not poetry per se, but personally i find that "good" literature (or perhaps better to say literature i find interesting =P) has a tendency to self-reflexively problematise its own certainty, making it opposed to the kind of reductive writing (a kind of "violence" in itself) one finds in Fanon. but that means it loses that revolutionary edge since you end up wandering the aporia rather than actually doing stuff.
violence and aesthetics... i suppose aesthetic _systems_ impose a certain kind of violence (transforming a subject reality into an "object" of beauty). perhaps thats what Gikandi finds annoying about Picasso.
Interesting point xinwei... let's bring it a step further, and consider: can we consider poetry also as a form of violence?
In fact, poets from "newly born" countries have often employed the medium to sort of bring a new concept (in the sense of a country) into being -- something which creates a dramatic sense of rupture. How then can this add to, or shift, the idea of "good art" being something which is not "political" in a narrow sense?
Poetry is a departure from the prosaic conventions of language, a violence on conventional syntax, perhaps? I'm actually thinking of Adorno here, and his famous dictum - "To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric". Now, he was speaking about the reification of culture and other things in the wake of WWII, but that it is in the nature of poetry to reify to displace the real with the abstract, and to render a rupture - as you put it - in one's perception, is essentially an assault on your gestalt: the epistemological birth pains of culture.
hmm... it would certainly point to the historical/political foundation of the standards of "art", ideas of "the canon", for example.
actually, i think it would depend alot on the language the poetry was in.
if it was in the colonisers language, perhaps it is borrowing the coloniser's standards to legitimise and glorify the new concept of "nation". (of course, this is problematic in itself, leaving the nation still "under the shadow" of the coloniser as it were)
if its in the colonised people's language, i think it would largely involve expressing modernity through older poetic forms or languages. i remember reading about something like this in java, where certain forms of javanese poetry were actually used to convey modern educational (and i suppose at some point, nationalistic) ideas.
both seem to suggest a systhesis of the modern with the ancient, as if the colonised individual was claiming a right to progress (or claiming to be modern), in their own terms;
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this sounds vaguely like the opposite of Fanon's essay: now we assume that the coloniser went in with "good intentions", to civilise, and then show the coloniser "ok we're civilised, you can get out now"
of course, i think you really can't say its entirely one or the other.
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