Fanon's pen is mightier than your sword

What struck me, and disturbs me, about Fanon’s “On Violence” is the aggressive style and tone that he adopts in writing the chapter. The words he uses are very harsh and violent and Fanon doesn’t mince his words, attacking and driving home his point again and again. Perhaps he meant for his readers to be disturbed by his style, and to think about the points he raised. Fanon definitely had an agenda in mind when he wrote this, and I think he does achieve it as far as anti-colonialism goes; but whether it still resounds with readers today I’m not too sure. Perhaps for those who share a similarly violent de-colonization background in their fight for independence (which brings to mind all those Southeast Asian histories that I studied in JC—remember the Vietnamese and the Burmese?), but coming from a Singaporean background, the violence he portrays doesn’t strike a strong chord in me, probably because what we’ve studied is Singapore’s rather mild de-colonization process (even the fight with the communists pale in comparison with what Fanon portrays here). Yet, keeping in mind that Singapore didn’t have it all that bad, I had to control my discomfort over his writing and finish the reading. I must say that Fanon’s work is rather revolutionary in itself (which reminds me of Aziz’s poem that Godbole liked the most), and after reading the chapter, I had to go and search for some background information of him out of pure curiosity.

What interested me was that he was ‘born into a mixed family background: his father was the descendent of African slaves, and his mother was said to be an illegitimate child of mixed race’ (from Wikipedia, not the best source to cite from but oh well) and he himself was a victim of racism from the French which formulated his entire anti-colonialism framework. I was also struck by his uneasy relationship with the French language, which he wrote in Black Skin, White Masks, ‘To speak . . . means above all to assume a culture, to support the weight of a civilization’ (17-18); for Fanon, as was what we’ve previously discussed, the adoption of the colonizer’s language is a violence done to oneself because in doing so, he has absorbed the French’s culture and way of thinking which then conflicts with and alienates his blackness. So, since his article was originally written in French, his presentation of anti-colonial sentiments in a particularly violent style in the colonizer’s language is interesting because in doing so, he is performing violence towards the colonizer using their own language and words rather than using an ethnic language. In “On Violence”, what is more fascinating is his avocation of the peasants as true revolutionaries because ‘it has nothing to lose and everything to gain’ (23) as opposed to other classes because the peasants are the only ones who don’t see any improvements in their situations whether the country is colonized or de-colonized. Considering the plight of Third World countries in the world today, I’d say Fanon’s observation is a rather sharp and sound one.

The biggest nugget I took away from this chapter is the idea of ‘absolute violence’ and the belief that violence begets more violence, but the only way to end it all is absolute violence which destroys everything, leaving behind a clean and blank slate. Only then can the world truly move on from the endless cycle of violence done to and done onto.

On another note, I wonder how much of this reading constitutes Fanon’s voice, and how much of it is the translator’s? Because I’m quite sure some things were lost in translation, and I can’t help but question if we will gain a different sense and understanding in reading the original rather than the translated. Alas, I don’t know French so I guess I’ll never know.

-Yuen Mei-