Intellectual Violence

In "On Violence" Frantz Fanon writes that "during the struggle for liberation, when the colonized individual touches base again with his people, this artificial sentinel is smashed into smithereens. All the Mediterranean values, the triumph of the individual, of enlightenment and Beauty turn into pale, lifeless trinket...Those values which seemed to ennoble the soul proved worthless because they have nothing in common with the real-life struggle in which the people are engaged." (11) It's clear that the process of colonization inflicts on its subjects violence of an intellectual nature, on top of the physical. To colonize is to impose the colonizer's value and ideological systems onto the colonized, so as to ensure a totality of control. Not only are subjects to be physically controlled and managed (with policing systems and violence) but they are to be persuaded into their own subjectivization through an interpellation into their colonizer's value systems. As such, the colonized subject both ensures and reinforces his own colonization--much as the Indian upperclass does in A Passage to India. They are to be convinced that the colonizer's ideals and values are superior to their own, and therefore a valid basis for colonization in the first place.

We see an example of the imposition and manipulation of values on an individual and not national scale with Fielding and Aziz, when the former tries to persuade Aziz not to sue Miss Quested for her money. Aziz persists in his irrational preference for Mrs. Moore over Miss Quested even when, as Fielding points out, "Miss Quested anyhow behaved decently this morning, whereas the old lady never did anything for you at all, and it's pure conjecture that she would have come forward in your favour." (209 of my Borders edition) Aziz responds with "'Is emotion a sack of potatoes, so much the pound, to be measured out? Am I a machine? I shall be told I can use up my emotions by using them, next.'" And eventually, Fielding is able to manipulate Aziz successfully by raising "a questionable image of [Mrs. Moore] in the heart of Aziz, saying nothing that he believed to be untrue, but producing something that was probably far from the truth." (215) Fielding believes that it is logical and fair to let Miss Quested off the hook for what she has sacrificed in telling the truth in court. But Aziz's feelings and actions are motivated by irrational emotional impulses, such as his love (and Orientalization--hence, idealization) of Mrs. Moore whom he had met only three times, and his lack thereof for Miss Quested.

My point here is, that there is clearly a mismatch in what is valued and upheld in the colonizer and colonized societies, and that colonization intends to bypass and totalize this difference as part of its mechanism in an act of violence. Certainly, value systems differ as a consequence of the standard of living and level of progress of the respective societies. While white societies look to values such as freedom, individual choice and so on, because they have attained a certain level of affluence which allows them to look beyond everyday bread and butter issues, colonies are usually in a backward stage of development which correspondingly impedes this development in value systems. (Although whether what works for white colonizers necessarily would work for colonized subjects remains to be seen of course.) I've often personally experienced this divide, when on my exchange in Canada, I'd have discussions with Europeans about how things like freedom of press and expression, individual will and political freedom can be insignificant in light of more immediate pressing needs such as the economic and social demands on the individual of living in a competitive and populous country such as China. Of course, they didn't get me and I didn't get them but at least I tried!

In A Passage to India, we do see a reverence or at least a respect for the Indian culture and what its people value. The message of the novel seems to amount to a compromise, that peoples and societies differ and while we may never reconcile these differences, we can agree to disagree. It's very clear in both the novel and Fanon's essay that colonization is a propagator of conflict, division and violence that would never allow such compromise.