The Wretch of My Week

Frantz Fanon's "On Violence", was an aggravating piece to consume and dissect.

For the first few pages it was easy to see his line of argument.
I found his style of writing concise and compelling, and saw much relevance to Forster's A Passage to India in terms of:
The two "species" - the colonists and the colonized; the "compartmentalized world" as exemplified by the divided landscape and divided spheres in which the two "species" operate in Passage; the violence imposed upon the colonized through the (militant) gaze (4); how the "colonist turns the colonized into a kind of quintessence of evil" (6) - Aziz and so forth.

And what I found interesting (as well as confusing) was:

"The "thing" colonised becomes a man through the very process of liberation" (2) - Then what was this "thing" before it was colonized? If it was not colonized in the first place, would it be a man/woman? The colonized man is only reduced to the status of a "thing" in the act of colonization.

"The cause is effect: You are rich because you are white, you are white because you are rich" (5) - I know this is important somehow, but why? Does this in anyway apply to Passage?

"The ruling species is ... "the others"" (5) - I found this interesting, it became clear to me that somehow I've always seen the native as the other.

However as his argument developed over the several, many pages... I began to lose track of his point and had to search for key points. I found the latter part of this reading not particularly useful to the study of Passage as it began to talk about the liberation of the colonized and post decolonization. Granted this, the reading did raise several useful ideas: the venting of pent-up muscular tension (20) and the multiple uses for violence (51).

Another thing I found interesting is his advocacy (is this too strong a word?) of violence - "[i]t is naked violence and only gives in when confronted with greater violence" (23). This violence is also seen in his language: "to destroy the colonial world means ... demolishing ... burying it ... banishing if from the territory" (6), "bulldozing" (16), etc...
In some way, he hurls his arguments at us, his readers. He pounds his reader with argument and example one after another, and I think it's his violent language/style that compels me to feel more sympathetic towards the colonized (not that I am not sympathetic).
Perhaps, Fanon's use of violence in terms of language/style is his way of confronting the violence done unto the colonized.

Angel.