“You taught me language, and my profit on’t is I know how to curse”

[I thought this quote from Caliban - typically thought to be Shakespeare’s figure for the native – was kind of apt because cursing = a violence against language]

It seems to me that Fanon’s polemical chapter stands not only as an exposition on the physical violence endemic in colonialism; on a more meta level, it performs violence of another sort – the (re)writing of narrative with the intention of usurping existing ones.

I would particularly like to consider this violence of narrative in light of Sartre’s preface to Fanon’s book when it was first published in 1961. On a basic level, Fanon is writing back to Empire, retaliating in much the same way as the natives physically do in his text. What I find interesting, though, is the way in which he does it: he literally sets out a historical narrative, a semi-detached observation of the flow of events in the interaction between settler and native (which later evolve into the capitalist West and the Third World). It is a mode of narrative highly reminiscent of Marx and Engels - the opposition of dialectics, the progression of society from capitalist to Communist - and I think it is a deliberate move on Fanon’s part. Besides his clear socialist and anti-capitalist slant, he is hijacking the Marxist narrative of violent revolution, change, and historical progress and moulding it to fit the colonial context. These connotations would not have been lost on the Western audience. Sartre says: “Fanon is the first since Engels to bring the processes of history into the clear light of day” (13), and indeed by presenting his argument as “history” Fanon clearly places the days of settler-native in the past. Now is the time of change and native violence, the time when colonial narratives get rewritten or erased to prepare the way for the tabula rasa of the new nationalist narrative.(Again to quote Sartre: “…in the past we made history and now it is being made of us”.)

The idea of conflicting and rewriting narratives is not new – one could say it marked the ‘soft’ side of imperialism: rewriting the rules, the history, the understanding of the East to fit Western frames. This is clear in Passage to India, in which Adela’s original narrative of what happened in the Marabar caves clearly trumps whatever narrative Aziz or his lawyer can weave in his defence. Yet at the same time, what happens in the caves is immaterial; what matters is the divergence of narratives that Forster can give us, for in the end the micro-narratives of the text are woven into a macro one by Forster with India as his main narrative. Interestingly though, Forster’s India narrative is essentially an unknowable (to repeat the point from last week), empty one for him to fill, like a blank canvas for him to paint or the empty echo of ‘boum’.

I think it may be too reductionist to say that this is Forster’s way of still imposing a (white) master narrative on his text (despite the multi-faceted view he presents), but you could draw a parallel with what Sartre does in his preface. While he seems to be trying to take Fanon’s point of view, the fact that he feels he has to explain Fanon’s points and make an appeal to his Western brethren turns his preface into an enwrapping, paratextual narrative for a reader of Fanon’s text. Pick up the book and you are reading Fanon first filtered through Sartre, as Passage to India becomes India filtered through Forster.

However, my question is: is it only in the nature of colonial-colonised narratives to be violent? Or is narrative in itself violent in the sense that it can be rewritten, taken apart, re-angled? I think modernism emphasizes this point best in the way that it fragments narrative (a form of violence against the unitary narrative) and breaks it up; in the same way, then, perhaps Fanon’s opposition and fragmentation of Western/historical narrative makes it deeply modernist – in spirit if not in form.