One of the most important novels, “The Wretched of the Earth”
(Les Damnes de la Terre, 1961) translated
in 1963 by Ibrahim Frantz Fanon, exposes the effects of dehumanising upon
the individual and the nation. In Algeria,a
black man witnessing the brutal war to get independence from Francein the 1950s.
The book expresses colonial and post-colonial situation. Some of the scholars
express about the book that is revealing race,
nation, and global capitalism. The book has been become as
the classical text. It is based on colonisation and decolonisation.
Fanonbegins by
considering the “colonized intellectual”,
someone who has been educated by the colonist but reacts against him. The
intellectual strategy advocates for a “Negro
literature” or “Negro art”
which unites all of Africa. This is
called the Negritude movement. Colonialismwas
not content to merely exploit and abuse the people, the colonial power stripped
the indigenous people of culture and history as well. The result was like a “hammer to the head of the indigenous population.” Colonialism
realizes it is incapable of achieving a program of socio-economic reforms that
would satisfy the aspirations of the colonized masses.
Colonialism proves
to be inherently powerless. Faced with the colonized intellectual's debunking
of the colonialist theory of a precolonial barbarism, colonialism's response is
mute. They must have been overjoyed to discover that the past was not branded
with shame, but dignity, glory, and sobriety. Colonialism,
little troubled by nuances, has always claimed that the "nigger"
was a savage, not an Angolan or a Nigerian, but a "nigger."
For Colonialism, Fanon
expresses, “this vast continent was a den of savages, infested with
superstitions and fanaticism, destined to be despised, cursed by God, a land of
cannibals, a land of ‘niggers."
The
"black world" came into being, and Busia from Ghana, Birago
Diop from Senegal, Hampate Ba from Mali and Saint-Clair
Drake from Chicago were quick to claim common ties and
identical lines of thought. The Arab
leaders have tried to revive that famous Dar el Islam, which
exerted such a shining influence in the twelfth, thirteenth
and fourteenth centuries. The African Society for Culture was to
become the Cultural Society for the Black
World and was forced to include the black diaspora, i.e., the dozens of
millions of blacks throughout the Americas.
"Negro"
or "Negro-African" culture broke up because
the men who set out to embody it realized that every culture is first and
foremost national. Colonialism's insistence that "niggers"
have no culture, and Arabs are by nature barbaric, inevitably leads to a glorification of
cultural phenomena that become continental instead of national, and singularly
racialized. "Speaking as a Senegalese and a Frenchman .... Speaking as an
Algerian and a Frenchman."
The
foregoing is sufficient to explain the style of the colonized intellectuals who
make up their mind to assert this phase of liberating consciousness. “Combat
literature”, revolutionary literature, national literature emerges. The
French poet, Rene Char fully
understood this when he reminds us that "the
poem emerges from a subjective imposition and an objective choice. The poem is a
moving assembly of decisive original values, in topical relation with someone
whom such an undertaking brings to the foreground."
National culture is the
sum of all these considerations, the outcome of tensions internal and external
to society as a whole and its multiple layers. The nation satisfies all those
indispensable requirements for culture which alone can give it credibility,
validity, dynamism, and creativity. The
birth of national consciousness in Africa strictly
correlates with an African consciousness. The responsibility of the
African toward his national culture is also a responsibility toward "Negro-African"
culture.
In
conclusion, Fanon’s “On National Culture” expresses colonizers try to
write the precolonial history of a colonized people as a "barbarism,
degradation and bestiality" in order to justify the supremacy of
Western civilization. Fanonargues
that “the men who proposed to embody it
realized that every culture is above all national.” According to
Fanon, for in rejecting the
normalized Eurocentrism of colonial thought, these intellectuals provide a
"condemnation radical"
of colonialism and its greatest undertaking.
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