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“It is the colonist who fabricated and continues to fabricate the colonized subject.” - Fanon, translated by Richard Philcox
Frantz Fanon’s 1962 book Wretched of the Earth is a vivid critique of the systems of oppression that maintain the colonial order and the violence necessary to both defend and dislodge it. In the chapter ‘On Violence,’ Fanon discusses the psychological dynamics that are essential to those systems. “It is the colonist who fabricated and continues to fabricate the colonized subject,” Fanon writes. [1] This quote describes the creation and perpetration of colonial identity on colonized people by the colonists who oppress them. This concept has roots in the Marxist idea of the false consciousness, the process by which classes adopt ideologies and identities that originate in their economic position but are counter-productive to their economic interests. By applying this notion to the colonial struggle, Fanon seeks to explain why Africans tolerate a system contrary to their human needs. Because the absorption of colonial identity is psychological and deeply entrenched, Fanon argues, echoing Marx, that the only way to disrupt it was through revolutionary violence. Only then would Africans be able to create their own true consciousness free from European interests.
By referring to fabrication, Fanon is pointing out that the identity of the colonial subject is one created by the colonizer to suit their position in the colonial order. It is the intention of this overall ideology to make the colonial system impossible to escape by the colonized. Richard Philcox’s translation illuminates a Marxist depth to Fanon’s thesis. In the original French, the verb ‘faire’ translates to ‘make,’ thus, ‘the colonist who makes and continues to make the colonized subject.’ Philcox translates ‘faire’ as ‘fabricate.’ This is evocative for two reasons. First, ‘fabricate’ can refer to someone lying and creating a fiction. ‘Fabricate’ can also allude to manufacturing a product in the industrial process. The translator did this most likely to connect the quote to Fanon’s Marxist ideology and the idea of the ‘false consciousness.’ [2]
As the European colonial system disintegrated in the mid-20th century, a growing number of radical thinkers like Fanon began considering why oppressive systems were so enduring. One explanation, grounded in the Marxist idea of false consciousness, was that the oppressed were subject to the ideological underpinnings of their own oppression. Karl Marx’s collaborator Friedrich Engels first introduced the idea of the false consciousness in an 1883 letter to Franz Mehring. Engels wrote that people incorrectly assume that ideologies and identities are invented and improved through political progress, and therefore worthy of acceptance. In fact, all aspects of political consciousness are created by and to serve the current economic order. “[T]he derivation of political, juridical and other ideological notions, and of actions arising through the medium of these notions, [is] from basic economic facts.” [3] In the colonial context, the self-conceptions of the colonized are fabricated by the economic system that forced them into a position of servitude and gratitude. This allows the colonizer to efficiently dominate them. The colonizer is in turn shaped by that same process, and the way they view each other emerges from it.
The process of colonialism requires the colonizer to create an identity for the colonized. The Europeans viewed the Africans as lower, which was crucial in the project of enforcing white supremacy using denigrating terms. Said Fanon: “The term ‘native’ usually connotes a person of lower order…Yet this term is still applied to Africans without regard to their national and ethnic origins.” [4] Other racist ideas rationalized European treatment of Africans with barbarism and cruelty. Europeans working in the Congo Free State viewed the Africans as savages, justifying barbarity and cruelty towards their workers, often done by Africans on other Africans.[5] It became a “psychological violence inflicted on the native to keep him in his place by convincing him of his unworthiness.” [6]
Eventually, as the colonial identity was firmly implanted into the psyche of the colonized, they developed their own perception of their oppressors. Fanon himself recognized the foreign nature of the colonizer to the colonized as much as the colonized were foreign to the colonizer. “Despite the success of his pacification, in spite of his appropriation, the colonist always remains a foreigner.” [7] The identity of the colonizer becomes associated with their power and status, with the colonized people understanding that the colonizer is “rich because [they] are white, [they] are white because [they] are rich.” [8] Some of the colonized understand their status and obey their colonizer overlords. They “[adopt] the colonizer’s ideology, even with regard to their own values and their own lives…To refuse means…withdrawing physically from those conditions.” [9]
Indeed, the identities of the colonizer and colonized are so inextricably linked, to the extent that the psychology of the colonized must be changed. The only way to disrupt this relationship is through violence, as it is the only way to express one’s freedom and agency. [10] The colonized citizen’s identity is built on their status as oppressed, so the struggle of decolonization is redefining the colonized as a free person capable of forming their own identity. It “transforms the spectator crushed to a nonessential state into a privileged actor, captured in virtually grandiose fashion by the spotlight of History.” [11]
Frantz Fanon understood that the oppressive systems maintaining the colonial order fabricated identities for the colonized that would help keep the colonizer in power. In doing so, the colonized developed an identity for the colonizer of superiority that further maintained colonial dominance. To Fanon, a psychologist, the only way to reverse these psychologically ingrained identities was to use violence. However, it is unclear that these wars of independence secure a better future over countries that achieved independence gradually. Perhaps it was a result of the fabricated identities and ideologies being too firmly entrenched for any violence to reverse.
Endnotes
1 Frantz Fanon, trans. Richard Philcox. The Wretched of the Earth. (New York: Grove Press, 2004): 2.
2 Dennis Forsythe. “Frantz Fanon -- The Marx of the Third World.” (Phylon (1960-) 34, no. 2 1973): 162.
3 Friedrich Engels, “Engels to Franz Mehring,” Marxists, 2000.
4 Harris, Joseph E. Africans and Their History. (New York: Meridian, 1998): 9.
5 Adam Hochschild, King Leopold's Ghost: A Study of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa (London: Papermac, 2000): 119-120.
6 Burke, Edmund. “Frantz Fanon’s ‘The Wretched of the Earth.’”( Daedalus 105, no. 1 1976): 132.
7 Fanon. Wretched of the Earth. 5.
8 Ibid.
9 Albert Memmi. The Colonizer and the Colonized. (Beacon, 1991): 6-19
10 Neil Roberts. “Fanon, Sartre, Violence, and Freedom.” (Sartre Studies International 10, no. 2 2004): 144.
11 Fanon. Wretched of the Earth. 2.
Bibliography
Burke, Edmund. “Frantz Fanon’s ‘The Wretched of the Earth.’” Daedalus 105, no. 1 (1976): 127–35.
Engels, Friedrich. “Engels to Franz Mehring.” Marxists, 2000. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1893/letters/93_07_14.htm.
Fanon, Frantz, trans. Richard Philcox. The Wretched of the Earth. New York: Grove Press, 2004.
Forsythe, Dennis. “Frantz Fanon -- The Marx of the Third World.” Phylon (1960-) 34, no. 2 (1973): 160–70.
Harris, Joseph E. Africans and Their History. New York: Meridian, 1998.
Hochschild, Adam. King Leopold's Ghost: A Study of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa. London: Papermac, 2000.
Memmi, Albert. The Colonizer and the Colonized. Beacon, 1991.
Roberts, Neil. “Fanon, Sartre, Violence, and Freedom.” Sartre Studies International 10, no. 2 (2004): 139–60.