Critical Appreciation of "On National Culture" by Frantz Fanon

 

          Critical Appreciation on Fanon’s “On National Culture”

                                                                       

      In “On National Culture”, an essay collected in The Wretched of the Earth, Frantz Fanon foregrounds the following paradox:  “national identity”, while vital to the emergence of a Third World revolution, paradoxically limits such efforts at liberation because it re-inscribes an essentialist, totalizing, fetishized, often middle-class specific understanding of “nation” rather than encouraging a nuanced articulation of an oppressed people’s cultural heterogeneity across class lines.  In other words, although the concept of “nation” unfairly characterizes colonized subjects as historically unified in their primitiveness or exoticness, the term’s promise of solidarity and unity often proves helpful nonetheless in their attempts at political amelioration.  Fanon encourages a materialist conceptualization of the nation that is based not so much on collective cultural traditions or ancestor-worship as political agency and the collective attempt to dismantle the economic foundations of colonial rule.  Colonialism, as Fanon argues, not only physically disarms the colonized subject but robs her of a “pre-colonial” cultural heritage.  And yet, if colonialism in this sense galvanizes the native intellectual to “renew contact once more with the oldest and most pre-colonial spring of life of their people, “Fanon is careful to point out that these attempts at recovering national continuity throughout history are often contrived and ultimately self-defeating.  “I am ready to concede, he admits, that on the plane of factual being the past existence of an Aztec civilization does not change anything very much in the diet of the Mexican peasant of today”.  In the passage below, Fanon explains that “national identity” only carries meaning in so far as it reflects the combined revolutionary efforts of an oppressed people aiming at collective liberation:

   A national culture is not a folklore, not an abstract populism that believes it can discover the people’s true nature.  It is not made up of the inert dregs of gratuitous actions, that is to say actions which are less and less attached to the ever-present reality of the people.  A national culture is the whole body of efforts made by a people in the sphere of thought to describe, justify, and praise the action through which that people has created itself and keeps itself in existence.

National Culture:

      National culture is the “collective thought process of a people to describe, justify, and extol” the struggles of liberation.  In summary, in The wretched of the Earth, Frantz Fanon argues that pre-colonial culture cannot be reclaimed as the world it initially existed in is no longer.

       Fanon explores the interrelation of politics and culture while saying little about the economic aspects of colonialism.  He undermines blackness as the basis of Africa’s cultural liberation from colonial oppression. He explores the “legitimacy of the claims of a nation” in his chapter “On National Culture”.

        Referring specifically to the poetry of negritude, he first introduces pan-Africanism as an alternative to colonialism.  As the italicized introduction would suggest, however, Fanon calls this investment in indifferentiation a necessarily blind and defeatist intellectual project that needs to be replaced by real bodily struggle against colonial domination and by the reestablishment of specific nations on the African continent. The rhythmic drum images characteristic of the poetry of negritude must e reinterpreted from a revolutionary standpoint, something with which Fanon credits Keita Fodeba.  The difficulty emerges when Fanon seems to undermine differentiation and the inherent particularity of African nations by reading a transparent and “unquestioned pedagogical value” into the poem; he returns to the idea of the universal colonial subject against which he positioned himself earlier:  “There is not a single colonized person who will not receive the message that this poem holds”.  Likewise, fanon describes the ironic amazement of the European nationalist colonizer at the native intellectual’s defense of an African national culture, yet he does not consider the foreboding correlation between European nationalism and colonialism.

       The image of the human body emerges throughout his argument for nationhood.  Fanon insists repeatedly that culture cannot survive in the absence of a nation; nationless culture becomes emaciated and exists finally as a skeleton of dead customs.  Fanon redefines the conventional distinction between rational Europe and corporeal Africa:  he privileges the reason that emerges from political action by the (black) national body.  Unlike the poetry of negritude, which upholds the European’s characterization of all Africans as black, black and only black, the physical struggle for national independence rationally refuses the racial logic of colonialism.  Such physical resistance will bring back to life moribund African national cultures.  Faced with the vestigial dregs of culture that sit inert in cold storage and that posses “no overflowing life”.  Fanon calls for anti-colonial activism to restore the nations of the African continent.  By such a preparation of the ground “where vigorous shoots are already springing up”, culture is revivified for post-colonial subjects.

        Fanon represents the process of liberation not as the bodily rhythm of tom-toms in the merely theoretical poetry he critiques, but as a “muscular” rejection f the West by the native intellectual.  This intellectual recognizes the horror of his homeland-ironically voided of its dignity by the “enlightener” who has in reality degraded his people (“ today’s barbarity” versus wht ws viewed by the colonizer as “pre-colonial barbarism”) .  The physical struggle also generates a return to “forgotten muscular tensions” in a changed post-colonial form that produces a national literature (“the songs will come by themselves”).  Anti-colonial combat not only has its “repercussions on the cultural plane”, but also is the “most complete and obvious cultural manifestation that exists”, the struggle for national liberation places nations and their cultures on the map so that they may play a “part on the stage of history”.

      Inside the political parties, and most often in offshoots from these parties, cultured individuals of the colonised race make their appearance.  For these individuals, the demand for a national culture and the affirmation of the existence of such a culture represent a special battlefield.  While the politicians situate their action in actual present day events, men of culture take their stand in the field of history.  Confronted with the native intellectual who decides to make an aggressive response to the colonialist theory of pre-colonial barbarism, colonialism will react only slightly, and still less because the ideas developed by the young colonized intelligentsia are widely professed by specialist in the mother country.  It is a fact a common place to state that for several decades large numbers or research workers have, in the main, rehabilitated the African, Mexican and Peruvian civilisations.  The passion with which native intellectuals defend the existence of their national culture may be a source of amazement; but those who condemn this exaggerated passion are strangely apt to forget that their own psyche and their own selves are conveniently sheltered behind a French or German culture which has given full proof of its existence and which is uncontested.

       On the plane of factual being the past existence of an Aztec civilization does not change anything very much in the diet of the Mexican peasant of today.  All the proofs of  a wonderful Songhai civilisation will not change the fact that today the Songhais are under-fed and illiterate, thrown between sky and water with empty heads and empty eyes.  But it has been remarked several times that this passionate search for a national culture which existed before the colonial era finds its legitimate reason in the anxiety shared by native intellectuals to shrink away from that Western culture in which they all risk being swamped. Because they realise they are in danger of losing their lives and thus becoming lost to their people, these men, hot-headed and with anger in their hearts, relentlessly determine to renew contact once more with the oldest and most pre-colonial springs of life of their people.

      Perhaps this passionate research and the anger are kept up or at least directed by the secret ope of discovering beyond the misery of today, beyond self-contempt, resignation and abjuration, some very beautiful and splendid era whose existence rehabilitates us both in regard to ourselves and in regard to others.  Perhaps unconsciously, the native intellectuals, since they could not stand wonder-struck before the history of today’s barbarity, decided to go back further and to delve deeper down, and, it was with the greatest delight that they discovered that there was nothing to be ashamed of in the past, but rather dignity glory and solemnity.  The claim to a national culture in the past does not only rehabilitate that nation and serve as a justification for the hope of a future national culture.  In the sphere of psycho-affective equilibrium it is responsible for an important change in the native.  Perhaps we have not sufficiently demonstrated that colonialism is not simply content to impose its rule upon the present and the future of a dominated country.  Colonialism is not satisfied merely with holding a people in its grip and emptying the native’s brain of all form and content.

       By a kind of perverted logic, it turns to the past of the oppressed people, and distorts, disfigures and destroys it.  This work of devaluing pre-colonial history takes on a dialectical significance today.  When we consider the efforts made to carry out the cultural estrangement so characteristic of the colonial epoch, we realise that nothing has been left to chance and that the total result looked for by colonial domination was indeed to convince the natives that colonialism came to lighten their darkness.  The effect consciously sought by colonialism was to drive into the natives’ heads the idea that if the settlers were to leave, they would at once fall back into barbarism, degradation and bestiality.  On the unconscious plane, colonialism therefore did not seek to be considered by the native as gentle, loving other who protects her chid from a hostile environment, but rather as a mother who unceasingly restrains her fundamentally perverse offspring from managing to commit suicide and from giving free rein to its evil instincts.  The colonial mother protects her child from itself, from its ego, and from its physiology, its biology and its own unhappiness which is its very essence.

        In such a situation the claims of the native intellectual are no luxury but a necessity in any coherent programme.  The native intellectual who takes up arms to defend his nation’s legitimacy and who wants to bring proofs to bear out that legitimacy, who is willing to strip himself naked to study the history of his body, is obliged to dissect the heart of his people.  Such an examination is not specifically national.  The native intellectual who decides to give battle to colonial lies fights on the field of the whole continent.  The past is given back its value. Culture, extracted from the past to be displayed in all its splendour, is not necessarily that of his own country.  Colonialism, which has not bothered to put too fine a point on its efforts has never ceased to maintain that the Negro is a savage; and for the colonist, the Negro was neither an Angolan nor a Nigerian, for he simply spoke of “the Negro” .  For colonialism, this vast continent was the haunt of savages, a country riddled with superstitions and fanaticism, destined for contempt, weighed down by the curse of God, a country of cannibals in short, the Negro’s.

 Pre-Colonial history:

          For Fanon, colonizes attempt to writ the pre-colonial history of a colonized people as one of “barbarism, degradation, and bestiality” in order to justify the supremacy of Western civilization.  To upset the supremacy of the colonial society, writes Fanon, the colonized intellectual feels the need to return to their so-called ‘barbaric’ culture, to prove its existence and its value in relation to the West.

            Fanon suggests colonized intellectuals often fall into the trap of trying to prove the existence of a common African or ‘Negro’ culture.  This is a dead end, according to Fanon, because it was originally the colonists who essentialized all people in Africa as ‘Negro’ without considering distinct national cultures and histories.  This points to what Fanon sees as one of the limitations of the Negritude movement.  In articulating a continental identity, based on the colonial category of the ‘Negro’, Fanon argues “the men who set out to embody it realized that every culture is first and foremost national”.

          An attempt among colonized intellectuals to ‘return’ to the nation’s pre-colonial culture is then ultimately an unfruitful pursuit, according to Fanon.  Rather than a culture, the intellectual emphasizes traditions, costumes, and clichés, which romanticize history in a similar way as the colonist world.  The desire to reconsider the nation’s pre-colonial history, even if it results in orientalised clichés, still marks an important turn according to Fanon, since by rejecting the normalized eurocentrism of colonial thought, these intellectuals provide a “radical condemnation” of the larger colonial enterprise.  The radical condemnation attains its full meaning when we consider that the “final aim of colonization”, according to Fanon, “was to convince the indigenous population that it would save them from darkness”.  A persistent refusal among Indigenous peoples to admonish national traditions in the face of colonial rule, according to Fanon, is a demonstration of nationhood, but one that holds on to a fixed idea of the nation as something of the past, a corpse.   

Struggle for national culture:

          Ultimately, Fanon argues the colonized intellectual will have to realize that a national culture is not a historical reality waiting to be uncovered in a return to pre-colonial history and tradition, but is already existing in the present national reality.  National struggle and national culture then become inextricably linked in Fanon’s analysis.  To struggle for national liberation is to struggle for the terrain whereby a culture can grow since Fanon concludes a national culture cannot exist under conditions of colonial domination. 

          A decisive turn in the development of the colonized intellectual is when they stop addressing the oppressor in their work and begin addressing their own people.  This often produces what Fanon calls “combat literature”, a writing that calls upon the people to undertake the struggle against the colonial oppressor.  This change is reflected in all modes of artistic expression among the colonized nation, from literature, to pottery, to ceramics, and oral story-telling.  Fanon specifically uses the example of Algerian storytellers changing the content and narration of their traditional stories to reflect the present moment of struggle against French colonial rule.  He also considers the bebop jazz movement in America as a similar turn, whereby black jazz musicians began to delink themselves from the image imposed on them by a white-Southern imaginary.  Whereas the common trope of African-American jazz musicians was, according to Fanon, “an old ‘Negro’, five whiskeys under his belt, bemoaning his misfortune”, bebop was full of an energy and dynamism that resisted and undermined the common racist trope.

          For Fanon, national culture is then intimately tied to the struggle for the nation itself, the act of living and engaging with the present reality that gives birth to the range of cultural productions.  This might be best summarized in Fanon’s idea of replacing the ‘concept’ with the ‘muscle’.  Fanon is suggesting that the actual practice and exercise of decolonization, rather than decolonization as an academic pursuit, is what forms the basis of a national culture.

International Consciousness:

          Concluding the essay, Fanon is careful to point out that building a national culture is not an end to itself, but a ‘stage’ towards a larger international solidarity.  The struggle for national culture induces a break from the inferior status that was imposed on the nation by the process of colonization, which in turn produces a ‘national consciousness’.  This national consciousness, born of struggle undertaken by the people, represents the highest form of national culture, according to Fanon.  Through this process, the liberated nation emerges as an equal player on the international stage, where an international consciousness can discover and advance a set of universalizing values.