Despite the fact that Fanon and Gandhi, in their pursuit of independence, have tried to rid the colonized people of feelings of inferiority and alienation, despair and inaction, Gandhi is drawn to the nonviolent resistance in South Africa and India, whereas Fanon shows his approbation of the resistance violence in Algeria and revolutionary violence in Iran. However, certain issues remain controversial in both realms: (1) whether violence is an innate feature in human nature, (2) the degree of the realistic effectiveness of violent and nonviolent resistance, and (3) the circumstances that can cause each approach to emerge.
Throughout his life, Frantz Fanon tried not only to criticize European (Western) civilization by analyzing its violent enforcement of colonialism, imperialism and racism on the people in the Third World countries in order to subordinate them, but also to harbinger the emergence of a new human race, which would occur in the course of the revolutionary decolonization against the oppressors.
Fanon’s “new man” is the one, with the unity of theory and practice, who can realize a true humanism not based upon the subordination, destruction and genocide of others but upon the coexistence with others in mutual understanding, and who can keep fighting for the true emancipation of the oppressed people in the world: “Insofar as I do battle for the creation of a human world–that is, of a world of reciprocal recognition” (Black Skin White Masks 218).
By analyzing his visions in the use of violence in the process of decolonization, first, this paper will study Fanon’s philosophy of the revolutionary decolonization for creating a new human race and second, within these contexts, the researcher will analyze, from the Fanonian perspective, the implications of violence as it is practiced in David Henry Hwang’s M. Butterfly (1988).
Until he died of leukemia at the age of 36 in 1961, Frantz Fanon was a psychiatrist, philosopher, and most importantly a revolutionary who up to the last minute of his life devoted himself to the Algerian independence movement. As many critics, especially Robert Young and Bart Moore Gilbert, have argued, Fanon, together with fellow Martiniquan Aime Cesaire, the author of Discourse on Colonialism (1955), has been known as one of the precursors of postcolonial theory far ahead of Edward Said.
In fact, The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon’s last work and dubbed “the Bible of decolonization” by Stuart Hall (qtd. in Young 281), was published in 1961, a year before Algerian independence from France, whereas Said’s Orie was published in 1978. Among Fanon’s four major works, The Wretched of the Earth (1961), Black Skin White Masks (1952) A Dying Colonialism (1959) and Toward the African Revolution (1964) –The Wretched of the Earth has in fact functioned as the seminal work in the development of postcolonial theory.
Therefore, it can be said that Cesaire and Fanon are the real precursors of postcolonial theory. My assertion of above can be justified when we think about how these three thinkers criticized the disastrous legacies and characters imposed by European and American civilizations upon humanity. In fact, we can find some historical lineage among these three thinkers. That is, Fanon is one of Cesaire’s followers in that Fanon follows Cesaire’s logic of the total denial of the European culture and its values by studying the violent conditions of the colonial/imperial system.
Said also indicts the Eurocentric perspective on the Oriental Others by studying the European writers’ canonical writings on the Arabic world. As Robin D. G. Kelly asserts, Aime Cesaire’s Discourse on Colonialism, published in 1955 after the Second World War, was a kind of “historical prose poem” (17) which, for the first time, locates the history of the Western civilization into a vulnerable position “by drawing a direct link between the logic of colonialism and the rise of fascism” (19).
In other words, Cesaire indicts the whole body of the Western Civilization by arguing that the Europeans’ concession on the atrocities perpetrated by its own colonialism and imperialism toward others gave birth to fascism: And then one fine day the bourgeoisie is awakened by a terrific boomerang effect: the gestapos are busy, the prisons fill up, the torturers standing around the racks invent, refine, discuss. People are surprised, they become indignant.
They say: “How strange! But never mind–it’s Nazism, it will pass! And they wait, and they hope; and hey hide the truth from themselves, that it is barbarism, the supreme barbarism, the crowning barbarism that sums up all the daily barbarisms; that it is Nazism, yes, but that before they were its victims, they were its accomplices; that they tolerated that Nazism before it was inflicted on them, that they absolved it, shut their eyes to it, legitimized it, because, until then, it had been applied only to non-European peoples; that they have cultivated that Nazism, that they are responsible for it, and that before engulfing the whole edifice of Western, Christian civilization in its reddened waters, it oozes, seeps, and trickles from every crack. (36)
Cesaire also predicts that America would become another imperial nation replacing Europe and thus warns the people of the Third World not to expect America to play the role of “a possible liberator”: I know that some of you, disgusted with Europe, with all that hideous mess which you did not witness by choice, are turning– oh! In no great numbers—toward America and getting used to looking upon that country as a possible liberator. [—] So, once again, be careful! American domination–the only domination from which one never recovers. I mean from which one never recovers unscarred. (Cesaire 76-77)
Throughout his works, especially in Black Skin and White Masks and The Wretched of the World, Fanon shows his difference from Aime Cesaire in that Fanon studied colonialism at “a theoretical and psychological rather than poetic level, providing a psychopathology of colonialism” (Young 276). However, Fanon owes the underlying guideline for his critique on French colonialism and European civilization to Cesaire’s Discourse on Colonialism. Like Cesaire, Fanon confirms that “European civilization and its best representatives are responsible for colonial racism” (Black Skin and White Masks 90) and also argues that there is nothing of worth in Europe and its successor the United States of America: Let us decide not to imitate Europe; let us combine our muscles and our brains in a new direction. [… Two centuries ago, a former European colony decided to catch up with Europe.
It succeeded so well that the United States of America became a monster, in which the taints, the sickness, and the inhumanity of European have grown to appalling dimensions. (The Wretched of the Earth 313) Said, in his book Orientalism (1978), argues that Orientalism is a discourse invented by the West to dominate over the East and its people. For this purpose, Said insists that Orientalism “operates in the service of the West’s hegemony over the East primarily by producing the East discursively as the West’s inferior ‘Other’, a manoeuvre which strengthens the West’s selfimage as a superior civilization” (Moore-Gilbert 39).
Therefore, Orientalism has functioned as a justification for the West to impose the oppressions of colonialism, imperialism and racism on its others in the Third World countries: Orientalism was such a system of truths, truths in Nietzsche’s sense of the word. It is therefore correct that every European, in what he could say about the Orient, was consequently a racist, an imperialist, and almost totally ethnocentric. Some of the immediate sting will be taken out of these labels if we recall additionally that human societies, at least the more advanced cultures, have rarely offered the individual anything but imperialism, racism and ethnocentrism for dealing with ‘other’ cultures.
So Orientalism aided and was aided by general cultural pressures that tended to make more rigid the sense of difference between the European and Asiatic parts of the world. My contention is that Orientalism is fundamentally a political doctrine willed over the Orient because the Orient was weaker than the West, which elided the Orient’s difference with its weakness. (Said, Orientalism 204) Fanon’s philosophy of revolutionary decolonization can best be understood by studying how different Fanon’s Marxism is from the traditional European Marxism. First and most importantly, Fanon was an existential Marxist deeply influenced by French Marxist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre who, unlike most of European philosophers and intellectuals made “the issue of colonialism central to his work” (Young 281).
Sartre spoke particularly harshly against the French colonial policies on Vietnam and Algeria. In the preface to The Wretched of the Earth, Sartre confirms his socialist belief enough to say, “In order to triumph, the national revolution must be socialist” (11). In his writings, Fanon also clearly shows the influence of G. W. F. Hegel and Karl Marx. Quoting from Hegel’s The Phenomenology of Mind, Fanon emphasizes “the necessity of revolutionary violence in the pursuit of freedom” (Hansen 70): “The individual who has not staked his life, may no doubt be recognized as a person, but he has not attained the truth of this recognition as an independent self-consciousness” (Black Skin White Masks 219).
In the same context, Fanon also quotes Marx echoing the passage, “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it” (Marx 173), from Theses on Feuerbach: But when one has taken cognizance of this situation, when one has understood it, one considers the job completed. How can one then be deaf to that voice rolling down the stage of history: “What matters is not to know the world but to change it. ” (Black Skin White Masks 17) Fanon also quotes directly Marx’ The Eighteenth Brumaire at the beginning of the last chapter of Black Skin White Masks: “The social revolution … cannot draw its poetry from the past, but only from the future” (223).
As Tony Martin argues, this philosophy of future-orientation appears over and over again in Fanon’s oeuvres and was used as the rationale for Fanon to reject Leopold Senghor’s concept of Negritude (86) which was criticized as the Negroes’ “anti-racist racism” (Black Skin White Masks 132) by Sartre. Fanon believes that Negritude is living in the past. Thus Fanon proclaims that any movement for progression of the African people must be future-oriented and modern: In no way should I derive my basic purpose from the past of the peoples of color. In no way should I dedicate myself to the revival of an unjustly unrecognized Negro civilization. I will not make myself the man of any past. I do not want to exalt the past at the expense of my present and of my future. (Black Skin White Masks 226)
