Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Wretched of the Earth, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Colonialism, Racism, and Violence
Oppression and Mental Health
Capitalism, Socialism, and the Third World
Decolonization, Neocolonialism, and Social Class
Culture and the Emerging Nation
Summary
Analysis
The mission of underdeveloped countries has been to resist colonialism and clear the path for new struggles. In a post-colonial world, the colonized have fought heartily. If their struggle failed to grace the international stage, it is not because they are not champions, but because the international situation is different. This chapter, Fanon says, is concerned with legitimacy, and it has little to do with political parties.
The struggle of underdeveloped nations failed to make the global stage because colonialist racism has guaranteed that the people of the Third World are not seen as legitimate in the eyes of the developed world. It is through national consciousness, Fanon argues, that the struggling nation is legitimized.
Themes
Parallel to the political parties, Fanon claims, are the colonized intellectuals. They are a cultured class, and “the recognition of a national culture and its right to exist” is their favorite issue. Politicians situate themselves in the present, but the colonized intellectual positions themselves in history. The colonized intellectual is aware that they run the risk of being trapped in Western culture, so they return to the time that is furthest away from colonialism. They are unable to come to terms with the oppression of recent history, so they reclaim the past to restore the national culture.
Fanon ultimately argues that precolonial culture cannot be reclaimed. Colonialism has largely erased it, and the world it initially existed in is no longer. Culture and intellect have long since been a way for oppressed individuals, especially those of color, to exert their right to exist. Colonialist racism assumes that the Third World does not have a culture, so the intellectuals badly want to prove that they do.
Themes
Colonialism was not content to merely exploit and abuse the people, the colonial power stripped the indigenous people of culture and history as well. Colonial power turns to the past of the colonized and “distorts it, disfigures it, and destroys it.” The result was like a “hammer to the head of the indigenous population.” In this way, it is not difficult to understand why the colonized intellectual sought to return to precolonial times and culture.
In claiming that the colonized have no culture, the colonial power denies the colonized their history and humanity, effectively destroying their indigenous culture. This metaphorical death makes them cultureless and nationless, and therefore more vulnerable to the oppressive power of colonialism.
Themes
The quest of the colonized intellectual to reclaim the past is not a national endeavor; it is done on a “continental scale.” The past is brought back, but not the cultural past. Under colonialism, the continent of Africa is seen as a “den of savages” that is cursed, evil, and hated on a continental scale. The colonized intellectual’s attempt to right this wrong must then be continental, too, and they embrace African, or “Negro,” culture. As colonialism places white culture opposite other “noncultures,” “Negro” culture, especially “Negro” literature, must encompass the entire continent.
By taking culture to a continental level, it becomes overly simplistic and vague, where the only identity represented is a black, or “Negro,” identity. But this leaves scores of people out, most notably Arab Africans. Fanon’s language again reflects colonial racism, as Africa is seen as a “den of savages,” reducing African people to animals stripped of their humanity.
Themes
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“Negro” literature, Fanon says, is an example of negritude, and its writers do not hesitate to go beyond the continent of Africa. Negritude has stretched all the way to America, where the “black world” is formed by those from Ghana, Senegal, and Chicago. Those in the “black world” share similar ties and thoughts. However, African culture instead of a national culture is a “dead end” to African intellectuals. Take for example the African Society for Culture, which was created to establish the existence of African culture. The African Society for Culture quickly turns to the Cultural Society for the Black World, and they include all of the black diaspora, including the millions of black people in the Americas.
Fanon again uses the term “dead end” to describe postcolonial efforts, like he does with the national bourgeoisie. A unifying black culture, in many ways, has the same problems as the national bourgeoisie. A unifying black culture that encompasses all black people can’t possibly be reflective of the culture as a whole, since black individuals from different nations are simply too different to fall under a single category. In this way, black culture becomes just another misrepresentation, which is counterproductive to establishing a genuine culture in the first place.
Themes
White Americans treat black Americans much in the same way that the colonists treated the Africans, but it does not take the black Americans long to discover that the only thing they have in common with black people from Africa is that they all “define themselves in relation the whites.” Thus, the negritude movement is seriously limited. “Negro” culture is breaking up because those who represent it have discovered that culture is national. Even Richard Wright and Langston Hughes must admit that their experiences are completely different from Léopold Senghor or Jomo Kenyatta. Through the insistence that Africans have no culture, the colonial power has led the cultural phenomena to be racialized and understood in continental terms rather than national terms.
Richard Wright and Langston Hughes, both 20th-century African American writers, have little in common with Senghor, the first president of Senegal, or Kenyatta, the former prime minister of Kenya. Their experiences are simply too different—except, Fanon points out, that they each suffer from the racism of white Western culture and define themselves as “other” to white culture. Thus, black culture cannot exist on a continental scale. Rather, it must exist on a national scale, which offers a true representation of black culture on a much smaller, and more authentic, scale.
Themes
Those without a nation are faced with serious psychological effects. They are “without an anchorage, without borders, colorless, stateless, rootless,” Fanon claims, and they are forced to assume two identities. For instance, a colonized individual is both Algerian and French or Nigerian and English. The colonized intellectual wants to escape white culture and identity, and he will look anywhere, as long as it gets him away from his oppressor.
This is an example of “double consciousness” in the way that W. E. B. Du Bois saw, as colonized Algerians and Nigerians are forced to see themselves though white, European eyes. Without an independent nation to “anchor” them, it is impossible not to define themselves in relation to another, which impacts their mental health and sense of identity.
Themes
Colonized writers typically go through three stages of development. In the first stage, the colonized must prove that they have assimilated to white culture. This stage is full of Symbolists and Surrealists. Then, in the second stage, the colonized writer goes back to precolonial culture. However, they are an outsider to their people and can’t really remember precolonial culture. In the third stage, the colonized writer turns into a fighter for the people and writes combat literature, revolutionary literature, and national literature. They soon discover that a nation does not exist because of culture, but because of the people’s struggle against colonial oppression.
Of these three stages, only the last actually expresses the national identity. The first stage is merely regurgitated white culture, while the second attempts to embrace a native culture that no longer exists in the postcolonial world. By turning to the people, the writer more accurately captures the struggle of the people, which Fanon argues is where black culture actually lives. Their national culture is in the struggle for said nation.
Themes
The very language the colonized intellectual uses to appreciate a piece of art is that of the oppressor. The intellectual talks of African art in terms of nationality, but it ends up sounding of exoticism. What’s more, when the intellectual returns to their culture through art, they are a like a foreigner. The intellectual is “mesmerized by these mummified fragments,” which, all bunched together, are negated. Culture cannot be simplified, Fanon says, and this is why the intellectual is “out of step.”
Looking at Africa and other parts of the Third World as exotic has long been a form of colonial racism, as it focuses solely on the ways in which the Third World is different from the West. The intellectual stares at the exotic culture like a zoo exhibit, “mesmerized” by it. But they only see parts or “fragments” of the culture, which dehumanizes, degrades, and erases it. Again, the intellectual is “out of step,” just like the national bourgeoisie.
Themes
In the visual arts, the colonized creator, in an attempt to make art of national importance, ends up working in stereotypes. They search for genuine national culture and want to represent a national truth. Under colonial rule, the colonized painter did not paint the national landscape; he or she instead chose still life or nonrepresentational art. In an independent nation, the painter returns to the people and wants to represent national reality, which is often “reminiscent of death rather than life.”
Society in a newly independent nation, as Fanon has already said, is exceedingly violent, which is why this art is “reminiscent of death.” The colonizer didn’t paint the national landscape during colonial rule because it was littered with the colonial presence, and still life paintings offered them more control over subject matter.
Themes
Poetry is much the same. The colonized poet, too, wants to pen a poem of national significance; but when he writes of his people, he or she comes up short. The poet must first define his or her subject in order to write, but he must first understand his or her “alienation.” The poet cannot just reconnect with a past where people no longer live. Rather, he or she must connect with the people as they live now.
Due to colonialism, the colonized are “alien” in their own nation and among their own people. Even though the nation is independent, it has splintered and fractured under colonial rule, and a unifying national culture must be established before the poet can write about it.
Themes
If the colonized intellectual is to write for their people using the past, they must also plan to open the door to the future to plant hope. The intellectual must commit wholeheartedly to the national struggle, and “muscle power is required.” The intellectual is not solely responsible to national culture, but to the nation as well. Fighting for national culture is also to fight for the nation’s liberation. The people of Algeria, for instance, are fighting for liberation, and Algerian national culture takes shape in that fight. Thus, the formerly colonized should not turn to the past to prove that their national culture exists. National culture is not folklore, nor is it gestures or words. National culture is the “collective thought process of a people to describe, justify, and extol” the struggles of liberation.
Plainly put, the fight for liberation is the culture of a developing nation. Thus, the intellectual cannot return to precolonial times to isolate their culture. Again, Fanon mentions the muscles of the colonized, which are always ready to take on the next challenge, and here it is building the nation. Fanon does not mean to say that there is not value in precolonial culture. On the contrary, Fanon argues, it is rich and valuable, but it must be modified for the future of the changing nation and its culture.
Themes
There is no connection between the national cultures of Senegal and Guinea, other than that they are controlled by the same French colonialism. Two identical cultures do not exist. The creation of a unifying black culture forgets that “Negros” are disappearing, Fanon says, under the weight of cultural and economic supremacy.
Again, a unifying “Negro” culture will, by necessity, not encapsulate everyone on the African continent. Those cultures, Fanon points out, will disappear, and the nonexistence of African culture introduced by colonialism is further perpetuated.
Themes
