In The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon argues that one of the ways in which colonial forces oppress colonized individuals is through the erasure of black culture. Racist colonial powers claim that colonized countries, especially those on the continent of Africa, are devoid of culture and meaningful artistic expression. The absence of culture is considered the height of barbarism, and colonialism assumes that in the precolonial period, Africa “was akin to a darkness of the human soul.” An important step in decolonization, Fanon therefore maintains, is proving the existence of one’s culture and exerting it on a world stage. “The recognition of a national culture and its right to exist” is crucial in building a new nation, and with the widespread decolonization of the continent of Africa came the establishment of “Negro” culture, a unifying black culture that recognized all cultures of the African diaspora. Fanon, however, contends that establishing a universal black culture is not possible, nor is it helpful to decolonization, because black culture is not universal. Instead, Fanon argues that the individual struggle for nationhood is the unifying black culture, and that this can’t be expressed or appreciated on a continental level.
Fanon explains negritude, an affirmation of African culture and heritage, which attempts to bring a unifying black culture to the world stage. For example, colonized literature in Africa has not historically “been a national literature but a ‘Negro’ literature.” Thus, colonized literature examines the continent of African as a whole rather than the individual countries and cultures that make it up. Negritude reached even America, where “the ‘black world’ came into being,” and it includes all black cultures affected by colonization, including those in Ghana, Senegal, Mali, and even those in the United States. Negritude considers these cultures collectively as black culture, not individually as independent nations. However, Fanon argues, a blanket African culture rather than an individual national culture “leads African intellectuals into a dead end.” One unifying African culture can’t possibly reflect the cultural importance of the entire African diaspora, and, Fanon contends, it shouldn’t even try. To do so is to further marginalize and oppress true black culture, and this is counterproductive to decolonization
Fanon contends that a unifying black culture cannot be established because it ignores crucial aspects of individual black culture and actively works against the process of decolonization. Fanon mentions black American writers, including Richard Wright and Langston Hughes, who were ultimately unable to build a collective black culture in the United States. Black Americans like Wright and Hughes, Fanon says, quickly “realized that their existential problems differed from those faced by the Africans.” As each black experience is wildly different, it cannot possibly be represented by one single culture. The culture of Richard Wright and Langston Hughes, Fanon says, is “fundamentally different” from those faced by Jomo Kenyatta, an anticolonial activist and the prime minster of Kenya, and Léopold Senghor, a Senegalese poet, politician, and the founder of negritude. These conflicting histories again suggests that one unifying black culture is impossible. In fact, Fanon claims, “the only common denominator between the blacks from Chicago and the Nigerians or Tanganyikans was that they all defined themselves in relation to the whites.” In every other way, black culture as a whole is completely unique and unrelated.
Fanon argues that black or “Negro” culture eventually “broke up because the men who set out to embody it realized that every culture is first and foremost national.” A unifying “Negro” culture attempts to express black culture on a continental scale, which, Fanon says, is wholly impossible and detrimental to the cause. According to Fanon, “culture is the expression of national consciousness,” which also means that “national consciousness is the highest form of culture,” and it is automatically established during the building of a nation.
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Culture and the Emerging Nation Quotes in The Wretched of the Earth
The struggle for national liberation is not a question of bridging the gap in one giant stride. The epic is played out on a difficult, day-to-day basis and the suffering endured far exceeds that of the colonial period.
Within the political parties, or rather parallel to them, we find the cultured class of colonized intellectuals. The recognition of a national culture and its right to exist represent their favorite stamping ground. Whereas the politicians integrate their action in the present, the intellectuals place themselves in the context of history. Faced with the colonized intellectual’s debunking of the colonialist theory of a precolonial barbarism, colonialism’s response is mute.
But gradually the black Americans realized that their existential problems differed from those faced by the Africans. The only common denominator between the blacks from Chicago and the Nigerians or Tanganyikans was that they all defined themselves in relation to the whites. But once the initial comparisons had been made and subjective feelings had settled down, the black Americans realized that the objective problems were fundamentally different.
The colonized intellectual should not be concerned with choosing how or where he decides to wage the national struggle. To fight for national culture first of all means fighting for the liberation of the nation, the tangible matrix from which culture can grow. One cannot divorce the combat for culture from the people’s struggle for liberation. For example, all the men and women fighting French colonialism in Algeria with their bare hands are no strangers to the national culture of Algeria. The Algerian national culture takes form and shape during the fight, in prison, facing the guillotine, and in the capture and destruction of the French military positions.
National culture under colonial domination is a culture under interrogation whose destruction is sought systematically. Very quickly it becomes a culture condemned to clandestinity. This notion of clandestinity can immediately be perceived in the reactions of the occupier who interprets this complacent attachment to traditions as a sign of loyalty to the national spirit and a refusal to submit. This persistence of cultural expression condemned by colonial society is already a demonstration of nationhood.
A culture is first and foremost the expression of a nation, its preferences, its taboos, and its models. Other taboos, other values, other models are formed at every level of the entire society. 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. In the colonial context, culture, when deprived of the twin supports of the nation and the state, perishes and dies. National liberation and the resurrection of the state are the preconditions for the very existence of a culture.
