The Wretched of the earth

Frantz Fanon

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The colonial world is a compartmentalized world. It is obviously as superfluous to recall the existence of
"native" towns and European towns, of schools for "natives" and schools for Europeans, as it is to recall
apartheid in South Africa. Yet if we penetrate inside this compartmentalization we shall at least bring to
light some of its key aspects. By penetrating its geographical configuration and classification we shall be
able to delineate the backbone on which the decolonized society is reorganized. The colonized world is a
world divided in two. The dividing line, the border, is represented by the barracks and the police stations.
In the colonies, the official, legitimate agent, the spokesperson for the colonizer and the regime of
oppression, is the police officer or the soldier. In capitalist societies, education, whether secular or
religious, the teaching of moral reflexes handed down from father to son, the exemplary integrity of
workers decorated after fifty years of loyal and faithful service, the fostering of love for harmony and
wisdom, those aesthetic forms of respect for the status quo, instill in the exploited a mood of submission
and inhibition which considerably eases the task of the agents of law and order. In capitalist countries a
multitude of sermonizers, counselors, and "confusion-mongers" intervene between the exploited and the
authorities. In colonial regions, however, the proximity ,and frequent, direct intervention by the police
,and the military ensure the colonized are kept under close and contained by rifle butts and napalm. We
have seen how the government's agent uses a language of pure violence. The agent does not alleviate
oppression or mask dominion. He displays and demonstrates them with the clear conscience of the law
enforcer, and brings violence into the homes and minds of the colonized subjects.

Fanon states that there is a sharp division in terms of economics, wealth, standard of living and
everything between the white colonizers and the native population. And then he says that the border
line between the two is actually police barracks and police station. So the repression is very obvious it is
very direct and visible in the colonial regime. Fanon here points out that in capitalist's society power(
mada nisam 100% siguran da je to rekla) people govern the controlled. like in "The Birthday party" this
also sounds like an ideological message transferred from father to son. Goldberg is like the epitome of
these ideological messages. When McCan fails to follow the line and feels sort of disturbed with what is
happening to Stanly, then Goldberg gives him this pep talk about ideology.

So there are more subtle ways of maintaining status quo in capitalist societies whereas in colonies there
is open repression rifles, napalms... and Fanon wants to point out that the colonizers introduce this
violence, violence is omnipresent always present in the colonies.

14 strana

We have seen therefore that the Manichaeanism that first governed colonial society is maintained
intact during the period of decolonization. In fact the colonist never ceases to be the enemy, the
antagonist, in plain words public enemy number 1. The oppressor, ensconced in his sector, creates
the spiral, the spiral of domination, exploitation and looting. In the other sector, the colonized
subject lies coiled and robbed, and fuels as best he can the spiral which moves seamlessly from the
shores of the colony to the palaces and docks of the metropolis. In this petrified zone, not a ripple
on the surface, the palm trees sway against the clouds, the waves of the sea lap against the shore,
the raw materials come and go, legitimating the colonist's presence, while more dead than alive the
colonized subject crouches forever in the same old dream. The colonist makes history. His life is an
epic, an odyssey. He is invested with the very beginning "We made this land." He is the guarantor
for its existence: "If we leave, all will be lost, and this land will return to the Dark Ages." Opposite
him, listless beings wasted away by fevers and consumed by "ancestral customs" compose a
virtually petrified background to the innovative dynamism of colonial mercantilism.

The colonist makes history and he knows it. And because he refers constantly to the history of his
metropolis, he plainly indicates that here he is the extension of this metropolis. The history he
writes is therefore not the history of the country he is despoiling, but the history of his own nation's
looting, raping, and starving to death. The immobility to which the colonized subject is condemned
can be challenged only if he decides to put an end to the history of colonization and the history of
despoliation in order to bring to life the history of the nation, the history of decolonization.

A world compartmentalized, Manichaean and petrified, a world of statues: the statue of the general
who led the conquest, the statue of the engineer who built the bridge. A world cock-sure of itself,
crushing with its stoniness the backbones of those scarred by the whip. That is the colonial world.
The colonial subject is a man penned in; apartheid is but one method of compartmentalizing the
colonial world. The first thing the colonial subject learns is to remain in his place and not overstep
its limits. Hence the dreams of the colonial subject are muscular dreams, dreams of action, dreams
of aggressive vitality. I dream I am jumping, swimming, running, and climbing. I dream I burst out
laughing, I am leaping across a river and chased by a pack of cars that never catches up with me.
During colonization the colonized subject frees himself night after night between nine in the
evening and six in the morning.

The colonized subject will first train this aggressiveness sedimented in his muscles against his own
people. This is the period when black turns on black, and police officers and magistrates don't know
which way to turn when faced with the surprising surge of North African criminality. We shall see
later what should be made of this phenomenon. 2 Confronted with the colonial order the colonized
subject is in a permanent state of tension. The colonist's world is a hostile world, a world which
excludes yet at the same time incites envy. Vie have seen how the colonized always dream of taking
the colonist's place. Not of becoming a colonist, but of replacing him. This hostile, oppressive and
aggressive world, bulldozing the colonized masses, represents not only the hell they would like to
escape as quickly as possible but a paradise within arm's reach guarded by ferocious watchdogs.

Manichean world - the perception of the world that everything is black and white, there is good and evil
and they are divided by the straight line. The colonizers perceive black race people as evil whereas
colonizers who represent progress are good( ovo su caletove rechi )

They see themselves as the force of good, as progress, and they see the native as uninvolved still
belonging to the dark ages, destructive etc. In the minds of colonizers the division is both physical and
ethical, physical in terms of where they live geographically ( white colonizers live in the cities and rich
areas and the native population lives in poor villages in suburbs, and the whites also perceive this as an
ethical division between good and evil). He uses the word petrified to express the idea that nobody can
cross this border, that world is divided in compartments for black and white and the colonial subject
during his early childhood has to learn his place. He must accept from the very beginning his place in
society and to accept the fact that he cannot change this position (there is no movement he will forever
be in this lower-class position). The first thing colonized subject learns is to stay in his place and not
overstep his limits. The only one who actually moves is colonizer since he believes that he is bringing
progress to the world and he continues to exploit the world to gain more and more wealth. There is a
sense of being petrified among colonized, Algerians in this case. Fanon explains the psychological
consequences of this feeling of being petrified and he says that because of that feeling the colonized
have dreams of jumping, swimming, running etc. which are all manifestation of the will to be released
from this confinement. They feel static so their dreams are all connected with movement. Because of
this accumulated energy which is not released the colonized people became aggressive but they didn't
turn their aggression against the colonist, they turned on each other instead. He was the first to address
the problems of colonialism and how bodies of colonized people suffer because of this oppression(and
not only body but also the mind and the psyche). He says that it is like a surge of spasm inscribed in the
bodies of the colonized subjects. This sense of confinement and of feeling petrified is what actually
produces aggression, which is later directed on other Algerians. Colonized subject does not have a
political vision he sees a problem for example- A man who has been working whole day comes home
very tiered and tries to sleep and behind the curtain is a child who begins to cry, now man is irritated by
this crying child since he can't sleep and he starts to hate this child even though the child is not
responsible for his problems. So the violence is inevitably present in the colonial system and he says that
the only perfect thing to do with it is to direct it towards the colonizers.

The Hospital at the Time of the Revolution

Caryl Churchill
What a time for her to be... when all my energies should be devoted pa sve do : So what is your
excuse for making us suffer...do kraja njegovog lajna

Madam and Mousier are the part of the French colonial apparatus of the administration, French
administration in Algeria. Mousier is a civil servant. Their daughter is seventeen but they still dress her
like a little doll and her mother says: "she is always the same when I think of her" so regardless of age 7,
13 or 17 she is always the same- this suggests that there is no development in character sort of arrested
development ( hehehehehehe), so just like Fanon talks about prettification, the colonial subject is
petrified and Fransoa ( ne znam kako se zove neam knjigu ali ovako nesto) is also petrified. There is a
sort of parallel just like there is an oppression of colonized people there is also an act of oppression
against feminine characters and it is expressed in the character of this young girl. The essential reason
for her madness is because her father brings arrested revolutionaries in the empty wing of their house
where he interrogates them and tortures them. Because of this she hears scream during the night but
her parents are trying to convince her that it is all in her head. So obviously this is the reason for losing
her mind. The reason why she hates her mother is because she does not nothing to stop her father and
treats her like a doll. She also speaks instead of her tells her what she is thinking etc. in a way she is
acting like an oppressor and that is why her daughter is petrified in her progress. This is what I
mentioned in my essay it is a sort of boomerang effect in a sense that the colonizers (the French) are
practicing violence on Algerians but the violence returns to them in a sort of indirect way since their
own families become the victims. Her parents are almost unaware that this situation in the country and
the way they treat the colonized people are responsible for their daughter's state of mind, they do not
won't to admit their own fault. There is also a bird in a cage that is mentioned in this text and it has
symbolic meaning since their daughter also feels caged.

They are commenting on a case of a young boy who stabbed his friend and his friend's mother and his
friend's sister because of few olives. They are convinced that he did it because it is in his nature that he
was born a criminal. In 1950( or something) UN brought certain article which stated that all people are
born with same intellectual capacities, they brought this article in order to abolish previous racist
scientific theories which were omnipresent ( claiming that African brain was different like they are
different species ). Social Darwinism: whites are more evolved than black people because black people
do not use frontal lobe of their brain and because of this black people are violent and savage. So we
have here this moral blindness where French do not recognize, or refuse to recognize the fact that they
are the ones who are making Algerians violent. This conversation is ironic because (taj neko koji pricha
sa doktorom nisam mu chuo ime) is black i doktor mu kaze da za njega nikada ne bi rekao da ne koristi
frontal lobe.

The issues in this seen, there are some revolutionaries in this hospital and in hospital he actually sees
the policeman who tortured him ( these are the details from Fanon's study, things from "The wretched
of the earth" these are the things that really happened in these hospitals and while he was working in
the hospital he was helping the rebellion, so eventually he had to run away to avoid being arrested).
What is significant about these passage on page 126( aaaaaaa eto to je ipak :D) is that Churchill shows us
the other side of the revolution, she problematises the issue of violence it is not so straight forward.
Fanon says that violence is the only way for the natives to recover, to set themselves free from this
prettification. But Churchill creates this character to show that this is not really straight forward,
because this man remains scared emotionally and psychologically by the violence he has committed.
What happens is this: he plants a bomb into a cafe ( in a bar) and this is a bar which is frequented by the
most reactionary French colonizers. So he believes that even though he killed civilians these villains are
all evil ( really bad people). But as he walks down the street he bumps into a young French man who is a
bit tipsy and he smiles and apologizes ( it is a very short moment of a recognition of their common
humanity-this French man did not treat him as a dirty black he treats him as his equal). Because of this
the Algerian revolutionary thinks about their humanity and how the people that he had killed in the bar
were also human beings 3 dimensional, so he is no longer is able to divide the French on good and bad
he can no longer think in those terms. In him this event created a constant state of anxiety and
insomnia so he continues to suffer the consequences of his act( he still believes in revolution and that he
is fighting for a good cause but he struggles with the violence that he has committed).

Tako da imate taj sukob da po Fenonu je potreban taj nasilni ustanak potreban da bi alzhirci povratili
svoju ljudskost a s druge strane ljudi ostaju trajno obelezeni tim nasiljem koji su pochinili pa pate od
psihoze i neuroze itd.

Na kraju The dress looked very pretty... that was a poison dress...

The dress is poisonous because it symbolically represents oppression and prettification food is also
poisonous because is prepared by her mother who represents her oppressor. Fransoa takes off the dress
to establish her own identity her true self. If we could think about human being in completly natural
circumstances then we would talk about an individual( ne chuje se najbolje ovaj deo nisam siguran jer
pishe na tabli i uporedo pricha ). But according to ( neko ime) we can never reach this complete freedom
we are all shaped by some ideology, an ideology of our society, so we are all constituted as subjects of
some ideology. So taking off a dress is like an attempt to get rid of this role of a subject, to no longer be
the subject of patriarchal society. However when she tries to feel herself under the dress there is
nothing there, she can't find her real being. The similarity between this play and "Cloud Nine" there is a
parallel between sexual and colonial opression.