PREFACE TO CONCERNING VIOLENCE: NINE SCENES FROM THE ANTI-IMPERIALISTIC SELF-DEFENSEAuthor(s): Gayatri Chakravorty SpivakSource: Film Quarterly, Vol. 68, No. 1 (Fall 2014), pp. 61-62Published by: University of California PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/fq.2014.68.1.61 .Accessed: 23/01/2015 20:21

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PREFACE TO CONCERNING VIOLENCE: NINE SCENESFROM THE ANTI-IMPERIALISTIC SELF-DEFENSE

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

FrantzFanonwasborn on the Caribbean island ofMartiniquein 1925, and grew up a gentleman of the French Empire. Herealized, when he came from the island of Martinique to themainland of France in Europe, through involvement in theFrench army elsewhere, that his class privilege among hisown black people did not mean anything in the country ofthe colonizing mastershe was nothing but a black man.In a famous chapter in his book Black Skin, White Masks(rejected as a dissertation by a French university), he men-tions his shock when a white French child cries out to hermotherMama, see the Negro! But Fanon moves fromjust this shock into an attempt to understand colonization allover the world. In this very book, in the last chapter, he walksus through a reading of the European philosopher Hegelsfamous chapter on Master and Slave, and turns it to hisown use. As we watch the film Concerning Violence, we re-member this in the freedom fighters invocation of the namedstates of Mozambique and Angola, borders established by theimperialists. Fanons lesson was that you use what themastershave developed and turn it around in the interests of thosewho have been enslaved or colonized. In this he is with greatleaders likeW.E.B. Du Bois and Nelson Mandela. Fanon did

not stop at thinking colonization, but wanted to do some-thing about it. He gave his time and skill to the healing ofthose who suffered from violence.

He went to an African country that spoke Frenchas theresisters in this film speak Portuguesecreolizing themasterslanguage as their very own. Such thinking is shared by greatwriters such as Assia Djebar of Algeria, Njabulo Ndebeleof South Africa, and Syed Abdul Malik of India. Receivingno response from Senegal, he went finally out of sub-SaharanAfrica into Algeria in North Africa, where he, as a trainedpsychiatrist, worked in the Blida-Joinville PsychiatricHospital,and developing a radical theory of colonial psychopathology,helped those who fought against French colonialism with theFLN, the National Liberation Front of Algeria, joining theparty himself in 1954. My friend Assia Djebar, whom I havealready mentioned, worked with him in Tunisia, and hasshared withme in detail the actual experience of his worktoheal the effects of violence, rather than to condone violenceas such.

Fanon died at 36, and we would have gained greatly ifthis man of fire and resolution had lived long enough to giveus his wisdom when the colonized nations regularly fell intointernal violence and internal class struggle and internalgreed after so-called liberation. The issue of colonization isa greed shared by humankind. No one is better than anyone,

Concerning Violence:

Nine Scenes from the Anti-ImperialisticSelf-Defense

Based on Frantz FanonsThe Wretched of the Earth

Narrated by Ms. Lauryn Hill

Directed by Gran Hugo Olsson

FILM QUARTERLY 61

Film Quarterly, Vol. 68, Number 1, pp. 6162, ISSN 0015-1386, electronic ISSN 1533-8630.

A previous version of this article was distributed at premiere screenings. 2014 Gayatri

Chakravorty Spivak. DOI: 10.1525/FQ.2014.68.1.61.

This content downloaded from 150.216.68.200 on Fri, 23 Jan 2015 20:21:50 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

every generation must be trained in the practice of freedom,caring for others, as did Fanon, and that is what colonizationstops. Within the greed for capital formation, colonizationallows already existing ignorant racism to spread the mar-kets in the name of civilization or modernization or globali-zation, as it does today. This film captures the tragedy of themoment when the very poor are convinced in the name of anation, that is going to reject it once it is established on itsown two feet, to offer themselves up for a violent killing.The French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, himself a stronganti-colonialist among the colonizers, read the book Fanonwrote in the last 10 weeks of his life, knowing that he wasmarked for death by acute leukemia, even as he was beinghounded by the colonizing government of France, as an en-dorsement of violence itselfnot reading between the lines,where Fanon insists that the tragedy is that the very pooris reduced to violence, because there is no other responsepossible to an absolute absence of response and an absoluteexercise of legitimized violence from the colonizers. Theirlives count as nothing against the death of the colonizers:unacknowledged Hiroshimas over against sentimentalized9/11s. Here the lesson of Gandhi regarding the power ofpassive resistance and the contrastive lesson of Israel in theexercise of state legitimized violence drawing forth violencein extremism is useful today. It is in this context that weremember that after the struggle against Portugal, the new na-tions of Angola and Mozambique fell into civil war, and dis-proved the dream of the very poor that decolonization wouldbring a new day. Mozambique has joined forces with capital-ist globalization. This is the rule rather than the exception.Fanons own warning is contained in A Dying Colonialism.Against the grain of his optimism of the will, he writes: it isno longer the age of little vanguards, an unintended descrip-tion of the guerilla warfare we will watch on the screen.Working within the problems created by a postcolonial nationwhich brings back the pre-colonial problems that the greathistorian Fernand Braudel called longue dure or long term:structures which lie invisible below the surface of social activ-ities,many of us think that the real disaster in colonialism liesin destroying the minds of the colonized and forcing them toaccept mere violenceallowing no practice of freedom, sothat these minds cannot build when apparent decolonizationhas been achieved. From the example of mature leaders suchas Du Bois and Mandela, we know or can at least have thefeeling that Fanon would have gone in that direction. UnlikeGandhi, the early Du Bois, or yet Mandela, who worked fortheir own nation-statesFanon was not himself an Algerian,not a member of the country which he helped. This is an im-portant lesson for those of us who want to think the worldrather than, thinking from within a nation-state, argue from

identity, learning the lesson thatmere national liberationwith-out the practice of freedom cannot in fact bring a socially justworld for the very poor. Fanon did not know the languageof the common people of AlgeriaArabic; hewas not himselfa Muslim, the majority religion of Algeria. He could notknow the power of religion as a discourse of political mobili-zation in todays world, particularly after so-called indepen-dence in what is today called the Islamic world. I wasworking the election booths inWahran (Algeria) in 1991. It iswithin the context of the aftermath of colonialismthatFanon could not knowthat the tragedy of what wewatch inthis film must be carefully considered. This is a teaching text.

I add a word on gender. This film reminds us that, al-though liberation struggles force women into an apparentequalitystarting with the 19th century or even earlierwhen the dust settles, the so-called post-colonial nation goesback to the invisible longterm structures of gendering. Themost moving shot of this film is the black Venus, remindingus of the Venus ofMilo with her arm gone, who is also a blackMadonna, suckling a child with bare breasts. This icon mustremind us all that the endorsement of rape continues not onlyin war but also, irrespective of whether a nation is developingor developedin women fighting in legitimized armies. Col-onizer and colonized are united in the violence of gendering,which often celebrates motherhood with genuine pathos.Here we have to promote our brother Fanon into a changedmindset, but he, who would have been in his 80s today, is notthere for us. What I can recommend is that you also watch avideomade byAlgerianwomen active in the revolution calledBarberousse mes soeurs (Hassan Bouabdallah, 1985) if you canget your hands on it.

Here now is our film, a tribute to and an illustration ofFrantz FanonsWretched of the Earth. I end it in Fanons ownway, turning around for our own use what a European phi-losopher wrote for the use of Europe over 200 years ago:turning Kant around for our purposes as he did Hegel: any-thing which the people (i.e. the entire mass of subjects)cannot decide for themselves and their fellows cannot bedecided for the people by the sovereign either. The peopleunder colonization have had no practice of freedom. Youcannot decide without practice. The ones you see on thescreen are a small part of the people, the poorest of the poor,mobilized into violence by sovereign leaders: cannon fodder.This practice goes on in all armies, all resistance movements,in the name of nation and religion. Here Fanon would havebeen useful today. As for gendering, we must ourselvesgender the people. Our brothers Kant and Fanon are notuseful here. I thank Gran Olsson for setting us these tasks.

New York City, December 30, 2013

62 FALL 2014

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