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Wikipedia Summary for Frantz Fanon
Frantz Omar Fanon (, US: ; French: [fʁɑ̃ts fanɔ̃]; 20 July 1925 – 6 December 1961), also known as Ibrahim Frantz Fanon, was a French West Indian psychiatrist and political philosopher from the French colony of Martinique (today a French department). His works have become influential in the fields of post-colonial studies, critical theory and Marxism. As well as being an intellectual, Fanon was a political radical, Pan-Africanist, and Marxist humanist concerned with the psychopathology of colonization and the human, social, and cultural consequences of decolonization.
In the course of his work as a physician and psychiatrist, Fanon supported Algeria's War of independence from France and was a member of the Algerian National Liberation Front.
For more than five decades, the life and works of Frantz Fanon have inspired national-liberation movements and other radical political organizations in Palestine, Sri Lanka, South Africa, and the United States. He formulated a model for community psychology, believing that many mental-health patients would do better if they were integrated into their family and community instead of being treated with institutionalized care. He also helped found the field of institutional psychotherapy while working at Saint-Alban under Francois Tosquelles and Jean Oury.
Fanon published numerous books, including The Wretched of the Earth (1961). This influential work focuses on what he believed is the necessary role of violence by activists in conducting decolonization struggles.
A man who has a language consequently possesses the world expressed and implied by that language.
If the building of a bridge does not enrich the awareness of those who work on it, then that bridge ought not to be built.
Every race will have disagreements amongst themselves, but we must put aside our differences, and work together for the advancement of that race Sandra Forsythe.
The native must realize that colonialism never gives anything away for nothing.
A government or a party gets the people it deserves and sooner or later a people gets the government it deserves.
Imperialism leaves behind germs of rot which we must clinically detect and remove from our land but from our minds as well.
There are too many idiots in this world. And having said it, I have the burden of proving it.
The Negro enslaved by his inferiority, the white man enslaved by his superiority alike behave in accordance with a neurotic orientation.
For violence, like Achilles' lance, can heal the wounds it has inflicted.
Educated blacks Society refuses to consider them genuine Negroes. The Negro is a savage, whereas the student is civilized. You're us, and if anyone thinks you are a Negro he is mistaken, because you merely look like one.
Violence is a cleansing force. It frees the native from his inferiority complex and from his despair and inaction; it makes him fearless and restores his self-respect.
The living expression of the nation is the collective consciousness in motion of the entire people.
I, the man of color, want only this: That the tool never possess the man. That the enslavement of man by man cease forever. That is, of one by another. That it be possible for me to discover and to love man, wherever he may be.
Anti-Semitism hits me on the head: I am enraged, I am bled white by an appalling battle, I am deprived of the possibility of being man. I cannot disassociate myself from the future that is proposed for my brother.
When I search for Man in the technique and the style of Europe, I see only a succession of negations of man, and an avalanche of murders.
I feel my soul as vast as the world, truly a soul as deep as the deepest of rivers; my chest has the power to expand to infinity. I was made to give and they prescribe for me the humility of the cripple.
When people like me, they like me in spite of my color. When they dislike me; they point out that it isn't because of my color. Either way, I am locked in to the infernal circle.
The life of the nation is shot through with a certain falseness and hypocrisy, which are all the more tragic because they are so often subconscious rather than deliberate ... The soul of the people is putrescent, and until that becomes regenerate and clean, no good work can be done.
Wealth is not the fruit of labor but the result of organized protected robbery.
The consciousness of self is not the closing of a door to communication. Philosophic thought teaches us, on the contrary, that it is its guarantee. National consciousness, which is not nationalism, is the only thing that will give us an international dimension.
I came into this world anxious to uncover the meaning of things, my soul desirous to be at origin of the world, and here I am an object among other objects.
National liberation, national renaissance, the restoration of nationhood to the people, commonwealth: whatever may be the headings used or the new formulas introduced, decolonization is always a violent phenomenon.
The unpreparedness of the educated classes, the lack of practical links between them and the mass of the people, their laziness, and, let it be said, their cowardice at the decisive moment of the struggle will give rise to tragic mishaps.
Hate demands existence, and he who hates has to show his hate in appropriate actions and behaviors; in a sense, he has to become hate. That is why the Americans have substituted discrimination for lynching.
To speak...means above all to assume a culture, to support the weight of a civilization.
The colonized is elevated above his jungle status in proportion to his adoption of the mother country's cultural standards.
The gaze that the colonized subject casts at the colonist's sector is a look of lust, a look of envy. Dreams of possession. Every type of possession; of sitting at the colonist's table and sleeping in his bed, preferably with his wife. The colonized man is an envious man.
I want the world to recognize with me the open door of every consciousness.
We believe that an individual must endeavor to assume the universalism inherent in the human condition.
Introducing someone as a Negro poet with a University degree or again, quite simply, the expression, a great black poet. These ready-made phrases, which seem in a common-sense way to fill a need-or have a hidden subtlety, a permanent rub.
It is the white man who creates the Negro. But it is the negro who creates negritude.
The misfortune of the man of color is having been enslaved. The misfortune and inhumanity of the white man are having killed man somewhere.
For the beloved should not allow me to turn my infantile fantasies into reality: On the contrary, he should help me to go beyond them.
The Church in the colonies is the white people's Church, the foreigner's Church. She does not call the native to God's ways but to the ways of the white man, of the master, of the oppressor.
The business of obscuring language is a mask behind which stands the much bigger business of plunder.
When we revolt it's not for a particular culture. We revolt simply because, for many reasons, we can no longer breathe.
In the colonial context the settler only ends his work of breaking in the native when the latter admits loudly and intelligibly the supremacy of the white man's values.
Culture has never the translucidity of custom; it abhors all simplification. In its essence it is opposed to custom, for custom is always the deterioration of culture.
The Third World today faces Europe like a colossal mass whose project should be to try to resolve the problems to which Europe has not been able to find the answers.
For a colonized people the most essential value, because the most concrete, is first and foremost the land: the land which will bring them bread and, above all, dignity.
Each generation must discover its mission, fulfill it or betray it, in relative opacity.
One avoids Creolisms. Some families completely forbid Creole and mothers ridicule their children for speaking it.
The people come to understand that wealth is not the fruit of labour but the result of organised, protected robbery. Rich people are no longer respectable people; they are nothing more than flesh eating animals, jackals and vultures which wallow in the people's blood.
I am black: I am the incarnation of a complete fusion with the world, an intuitive understanding of the earth, an abandonment of my ego in the heart of the cosmos, and no white man, no matter how intelligent he may be, can ever understand Louis Armstrong and the music of the Congo.
Whether he likes it or not, the black man has to wear the livery the white man has fabricated for him.
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 Europe have grown to appalling dimensions.
Everything can be explained to the people, on the single condition that you want them to understand.
However painful it may be for me to accept this conclusion, I am obliged to state it: for the black man there is only one destiny. And it is white.
I ascribe a basic importance to the phenomenon of language. To speak means to be in a position to use a certain syntax, to grasp the morphology of this or that language, but it means above all to assume a culture, to support the weight of a civilization.
