Do it for The Culture™

A critique of Frantz Fanon’s essay “On National Culture”  from The Wretched of the Earth

Note: This essay was adapted from a class assignment. Changes in tone and structure have been made for relevance and personalization. This essay is available for reading and discussion until the 31st of March.

Culture is constantly in motion. In this modern Age of Information, culture is expanding and contracting on larger scales and at even faster rates than ever before. Yet, a scathing essay from 1959 remains relevant in these so-called unprecedented times. One of the ways that Frantz Fanon defines culture in his essay, “On National Culture,” is as an ongoing process. This chapter was originally a “statement made at the Second Congress of Black Artists and Writers” (248), in Rome. On the outset, there is a hypocrisy to advocating for an anticolonial ethic on a major colonizer’s soil. This gathering partially frames this essay as an in-house conversation between the Harlem Renaissance and Négritude, which inspired Africa’s literary rebirth of the 1960s. This rebirth included Afropolitans such as Léopold Sénghor, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, and Chinua Achebe. These literary giants could be analyzed as examples of the “native intellectual,” as described in Fanon’s essay. One could read this essay as more descriptive than prescriptive, but there are still critical problems. In another essay, one could also argue that the strict determinism of the three phases of the native intellectual’s evolution is fraught and hints at a Christian fatalism. Regardless, this will be the focus: while Fanon makes several important critiques of the native intellectual and their role in the culture in three major phases, he still uses colonial frameworks laced with classist ideals which significantly undermine his argument.

The exact word, “culture,” is used by Fanon about one hundred and thirty-five times in this essay. Variations of the term like “cultures” or “cultured” are not included in this tally. Of all his different applications, this definition appears to be the most present: national culture is arguably a dynamic and perpetual reinvention and recreation of a native group of people. One could argue that essentials such as food, clothing, and shelter are refined into foundational elements of culture known as cuisine, fashion, and architecture. From them, more niche elements of culture are created such as art for the basic five senses. These elements are most efficiently communicated through language. Paradoxically though, while these basic needs shape the language, language also shapes these basic needs. Together, they shape culture.

Culture has always existed among the human species, but nations are rather young in the scope of human history. The nation is an invention of war, imperialism, and colonialism. His argument for building a national culture is already fractured by its conceit. In the 1880s, the European colonizers began to carelessly and violently impose national borders on the most diverse continent in the world. The infamous Scramble for Africa continues to deliver aftershocks across the whole world (e.g. the ongoing genocide in Sudan is the worst humanitarian crisis today, and its factions can be traced to the scramble). A handful of capitalists sought to enforce national borders upon over two-thousand distinct ethnic groups, with their own distinct cultures and languages, into less than one hundred countries. The math alone is devastating. The nation, much like race, is a European construct forcefully projected onto the African continent. Predictably, the colonized have responded to the colonizers with constant civil war, redrawn borders, and mass migrations. These migrations, often as refugees and asylees, produced a unique figure in the diaspora: Fanon’s native intellectual. If Fanon seeks to give an anticolonial call to action in the form of this essay, then his speech already falls short. As Audre Lorde later warned, “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.”  A colonial framework such as the nation, which vehemently tries to graft a culture out of anywhere from five to two-hundred distinct cultures, is not necessarily doomed to fail, but it is doomed to repeat colonial violence and evolve into the neocolonialism of today. And when the nation does succeed in grafting an inherently bastardized national culture, it often bleeds into nationalism, which inevitably leads to fascism. Fatally, this very fascism is opposed to the Marxism of Fanon.

For all this critique, Fanon concisely defined a global and persisting phenomenon in the African diaspora, and frankly most diasporas: “In the first phase, the native intellectual gives proof that he has assimilated the culture of the occupying power” (222). Assimilation has proven to be a highly effective tool of colonialism that the host of Fanon’s original audience, in Rome, knew too well. While the Roman Empire wielded assimilation on broader scale than most empires in European history, they did not invent it. Assimilation functions as an evolutionary part of an organism’s survival instinct. Humans perform for the dominant culture and often pretend just as other animals do, but it can be important for self-preservation in a settler-colonial state. Fanon, too, mastered French and completed a graduate degree in France. He, too, was significantly influenced by ultimately colonial thinkers such as Jean-Paul and Jacques Lacan. He attended the most elite schools in Martinique and France, and that probably accelerated his assimilation while aiding his class privilege. Consider who wrote the foreword of The Wretched of the Earth: Jean-Paul Sartre (who adamantly supported the settler-colonial state of Israel). This pattern of assimilation continues across academia and sometimes leads to the next phase.

Fanon argues for the most compelling part of the native intellectual evolution—compelling because postwar multiculturalism (and ongoing conversations of culture appreciation versus cultural appropriation) dominated the culture during the Obama administration, both in the U.S. and abroad. He writes, “the man of culture, instead of setting out to find this substance, will let himself be hypnotized by these mummified fragments which because they are static are in fact symbols of negation and outworn contrivances” (224). This comparison is especially devastating because so many Black intellectuals before Fanon, alongside Fanon, and after Fanon fall into this trap and often stay there. Some examples across the diaspora might include the Black Israelites, the Nation of Islam, and variations of the Hotep. One of the most popular figures in this school of thought is probably Dr. Umar Rashad Ibn Abdullah-Johnson, more commonly known as Dr. Umar. He often espouses nonscientific ideology in the name Black supremacy. There is an unwitting fetishization of the past, a sort of golden age syndrome that inadvertently practices revisionist history. After all, many secondary school students in the United States are taught that the ancient kingdoms of Ghana, Mali, and Songhai is the peak of African innovation and brilliance. Never mind the fact that many do not know that Ethiopia is the only nation that was never colonized (Italy occupied Ethiopia for several years before failing to establish a colony there).

The native intellectuals going through the second phase often glamorize the violent monarchies of yesteryear and yearn for kingdoms that were also fraught with their own harmful hierarchies. The reification of Emperor Haile Selassie by Rastafarian religion comes to mind. “What he ultimately intends to embrace are in fact the castoffs of thought, its shells and corpses, a knowledge which has been stabilized once and for all” (225). While Fanon was likely addressing first-generation and second-generations emigrants of Africa, there is a unique perspective offered by descendants of formerly enslaved Africans. Some U.S. fashion reflects an amalgamation of a fantasized Africa by descendants of stolen children of the motherland. The Boondocks is a highly controversial television show that parodies this character in season one, episode thirteen, through the character Dewey Jenkins. “In the second phase we find the native is disturbed; he decides to remember what he is. This period of creative work approximately corresponds to that immersion which we have just described” (222). The stolen child is violently robbed of their heritage and often becomes an adult who remains fixed on a fragmented past and defensive history. Toni Morrison once wrote that, “The function, the very serious function of racism is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining, over and over again, your reason for being. Somebody says you have no language and you spend twenty years proving that you do… Somebody says you have no art, so you dredge that up. Somebody says you have no kingdoms, so you dredge that up. None of this is necessary. There will always be one more thing.” And so it goes, in conference after conference, with some native intellectuals deciding to return to Africa, especially the western coast. Very few of the repatriated intellectuals of Africa establish a life among the locals and move on to the final phase.

Fanon believes that “… in the third phase, which is called the fighting phase, the native, after having tried to lose himself in the people and with the people, will on the contrary shake the people” (222). The native that Fanon centers in his analysis is the artist, and it is telling that of all the artists to exemplify, he repeatedly chooses the poet. There is an ancient tradition across many cultures of the poet’s power to shape culture. They often reflect the culture as mirror back to the other natives and that compels the culture to change. The narrative poem analyzed is “African Dawn” by the Guinean poet Keita Fodeba. The poet here functions as a truth-teller, as a historian, as Africa’s original poet: the griot. After all, “the first duty of the native poet is to see clearly the people he has chosen as the subject of his work of art. He cannot go forward resolutely unless he first realizes the extent of his estrangement from them” (227). After his formal education in France, Fanon attempted to follow through with a return to the motherland and armed struggle as the colonial framework of France—with a slight twist. While his essay centers on Africa and his own personal commitment to Algeria, Fanon was born and raised in Martinique and its culture. He was born to a Black father and a Black biracial mother (with Alsatian ancestry which ties her loosely to Algeria). After his post-secondary education, he did not reestablish a life in Martinique. This orientation presents a foundational point of contradiction in his arguments. He did not fulfill the third phase of his own theory, and Martinique continues to function as a French colony in the present day.

The application of the term “native” may be functionally outdated, a modern day “cast-off” of colonial frameworks. This poignant quote by the admittedly trans-exclusionary feminist, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Chinua Achebe’s protégé) comes to mind: “…my point is that the only authentic identity for the African is the tribe…I am Nigerian because a white man created Nigeria and gave me that identity. I am [Black] because the white man constructed [Black] to be as different as possible from his white. But I was Igbo before the white man came.” If Fanon had used the term the “indigenous intellectual” instead, it could have more accurately represented his diasporic reach and global audience, since not all African peoples were born in Africa. As a sidenote, he could’ve also avoided the ethnically derogatory terms of “barbarian” (against the Berbers) and “philistine” (against the Palestinians). Not to mention the persisting conflation of race and ethnicity i.e. referring to African Arabs as Black when they more often present as Brown. Nonetheless, in the modern, literal use of “native,” he would have been limited to the first-generation African emigrant, but one could argue that this essay might have been strengthened by separately addressing the ‘niggered’ subgroups of the African diaspora (Black Africans, Black Americans, Black Latines, Black Caribbeans, Black Europeans, etc.) as opposed to the whole African diaspora.

This delineation may have been a way to remedy his justified grievance that, “for the colonist, the Negro was neither an Angolan nor a Nigerian, for he simply spoke of “the Negro” (211). Once again, ethnicity could be a more solid foundation for Pan-Africanism and culture-making, as opposed to nationality. The archives and technology are becoming better at tracing a human being’s ancestry with increasing accuracy—though that is complicated by mass surveillance, data brokers, and reduced rights to privacy. Still, there is a certain privilege in theorizing with the technological advancements of the 2020s as opposed to the 1950s. In his last task for the subject of his essay, Fanon concludes, “while at the beginning the native intellectual used to produce his work to be read exclusively by the oppressor, whether with the intention of charming him or of denouncing him through ethnic or subjectivist means, now the native writer progressively takes on the habit of addressing his own people” (240). Much to Fanon’s credit, that is a mantle he carried until the very end.

Some of the critical problems in this essay hinge on the following questions. Is the revolutionary writer obligated to embody the ideals of their writing as best as they can? Do writers have an obligation to practice the theory that they offer as a call to action? Is an anticolonial psychotherapist expected to be anticolonial in both in their professional and personal relationships? Fanon’s writing seems to suggest so: “As for we who have decided to break the back of colonialism, our historic mission is to sanction all revolts…” (207). The call to armed struggle against colonialism and classism is a revolutionary ideal worth pursuing. Yet many revolutionaries transfer this sanctioned violence to their personal relationships, which is a major byproduct of colonialism. Many anticolonial movements across time and space make the crucial error of pedestaling, lionizing, idolizing, or blatantly deifying the charismatic leader, the face of the movement. This behavior also promotes the individualism of colonialism instead of the collectivism of anticolonialism.

In the United States’ current cultural moment, there is an ongoing reckoning with the revolutionary leader César Chávez. Multiple archives have proven that women of color were the backbone of every major civil rights movement in the United States in the 20th century. Yet, there is a centuries-long pattern of violent misogyny by leftist men in these leftist movements, that is perpetuated to this day. This misogyny ranges from the use of exclusively masculine pronouns of Fanon’s “native intellectual” and the assumed general audience of his speech turned essay. His work bypasses the women and gender-nonconforming founders of the Harlem Renaissance, Négritude, and his own contemporary movements. Unfortunately, this subtle erasure is common across all genders. Nonetheless, it does an incredible disservice to creators of culture such as Martinique’s Nardal sisters (cofounders of the Négritude movement) and his own wife, who painstakingly transcribed, edited, and allegedly even contributed to most of his books and essays, such as this one.

This career support from his wife may have been based on a disability, but there is no informal or formal record of one. It is also worth noting that he left a university student after he impregnated her. He left her for a white high school student who became his devoted wife, and he never had any contact with his first-born child. He refused to acknowledge that child until his peers pressured him to do so. At least one of Fanon’s friends had also witnessed Fanon physically abusing his wife. Frustratingly, Fanon’s previously mentioned contemporaries, Jacques Lacan and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o also died with numerous allegations of physical abuse. Even Jean-Paul Sartre lived long enough for former students to bring cases of sexual abuse against him (and his long-term partner, Simone de Beauvoir). Their own violent traumas from war, exile, and disease are well-documented and have even been used to excuse their violence against girls and women. There are no words for these levels of internalized colonialism and flagrant hypocrisy, and this question lingers: what is a revolution without the inclusive an intersectional pursuit of liberation for all? I am not proposing a carceral response to these patterns of domestic violence, but there needs to be a system of accountability that centers survivors and victims, through transformative justice.

The writings of Frantz Fanon are undeniably foundational for Black diasporic literature and institutional psychotherapy. Yet, there are multiple critical lenses that can be used to still read and still learn from his work. And his work came at a great cost. He sacrificed his body for the Algerian revolution. Allegedly, the CIA is responsible for his negligent death by pneumonia, while he awaited cancer treatment. Ultimately, he died at the age of the thirty-six. While his Pan-Africanism was crucial to the revolution, there is a more intersectional and liberatory internationalism offered by others such as his fellow Caribbean, June Jordan. She cautioned, “I believe that suffering does not confer virtue upon the victim. Hence it is possible that the slave will become the slaveholder and that the victim will become the executioner.” As the intellectuals of the diaspora continue to create culture and pursue liberation, they may need to remember that just as culture can and does shift between spectrums of extremes, so can they. That volatility requires accountability from the collective, and yes, perhaps, especially from the poets.

Works Cited

Alessandrini, Anthony. 2024. “Ambivalent Fanonism: On Adam Shatz’s “The Rebel’s Clinic.” Los Angeles Review of Books.

Fanon, Frantz, 1925-1961. The Wretched of the Earth. New York: Grove Press, 1968.

Gordon, Lewis, 2015. What Fanon Said. New York: Fordham University Press.

Macey, David, 2014. Frantz Fanon: A Biography. Verso Books

Zeilig, L., 2016. Frantz Fanon, Militant Philosopher of Third World Liberation. I.B. Tauris & Co. Ltd. p 31