"Escapes" and Displacements

Notes on Frantz Fanon's Oppositional Discourse

Alejandro De Oto
*

In recent years, "Fanon's readings"
1
have been recurrent in cultural studies, and specifically in
the criticism of the colonial discourse. Apparently, they are not just another "reading". On the
contrary, Fanon's work currently gives way to the production of such far-reaching texts that even
the most restricted notion of historical context, as a cultural and idiosyncratic category, is
displaced and, to a large extent, replaced by notions of cultural mobility, construction and social
negotiation of meaning, of commonness as an almost unlimited space for the intersection of
narratives that express a new direction of representations. These texts comply with a difficult
pact: reading Fanon beyond the historical period produced by his discourse. Fanon's work is a
classic example of the discourse that opposes colonial culture. Nevertheless, currently, it is also
the starting point of postcolonial criticism. The itineraries of this change are complex and relate
to different problems and analyses: the poststructuralist perspectives on texts; the criticism of
disciplinary limits; the emergence of a postimperial culture; the historical and cultural
experiences of millions of individuals that extend beyond any concept of gender, class, and
ethnic or national origin.


*
National University of Patagonia, Argentina.

1
Two concrete examples are the texts by Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism, and Homi K, Bhabha, The
Location of Culture. Each are quoted in different sections of this essay.
The pact includes the possibility of disseminating Fanon's claims throughout increasingly
broader cultural settings, since one of its major requisites is detachment from the most rigid
dimensions of the representations of difference; those that reduce the world to a double-side
place. The pact therefore includes the possibility of network thinking in the sense that Deleuze


2
and Guattari (12) gave to this term, as a means of imagining culture in the crossroads of multiple
narratives.

Dualism and opposition
This article proposes a reflection on how, within the sphere of the criticism of colonialism,
Fanon's texts can contribute towards building spaces for the representations of culture and
society which are less dependent on positions that rigidly display differences and cultural
pronouncements. However, it is necessary to discuss briefly the direction followed by a criticism
that could be termed traditional with respect to Fanon's work. In the first place, the radical
separation produced by the culture of colonialism has been particularly highlighted in Fanon's
criticism. It is frequent to find in his writings the construction of a world full of dualisms, of
insurmountable dichotomies as, for instance, that of the colonizer and the colonized. From my
perspective, emphasizing the divisory nature of such enunciations implies moving Fanon's
interpretations of culture and political action towards a dimension of cultural criticism that places
subjects within fixed representations of cultural and political identities which reproduce what
could be called a predictable context for social and ideological practices. The readings take
place, in my opinion, in the framework of certain conceptual legacies of the theories on
dependence and unequal development. From the cultural point of view, such readings are
supported by the strengthening of discrepancies that stem from two traditions and cultural
projects, among which the "Western" one is hegemonic. Reading Fanon in that direction implies
recognizing the oppositional nature of his discourse emphasizing, however, the functions that
turn it into a place for the irreducible differentiation of historical subjects, insofar as each
represents a determined set of practices defined -externally- by the dimension itself of dual
concepts.


3
Based on the solidness of Fanon's taxonomies, such readings are guided by a conception
of the text that is restricted to the idea of writing as the looking-glass reflection of a reality that
the author tries to describe. Thus, characterizing the colonial world as divided is proving,
verifying the real processes, whose nature logically gives way to an explanation and
classification of subjects oriented to what they should be, and not to what they do or might do.
The assertion that the author's actions are correct would come from the existence of a colonial
situation that is expressly opposed by various social actors within the specific time and space of
decolonization, from the point of view of both the discourse and the social, cultural and political
practices. Fanon's political and cultural texts would then claim their links to a context that
includes three characteristic moments. The first moment places Fanon's work as an indivisible
part of the historical context where it is displayed; the second considers it as an act of mimetism
with respect to itself, as far as the descriptions of concrete processes are concerned, and the third
moment thinks of the author's work as an intervention upon the reality that is being described.
This kind of reading required the emerging representations of Fanon's work to remain
unchanged, in non-metaphorical terms. The consequences of these readings are diverse. To begin
with, they place Fanon's writing within an idea of context that acts simultaneously as reference
and framework. Secondly, they presuppose that this author's claims acquire their meaning or are
echoed exclusively in the specific domain of national liberation struggles, and in the field of
political texts written by decolonized intellectuals. In the third place, these readings territorialize
Fanon's claims in a sense that could be described as restrictive. This kind of territorialization
does not imply establishing the bases of a new thought, but rather restricting it to a specific time
and space. The Wretched... or Dark skin,...
2
should be read only as an example of national


2
I refer here to the translation into Spanish by Julieta Campos, Los condenados de la tierra, Fondo de Cultura
Econmica, eleventh edition, 1994. With respect to Black skin, white masks, the original French version Peau noir,
masques blancs, preface (1952) and epilogue (1965) by Francis Jeanson, ditions du Seuil, 1965, was consulted. The


4
liberation struggles of the decolonization period or, at best, as a theoretical reference to analyze
processes characterized by that name. In other words, these texts would be available only for a
historical delimitation or a specific territorialization of the meanings they contain. From my
standpoint, such a conception is expressing an idea of culture traversed by an order that
transcends the appeals of the concrete assertions of Fanon's writing. When the order of materials
rests upon the idea of corresponding to a particular period, Fanon's escape lines are turned off,
and, consequently, his work is reduced to the dimension of being an historical source in the
narrowest sense of the 19th century methodical historiography. This cancels the possibility of
imagining that Fanon's texts might have a resonance in other times and geographies; that they
could produce an uncertain setting, or that they might be present in the social negotiation of
meanings throughout an extensive historicity. The notion of order appears when Fanon's writing
refers to a taxonomy that prescribes, from the start, different readings, or at least, different texts.

Displacement and opposition
Thus, thinking about Fanon's texts as forming a network implies a totally different strategy from
that which organizes them as a homogeneous unit. It implies considering their associative and
multicultural nature, insofar as it becomes a space for the construction of dialogues about the
experiences of subordination and emancipation that form part of the contemporary historical and
cultural processes.

title is translated for the readers' convenience. Textual quotations are all my translations.


5
In this sense, cultural identities are among the privileged domains of The Wretched..., and
Dark skin..., to investigate the displacement and association strategy contained in Fanon's
oppositional discourse. The refusal to configure an African culture from a racial perspective (The
Wretched...: 193), as it appears in Senghor's
3
essentialist views, against the background of a
national culture,
4
represented by a metaphor of dynamism and transformation, of mobility and
differentiation (225), evokes a twofold action: On the one hand, imagining culture as a field of
opening and association and, on the other, as a challenge confronting the taxonomy of colonial
discourse. This twofold action constitutes the nucleus of Fanon's postcolonial criticism insofar as
it produces a force of escape and displacement. It is equivalent to Csaire's marronage, depicted
as a permanent transgression of the notions of colonial order and hierarchy. The term marronage
and the related verb marroner, were coined by Aim Csaire, one of the creators of the
Ngritude (another of the most powerful neologisms of postcolonial histories). As James Clifford
clearly indicates, what Csaire evokes with the term marronage (to be interpreted as marooning,
which derives from the idea of the runaways Negro slaves of the West Indies and the Guyana's'
Swamps) is not only an escape from order and its impositions, but the experience of
transgressing and reconstructing culture (220). Such reconstruction begins by imagining that the
postcolonial identities are basically an act of resistance symbolically represented by opposition
but also, and fundamentally, by displacement. In this sense, the experiences of The Wretched...
and Dark skin..., emerge as displacements confronting the colonial order, with the reinvention of
cultural toponimics through a permanent mobility of the "motive" for constructing an identity.
Where the presence of colonial order imposes a representation of subjects limited to certain


3
See particularly Libert III. Ngritude et...

4
Fanon sees in the dimension of national culture a form of historization that is absent in the perspective of racial
culture. National culture constitutes, for him, the specific context where resistances evolve and can develop their full
potential (The wretched...: 196-7).


6
desiccated attributes (negro, oriental, slave, woman, etc.) Fanon's texts move in the opposite
direction and, in passing, produce identities that do not claim difference as a refusal to constitute
themselves, but rather as an act of recognition.
5
Consequently, in Fanon's texts, the same as in
Csaires poems, the escape is a form of critical displacement with respect to overintegrated and
hegemonic conceptions of culture:
We are now witnessing Europe's stagnation. Let us escape comrades from that
motionless movement where dialectics have slowly become the logic of balance.
The problem of man must be reformulated. The problem of the brain's reality
must be reformulated, that of the brain mass of the whole humankind, whose
connections must thrive, whose networks must be diversified, and whose
messages must be re-humanized (The Wretched...: 290) (Italics mine).


5
It is nonetheless true that recognition is, to a large extent, a re-inscription on similar bases as those of the
imperial culture. Edward Said asserts that this constitutes the "partial tragedy of resistance, which must to some
degree recover the forms that have been established or at least influenced by the imperial culture" (210).
Escapes, displacements, motionless movements, networks. These are all cultural
strategies of The Wretched... to imagine the way out of a world and a book that do not seem
restricted to their most immediate references. Escapes, motionless movements, networks
represent the tools "offered" by a maroon writing that, although it finds it hard to break its ties
with dual categories, recognizes the need to move, even without changing place. Movement is
thus a form of non-subjection. The network represents a form of multiplicity where culture and
politics are imagined.


7
Fanon's displacement explores the cultural boundaries of colonialism, and of a
construction of culture beyond them. In this sense, his texts are always tension spots that imply,
as Hommi Bhabha recognizes, "questioning our sense of legitimacy of the cultural synthesis in
general" (35). Consequently, movement metaphors bring forth the problem of commonness and
the home. In The Wretched... Fanon sketches the drama of dispossession affirming the reason for
emancipation that reconstructs the postcolonial commonness. Dark skin... exerts pressure over
the cultural boundaries of the colonized peoples to finally discover that commonness is possible
only after colonial alienation has been overcome. The presence of a historical time and a non-
ontological space restore the networks through which Fanon's writing and culture are displayed.
Historicity in the displacement is oppositional by definition, insofar as it subverts retrospective
images that make us think about societies as places where meanings and cultural practices
become permanent (Leed 19). Consequently, home in The Wretched... cannot be a fixed place. It
is a home supported by the process of enunciation of culture and colonial criticism. For Fanon,
the time underlayer of national commonness enables the establishment of a twofold action of
displacement and opposition:
If culture is the expression of national awareness, I would not hesitate in
asserting, in this particular case, that national awareness is culture's most
elaborate form.
Self-awareness does not bar communication. Philosophical reflection teaches us,
on the contrary, that it ensures communication. National awareness, which is not
the same as nationalism, is the only thing that gives us an international dimension
(The Wretched...: 226).
The re-inscription of commonness beyond colonialism is imagined as stemming from the
development of awareness about the possessions that emancipation generates. Displacement is,


8
therefore, the key to cease reproducing the desire of inscribing commonness under the terms of
colonial order. However, such emancipation is expressed as a separation from the regime of truth
that the ambivalent colonial discourse produces, and that holds stereotypes as a major strategy.
As Homi Bhabha has pointed out" Permanence, as the sign of cultural, historical and racial
difference in the colonial discourse is a paradoxical form of representation: it implies rigidness
and an immutable order, as well as disorder, degeneration and devilish repetition" (66). A
passage of The Wretched... reads:
Manicheism sometimes touches the extremes of its logic and dehumanizes the
colonized. Properly said, the colonized are considered animals. In fact, the
language used by the colonizer when talking about the colonized, has a
zoological nature. Reference is made to the reptile movements of the yellow, the
emanations of the indigenous city, the hordes, the reek, the swarming, the
formication, and the gesticulations. When the colonizer wants to make a
description and looks for the right word, he constantly refers to the bestiary (37).
In the animalization of colonized peoples, one of the most impressing passages of The
Wretched..., Fanon interprets the excessive use of these terms in the colonial discourse as a lack
of self-confidence to establish a final knowledge of the world that, in spite of its central role and
the hierarchization it produces (for example by means of taxonomy) endlessly repeats the cause
of the difference. The logic of displacement appears with greater force in Fanon's attempt to re-
sketch the territory where the colonial inscription takes place. For this reason, neither
commonness nor home are possible when the colonized decides to take the place of the colonizer
(34). While one of the principles of the demystification of the colonizers' superiority is already at
stake here, the desire finally becomes articulated with one of the elements of the stereotype
provided by the colonial discourse: natives are ruled by their feelings and not by rational


9
arguments. Commonness will only be possible when it is no longer necessary to re-inscribe a
regime of truth to reproduce the conditions of the colonial discourse; that is, when repetition
ceases.
6
Such is the opportunity imagined by Fanon for national culture and it is, in turn, one of
the most controversial issues of the reading intended here. The nation, or the variation of national
culture can be represented as an attempt to decentralize the idea of nation at stake -said
otherwise, the production of a changing, unsteady national culture- recognizing it as a space that,
as Wilda Western has indicated, admits the addition of "metaphorical figures, more voices,
greater plurality" (60). Nevertheless, it is also a space where one can see "the power to bar other
alternatives", making the claims of subordinate groups seem illegitimate (61). In this sense, the
partial tragedy mentioned by Said may reappear, and the force of the displacement with respect
to the actions of the colonial discourse may be lost, with the consequent weakening of the
oppositional content of a postcolonial discourse achieved by a regime of truth that has only
changed its sign. However, as mentioned earlier in this essay, that is a possibility at stake in the
readings of Fanon's texts, and the possibility of displacement is also at stake. Let us now go
deeper into this.

Histories, impure foundational histories
From my point of view, Fanon's texts establish an agreement with two major dimensions of the
criticism of colonialism. The first is linked to a type of historicity that debates itself between the


6
In this argument taken from Bhabha, reiteration or repetition can be traced back to Freud's considerations on
the difference between repetition and memory ("Recalling, repeating, reelaborating"). For Freud, from the
psychoanalytic dimension, repetition blocks memory and, consequently, makes the past appear as if it were present,
and to be forgotten as past (Luis Hornstein: 1971). This is a central argument in Fanon's emancipation discourse,
provided that, in this case, reference is made to a collective subject. In postcolonial societies, the reiteration of the
logic of the colonial discourse is a kind of "pathology". For this reason, I venture to say that displacement is a form
of making history insofar as it relocates what corresponds in the past and liberates the present from an act of
mimetism. Luis Hornstein, quoted here, uses an expression that clearly reflects this point: "Remembering to forget"
(171). The problem of repetition is examined further below in this essay.


10
reiterative nature of the colonial discourse and the need to construct an emancipatory account.
The second has to do with the emancipation of a global subject.
In The Wretched..., for example, the evidence of the colonial order places the colonized
before the dilemma of constructing opposition discourses that, in the first place, seem to respond
to the logic of dualism, of the manichean representation of culture. In an effort to make
substitutions, the colonized must imagine the world beyond that representation. However, the
problem lies in the fact that the dualism of the colonial discourse could only be abolished with an
effort in the same direction; that is, with a representation of culture that would reproduce the
logic of repetition. The same as overcoming the colonial context does not imply its
fragmentation
7
but rather its displacement, Fanon will show that such a movement implies
certain homogenization. Let us examine the following passages of The Wretched...:
The area inhabited by the colonized is not complementary to that where the
colonizers live. Those two areas oppose each other, but not in the service of a
superior unity. Ruled by a purely Aristotelian logic, they obey the principle of
mutual exclusion: there is no possible conciliation, one of the terms can be spared
(33).


7
It could be said that the colonized world is integrated by the fragmentation that colonialism has produced.
Restoring certain unity is a need of the postcolonial discourse. However, this is paradoxical: colonialism fragments
but also unifies both the colonized and the colonizer. Therefore, it is necessary not to confuse this fragmentation with
the rupture of a colonial discourse that seems solid and homogeneous in most of its articulations.


11
Dislocating the colonial world does not mean that communication between the
two areas will be restored once frontiers are abolished. Destroying the colonial
world is equivalent, precisely, to abolishing an area, burying it deep in the earth
or banishing it from the territory (35).
In this case, abolishing one of the sides represents a project of decolonization equivalent
to the foundation of a new world; that is, a representation whose referent remains momentarily
unchanged, because abolishing one of the sides implies that thereafter there would be no more
sides. The "side" of the colonized disappears during the creation of the new world. The space of
the opposition, cleared and delimited in the colonial discourse, becomes uncertain. It can be said
that the oppositional character of discourses assumes a new shape when the schematization of
colonial representations disappears. The historical time is subtly reintroduced as an implicit
enunciation. In the colonial dualism historicity was refrained by the time of repetition. The
abolition of that dualism clears the way for a historical time that includes different paces, and is
out of tune and heterogeneous since it cannot prevent the apparition of the difference contained
in the stereotypes of the colonial discourse.
At that point, Fanon privileges two strategies. On the one hand, the creation of a
postcolonial society that shares with classic humanism the notion of a global man, but which
opposes it in considering that the new man cannot be built from clippings of the European
historical tradition. On the other hand, the possibility of imagining a policy of identities that
stems from the subject's decisions, both from the enunciate's subject and from that of the
enunciation, thus enacting a history of decisions.
The negro [...] is a slave of his past. However, I am a man, and in that sense the
Peloponnesian war belongs to me just as much as the discovery of the
boussule.[...] Somehow I must obtain from the past of colored peoples my
original vocation. Somehow, I must not try to revitalize an unfairly ill known
negro civilization. I do not become the man of a certain past. I do not want to
acclaim the past at the expense of my present and my future (Dark skin...: 202-3).


12
Sartre has shown that the past, following the line of an illegitimate attitude, has
"taken" individuals massively and [...] shapes them. Such is the past when
transformed into a value. However, I too can recover my past, and give it a value
or blame it for my subsequent choices. I am not obliged to be this or that [...] If a
white man disputes my human nature, I will show him, by making his life bear all
my manly weight, that I am not the Y a bon banania
8
that he still imagines. One
day I discover myself in the world recognizing one sole right: demanding a
human behavior from others. One sole duty: not denying my freedom through my
choices. [...] I am not History's prisoner. I must not search there for the sense of
my destiny. [...] History's density does not determine any of my acts. I am my
own foundation. It is by overcoming what has been historically given, the
instrumental, that I start the cycle of my freedom (Dark skin...: 204-5-6).
Fanon's twofold strategy in these remarkable passages tends to recover a notion of history
that restores the decision-making capacity; it also tries to place decisions within a present
condition on which to establish the construction of an awareness that is not fragmented. History's
determinations forcibly lead to an action that turns subjects into agents. This implies a
historization of the past or, in different terms, a way to stop repetition. For that reason, the appeal
to a pre-colonial past is not included in Fanon's project of emancipation; however, it does


8
Banania was the trademark of a French powdered chocolate in which label appeared an individual with
exaggerated "negro" traits (particularly broad lips), who seemed to be pronouncing, in what was pejoratively termed
"petit ngre", the phrase "Y a bon banania", which can be translated as "Banania is good". Fanon uses this powerful
image in the middle of an existentialist argument, thus revealing that the construction of stereotypes in the colonial
imaginary is evident even in the minutest details. I thank Bertrand and Dominique for their explanation during a talk
we had in Trelew (Patagonia) in the winter of 1996.


13
delineate a humanism that has moved away from the center of any conception of cultural and
historical superiority.
9

It is not possible to stop the repetition and fragmentation of the colonial world claiming
roots that grow deep into "before the Fall". If the cycle of freedom is to be reintroduced, the
consolidation of a postcolonial culture is a process with multiple positions.


9
One could object this aspect of Fanon's criticism arguing that there is a contradiction between his radical
criticism to colonialism, especially in the quoted passages that refer to the worlds of the colonizer and the colonized,
and the holistic posture of his cultural criticism, which is inclusive. However, as Robyn Dane has pointed out, the
exposure of colonialism's mutual destructiveness is Fanon's immortal revolutionary act, because his appreciations
can be applied to all kinds of oppression (75). In this sense, posing the existence of a new humanism in Fanon is far
from wrong since he appeals to all forms of subordination. For an opposed perspective with a high argumentative
level, see Oladipo Foshina's article, "Frantz Fanon and Ethical Justification of Anti-Colonial Violence".


14
In view of the above, I presume that The Wretched... describes opposition to colonial
culture as a struggle in a territory free from roots. This is because no permanence is possible
when a new form of nomadism is going to be inaugurated. Neither The Wretched... nor Dark
skin... show a longing for deep, negro, cultural roots from which to oppose colonialism.
Nonetheless, these texts allow readings that emphasize an opposing perspective because Fanon
presents colonial culture as an inscription. This inscription privileges the grounding (both
physical and discursive) of order and taxonomy in the territory and the bodies of the colonized.
In a sense, it could be said that such an inscription captures Fanon's text in a logic of totaling
hierarchies and gazes. But what really occurs is a negative sanction of the value of a root coined
in cultural absolutism, in the myth of the origin, and in the predestination of a group of men and
women in contrast to another group of men and women. Following the same direction, these
texts announce an intention: constituting a "Rizomatic" culture, according to Deleuze and
Guattari's terms. That is, a culture available to multiplicities and lines of escape. That intention is
mentioned in Fanon's refusal to claim the lost identity, and it is a form of imagining the
whereabouts in his discourse of unification after colonial fragmentation. Fanon can claim a
humanism different from the classical Western one, which constructed a homogeneous and
hegemonic notion of Man, because nowadays being a man is a matter of networks and decisions.
Consequently, both the discoveries of the compass and the Peloponnesian war are man's own. At
this point, Fanon's existentialist argument,
10
unifying in the direction of an almost essential
human experience, becomes intertwined with the claim for an extended and, in many cases,
diverging historicity, investing his discourse with a postcolonial project. A space for the dialogue
between identities and the social pacts or negotiations of meaning appears at this point.


10
At the beginning of "Existentialism", Jean-Paul Sartre declares: "Man is nothing else than what he does of
himself. Such is the first principle of existentialism" (259).


15
Fanon will show these aspects ambiguously because in a first reading it would seem that
he is precisely trying to indicate a failure of the colonial society: the lack of roots. Thus, the
colonizer's society will be an act of violence, a kind of externality that attempts, and to great
extent succeeds in taking over the body of the colonizer, and the "body" of the land. A particular
trait of this society will be its amazement before the "deeply rooted" world of the colonized. The
colonizer, Fanon would say, "never shows his feet", "[t]he colonizer's city is tough, all made of
stone and iron. It is a city with lights and paved streets..." (33). In the colonizer's practices and
representations there is always a distance with respect to the land, which is, paradoxically, the
place that the "wretched" long for but already inhabit:
For the colonized peoples, the most essential value, being the most tangible, is
primarily land...; [...] What the colonized have experienced in their land is that
they could be arrested, beaten, starved... (The Wretched...: 39).
However, the failure shows something else. The failure shows that there is no escape
from a colonial history if it is repeated. Reiteration leads to new foundations that are presented,
and therefore represented, as the solution to the anomaly. Once the links with the land are
restored, it is possible to talk again of a culture. In The Wretched... and Dark skin... movement
pretends to proceed beyond the discovery of the root.
Fanon's criticism of the colonial society has shown that it is not possible to think about
emancipation if it is not permanently kept away from the center; that is, if it is not preserved
from a pattern of oppositions that forces defining who are inside and who are outside. But
lacking a root or not conceiving the world from that point of view implies that the dramatic space
of dispossession begins to turn into the unsteady soil upon which colonial identities are built, and
where the construction of postcolonial identities is debated. Between the demand to beat down
the injustice of colonial society, and the desire to occupy the colonizer's place, the intermediate
space of an oppositional representation somehow arises. Not absolutely oppositional, as
manichean categories, but oppositional insofar as it produces difference as an act that does not


16
follow the rules of the game of the colonial discourse. De-centering, at this point, is the same as
nomadism. It is equivalent to contrasting the "History that does not determine any of my acts"
against itself, thus challenging the operations of the classic humanist discourse, which in the
colonial world is depicted as lacking synchronization between the colonial institution and its
discursive postulates. The "colonial" reiteration of "fruitful" discourses in the production of
power and knowledge in other geographies is, in the colonized societies, a space for the
desiccation of cultural practices. The subject of the enunciation and the subject of the enunciate
are represented as two places characterized by an ontological concept of identity. The production
of power and knowledge and the establishment of a regime of truth follow the direction of
irreducibly opposing categories. The third space, that is formed between the subject of the
enunciation and the subject of the enunciate begins to represent a displacement in the limits of
duality. This is a crucial moment of Fanon's criticism. When in Dark skin... he talks of the
language, he imagines it precisely as a space of crisis. Of crisis because it represents a colonial
inscription that postcolonial society cannot disregard insofar as the process of emancipation of
the colonial subject is based on a new text:
To talk [is] [...] to bear the weight of a civilization. A man who knows the
language also knows the world explained by that language. All colonized peoples
(with an inferiority complex) [...] stand vis--vis the language of the civilizing
nation; that is, of the metropolitan culture (Dark skin...: 34).
Among a group of youngsters of the West Indies, the one who can explain
himself adequately, who knows the language as if it were his mother tongue [...]
deserves attention, he is a quasi white. In France it is said: talking like a book; in
Martinique: talking like a white (Dark skin...: 36).
Moreover, that new text cannot easily do without what could be called the construction of
sense. In other words, showing Fanon's liberation effort only in terms of the substitution of a
colonial account by a postcolonial one does not solve the problem of inscription and maintenance
of sense beyond a brief period. If, in the colonial context, talking like a white is talking like a


17
book, then the possibility of inscribing sense and direction rests in the hands of those who are
closer to the most "literal" form of culture. That which is capable of making endure the mark left
by writing, in spite of the fact that its lyrics may have the sound of repetition and erosion in the
colonial space. This dilemma poses certain problems for the criticism of culture that is conceived
as a root. The inscription of sense, its production and durability in writing, even in the
metaphorical writing of social texts, is a deep mark that Fanon's discourse cannot easily
overlook. The wish of the colonized to occupy the place of the colonizer has to do with an
inscription related to the culture of writing. In this framework, leaving behind the oppositional
categories produced by the colonial space also implies giving up forms of inscription; that is,
giving up the idea of a subject that maintains an extensive control over the production of sense.
Such a subject would only be possible under the unsteady conditions and nomadism of the
process of enunciation in the social text, and in a broad projection of the readers' universe.
However, Fanon's project does not contemplate writing as an exit, although it always inscribes
and makes sense endurable. Paul Ricoeur indicates that "part of the sense of a text is being open
to an indefinite number of readers and, consequently, of interpretations [and that this]
opportunity for multiple readings constitutes the dialectic counterpart of the text's semantic
autonomy" (44). The sense of Fanon's texts can be considered in this way. These texts are
"offered" to an extensive and heterogeneous universe of readers who would produce a broad
range of interpretations to ensure the permanent opening of this writing. While this can be
applied to almost any case, within the colonial culture it acquires evident relevance: From the
reading of The wretched... and Dark skin... it can be seen that the sense of the colonial text and
its related practices has become autonomous, and it is therefore very difficult to establish a
process of interpretation of such practices aimed at displacing them. Talking like a white, which
is in turn talking like a book, is the shape that sense acquires in the colonial representation. This


18
shape acts as a non-temporal code that inscribes subjects in repetition. Historicity, or the capacity
to remember in order to reconstruct the present, is the response in terms of displacement that
Fanon inaugurates.
The possibility to historicize then depends on the subjects' capacity to perceive that
representations are something constructed and that, as such, they can be replaced. In addition, it
is possible to imagine an associative experience; one that can be related to other texts and
durations.
The second dimension mentioned earlier in this section appears at this point. The
emancipation of a "global" subject enables Fanon's texts to be read and related to historical,
cultural and social experiences that are beyond the narrow contextual limits. It is not only
Algeria or Africa in general what is at stake, but the cultural criticism of any process of
subordination. Here The Wretched... and Dark skin... become a new, global scale, ethical subject.
The decolonized subject now becomes a model and, as such, the ethico-cultural ideal to be
sustained.
After the struggle, not only colonialism disappears, but also the colonized.
This new humankind, for itself and the others, cannot prevent defining a new
humanism. The objectives and methods of the struggle forestall that new
humanism (The Wretched...: 225) (Italics mine).
The evidence and criticism of the alienation of the colonized subject -and of the
colonizer- can be transferred beyond the geographic, historical and cultural limits. Both
dimensions, are certainly linked, but the importance of the difference lies in the possibility of
seeing how Fanon's discourse permanently moves away from the enunciation subject, producing
historico-political dimensions that will prevail longer. The assertion that Fanon generates a
humanistic type of thought can be held if this difference is established between the reduced
historical context where his works appear, and the less delimited space of a massive criticism of
colonialism where negotiated identities would be built.


19

Last displacement
Displacement, the way it is addressed in this essay, is a deferred problem. Fanon's displacement
is towards indetermination; however, this could not be explained unless his texts were read as
historico-social programs, which would bring about a reduction of their mobility. The
experiences of the fragmented world of colonialism, and the frequently upsetting mobility of
postcolonial processes knit together to suggest that beyond the separation between the
hegemonic I/We and the subordinate Other/They what is at stake is a more complex process of
cultural identifications and origins. Displacement takes place, as already mentioned, with respect
to binary logic but, from that point, the problem is different. This is a key aspect of the criticism
of the colonial discourse, and constitutes a link with other postcolonial writings; for example,
two stories by the Islamic Indian writer Saadat Hasan Manto,
11
that occupy the same unsteady
space as Fanon's criticism of colonial dualism: "Toba Tek Singh" and "El perro de Tithwal" (The
dog from Tithwal"). In the first story, Manto makes a masterful description of a madhouse
where, after the separation of India and Pakistan, "sick" persons are distributed during a
borderline exchange. An old man, the main character, refuses to be sent back to any place except
Toba Tek Singh. Another patient remains on top of a tree claiming that he wants to live there.
The old man finally dies at that no-man's border area, the space between the Pakistani and Indian
lines. "The dog from Tithwal" is about a dog trapped in the battlefront trenches. Indians and
Pakistanis permanently "accuse" it of being the Other, and while running between one trench and
the other to save its life, it dies. Both tragedies depict the danger of maintaining repetition and
preventing nomadism. Above all they represent the actions of a colonial narration that attempts


11
For a historico-political study, in Spanish, of Saadat Hasan Mantos' works, see Susana Devalle, Saadat Hasan
Manto, Antologa de cuentos.


20
to exorcise, by means of separation, an absolute identity from the dimensions of the same
Otherness it institutes.
In both stories, the duality of the colonial discourse and the despair over fixing identities
emerge as a postcolonial trope. The "mad" old man and the dog on the battlefront give proof of
the strengthening of social and textual legitimacy. In the extreme of the metaphor, both
characters are brought back to order through death
12
, however, the tragedies where they appear
can also integrate the space for the criticism of colonial narratives. Both characters die in an
undetermined, no-man's land which, on the one hand, seems like a barren territory but, on the
other, forestalls a representation of escape and displacement. It is at the boundaries where the
legitimacy of colonial discourse is first questioned. Fanon, with a more evident political
determination, but definitely the same as Manto, understands the criticism of the colonial
discourse as a displacement toward undetermined regions. In the last case, whether the place of
this displacement is national culture is not the most important issue. What matters is that with
Fanon's texts we can image that leaving behind determination and repetition, and reintroducing
historicity, can lead to a different type of journey, that is, to nomadism.


12
The echoes of this attitude are a constant even in works that do not share the same historico-cultural setting.
For example, in Goethe's Dr. Faustus, Marguerite, the young peasant girl in love with Faustus, ends up committing
suicide. This tragedy that has often been considered as a victory of the Old Regime, can be thought of, as Marshall
Berman points out, as a form of escape from the medieval world towards modernity (1986).


21
REFERENCES

Berman, Marshall. Todo lo slido se desvanece en el aire. La experiencia de la modernidad.
Mxico: Siglo XXI, 1986.

Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture. London-New York: Routledge, 1994.

Clifford, James. Dilemas de la cultura. Antropologa, literatura y arte en la perspectiva
posmoderna. Barcelona: Gedisa,1995.

Dane, Robyn. "When Mirror Turns Lamp: Frantz Fanon as Cultural Visionary". Africa Today,
2nd quarter (1994): 70-91.

Deleuze, Gilles and Flix Guattari. Rizoma. Introduccin. Mxico: Ediciones Coyoacn, 1994.

Devalle, Susana B.C. Saadat Hasan Manto. Antologa de Cuentos. Estudio de Susana Devalle.
Traduccin del urdu, Daniel de Palma. Mexico City: El Colegio de Mxico, 1996.

Fanon, Frantz. Los condenados de la tierra. Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Econmia, 1994
(eleventh edition).

________. Peau Noire, masques blancs. Preface and Epilogue by Francis Jeanson, Paris: ditions
du Seuil, 1965.

Foshina, Oladipo. "Frantz Fanon and the Ethical Justification of Anti-Colonial Violence".
Theory and Practice, 15.1 (1989): 179-212.

Freud, Sigmund. "Recordar, repetir, reelaborar. (Nuevos consejos sobre la tcnica del
psicoanlisis; II) (1914)". In Sigmund Freud, Obras completas. Buenos Aires: Amorrortu, 1990.
Vol. XII, 1946-1957.

Hornstein, Luis. "Recordar, repetir y reelaborar: una lectura". In Silvia Bleichmar, Luis
Hornstein, David Maldavsky et al.. Lecturas de Freud. Buenos Aires: Lugar Editorial, 1990. 171-
210.

Leed, Eric J. The Mind of the Traveler. From Gilgamesh to Global Tourism. New York: Basic
Books, 1991.

Ricoeur, Paul. Teora de la interpretacin. Dicurso y excedente de sentido. Mexico City: Siglo
XXI, Univ. Iberoamericana, Depto. de Letras, 1995.

Said, Edward. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Alfred P. Knopf, 1993.

Sartre, Jean Paul. "Existentialism". In Lawrence Cahoone (ed.). From Modernism to
Postmodernism. An Anthology. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishers Inc., 1996,
259-273.

Senghor, Lopold Sdar. Libert III. Ngritude et civilisation de l'universel, Paris: Seuil, 1977.


22
Western, Wilda. Alquimia de la nacin. Nasserismo y poder. Mexico City: El Colegio de
Mxico, 1996, (forthcoming).