Amongst the Ruins of Colonialism: the Endless Return of Frantz Fanon

 

In 1992, the day after the first Gulf war, while retrieving The Wretched of the Earth from his own library, Franco Fortini answered to the question “what to do of such oratory, after so many disasters and denials?” in a lapidary way: “Open the newspapers or else go down into the streets. You will soon realize”. By reintroducing the tragic topicality of Fortini’s answer, through this essay I would like to reflect on the double relationship between Fanon and the archive of postcolony.
On the one hand Fanon’s biographical and political parable together with his heritage deal with the different temporalities of decolonization, as discontinuous and unfinished process. On the other hand, Frantz Fanon’s unceasing ‘return’ has to do with the persistent inscription of the trauma of colonial violence within the historical processes of contemporaneity. The misplaced bodies of veiled women, migrants and asylum seekers, signal the breaking of a rule, invisible as it is considered ‘natural’. Similarly the figure of speech of the “awakening of the Arab people” which became popular the day after the ‘Arab springs’ goes together with the obstinate darkening of the relationship between contemporary migrations and colonialism which contribute to transform contemporary migrants into dehistoricized figures.
“Europe literally is – Frantz Fanon wrote from the heart of the colonial struggles – a creation of Third World”.

Published on: The Wretched of the earth? N. 24 New Series – Year XII 2016