The Read: Kwame Anthony Appiah, "Liberation Psychology", New York Review of Books, Feb. 24 2022
Friday's Child Is Loving and Giving
Why did I get this article?
I think here it’s “why did I immediately start this article before working through the rest of the issue”? (I generally don’t read the NYRB or the London Review of Books cover-to-cover.) The answer is: I’m always interested in what Appiah has to say, I’m interested in Fanon, and another scholar I respect a lot had said that this essay made him feel a bit queasy about Fanon.
Is it what I thought it was?
Yes, it’s very interesting and made me think a lot not just about Fanon but about how I have come to know the things I know.
What continuing uses might I have for it?
I think I need to re-read Wretched of the Earth, or at least “On Violence” (it’s been a while) and I’ll want to look at this again before I start. It’s also a teachable essay any time I might assign Fanon, which I might do in a few years in a new class I’m going to teach on African nationalism between 1945-1975.
Quotes
“They were out to get him. It was at once a source of terror and a form of tribute. Frantz Fanon was targeted as an Algerian revolutionary, but he was also a psychiatrist, and he knew how emotions could be linked with their opposites.”
“It is an awkward fact of history that our fiercest anticolonial leaders generally came from the educated bourgeoisie…Fanon was reared in a household that had servants, private music lessons for his sisters, and in addition to a comfortable home in the capital, a country house with luxuriant gardens.”
“But then Fanon always had a flair for the dramatic in matters large and small: writing to his dear maman from Lyon, he declared ‘Without coffee, I believe I’ll die.’ He also went to the movies. This is not an incidental fact about him. Fanon was a movie lover—’cinephile’ is too fastidious a term for someone who loved popular films and loved to complain about them.”
“Parts of The Wretched of the Earth have a corruscating power, even when its claims are wildly at odds with reality…Yet the prose of the party apparatchik often obtrudes. That’s particularly notable when it comes to what Harbi dubs Fanon’s ‘peasant messianism’. Fanon, knowing very little about Algeria’s peasants, turns them into magical creatures, a source of ‘unimagined tenderness and vitality’, who were ‘spontaneously revolutionary’.”
“Fanon’s analysis would have been improved had he been a better Marxist, or at least grappled with debates over the economic realities of colonization.”
“Theorists of revolution sometimes use the term ‘prefigurative politics’ to warn that movements are not transformed in their character when they attain power: beware a group devoted to participatory democracy that is itself harshly autocratic.”
“Today, The Wretched of the Earth…has the status of the ubiquitous predigested text, the ‘campus classic’ rendered almost illegible by the interpretations layered over it.”
“The poet and the propagandist vied within him, as did the teller of truths and the retailer of cant. It’s almost painful to recall the ‘final prayer’ with which he concluded his first book: ‘Make me always a man who questions.’ What would have happened, one wonders, had this prayer been granted?’”
Commentary, asides, loose thoughts, unfair complaints
On one hand, this is a familiar kind of treatment of a radical or revolutionary intellectual or leader and honestly a bit tedious and predictable as a result. Appiah wonders what Fanon would have been had his prayer to become a man who questions been granted, but this is a somewhat incurious or predetermined engagement by Appiah himself—he is not really grappling with Fanon as a person, with the most challenging dimensions of Fanon’s work, or with the complicated history of readings of Fanon since he died. This essay is one of those familiar bursts of exasperation from an intellectual at left-wing colleagues, friends, students and adversaries: “let me show you that someone you venerate was in fact a rather bad person”. You can almost hear him fuming, “ok you woke kids, you want to get woke? here’s some stuff for you to chew on”. So the Fanon we get here is cruel to women (he abandons an early lover and the child he had with her, he hits his wife, he embraces revolutionary patriarchy), he’s a thoroughly bourgeois figure who loves popular cinema (but also completely misrepresents the plot of a film he loved), he was part of murderous and autocratic factionalism within the FLN but also a calculating person primarily looking to self-preservation, he was a “demanding boss” in his professional practice and also a rather conventional psychiatrist to boot, he was wrong about how decolonization actually happened and also had lethally stupid ideas about military strategy, he was a grandiose party hack whose writing was mostly uninteresting, he was so chatty that he couldn’t resist blabbing on and on to a CIA agent, and so on.
It’s not wrong—Appiah is pulling this from biographers and scholars of the Algerian conflict and scholars who work on decolonization and nationalism—but it does feel incomplete, incurious, tendentious. Appiah visits uniquely on Fanon things that could really be said of almost any nationalist or radical of his era—for example, which of them, of whatever ideological bent, was not of the educated bourgeoisie, in that generation? The least fierce and most conciliatory were; so were the most fierce and militant. “He was a cultivated Frenchman—a student of its civilizational treasures. Why wasn’t he treated as one?” I could read that line in a biographical engagement with the writing or speeches of any Francophone nationalist or negritude intellectual of this era, I suspect, and judge it a fair and accurate observation. I’m hard-pressed to think of an Anglophone African nationalist of this era about whom something simialr could not be said: I am an educated man! I am a civilized man! Why am I not accorded recognition and privileges that recognize that I have done what you ask of me? It gets asked again and again at exactly that moment when these men and women discovered that what they took to be a promise about class aspiration was relentlessly revoked by a color bar when they first sought to cash in on the promise. That’s a good conversation (though not a new one) but it’s bigger than Fanon.
Appiah seems to be working overtime at some points to rob Fanon of any claim to generative provocation, any insight or inspiration. For example, somewhat unsurprisingly, Appiah holds Ghana up as proof of how little Fanon understood about how decolonization was going to actually unfold—that in non-settler colonies, the empires were concluding that colonialism wasn’t worth it, that it was a bad investment, and that they would let independence unfold peacefully, that violent struggle would only happen where white settlers tried to hold on to what they had stolen. This is a rather literalist reading of Fanon as simply trying to provide an instruction manual for African nationalism that had only one commandment: be violent! with only one rationale: because that’s the only way you’ll get independence! Appiah wags his finger: no, you silly man, mostly it was negotiated. But campus classic or not, Fanon’s writings (both Black Skin, White Masks and the writings collected in Wretched of the Earth are much more a critique of the men who were negotiating and eventually achieved independence than they were a specific argument about tangible strategies of decolonization. Fanon may have been dismayed by Nkrumah and Ghanaian independence, but not because they defied his prescribed method; more because they demonstrated his point, which is that a postcolonial state that was tightly built on the administrative and material infrastructures of the colonial state was doomed to reproduce the dependencies and subjugations of colonialism in new form.
That’s a huge debate in its own right, but I know that Appiah understands that Fanon might have had a fairly valid point on that score—and that there is at least one valid way to read Fanon that is not about the literal use of specific kinds of violent insurgency to overturn imperial rule but about a belief that colonialism could only end via some complete erasure of its forms, institutions and histories, some scouring or erasure of the violence used to establish imperial rule in the first place. However inadvisable or impossible that seems, if one is determined to read Fanon as a prophetic guide who foresaw decolonization, it seems plausible to credit him with understanding perfectly well why the postcolonial states inhabited by nationalists who came into power after more-or-less peaceful transitions would be swiftly trapped in dependent relationships to former empires, mired in profound corruption and ineptitude, and undercut by military coups and insurgencies. Fanon’s own real political involvements may have been just as awful (and their ultimate outcomes little different, beyond his death) as those of any other nationalist who schemed against rival parties and rival leaders and betrayed most of the commitments made in the struggle but Fanon’s cynicism about nationalism and nationalists still has some punch to it. I’m just surprised to see Appiah being this grudging and circumscribed about any appreciation at all for Fanon (the thinker or the person). I understand what annoys Appiah about The Wretched of the Earth; some of that annoyed me too on my last encounter with the text, in much the same way that Hardt and Negri’s Empire irked me.
On the other hand, if there was a point where I did really pause and was convinced that I needed to re-read Fanon, it was actually from a seemingly trivial observation. Appiah discusses Fanon’s interest in the 1949 film Home of the Brave. I haven’t seen the movie, but it comes up in Black Skin, White Masks. What stuck with me in Appiah’s essay is that I’m completely convinced that the film was important to Fanon, that comes up in the book in a central way, and yet I kept thinking “I don’t remember this at all”. What I was even more struck by is that Appiah seems completely right that Fanon misunderstands some of the films that informed his writing (and that Black Skin is in some ways “zany”). What this made me think of is Appiah’s valid point about how we read works presented to us as “campus classics” or as theoretical touchstones. Much of the time we’re just hunting through them for the passages we’ve already been prompted to find, like we’re on an Easter Egg hunt. Humanities faculty frequently get frustrated when students do not really read some canonical work we are hoping to slowly work through with them, but I think at least some of us (me at least) have some histories of instrumental reading in our own intellectual lives. More importantly, even if we did take that kind of time, to really read in that way takes a kind of erudition that students don’t have and sometimes we don’t either—to know the referents in the text (and where they mis-refer), to try to decide whether what seem now to be oddities and fragments matter enough to puzzle through, to read with a will to what is useful and evocative or with a skeptical tallying of contradictions, failures and errors?
I almost think making those decisions clearly and persuasively, for oneself, for students, for readers of an essay about reading a canonical text, takes something of a dispositional confession at the start, about what a book or an author has meant to you before. Appiah comes back to several of Fanon’s aphorisms from key moments in his life and his writing: Make of me a man who questions. I needed not to know. I avenge myself. You get a clear sense of Appiah’s disappointment that Fanon was not a man who questions the things that Appiah believes he should have questioned, and that he succeeded in not knowing what he did not want to know. But I can’t quite get away from the sense that the avenging here is from Appiah for all those conversations he’s been stuck in where someone has waved Fanon at him as a sacred icon without really knowing what they’re endorsing. There are re-readings where I’m surprised to find that there is more there than the common wisdom says, and re-readings where there is less. There are re-readings where I’m rediscovering the ways in which I was stupid the last time I read something or I’m realizing that I paid more attention back then than I have more recently. But the starting place is usually personal as well as collective—sometimes I also find that the “collective wisdom” I’m reading against evaporated long ago or was always more sagacious than I was. I’m not actually sure what my starting place on The Wretched of the Earth will turn out to be whenever I undertake it myself, but I think I may start on a different square of the board than Appiah has in this essay.
Image credit: “frantz fanon” by désinteret, https://www.flickr.com/photos/26529156@N08/2480718989