Re-framing Franz Fanon
This is a beautiful interview with Lewis Gordon, scholar of the work of Franz Fanon. Gordon contends that many people mis-interpret Fanon, especially around his views of political violence. Gordon’s reframing of Fanon is succinct and captures a side I didn’t get before.
Here are couple of choice quotes, but the episode is short and I encourage you to listen tot he whole thing. Dr Gordon is a great speaker.
As a psychiatrist:
[The book] Black Skin White Masks is the argument that there is such a phenomenon as a sick society. Sometimes the people who suffer the most in a society suffer from actually being healthy. Fanon argues that colonialism produces what he calls sociogenetic, and this means socially produced forms of disorders that take the form not only of mental disorders, but forms of suffering that are political. As a consequence, if there are politically induced forms of suffering, then one has to develop political solutions for them.
(my emphasis added… just look around!)
As an activist:
In other words, Fanon argued that if you’re in a war, your goal should be to end a war to start a struggle for coexistence. Whereas there are people who are in a war who are onlly focused on one thing: the elimination of the enemy. So for them, even if they win, they keep fighting because their ultimate goal is noncoexistence, the absolute elimination of the other. And that’s what Fanon was against.
and:
The issue was the liberation of humankind. He was a radical humanist.
As an existentialist:
Well, here’s the thing. There are varieties of idealism. There are idealisms that are based on the notion of absolute perfection, but there are other idealisms that are based on the notion of reasonability and maturity. For instance, if you think about being a parent, what is an ideal parent? An ideal parent is a parent who is reasonable enough to enable their children to grow up and have room to live their lives. However, an ideal perfect parent in some models is like a god. A parent so perfect that there’s no room for the subsequent generations to grow, to emerge because daddy or mommy were absolutely perfect.
I like to think that this is the sort of idealist that I strive to be: one that can welcome others and co-create a pluralistic utopia. See: “we all can’t be Buddhas”
And finally, a testament from his own brother:
fireworks on the outside, fireworks on the inside
What a description of the man!