Does Frantz Fanon have anything to teach us today?
Some ideas exist so far beyond one’s own moral boundaries that to hear them articulated out loud, unabashedly, is to experience something akin to awe. That’s how I felt, anyway, when I watched the video of a Cornell professor speaking at a rally a week after Hamas’s October 7 attack. “It was exhilarating!” he shouted. “It was energizing!” The mass murder and rape and kidnapping of Israelis on that day had already been well documented. I saw an atrocity; he saw renewal and life. Gazans, he exclaimed, “were able to breathe for the first time in years.”
The professor spat out these words, but I heard another voice too. It belonged to Frantz Fanon.
The mid-century theorist of decolonization has long been the patron saint of political violence. Since his death in 1961, at the age of 36, Fanon’s concepts have provided intellectual ballast and moral justification for actions that most people would simply describe as terror. For him, the world divided neatly into two groups, the colonized and the colonizer. Innocent civilians didn’t figure much into this dichotomy. When posters bearing photos of Israeli toddlers abducted to Gaza were vandalized and the word kidnapped replaced with occupier, that was pure Fanon. His argument, articulated in “On Violence,” the provocative first chapter of his book The Wretched of the Earth, has the efficiency of a syllogism, as seemingly self-evident as an eye for an eye: The violence of colonialism has robbed the colonized of their humanity; to regain a sense of self, they must commit the same violence against the colonizer. “For the native,” Fanon wrote at his bluntest, “life can only spring up again out of the rotting corpse of the settler.”