The Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon

At the level of an individual, violence works as a mobilization force and removes the inferiority complex. Colonial systems always tends to disunite people, which makes them weaker what violence does is the opposite. At the level of the whole community, it unites people. Violence has an important role in terms of struggling against the colonizers. When two worlds collide, trying to defend their interests, it cannot take a peaceful way. Secondly, decolonization is always about dramatic, crucial changes, which can not be fulfilled without resistance. The natives dream all the time about putting themselves in the place of the settlers. A colony place is usually divided into two separate worlds, where the settlers live in a tidy lit town, with comfortable dwellings, and the natives stay in poverty and misery. The author also makes an important psychological assumption about a native’s envy of the settler. This confrontation is a source of violent struggle between a settler and a native. At the same time, a native’s interest is, correspondingly, is his well-being and prosperity of his community. A settler’s interest does not consider the well-being of a native at all, or, at least, it is of interest for him as long as it can produce his own prosperity. Firstly, colonization is a collision of two separate worlds, which do not understand the peculiarities of each other.īesides the collision of peculiarities, confrontation of interests is even more crucial in bearing colonial violence. Two causes of confrontation contained within the nature of colonization and anti-colonization struggle can be defined after reading Fanon’s work.

In his reasoning, he builds a logical sequence, which causes a chain reaction of violence: experiencing violence from the side of the colonizer, the colonized are forced to show counter-violence. The author considers colonial violence to be a logical and grounded stage of a colonized community’s development.

The Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon