Remembering the Wretched: Narratives of Return as a Practice of Freedom

Introduction: Fanon's Final Adieu In The Wretched of the Earth (1), Fanon theorizes a rupture between colonization and decolonization that must be marked by violence in order to be authentic. He reasons that where once hostility of the colonized was directed toward his compatriots or else confined to the practices of dance and possession in which "symbolic killing, fantastic rides and imaginary mass murders [were] brought out and the most aggressivity and the most impelling violence [were] canalized, transformed and conjured away," the confrontation with the colonizer serves as the conduit for the expression of rage. Where the violent impulse was once appeased by myths, it is now directed towards the very real act of liberation (Fanon 57). With this cleavage, not only is the social order completely inverted as "the last shall be the first" (Fanon 2), but the decolonized terrain is a tabula rasa. Fanon, the revolutionary, imagines that this violence unifies the colonized and is a cleansing force for the individual, freeing him from his despair and inaction, making him fearless and restoring his self-respect. Violence is met with self-imposed silence as "when the native is tortured, when his wife is killed or raped, he complains to no one" (Fanon 92). The "native" simply continues to fight, maintaining focus on the justice that will ultimately justify his violence. There is no room for the exposure of grief, only for reciprocating such violations. However, this liberatory violence is not without psychic and psychological consequence as Fanon, the psychiatrist, explores in The Wretched's final chapter, 'Colonial Wars and Mental Disorders'. Through case studies of both victims and perpetrators of violence committed during the anti-colonial struggle in Algeria, Fanon reveals his belief that political violence cannot be bracketed, that it bleeds into the realm of the intimate. (2) It is significant that Fanon wrote The Wretched in the middle months of 1961, shortly before dying of leukemia, and thus its final chapter, from which this paper owes its foundation, is his final adieu. Given that torture and other forms of violence continue to be widespread practices in conflicts local, regional, and global, Fanon's insights on its consequences are clearly applicable to the terrain of the 21st Century. However, the current work focuses not on "the wretched of the earth again", (3) but on Fanon's wisdom in directing our attention toward the psychological and social fragmentation that results from violent confrontations with modern power. It is a more ethereal but no less potent arena of liberatory struggle, one that is engaged in through the use of multiple strategies, including the act of writing. Using Toni Morrison's Beloved and Edwidge Danticat's Breath, Eyes, Memory, this paper explores the ways in which the psychic trauma inflicted by regimes of modern power, trauma that Fanon insists upon exposing, is represented in and resolved through the journeys of the novels' protagonists. It observes that whereas Fanon envisions the decolonized subject as one who rejects the symbolic, these post-colonial writers center the spiritual in the path toward reconciliation with the legacies of colonial and anti-colonial violence. As we will see, the characters in Danticat's and Morrison's novels engage in acts of violence in order to secure their freedom, acts that resonate with aspects of Fanon's vision of anti-colonial struggle. However, these authors' works suggest that in order to repair what enslavement, colonialism, and post-colonialism have broken, there must be a reconnection with the practices, the myths, and the embodied spirituality that Fanon appears to dismiss as diversions from the real business of liberation. Thus, these writers expose Fanon's analysis to be shortsighted or incomplete. However, their work also points to what might be one of the most profound elements of Fanon's legacy. …