Those who find themselves content with only the early works of Fanon (Black Skin, White Masks) are lacking in political imagination, and are too deep into the intellectual decadence that have long pervaded Fanonian studies just years after his untimely death.
This isn’t to say that BSWM is inferior to The Wretched of the Earth, but it’s obvious that the “late” Fanon has proven to be quite too Marxist and militant for liberal readers. Even more so ironic is how traces of Fanon’s militancy is already apparent in BSWM, but they’d rather not talk about that. Far worse, of course, are those in the postcolonial tradition who treat the Wretched of the Earth as some obscure text. It’s a revolutionary text – a diagnosis of the colonial experience, a political manifesto, an investigation of the pitfalls of decolonization, and a prophetic call towards a new human, better than their former masters.
But really, this is the fate of far too many revolutionaries, when institutionalized academia has pacified their heeds. Even in the 50’s Fanon had already predicted this through his trenchant assertions of the duties of the intellectual: that they must be careful with their words, for they usually possess the “ill-repressed desire to guide, to direct the very liberation movement of the oppressed.”
I am aware of the demarcating lines between postcolonial traditions (which I had first studied before Fanon) and the anti-colonial tradition, but the hesitance of the former to seriously engage with the literature of the latter is deeply concerning and indicative of its complicity within the very structures they critique. History, that which provides us clarity of our situation through its rigorous analysis, has now been replaced with poststructural obscurity – and these charlatans have the gall to say that they are on the colonized’s side.
It is best that we do away with such ahistorical (or even supra-historical) approaches, and that while postcolonial nations have far too complex of a situation to be reduced to a singular viewpoint, neither should we resort to a chaotic alternative that breeds opportunism. What we need is therefore not more spaces for new concepts to emerge, but a continual critique of what is already too real for the colonized’s experience. All talks of oppression, and yet are still playing safe with their analysis, are therefore useless. What is clear to us must remain clear.