Like Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon is one of the best-known Martinicans in history, whose thoughts have been studied extensively throughout the world. Like the poet, Frantz Fanon vigorously denounced colonialism and the subjugation of one people to another who believed themselves superior. Although some of his words provoked strong hostile reactions in the midst of the war between France and Algeria, Frantz Fanon is still an international figure in the anti-colonialist struggle. Here is a look at his most striking quotes.
The black man who wants to whiten his race is as unfortunate as the man who preaches hatred of the white man.
The Martinican is a Frenchman, he wants to remain within the French union, he asks only one thing, the Martinican, that the imbeciles and the exploiters leave him the possibility of living humanly.
The European nations are wallowing in the most ostentatious opulence; this European opulence is literally scandalous because it was built on the backs of slaves, it was nourished by the blood of slaves, it comes in a straight line from the soil and subsoil of this underdeveloped world; the well-being and progress of Europe were built with the sweat and the corpses of the Negroes, the Arabs, the Indians, and the yellow people. This we decide not to forget.
Each generation must, in relative obscurity, discover its mission, fulfill it or betray it.
[Colonization is] a systematized negation of the other, a forced decision to deny the other any attribute of humanity.
The colonial regime is a regime established by violence. It is always by force that the colonial regime was established. It is against the will of the people that other peoples more advanced in the techniques of destruction or numerically more powerful have imposed themselves. Violence in daily behavior, violence towards the past which is emptied of all substance, violence towards the future.
My philosophy teacher, of West Indian origin, reminded me one day: When you hear bad things said about Jews, listen up, they are talking about you.
The density of history does not determine any of my actions. I am my own foundation. And it is by going beyond the historical, instrumental data, that I introduce the cycle of my freedom.
Let's leave this Europe that never stops talking about the human while massacring him everywhere it meets him, in every corner of its own streets, in every corner of the world.
The colonized also manages, through religion, to ignore the colonizer. Through fatalism, all initiative is taken away from the oppressor, the cause of the evils, of the misery, of the destiny returning to God. The individual thus accepts the dissolution decided by God, flattens himself before the colonist and before the fate and, by a kind of interior rebalancing, reaches a stone serenity.
Let us not pay tribute to Europe by creating states, institutions and societies inspired by it. Humanity expects something else than this caricatured and on the whole obscene imitation.
If we want to transform Africa into a new Europe, America into a new Europe, then let us entrust the destinies of our countries to Europeans. They will know how to do it better than the most gifted among us.
But if we want humanity to advance a step further, if we want to take it to a different level from that at which Europe has manifested it, then we must invent, we must discover.
If we want to respond to the expectations of our peoples, we must look elsewhere than in Europe.
Moreover, if we want to respond to the expectations of Europeans, we must not send back to them an image, even an ideal one, of their society and of their thinking, for which they occasionally feel an immense nausea.
For Europe, for ourselves and for humanity, comrade, we must make a new skin, develop a new thought, try to set up a new man.
The explosion will not happen today. It is too early... or too late.
I do not arrive armed with decisive truths.
My conscience is not crossed by essential fulgurances.
However, in all serenity, I think that it would be good if certain things were said.
I will say these things, not shout them. Because for a long time, the cry has been out of my life.
And it is so far away...
Why write this book? Nobody asked me to.
Especially not to those to whom it is addressed.
So what do you think? So, calmly, I answer that there are too many fools on this earth. And since I say so, it is a question of proving it.
If you don't want the man in front of you, how can I believe in the man who can be in you?
When Negroes approach the white world, there is a certain sensitizing action. If the psychological structure proves fragile, there is a collapse of the Self. The Negro ceases to behave as an actional individual. The goal of his action will be Other (in the form of the White), because Only Other can value him. This on the ethical level: self valorization...
My final prayer: O my body, make me always a man who questions!
Racism is a plague on humanity.
At the level of individuals, we are witnessing a real negation of common sense. While the colonist or the policeman can, all day long, hit the colonized, insult him, make him kneel down, we will see the colonized pulling out his knife at the slightest hostile or aggressive look from another colonized. For the last resource of the colonized is to defend his personality against his fellow man. Tribal struggles only perpetuate old grudges buried in the memories. By throwing himself into his vengeance, the colonized tries to persuade himself that colonialism does not exist, that everything happens as before, that history continues. We grasp there in full clarity, at the level of the communities, these famous behaviors of avoidance, as if the plunge in this fraternal blood made it possible not to see the obstacle, to postpone the inevitable option, the one that leads to the armed struggle against colonialism.
What we are saying is that the European has a definite idea of the Negro, and there is nothing more infuriating than to be told, "How long have you been in France? You speak French well."
One might reply that this is because so many Blacks speak in little Negroes. But that would be too easy. You are on the train, you ask:
- Excuse me, sir, would you point me to the dining car, please.
- Yes, my friend, you take the corridor straight ahead, one, two, three, it's there.
The colonized, therefore, discovers that his life, his breathing, the beating of his heart are the same as those of the colon. He discovers that a settler's skin is no more valuable than a native's skin. That is to say that this discovery introduces an essential jolt in the world. All the new and revolutionary assurance of the colonized follows from it. If, indeed, my life has the same weight as that of the colonist, his look does not strike me any more, does not immobilize me any more, his voice does not petrify me any more. I don't get confused in his presence anymore. Practically, fuck him. Not only does his presence no longer bother me, but I am already preparing such ambushes that he will soon have no other way out than to flee.
The question is: Can the white person behave in a healthy way towards the black person, can the black person behave in a healthy way towards the white person?
This Europe that never stopped talking about man, never stopped proclaiming that it was only concerned about man, we know today with what suffering humanity has paid for each of the victories of its spirit.
Racism is not a whole but the most visible, the most daily, to say the least, at times, the most crude element of a given structure.
Colonialism is not a thinking machine, is not a body endowed with reason. It is violence in the state of nature and can only bow to greater violence.
The U.N. has never been able to solve any of the problems posed to human consciousness by colonialism, and whenever it has intervened, it has done so in order to come to the concrete aid of the colonial power of the oppressor country. [...] In reality, the UN is the legal card that imperialist interests use when the card of brute force has failed.
It is the other's view of us that makes us strangers to ourselves.
The great success of the enemies of Africa is to have corrupted the Africans themselves.
The colonized world is a world cut in half. The dividing line, the border, is indicated by barracks and police stations. In the colonies, the valid and institutional interlocutor of the colonized, the spokesman of the colonist and the oppressive regime is the gendarme or the soldier.
For the colonized people, the most essential value, because it is the most concrete, is first of all the land: the land that must ensure bread and, of course, dignity. But this dignity has nothing to do with the dignity of the human person. This ideal human person, he has never heard of it...
We still seem to hear Césaire: "When I turn the knob on my radio and I hear that in America negroes are being lynched, I say that we have been lied to: Hitler is not dead; when I turn the knob on my radio and I hear that Jews are insulted, despised, pogromized, I say that we have been lied to: Hitler is not dead; when I finally turn the knob of my radio and learn that in Africa forced labor is instituted, legalized, I say that, truly, we were lied to: Hitler is not dead."
