The Wretched of the Earth (1961) - Frantz Fanon

Critical Analysis of Violence in the First Part of The Wretched of the Earth (1961)

Introduction: The Cry of the Colonized

Frantz Fanon opens The Wretched of the Earth with a bold, unsettling assertion: decolonization is always a violent phenomenon. Fanon highlights that true liberation demands an explosion, a physical rupture with the colonial system that built itself through force. Violence is not a tragic consequence but a necessary process, a cleansing force that frees both the land and the soul of the colonized.

“At the level of individuals, violence is a cleansing force. It frees the native from his inferiority complex and from his despair and inaction; it makes him fearless and restores his self-respect.”

Violence: As Historical Continuity

Fanon argues that violence precedes violence. Colonization itself, he says, was born in blood—through conquest, domination, dispossession, and racial hierarchies. The colonial world is divided into two: the settler and the native, the rich and the impoverished, the white and the black. This world is not just unequal; it is antagonistic and irreconcilable.

“Colonialism is not a machine capable of thinking, a body endowed with reason. It is naked violence and only gives in when confronted with greater violence.”

Liberal humanism, Fanon does not romanticize violence, but he contextualizes it as the only language the colonized were ever taught to understand, because it is the only language the colonizers ever spoke.

Colonial Space: A Geography of Hostility

Fanon details how colonialism created a bifurcated world: the clean, white cities of the colonizers and the chaotic, neglected ghettos of the colonized. The native is taught to feel inferior, dirty, and inhuman, and violence is seen as the only tool. Violence becomes the only path to reclaim humanity. The act of rebellion is not just a political movement; it is a psychic rebirth.

“The native’s sector is a place of ill fame, peopled by men of evil repute. It is a world without spaciousness; men live there on top of each other, and their huts are built one on top of the other.”

Violence as Rehumanization

Fanon expresses that violence restores the native’s sense of agency. Under colonization, the native is reduced to an object, a shadow, a tool. 

“The colonized man finds his freedom in and through violence.” Through armed resistance, the native is reborn as a subject, a being capable of acting, deciding, and fighting.

“To shoot down a European is to kill two birds with one stone, to destroy an oppressor and the man he oppresses at the same time.”

Cycle of Reaction and Counter-Reaction

Fanon acknowledges that colonial violence breeds psychological trauma, inferiority complexes, and internalized racism among the colonized. But he also suggests that organized resistance through revolutionary violence is the only way to break this cycle. 

“The colonized can see right away if decolonization is taking place or not: the minimum demand is that the last become the first.”

The native does not begin with ideology; he begins with the experience of pain, humiliation, and rage. Violence, then, becomes a reaction, but one with political meaning—to reclaim control over history. He insists that violence is not immoral—it is pre-moral, a tool of existence in a world that erased their dignity.

Conclusion: The Heartbeat Beneath the Gunfire

Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth does not offer comfort, but it offers clarity, urgency, and raw truth. Through “On Violence”, he strips away illusions about decolonization being peaceful or negotiated. He tells us, plainly and painfully, that when a people have been crushed generation after generation, their liberation cannot be soft. It erupts. It screams. It fights. Violence, in Fanon’s view, is not a moral choice; it is a historical consequence. It is what happens when all other roads to dignity are blocked, when voices are silenced, cultures erased, and humanity denied. He makes us understand that the gun in the native’s hand is not just a weapon, it is a cry, a wound, and a demand. A demand to be seen not as a slave, not as an inferior, but as a human being with pride, pain, and power.

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