"In an under-developed country the party ought to be organized in such fashion that it is not simply content with having contacts with the masses. The party should be the direct expressino of the masses. The party is not an administration responsible for transmitting government orders; it is the energetic spokesman and the incorruptible defender of the masses. In order to arrive at this conception of the party, we must above all rid ourselves of the very Western, very b ourgeois and therefore contemptuous attitude that the masses are incapable of governing themselves. In fact, experience proves that the masses understand perfectly the most complicated problems."
What can I say about Fanon that hasn't already been said better than I ever will? The Wretched of the Earth is truly a seminal text for anyone who wishes to engage with ideas about decolonization and postcolonialism. Fanon is an astute and original thinker, and uses his experience as a psychotherapist to shine a harsh light on the economic and psychological degradation inflicted by imperalism. He doesn't shy away from how colonized people can easily fall into traps of perpetuating greater violence on the path to total liberation, nor from condemning the national bourgeoisie's instinct for survival in the postcolonial state that inevitably leads them to turn their back on its country and looking more towards the colonial mother and foreign capitalists.
What is most valuable from The Wretched of the Earth, I find, is not the first few chapters that have formed the basis of anti-colonial movements since, but rather the lesser discussed later chapters. They take us through a framework of thinking about national culture — "A national culture is not a folklore, nore an abstract populism... A national culture is the whole body of efforts made by a people in the sphere of thought to describe, justify and praise the action through which that people has created itself and keeps itself in existence." — and examples of how a colonial system manifests itself in individual bodies and minds, taken from Fanon's work, from both colonized and colonizer. Its a fascinating way to cap off the text, taking the theoretical and showing us directly, this is what has already happened.
I spent around four months with this text. Not to say that it is particularly dense, but it certainly takes time to sink into you. While reading I was repeatedly reminded of Lacan's work around trauma that I studied during a university course called Violence, Trauma and Reconciliation. We often forget that trauma isn't always individual — it can be a national or even global state that simply shows itself through different symptoms in different people. I've heard that in Black Skin White Masks Fanon explicitly cites Lacan's theories of the mirror stage, so I'm keen to dive into that text sometime this or next year.