The Wretched of the Earth: Chapter 4: On National Culture Summary & Analysis

The mission of underdeveloped countries has been to resist colonialism and clear the path for new struggles. In a post-colonial world, the colonized have fought heartily. If their struggle failed to grace the international stage, it is not because they are not champions, but because the international situation is different. This chapter, Fanon says, is concerned with legitimacy, and it has little to do with political parties. 

Parallel to the political parties, Fanon claims, are the colonized intellectuals. They are a cultured class, and “the recognition of a national culture and its right to exist” is their favorite issue. Politicians situate themselves in the present, but the colonized intellectual positions themselves in history. The colonized intellectual is aware that they run the risk of being trapped in Western culture, so they return to the time that is furthest away from colonialism. They are unable to come to terms with the oppression of recent history, so they reclaim the past to restore the national culture. 

Colonialism was not content to merely exploit and abuse the people, the colonial power stripped the indigenous people of culture and history as well. Colonial power turns to the past of the colonized and “distorts it, disfigures it, and destroys it.” The result was like a “hammer to the head of the indigenous population.” In this way, it is not difficult to understand why the colonized intellectual sought to return to precolonial times and culture.

The quest of the colonized intellectual to reclaim the past is not a national endeavor; it is done on a “continental scale.” The past is brought back, but not the cultural past. Under colonialism, the continent of Africa is seen as a “den of savages” that is cursed, evil, and hated on a continental scale. The colonized intellectual’s attempt to right this wrong must then be continental, too, and they embrace African, or “Negro,” culture. As colonialism places white culture opposite other “noncultures,” “Negro” culture, especially “Negro” literature, must encompass the entire continent.

“Negro” literature, Fanon says, is an example of negritude, and its writers do not hesitate to go beyond the continent of Africa. Negritude has stretched all the way to America, where the “black world” is formed by those from Ghana, Senegal, and Chicago. Those in the “black world” share similar ties and thoughts. However, African culture instead of a national culture is a “dead end” to African intellectuals. Take for example the African Society for Culture, which was created to establish the existence of African culture. The African Society for Culture quickly turns to the Cultural Society for the Black World, and they include all of the black diaspora, including the millions of black people in the Americas. 

White Americans treat black Americans much in the same way that the colonists treated the Africans, but it does not take the black Americans long to discover that the only thing they have in common with black people from Africa is that they all “define themselves in relation the whites.” Thus, the negritude movement is seriously limited. “Negro” culture is breaking up because those who represent it have discovered that culture is national. Even Richard Wright and Langston Hughes must admit that their experiences are completely different from Léopold Senghor or Jomo Kenyatta. Through the insistence that Africans have no culture, the colonial power has led the cultural phenomena to be racialized and understood in continental terms rather than national terms.  

Those without a nation are faced with serious psychological effects. They are “without an anchorage, without borders, colorless, stateless, rootless,” Fanon claims, and they are forced to assume two identities. For instance, a colonized individual is both Algerian and French or Nigerian and English. The colonized intellectual wants to escape white culture and identity, and he will look anywhere, as long as it gets him away from his oppressor. 

Colonized writers typically go through three stages of development. In the first stage, the colonized must prove that they have assimilated to white culture. This stage is full of Symbolists and Surrealists. Then, in the second stage, the colonized writer goes back to precolonial culture. However, they are an outsider to their people and can’t really remember precolonial culture. In the third stage, the colonized writer turns into a fighter for the people and writes combat literature, revolutionary literature, and national literature. They soon discover that a nation does not exist because of culture, but because of the people’s struggle against colonial oppression.

The very language the colonized intellectual uses to appreciate a piece of art is that of the oppressor. The intellectual talks of African art in terms of nationality, but it ends up sounding of exoticism. What’s more, when the intellectual returns to their culture through art, they are a like a foreigner. The intellectual is “mesmerized by these mummified fragments,” which, all bunched together, are negated. Culture cannot be simplified, Fanon says, and this is why the intellectual is “out of step.”

In the visual arts, the colonized creator, in an attempt to make art of national importance, ends up working in stereotypes. They search for genuine national culture and want to represent a national truth. Under colonial rule, the colonized painter did not paint the national landscape; he or she instead chose still life or nonrepresentational art. In an independent nation, the painter returns to the people and wants to represent national reality, which is often “reminiscent of death rather than life.”

Poetry is much the same. The colonized poet, too, wants to pen a poem of national significance; but when he writes of his people, he or she comes up short. The poet must first define his or her subject in order to write, but he must first understand his or her “alienation.” The poet cannot just reconnect with a past where people no longer live. Rather, he or she must connect with the people as they live now.

If the colonized intellectual is to write for their people using the past, they must also plan to open the door to the future to plant hope. The intellectual must commit wholeheartedly to the national struggle, and “muscle power is required.” The intellectual is not solely responsible to national culture, but to the nation as well. Fighting for national culture is also to fight for the nation’s liberation. The people of Algeria, for instance, are fighting for liberation, and Algerian national culture takes shape in that fight. Thus, the formerly colonized should not turn to the past to prove that their national culture exists. National culture is not folklore, nor is it gestures or words. National culture is the “collective thought process of a people to describe, justify, and extol” the struggles of liberation.

There is no connection between the national cultures of Senegal and Guinea, other than that they are controlled by the same French colonialism. Two identical cultures do not exist. The creation of a unifying black culture forgets that “Negros” are disappearing, Fanon says, under the weight of cultural and economic supremacy.