Fanon and the Violence ofthe Mother Tongue

Fanonandthe Violence of the Mother Tongue »

How to undermine one’s inmost organ? How to hear in the mother tongue not only oneself but also the voices of the mother and father that resoundinit? Needone estrange oneself from those voices in order to hear in this mother tongue all that is not simply natural but also artificial? For even when one’s native language is known to be mediated by upbringing, education and violence, the tone and stress offamilial voices persist as so many violent voiceovers that follow every thought and determine every action.

“Be careful walking home at night,” a mother tells her daughter, “And don’t talk to men, foreigners especially: it’s too dangerous.” As a result, whenever a man crosses her path, the daughter’s heart races, her pace increases, and she is overcome by fear. But this fear is not only her own; she knows that it is taught, trained and practiced, and is itselfmediated by the mother’s voice. Once she comes to recognize this, once she hears in the sound of her quickening steps the fear that resounds in her mother’s terrified voice, and knows that her movements are the effect ofavoice that is not herown, then it is no longer the approaching man that figures the violence she feels, but the voice ofthe mother, internalized and communicated to a heart that pounds in her ear, directing her everystep. Here, the voice ofthe mother is heard as belongingto that historical voice ofprejudice and plunderthat has always articulated the fear ofthe foreigner and projected onto him all that is bad, evil and violent. When the mother tongue is heard in this way, in all its historical and familial density, it reveals its participation in that violence which inscribes itself within the subject and thereby perpetuates violence “at every corner ofthe world” (Fanon 2008: 235).

A black man is the product of the racist. And racism is not exclusive to a single space. The black diplomat who works at the U.N. shares the same skin color with the black man selling drugs on the Wiener Gürtel - and while the former is trusted, the latter is feared as a danger to the life ofthe daughter. A “Hello, howare you?” from the diplomat is regarded as a friendly greeting capable ofenhancing one’s own white social status (since interacting with people from all over the world is to one’s credit as a good white person) - but the same words, when they come from a black man on the Gürtel, are treated as harassment. Exclusive bilingual schools, years abroad, the experience ofdifferentcultures: all culminating in an all-too-common fear ofthose who look foreign, articulated in secret, in German, behind the back ofEnglish-speaking internationalism and the ideal ofmulticultural love. The purity and tolerance ofwhite skin hides behind a mask that is gladly stripped offevery night at the family dinner table, where the language ofchildren is born and bred, and fear is installed as law.

The masks of racist whites, and their secret, scared - and to me, German - voices were first violently exposed by my reading of Frantz Fanon. I read his work in German rather than English translation because the German seemed uniquely capable ofviolating my mother tongue. Through Fanon’s German, the language I grewup with but distrusted on account of its perceived harshness could finally be addressed on its own violent terms. In Fanon’s Schwarze Haut, Weiße Masken [BlackSkin, White Masks], whenever Fanon analyzed the ideal ofwhiteness I heard the echo ofall those familiarandafraidGermanvoicesIknowalltoowell. Indeed, Fanon knew their arguments better than they do. Is there a single good, Christian, Austrian grandmother who has not once asked herself: “Why did god create black people?” She cannot understand why God would make something black when he himselfis white. Fanon concurs: “In the homo occidentalis the black man - or ifyou prefer, the color black - symbolizes evil, sin, wretchedness, death, war, and famine. Every bird ofprey is black” (Fanon 2008: 167). He repeats such arguments and writes what such people would not dare to saybut likelythink. He lets slip theirmasks, even though he is not concerned with addressing them. “[Fanon’s text] talks about you, not to you,” Sartre writes ofFanon (Sartre 2004, xlv). Fanon addresses, instead, his compatriots from Martinique, those who also askedthemselves aboutthe “fact ofblackness,” showingthem howthe violence ofracism and the deification ofwhiteness lives on in the very people who have been and continue to be written offby white “humanity”. Fanon knewthatthis shared idealis basedon an ideal of whiteness, and called upon independent blacks to “develop a new kind ofthinking, and endeavor to create a new man” (Fanon 2004: 239). In The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon calls on the Third World to leave Europe behind, to neither follow its path nor treat it as a model for society:

“Let us leave this Europe that neverstops talkingofman yet massacres him at every one ofits street corners, at every corner ofthe world.” (Fanon 2004: 235)

French Original: “Quittons cette Europe qui n’en finitpas de parler de l’homme tout en le massacrant partout où elle le rencontre, à tous les coins de ses propres rues, à tous les coins du monde.” (Fanon 2002: 301)

German translation: “Verlassen wir dieses Europa, das nicht aufhört vom Menschen zu reden, und ihn dabei niedermetzelt, wo es ihn trifft, an allen Ecken seiner eigenen Straßen, an allen Ecken der Welt.” (Fanon 2015: 263)

Fanon’s sentence knows Europe to be the landofbroken promises. Its ideal ofman, ofmulticultural societies, ofbilingual tolerance are only so many alibis. Europe’s white idealis usedto shedthe bloodofthose who do not fit its concept. In this, the above quote shows itselfto be a commentary on all the dinner table conversations that daily play themselves out across Europe: The ideal that the people of all nations should work together, sideby-side, their children playing together in peace and togetherness, is itself based on the exclusion of those who work at places like the Wiener Gürtel and strike terror into the heart ofevery good white mother - such people are necessaryfor the consistencyofan ideal from which they are themselves excluded. In this, their place within the logic ofthe ideal is determined by the process ofprojection. “Whenever I discover [... ] something reprehensible in me,” Fanon writes, “I have no other alternative but to get rid ofit and attribute its paternityto someone else. TherebyI putan endto the circuitofhigh tension that threatened to compromise myequilibrium” (Fanon 2008: 167). Ideals are based on equilibrium. Behind his mask, the white can chat about how he loves the other, adores him for his openness, but onlyso long as the white can remain masked. For once the mask is removed, the voice ofthe mother tongue becomes terrified ofthe consequences ofsuch openness. Because it is spoken in the family, the mothertongue can give vent to these secretprejudices so longas there are manywho are not privy to these conversations and whose exclusion is the very condition ofgroup identity formation. Because Fanon’s German made this self-evident to me, his voice did violence to a mother tongue that wants for itselfa naturalness and innocence it has never earned. Instead, it began to ring with historically mediated colonial violence, its volume and brutalityincreasinguntil it reached a pitch ofviolence that has forced my mother tongue to bear the weight ofits crimes.

Even the most cursoryanalysis ofthe language ofthe above sentence demonstrates this essential violence. As is typical ofa language that tries to mask its force, the English translation leaves out the phrase “partout où elle le rencontre,” which is significant because the rencontre ofthe original refers not only to a meeting but also to a combat, a contest between forces: between Europe and man. In German, the phrase becomes “wo es ihn trifft,” and the German treffen, translation ofrencontre, implies an even more physical, visceral combat, in which someone is not only met, but also struck at, in the sense ofstriking a blow. Similarly, a “Europe that never stops talking ofman” - or, in French, ofl’homme - resonates with the ideal ofman, ofhumanism, ofthe declaration of human rights, of what man is envisioned to be. By contrast, a Europe that, in German, won’t stop talking vom Menschen, speaks not only ofan ideal, but also of the human as a thing offlesh and blood that is the object ofviolence. And this emphasis, in German, on the bodily, on violent encounters between man and Europe, gives the lie to the discourse ofhuman rights in its English andFrench articulation. The latterexpress an ideal, immaterial body the German knows to be wholly material, open not to comity and peace, but to pain.

This language ofpain and fear is, in Fanon, shown to be the language of an historical violence that has survived the centuries. For Ingeborg Bachmann, all crimes against humanity are inscribed within and persist through language: “Prejudices - racial-prejudices, class prejudices, religious prejudices and all others - remain an outrage, even when they vanish through education and insight. [... ] The disgraces, maintained by the continued existence ofthe words, may therefore be re-established at any moment” (Bachmann 1995: 50). But it is not only that they may be re-established at any moment; far more significant is the fact that they are re-established at every moment, hidden as they are under so many white masks. The mother tongue is violent to the extent that it subjects the child to the fear and projection ofgenerations, therebyreproducingaviolent, fearful subject that guarantees the continuation ofpast atrocities. Fanon undermines the force and substance of the mother tongue, and compels its language offear to confess its guilt for continuing a violence that sustains an ideal of man whose costs have always been paid by actual men and women.

| Sara Walker

Literatur

Bachmann, Ingeborg (1995): The Thirtieth Year: Stories by Ingeborg Bachmann. New York: Holmes & Meier.

Fanon, Frantz (2002): Les damnés de la terre. Paris: Éditions La Découverte & Syros.

Fanon, Frantz (2004): The Wretched of the Earth. New York: Grove Press.

Fanon, Frantz(2008): BlackSkin, White Masks. NewYork: Grove Press.

Fanon, Frantz (2015): Die Verdammten dieser Erde. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.

Sartre, Jean-Paul (2004): Preface to The Wretched ofthe Earth. New York: Grove Press.