8 minute read
WRETCHED IS THE EARTH
from Issue 3
BENJAMIN DUBOW
WRETCHED IS THE EARTH
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—Aimé Césaire, “Discourse on Colonialism”
Though it is possible that Frantz Fanon and Aimé Césaire did not have the climate crisis in mind when they wrote in the mid-20 th century, their words provide an excellent, if disheartening, language with which to speak about our current situation. For greed of ever-greater proft, humans have conquered, colonized, oppressed, and exploited various ‘Other’ peoples of the planet on a scale never seen before, owing in large part to new industrial technologies. Yet over and above this stark historical reality, to say nothing of the disguised or ignored forms of slavery and oppression of peoples that still very much exist, there is also a broader manifestation of humanity’s insatiable and rapacious hunger. In fact, it is difcult to read their words—Césaire’s in “Discourse on Colonialism” in particular—and not feel a connection to the environment: “A civilization that proves incapable of solving the problems it creates is a decadent civilization. A civilization that chooses to close its eyes to its most crucial problems is a stricken civilization. A civilization that uses its principles for trickery and deceit is a dying civilization.”
Tis resonance should not surprise us. Perhaps the same system of thought that blinded us to the evils of colonialism continues to conceal the more-than-human world’s suffering from our myopic and self-centered vision. 1 Césaire’s words’ uncanny relevance stems from the reality that colonization and the climate crisis are but diferently manifested results of the same invidious modality. Tis modality underlies both the project of colonialism (past and present) and the domination of the industrial-capitalist West. It requires, among other things, the categorization and division of the world along hierarchical lines, with predictably disastrous consequences for the bodies on the lower half.
Tese divisions are partly responsible for our inability to deal with, or even grasp, the magnitude of the problem we have wrought. Various aspects of the climate crisis may seem, if
1. Te phrase “more-than-human world,” coined by David Abram, a philosopher, attempts to counter humanity’s instrumental (and solipsistic) view of the world in favor of one that recognizes the world’s intrinsic value. i.e., the world is not our property or rightful domain: there is more to this planet than just us and our desires; we are not all that is signifcant.
not quite neat, at least comfortably distinct and diferentiated: foods are foods, which are certainly not droughts, and neither foods, nor droughts have much to do with the annihilation of coral reefs. But the natural world, where everything is intimately and intrinsically connected, does not care for our categories. Feedback loops and climatic cascades will continue to build on themselves and on each other (in a kind of dialectical motion of development), undermining not only the narrow defnitions into which they’ve been siloed, but the entire interdependent system that is our Earth. 2 Te problems are all part of one big problem. And our inability to see the web in its entirety is what opened the door to the unimaginable cruelties of colonization in the frst place: Western man would never have intentionally perpetrated such violence on himself. Harm inficted on the ‘Other,’ though, is a diferent matter.
This framework help explains why exploitation of peoples came hand-in-hand with exploitation of land: for who cares about the well-being of these ‘Others’? Te same brutal, alienating logic of extractive capitalism drove both. Tese two forms of exploitation, especially in the later phases of colonialism (e.g. Belgian exploitation of the Congo and its inhabitants in the late 19 th century to supply the West with rubber and exorbitant wealth), even supported one another in service of “Progress”––a thoroughly unimpeachable end in the West. Césaire demonstrates this relationship:
Tey throw facts at my head, statistics, mileages of roads, canals, and railroad tracks. I am talking about thousands of men sacrifced to the Congo-Océan. I am talking about those who, as I write this, are digging the harbor of Abidjan by hand. I am talking about millions of men torn from their gods, their lands, their habits, their life—from life, from the dance, from wisdom…I am talking about natural economies that have been disrupted—harmonious and viable economies adapted to the indigenous population— about food crops destroyed, malnutrition permanently introduced, agricultural development oriented solely toward the beneft of the metropolitan countries; about the looting of products, the looting of raw materials.
With the destruction of men came the destruction of the Earth. Tey are co-incidental, not accidental: both are part of a whole, and the health of one directly infuences that of the other. Te forces of colonization even realized this truth to some degree; they strategically destroyed the grounded economies and traditions—modes of being in the world
2. For a detailed scientifc introduction to the interconnectedness of the global system, see Tim Lenton, Earth System Science. For a more spiritual introduction, go outside where there are trees and birds and water and open sky and, for a moment, suspend your disbelief.
carefully developed to work in harmony with the immediate environment—in order to better control the local populace. Crucially, both the exploitation of land and its peoples required a startling blindness to the reverberations of violence. W hen frst I read Fanon’s Te Wretched of the Earth, I was unable to stomach the work’s call for violence. Upon returning to Fanon’s words, however, I realized that I’d missed his crucial point. Violence is not desirable, it is rather the unavoidable and inevitable synthesis of colonialism’s dialectic. “Decolonization is always a violent phenomenon.” In the environmental realm, this same phenomenon might show us how the current climate crisis will inexorably unfold. As feedback loops, now kicked into gear, begin to spiral out
ward, we will feel the repercussions of a planet that has sufered long enough. But it is unclear if we can stop these loops merely by dropping our still-smoking guns and ofering pittances of remuneration, for they now have their own momentum. Te dialectic has tipped; as it asserts its own existence, the world fghts back. We might even be tempted to think, in Fanon’s terms, that the Earth is coming to consciousness. 3
We must be careful not to confuse this dialectical development of the Earth’s consciousness with Hegel’s development of History or World Spirit, an anthropocentric idea. Hegel (to whom Fanon is indebted) sees the evolution of History as driven by Reason and tending toward a perfected telos for mankind; catastrophes that occur along the way are regrettable but necessary
3. Of course, one might respond that it has been conscious all along—we just didn’t, couldn’t or refused to understand how many shapes consciousness can take.
stages of development toward this end. But contra Hegel, the logical and seemingly necessary culmination of the Man-World dialectic discussed here is not meliorative but destructive; rather than pushing history toward the realization of Geist’s self-standingness, our dialectic tends toward the devastation of humanity or the world (or both). Tat the Earth reacts to our violence is clear to those who bother to look. It is a reaction we naïvely thought we could avoid—if ever we thought of it at all. It is as though we tunneled into the dark void beneath our feet in search of oil and gold and then decried the ground for collapsing.
If the nature of climatic cascades bears a marked formal similarity to Fanon’s or Hegel’s immanent evolution of Spirit or national consciousness, what’s at stake in the ofng ought to parallel the people. For, after all, Fanon thought like a proper Marxist (at least he did where the masses were concerned). Te masses and their ability to violently upend the colonial system that oppressed and ignored them were the key to the revolution.
In my reading of Fanon, the people are Earth itself. It is no wonder it has been overlooked for so long: the world is everything, and so we see it as nothing—evidence so evident it paradoxically vanishes into the background. We need it to be this way. What actor could play Shakespeare’s Hamlet if he felt the stage to be alive and writhing underfoot? 4 We would be unable to breathe so freely, so carelessly, if we thought too deeply about this air, where it came from, where it went.
So the multitude’s violence, which Fanon foresaw as the inevitable development, indeed as the driver, of decolonization, is replicated and magnifed by the planet as it struggles to fnd a new equilibrium. 5 Instead of riots, guerilla warfare and retributive attacks, we face ever fercer hurricanes and foods; instead of decimated populations, starvation and disease, there is extinction, desertifcation, and pollution. Ecological devastation will exacerbate human tendencies for violence and our own vulnerabilities; once again, the seemingly discrete aspects of the problem are entangled. Unlike colonization of peoples, however, which prolonged its abuses by quashing incipient rebellion through force, environmental colonization is diferent; neither guns nor bombs will subdue the Earth.
The only hope I see, then, is to relate to the world not through violence and exploitation but through love, respect, and recognition. Perhaps akin to Hegel’s formulation of Recognition, our subject at last sees itself refected in an object, one that is itself also a subject (and thus can withstand negation). And once our initial subject realizes that the object is also somehow not other, possibility blooms. Following this Hegelian possibility, so might we also see ourselves revealed in the Earth, clearly other, even alien, but also clearly not other; so might we also see the Earth revealed in us. Like two mirrors, we endlessly refect each other. 6 Te cruel face of Nature we see today is merely the refection of our own monstrosities. To see another, less frightening image, we must frst fnd it in ourselves. To quote Césaire once more, “A signifcant thing: it is not the head of a civilization that begins to rot frst. It is the heart.”
4. I am indebted to Bruno Latour’s Down to Earth for this image. 5. For more on the Earth as a holistic system that seeks equilibrium, see Lovelock and Margulis, “Atmospheric homeostasis by and for the biosphere: the Gaia hypothesis” (1974). 6. Hegel’s picture is complicated further in this instance, as the object of our aufheben makes possible our own existence (and thus, of course, any possibility of realizing self-standingness). Tis concept is beyond mere Recognition.
