Despite witnessing intolerance and violent scoring within the FLN, he stuck to the official line and remained an excellent soldier. But in the “misery of the earth”, he said, the impending liberation of Algeria and the African continent is being suppressed as a greedy and corrupt “national bourgeoisie” blocks the path of more societies. He expressed concern that it would not bring true freedom to people. An overwhelming social revolution. Fanon, both in his writings and in his work as a psychiatrist, is committed to what he calls “alienation”, a cause he himself has in a sense adopted, a commitment to collective and individual freedom. It promoted a rebellious vision of being a challenge. No wonder he became an object of admiration among young intellectuals in modern Algeria. They still feel suffocated by the dictatorship, pouvoir, or opaque power that rules the country.
Despite being a revolutionary and an extremist,, Fanon disliked the kind of identity-based politics that is often conscripted today. Although he dissected the destructive effects of racism on the psyche of colonized peoples, he considered the cultural reclamation project inherently conservative and dismissed the idea of race itself. “Black people are not like that,” he wrote. “No more than a white man.'' While he acknowledged the role Islam played in mobilizing Algerian Muslims against French rule, he said Islam was “not devoid of sectarian and religious ethos.'' He warned that there was a risk of separating the anti-colonial struggle from an “ideal future in order to reconnect it with the past.” ” What was ultimately important to Fanon was the “leap of invention,” which for him was closely linked to the leap to freedom.
Today, the idea of transcending race, ethnicity, and religion seems fanciful and, to some, undesirable. But Fanon believed that the prisons of race and colonialism in which millions of men and women were confined were created by humans, and therefore did not have to be created by humans. No one has evoked with more dark force than Fanon the dream world of race and colonialism, where oppression invades the human psyche. That is an important reason why he is so popular today. But Fanon was also, paradoxically, an optimist, in stark contrast to many of today's radical thinkers and activists.
History has been cruel to the victims of slavery and colonialism, but in his view it was not an inevitable fate. “I am not a slave to the slavery that dehumanized my ancestors,” he declared with “black skin, white mask.” “The depth of history does not determine my actions,'' he added. He put his faith in humanity's capacity for regeneration and innovation, and in the possibility of a new beginning in history, in what Arendt called “natality.”
When he bids farewell to Europe in the final pages of The Wretched of the Earth, he was dreaming of a new humanity freed from colonialism and empire. What we want is to always move forward, day and night, with humans, with all humans. ” It is Fanon's insistence on the struggle for freedom and dignity in the face of oppression, and his belief that “the last will come first”, that imbues his writing with moving power.
