Posted by Hello I.M. Lisa | Posted in Cairo, Frantz Fanon, revolution, the people, Tunisia | Posted on 5:10 PM
Cairo.
(Image via AP)
To me, there is no more salient vision for revolution than the kind Frantz Fanon describes in Wretched of the Earth:
...thus it is not enough to try to get back to the people in that past out of which they have already emerged; rather we must join them in that fluctuating movement which they are just giving shape to, and which, as soon as it has started, will be the signal for everything to be called into question. Let there be no mistake about it; it is to this zone of occult instability where the people dwell that we must come; and it is there that our souls are crystalized and our perceptions and our lives are transfused with light.
Fanon's faith in the people always softens my hardened and untrusting heart. Whenever I read his words, I feel an ache that I believe can only be appeased by marching alongside brothers and sisters, as part of a teeming mass, in spite of great hopelessness and fear. That revolution in our popular imagination means the occupation of public spaces by bodies who no longer desire to suffer in private, remains a powerful image for me. To have grown up in a time and place where such upheavals, both peaceful and bloody, occur as often as the wind shifts direction, I am all too aware how a seemingly small incident in the life of one, can transform into an explosive moment in the lives of many. This to me, has always been the face of revolution.
But Fanon's ardent belief in the people not only makes way for the possibility that individuals can constitute one pulsating force moving towards freer spaces, but it also opens up the possibility for upheavals in day-to-day life. That to revolutionize means to challenge, to teach, to think and to swim upstream even when your legs are tired, your arms feel weak and each breath is labored because the alternative would be to sink into the cold oblivion---and this is not an option.
But Fanon's ardent belief in the people not only makes way for the possibility that individuals can constitute one pulsating force moving towards freer spaces, but it also opens up the possibility for upheavals in day-to-day life. That to revolutionize means to challenge, to teach, to think and to swim upstream even when your legs are tired, your arms feel weak and each breath is labored because the alternative would be to sink into the cold oblivion---and this is not an option.
Revolution is the explosion of space onto time, the forward movement of historical time and capitalist modernity no longer able to contain the reality of those on the ground. Revolutions are always surrounded by violence---the arms we take up to threaten the other, the stones we throw at each other and into our world, the blood we spill when we fight or even when we don't, the spirits we break when we stand by idly as our brother or sister suffer, the damage done when we deprive the other compassion, attention, help and recognition---and we all, no matter how near or far, are implicated. While to revolt means to rid of the violence, often with violence itself, it also carves out a space of hope onto the field of inequity where the peaks of excess look down onto the valleys of empty. If we have nothing else, it is this hope that can help to sustain us, and if not bring us to the place where, as Fanon describes, we can be transfused with light, then at the very least this hope can help keep us fighting.
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