Françoise Vergès: 'Chains of Madness, Chains of Colonialism: Fanon and Freedom'
In: The Fact of Blackness: Frantz Fanon and Visual Representation. Edited by Alan Read. London: Institute of Contemporary Arts and Institute of International Visual Arts, 1996, pp. 46-75.
The rejection of imperialism's signifying system, proposed by Fanon, supposes that the possibility exists of creating an entirely new one. Such a project begs questions of this new signifying system's conditions of formation. Fanonian theory depends on a system which organises history as a progressive development. It implies that women and men have the power to reinvent their symbolic and material world; to shed memories. Fanonian theory construes memory as a series of lifeless monuments, a morbid legacy, a melancholic nostalgia for a past long gone. There is no place for dreams, for inventing a future. Memories are shackles to progress and movement. There is in this approach a fantasy of self-engendering, of refusing an affiliation in which it is impossible to receive and to transform.
Fanon wanted revolution to be a creation, unfettered by the spirits of the past that burden the living with past losses and defeats. Revolution would be a means to negate these defeats. Yet he did not discuss what was the foundation of his society, the Creole society of Martinique, and the defeat that slavery had been. A past of slavery, Toni Morrison has said, 'until you confront it, until you live through it, keeps coming back in other forms. The shapes redesign themselves in other constellations, until you get a chance to play it over again, this moment - this 'loss' - was constitutive of the present. The recognition of this loss was part of the process of becoming other, an 'other' whose subjectivity was not contained in colonial representation, but transformed by its experience of colonialism. In other words, rejecting the self of colonisation, when one was subjected to the humiliations of colonialism, rejecting the shame produced by that moment, might be constructing a fantasmatic original innocence, spoiled by colonialism.