Towards a Fanonian Poetics: Cultural Decolonization as Translation

Abstract

Towards a Fanonian PoeticsCultural Decolonization as Translation Richard L. W. Clarke In what follows, I shall attempt to provide a close reading of Fanon's often cited but dense, highly complex, richly allusive and rarely carefully dissected "On National Culture," the seminal fourth chapter of The Wretched of the Earth, with a few passing gestures along the way to related essays of his such as "Racism and Culture." My thesis here is that much light is shed on Fanon's theory of cultural decolonization by conceptualizing cultural history as predicated on processes of translation, perhaps the best guide to which is George Steiner's After Babel. I argue, in light of this, that Fanon advances a dialectical model of post-colonial national culture as developing in three principal stages. During the first (the thesis), which I shall term the dominant neo-classical phase, the assumption that human nature is universal informs the tendency of the colonized artist to regurgitate not only many of the preoccupations but also, most importantly, the forms of the colonizer's cultural practices. The cultural production specific to this stage is analogous to what, in the world of translation studies, is termed "word-by-word" translation. During the second stage (the antithesis), which I shall call the residualist neo-romantic phase, the colonized artist conceives of his/her identity as distinct from that of the colonizer and angrily rejects cultural practices imported from the "mother country" with a view to resurrecting not only a largely suppressed pre-colonial identity but also, equally importantly, the forms through which that self had traditionally been expressed. Fanon's point is, however, that this is an impossible undertaking precisely because as a result of imbibing through education the colonizer's epistemological and aesthetic frameworks, the chances of recuperating that self and its traditional modes of expression in their pristine form are next to nil. Cultural production at this stage turns out to be, ironically, something ultimately akin to a "sense-for-sense" translation of many of the concerns to which the colonizer's cultural practices are devoted, albeit by means of a style that purports to be different. During the third stage (the synthesis), which I shall label the emergent nationalist phase, the colonized artist fuses modes of making sense and forms of artistic expression undeniably inherited from the colonizer (most importantly, the Marxist theory of culture favored by Fanon) with nationalist content to produce hybrid forms of cultural praxis grounded in the specific economic, social and [End Page 261] political circumstances in which a colony struggling to throw off the yoke of colonialism finds itself. This stage corresponds to that ideal of translation which Steiner terms, for reasons which I shall explain in the next section, "interanimation."1 steiner on translation I have argued elsewhere that the process by which ideas "travel" (to use Edward Said's metaphor) from one person and, by extension, community living in a particular place and time to another and, in so doing, are altered may best be understood as a form of translation.2 This is true, I believe, of all forms of discourse, including the arts in general and literature in particular. The most compelling philosophies of translation which I have found are those offered by Walter Benjamin (see especially his "On Language as Such and on the Language of Man" [1916] and "The Task of the Translator" [1923]) and George Steiner in After Babel (1975), itself deeply influenced by Benjamin's model of translation, all of which have become classics in and cornerstones of the field of translation studies. A thorough treatment of the transmission of ideas constitutive of intellectual history is beyond the remit of this essay. Suffice it to say, however, that I am of the view that there are few better guides to understanding the precise processes involved in translation than Steiner's complex and massive tome, After Babel, a cursory overview of which I shall attempt to provide in this section. Steiner's starting-point is hermeneutical, to be precise, the view that any act of listening or reading is tantamount to one of "interpretation" (18), the goal of which is the comprehension of the speaker...