The Wretched of the Earth

Fanon calls these five cases “mental disorders of the reactionary type” (204).

In the first example a taxi driver, who married for duty rather than love, and who has a young daughter, gets involved with the Front de Libération Nationale (FLN), Algeria’s nationalist political party. After his involvement is discovered, he is forced to flee the city and hide in the countryside. After some time he learns that the French police took his wife for interrogation and that she was raped repeatedly by her interrogators. Such a fate is considered extremely shameful for the woman, and by extension, her husband. After learning this the taxi driver feels great shame and guilt, particularly because he does not love his wife and did not treat her particularly well. Anything related to her, such as sex, becomes repugnant, resulting in his impotence.

The second example concerns the sole survivor of a village massacre who saved by the FLN. After his ordeal he becomes paranoid and prone to violence, attempting to shoot the soldiers who help him. He reaches the point where he starts planning on killing everyone around him.

The third case is based on a young man’s unplanned murder of an older woman. The 19-year-old rebel recently lost his mother. He was sent to a settler estate to capture a man responsible for two Algerian deaths. Only the wife was at home, and she reminded the boy of his mother. The woman threw herself onto him, demanding mercy, and the boy killed her with his knife. Afterward, he vomits after each meal, becomes suicidal, and hallucinates that a woman comes at night to seek retribution.

The fourth case concerns a young French police officer. At night he hears screams that prevent him from sleeping. His symptoms started after being transferred to an anti-FLN brigade in which he deals with interrogations that involve beatings and torture. The young policeman has learned to distinguish the different ways prisoners scream depending on what kind of torture they are undergoing. One day Fanon meets him on the street while the policeman has an anxiety attack after encountering a former victim at the hospital. After that encounter the torture victim, now a patient, is discovered in the bathroom attempting to commit suicide, believing the policeman came to take him back.

The last case involves a French police inspector who is experiencing violent episodes during which he physically abuses his wife and three children. He becomes frightened of his own behavior when one day his wife criticizes him for hitting the children and he goes into a frenzy, tying her to a chair and beating her savagely. He believes he would have killed her if the children had not started crying and shouting loudly. After this episode he decides to seek professional help. From the inspector’s account, it becomes clear that he is in charge of torturing suspects. Since it is a delicate process—beating someone enough to make him talk, but not too much to kill or incapacitate him completely—the Frenchman has to do the torturing himself. He is unwilling to take a leave of absence and requests that Fanon help him continue with his job without experiencing negative effects.

The examples from the second series are what Fanon considers to be the result of the “atmosphere of total war” (217).

The first case concerns a murder committed by two 13- and 14-year-old Algerians, who killed their European playmate. The two boys feel no remorse. Their decision to kill was not motivated by a personal reason but by the European boy’s father’s involvement with the settlers’ militia. The two teenagers grew up with the belief that all colonizers want to kill all Algerians, so their senseless action, to them, becomes an act of resistance.

The second case concerns a young man who becomes gradually convinced that his family considers him a traitor for focusing exclusively on his professional development. One day he starts hearing a voice calling him a traitor and a coward. He stops eating and feels constant anxiety. The only relief he finds is in prayer, and he stays kneeling for hours at a time. After four days of such behavior, he goes out into the European part of town. His strange behavior and appearance preclude him from being stopped and searched, which intensifies his delusions. Convinced that everyone considers him a traitor, he throws himself at a French soldier and attempts to take away his gun. He is arrested and tortured but eventually sent to the hospital.

The third example is based on the experiences of a young Frenchwoman whose father, a high-ranking official, tortured and killed many Algerians. She feels guilty because most of the people tortured are villagers she has known all her life. Eventually, she stops going home, so as not to hear the constant screams. She cannot look her father in the face or kiss him. At his funeral the young woman is appalled by the hypocrisy displayed by his fellow officers, who praised her father’s “high moral qualities” (277). She exhibits symptoms of anxiety, such as sweaty hands, bitten nails, and chest constrictions.

The last examples in this series concern children under 10 and childbirth-related issues in refugee women. Children who are refugees or whose parents are part of the resistance begin exhibiting specific unusual behaviors, such as “a marked love for parental images,” aversion for noise and confrontation, enuresis, and sadistic tendencies (278). Women who are forced to flee and live on the borders of Morocco and Tunis due to the French “burnt earth” policy experience a constant state of insecurity (278). Such women display anxiety, agitation, depression, and suicidal tendencies. They might also suffer from persecution complex, fearing for their children’s lives and begging for mercy from invisible executioners.

These cases concern the effects of torture.

Fanon begins by listing several torture methods meant to quickly extract information. These include “injection of water by the mouth accompanied by an enema of soapy water given at high pressure”; “introduction of a bottle into the anus”; and the so-called “motionless torture,” which forces the prisoner to stay in an uncomfortable position for long periods of time by hitting him every time he moves (226). Additionally, a prisoner could be tortured by several attackers at the same time, with some of them striking his body, others burning his torso with cigarettes, and others still hitting the soles of his feet with sticks.

The results of such ordeals are varied. After release some men display sadness and depression with sudden bouts of agitation. Others suffer loss of appetite or motor instability. The most common feeling among those who are innocent of any wrongdoing is injustice.

Victims tortured by electricity are mentioned as a special case. They often develop a feeling of pins and needles in their extremities, as well as apathy or phobia of electricity.

When truth serum is used, one of the results can be a cognitive breakdown. Some victims display verbal stereotypy in which they constantly repeat the same phrases. Others experience clouded perceptions, or the inability to distinguish between truth and falsehood. Most develop a phobia of personal conversations or constant alertness to what is being said.

Finally, the process of brainwashing can be applied to both intellectuals and peasants. When used on an educated person, it involves a process of forcing the intellectual to collaborate with the authorities by making public statements supporting French policies, expecting him to reason out the benefits of colonization, and refusing him any private life. This leads to a phobia of collective discussions and the inability to logically explain or defend any position.

In the case of brainwashed peasants, they are beaten or denied food and repeatedly forced to avow their allegiance to France. However, this second method is ineffective, and the victims remain relatively unaffected after recovering physically.

This series describes psychosomatic disorders. Fanon argues that it is not necessary to suffer a physical wound to display a disorder associated with the effects of war. All the cases described earlier can be found in World War II records.

Symptoms of this series include stomach ulcers, nephritic colic, menstruation irregularity, sleeplessness caused by tremors, hair turning white prematurely (sometimes overnight), heartbeat acceleration, and contractions with muscular stiffness. Men also display motor problems, such as going up the stairs or running, due to brain damage.

This section contains an additional subsection, “Criminal impulses found in North Africans which have their origin in the national war of liberation,” in which Fanon sets out to debunk the myth, perpetuated by European scientists, that Africans are genetically predisposed to violence and mentally inferior to white people.

Criminal impulses are not genetic, as the Europeans claim, but a direct result of the colonial system. Forced to exist in poverty and degradation, Algerians have no choice but to turn against each other to survive. Additionally, the self-hatred nurtured by the colonizers finds an outlet in intraracial violence, since it is impossible to seek retribution from the white people. Thus, total liberation is not simply a political change but an entirely new way of thinking about oneself and will solve the problem of local crime. Fanon sees proof of this in the fact that after the War of Liberation begins, the instances of Algerian criminality in France diminish.