On Violence and The Wretched of the Earth
We've been surrounded by violence in the last 20 months. It's impossible to get away from if you are in the Middle East or Africa or addicted to social media.
I try to avert my eyes when I doom scroll, but it rarely works because every other post, at least on my twitter and Instagram timeline shows headless children, burning ambulances, blood stained mothers and shell shocked fathers. It's unbearable.
I thought seeing images and videos of dead limbless children would be the most horrific thing I could see.
I now realise that seeing babies and children covered in third degree burns, crying in agony whilst being consoled by an inanimate toy because their entire family has been killed is worse.
Well done to the butchers of Israel for pushing the boundaries of our horrifying imagination every single day.
~ Dr. Sabreena Ghaffar-Siddiqui
I am luckier than some, certainly more so than Palestinians and the Sudanese who are attempting to survive a genocide. My attention issues keep me from dwelling on every single burned body and mass grave.
My mind can't stay still, which has given me the opportunity to re-acquaint myself with the work of Frantz Fanon and Mark Twain.
It was Fanon's birthday this month. One of the most famed/infamous quotes in his final book ‘The Wretched of the Earth’ is,
…colonialism is not a thinking machine, nor a body endowed with reasoning faculties. It is violence in its natural state, and it will only yield when confronted with greater violence.
- The Wretched of the Earth, Ch 1, “Concerning Violence”, p. 48
But it was how he lived his life that intrigues me.
In her autobiography Simone de Beauvoir depicted Frantz Fanon’s role in helping the FLN in the Algerian liberation struggle between 1955-56:
He didn't just talk the talk, he walked the walk and as a doctor, instilled a resilience in fighters that probably stayed with everyone he taught, if they managed to survive the war.
A far cry from the Israeli doctors who have been implicated in the torture and murder of arbitrarily detained Palestinians.
Most writers worth their salt write about violence in one way or another. Mark Twain wrote this about the French revolution..