“I can’t turn around without
hearing about some ‘civil rights advance’! White people seem to think the black
man ought to be shouting ‘hallelujah’! Four hundred years the white man has had
his foot-long knife in the black man’s back—and now the white man starts to wiggle the knife out, maybe six inches!
The black man’s supposed to be grateful?
Why, if the white man jerked the knife out,
it’s still going to leave a scar!”
(The Autobiography of Malcolm X, 275, original emphasis)
“The muscles of the
colonized are always tensed. It is not that he is anxious or terrorized, but he
is always ready to change his role in the game for that of the hunter…This
impulse to take the colonist’s place maintains a constant muscular tonus. It is
a known fact that under certain emotional circumstances an obstacle actually
escalates action” (Fanon, 16-17)
“In the colonial world, the
colonized’s affectivity is kept on edge like a running sore flinching from a
caustic agent. And the psyche retracts, is obliterated, and finds an outlet
through muscular spasms that have caused many an expert to classify the
colonial as hysterical. This overexcited affectivity, spied on by invisible
guardians who constantly communicate with the core of the personality, takes an
erotic delight in the muscular deflation of the crisis” (Fanon, 19).
I juxtapose these quotations
from Malcolm X and Fanon not merely to illustrate the similarities in bodily
metaphor and embodied racial injury. Rather, I want to pause, as Darieck Scott
suggests, within the muscular tension that Fanon seeks to transcend (Scott,
93). Fanon utilizes the image of tensed muscles to corporealize the temporal
proximity of revolution. The tensed muscles of the colonized are trained in the
quiet resistance to the colonizer in everyday existence. This tension is
productive for Fanon inasmuch as it precedes radical action, so the loss of
accumulated tension in non-liberatory actions is detrimental to the momentum of
revolution. The muscle tension, for Fanon, is effectively deployed when the
colonized inverts his position of abjection.
However, Fanon’s description
and proscription for revolutionary action goes beyond the actual
counterviolence of the colonized people. Throughout The Wretched of the Earth he is deeply invested in that which comes
after the creation nationhood and nominal independence. Fanon cautions against
over-working the newly liberated people in world-building as they cannot
possibly attain all the promises of beginning again in the shadow of colonial
rule (Fanon, 135). This imperative to continue the struggle for
self-determination even after nominal independence necessitates muscle tension
be maintained rather than ultimately overcome as Fanon would suggest.
Malcolm X’s image of the
knife in the back of the black man corporealizes racial injury and is
particularly enlightening in its relationship to continued struggle in the face
of supposed civil rights success. Malcolm X describes the white man as
“wiggling” the foot-long knife out “maybe six inches,” or even jerking the
knife out, calling attention to the muscular reaction: constant tension in the
former and muscular spasm in the latter. In both cases, Malcolm X portrays the
black body in a lived experience of muscle memory and trauma that prevent an
acquittal of white supremacy that, after all, leaves a scar. The muscular
reaction to white racism holds promises of equality in tension with racial
hierarchies four centuries in the making, suggesting that black bodies will not
relax until they have really begun to build their own world.
Your post on Fanon, X, and embodiment is really generative. It makes me think of several works of fiction that thematize the body and embodied revolt. Your work here also anticipates very nicely Alice Walker’s novel Meridian which we will read later in the semester. Here the protagonist literally sacrifices her body for the movement, but the past resides in her body in ways that are not always in her control.
ReplyDeleteThe image or symbol of the scar is also informative because it is not only a sign of battle or attack, but a sign of recovery, of the body healing itself. Moreover, scars can be both physical and psychological. Or scars can reside in places that are not apparent to the eye. Scars may reveal secrets that their owner wants to keep hidden from an “audience.” As you propose the idea of “muscle memory,” which is very much a concern of Walker’s in Meridian, and a concern of other black American novelists in the late-twentieth century, scars can also signify memory. Scars heighten memory. They resist forgetting, as they exist on or inside the body as evidence of an injury, as evidence of the body or mind’s own battle.