The anti-antiracism of Frantz Fanon

 "The [Frantz] Fanon we encounter in [Schatz's] pages rejects every form of racialist essentialism and envisions a future in which 'savage self-interest is [not] the sovereign principle of human conduct.'  His target is neither the West nor the Global North but all attempts to divide us through counterfeit categories in order to convince us that politics amounts to tribal struggles for power.
     "Schatz's portrait of Fanon does what superb biographies always do:  send the reader back to the original texts.  They provide a startling challenge to that recent antiracist ideology that routinely dismisses appeals to universalism as intellectual imperialism, fraudulent attempts to impose European ideas on non-European peoples.  The versions promoted by Ibram X. Kendi or Robin DiAngelo may be simplistic, but their simplicity and success lay bare assumptions also held by more thoughtful writers.  The very expression 'identity politics' assumes what is never proven:  that our identities are most fundamentally determined by aspects of our selfhood over which we have no control.  The inherited victimhood, or perpetratorship, that much current antiracist literature presupposes is just what Fanon sought to renounce. . . .
     "Common as it is today, th[e] claim [that 'universalism [is] itself a construct designed to veil the imposition of European values and institutions on the rest of the world'] was never made by Fanon.  His fury at the ways in which the ideals of the French Revolution were unrealized in the successive republics that proclaimed them never led him to jettison the ideals themselves.  Rather, he saw universalism as a promise whose fulfillment must be demanded.
". . . Fanon's goal was, according to Sekyi-Otu, 'not the death of the colonizer, but the death of race as the principle of moral judgement'. . . ."

     Susan Neiman, "Fanon the universalist," a review of The rebel's clinic:  the revolutionary lives of Frantz Fanon, by Adam Schatz, and Fanon's dialectic of experience, by Ato Sekyi-Otu, in The New York review of books 71, no. 10 (June 6, 2024):  21 (19-21).  It should be added that Nieman goes on to apply this Revolutionary "never been tried-ism" to Fanon's communism as well.

"Mistrust him, Meg, will I not"

      "'Mistruste him, Megge, wil I not, though I feale me faint, yea, and though I shoulde fele my feare euen at poynt to ouerthrowe me to, yet shall I remember how S. Peter, with a blast of winde, began to sinke for his faint faith, and shall doe as he did, call vpon Christ and praye him to helpe.  And than I trust he shall set his holye hande vnto me, and in the stormy seas, holde me vp from drowning.  Yea and if he suffer me to play S. Peter ferthere, and to fall full to the grownd, and swere and forsware too (which our Lorde for his tender pasion kepe me fro, and let me leese if it so fall, and neuer winne thereby:) yet after shall I trust that his goodnes will cast vpon me his tender pyteous eie, as he did vpon S. Peter, and make me stand vp againe and confesse the trouth of my conscience afresh, and abide the shame and the harme here of mine owne faulte.
     "'And finally, Marget, this wot I well, that without my fault he will not let me be loste.  I shall therfore with good hoope committe my selfe wholie to hym.  And if he suffre me for my faultes to perish, yet shall I than serue for a praise of his iustice.  But in good faith, Meg, I trust, that his tender pitie shall kepe my pore soule safe and make me commende his mercye.'"

     St. Thomas More, as quoted by his daughter Margaret Roper in her famous letter of August 1534 to Lady Alice Alington, at ll. 640-659 of no. 206 in The correspondence of Sir Thomas More, ed. Elizabeth Frances Rogers (Princeton, NJ:  Princeton University Press, 1947), 531 (514-532).  This came into the Liturgy of the hours from (supposedly) The English works of Sir Thomas More (London:  1557), 1454, as follows:

     I will not mistrust him, Meg, though I shall feel myself weakening and on the verge of being overcome with fear.  I shall remember how Saint Peter at a blast of wind began to sink because of his lack of faith, and I shall do as he did: call upon Christ and pray to him for help.  And then I trust he shall place his holy hand on me and in the stormy seas hold me up from drowning.
     And if he permits me to play Saint Peter further and to fall to the ground and to swear and forswear, may God our Lord in his tender mercy keep me from this, and let me lose if it so happen, and never win thereby!  Still, if this should happen, afterward I trust that in his goodness he will look on me with pity as he did upon Saint Peter, and make me stand up again and confess the truth of my conscience afresh and endure here the shame and harm of my own fault.
     And finally, Margaret, I know this well: that without my fault he will not let me be lost.  I shall, therefore, with good hope commit myself wholly to him.  And if he permits me to perish for my faults, then I shall serve as praise for his justice.  But in good faith, Meg, I trust that his tender pity shall keep my poor soul safe and make me commend his mercy.

Papias, the 11th-century lexicographer and grammarian, on "labyrinth"

 From his Elementarium:

"or, as it were, an interior labor" (labor-int-us).

     I was put onto this by Annie Cazenave, "Chartres et Jerusalem ou la cathédrale et le temple," in Association des Amis du Centre Médiéval Européen de Chartres, Un fil d’Ariane pour le labyrinthe de Chartres:  Actes du Colloque Européen des 3 et 4 juillet 1999 (Chartres:  AACMEC, 1999), 52 (47-63), where this is called "one of those false etymologies then so frequent and often revelatory of [the medieval and sometimes (rarement) Hellenistic] mode of thought".  OED:  "< ancient Greek λαβύρινθος maze, complicated question or argument, of unknown origin"; "The traditional association of ancient Greek λαβύρινθος with the supposed Lydian word λάβρυς 'axe' (see labrys n.) is highly doubtful and the origin of this word remains unclear."
     Translate the rest of this!

"the father would renounce his religion and remain at home to raise the children while the mother went to the Solovetsky Islands."

"However, the root destruction of religion in the country, which throughout the twenties and thirties was one of the most important goals of the GPU-NKVD, could be realized only by mass arrests of [not just high-ranking clergy, but] Orthodox believers. Monks and nuns, whose black habits had been a distinctive feature of Old Russian life, were intensively rounded up on every hand, placed under arrest, and sent into exile. They arrested and sentenced active laymen. The circles kept getting bigger, as they raked in ordinary believers as well, old people, and particularly women, who were the most stubborn believers of all and who, for many long years to come, would be called 'nuns' in transit prisons and in camps.
     "True, they were supposedly being arrested and tried not for their actual faith but for openly declaring their convictions and for bringing up their children in the same spirit. As Tanya Khodkevich wrote:

You can pray freely
But just so God alone can hear.

(She received a ten-year sentence for these verses.) A person convinced that he possessed spiritual truth was required to conceal it from his own children! In the twenties the religious education of children was classified as a political crime under Article 58-10 of the Code—in other words, counterrevolutionary propaganda! True, one was still permitted to renounce one's religion at one's trial: it didn't often happen but it nonetheless did happen that the father would renounce his religion and remain at home to raise the children while the mother went to the Solovetsky Islands. (Throughout all those years women manifested great firmness in their faith.) All persons convicted of religious activity received tenners, the longest term then given."

     Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, The gulag archipelago 1918-1956:  an experiment in literary investigation I-II, trans. Thomas P. Whitney (New York:  Harper & Row, 1973), 37-38.

"why did I keep silent?"

     "Yes, resistance should have begun right there, at the moment of the arrest itself.
     "But it did not begin.

     "And so they are leading you. During a daylight arrest there is always that brief and unique moment when they are leading you, either inconspicuously, on the basis of a cowardly deal you have made, or else quite openly, their pistols unholstered, through a crowd of hundreds of just such doomed innocents as yourself. You aren’t gagged. You really can and you really ought to cry out—to cry out that you are being arrested! That villains in disguise are trapping people! That arrests are being made on the strength of false denunciations!  That millions are being subjected to silent reprisals! . . .
     "Instead, not one sound comes from your parched lips, and that passing crowd naively believes that you and your executioners are friends out for a stroll.
     "I myself often had the chance to cry out. . . .
     ". . . So why did I keep silent? Why, in my last minute out in the open, did I not attempt to enlighten the hoodwinked crowd?
     ". . .
     "Every man has handy a dozen glib little reasons why he is right not to sacrifice himself. Some still have hopes of a favorable outcome to their case and are afraid to ruin their chances by an outcry. . . . Others have not yet attained the mature concepts on which a shout of protest to the crowd must be based. Indeed, only a revolutionary has slogans on his lips that are crying to be uttered aloud; and where would the uninvolved, peaceable average man come by such slogans?  He simply does not know what to shout.  And then, last of all, there is the person whose heart is too full of emotion, whose eyes have seen too much, for that whole ocean to pour forth in a few disconnected cries.
     "As for me,. I kept silent for one further reason: because those Muscovites thronging the steps of the escalators were too few for me, too few! Here my cry would be heard by 200 or twice 200, but what about the 200 million? Vaguely, unclearly, I had a vision that someday I would cry out to the 200 million.
     "But for the time being I did not open my mouth, and the escalator dragged me implacably down into the nether world.
     "And when I got to Okhotny Road, I continued to keep silent.
     "Nor did I utter a cry at the Metropole Hotel.
     "Nor wave my arms on the Golgatha of Lubyanka Square."

     Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, The gulag archipelago 1918-1956:  an experiment in literary investigation I-II, trans. Thomas P. Whitney (New York:  Harper & Row, 1973), 15-18.

Anti-classism

"In his instructions on the use of Red Terror, the Chekist M. I. Latsis wrote:  'In the interrogation do not seek evidence and proof that the person accused acted in word or deed against Soviet power.  The first question should be:  What is his class, what is his origin, what is his education and upbringing? . . . These are the questions which must determine the fate of the accused.'"

       Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, The gulag archipelago 1918-1956:  an experiment in literary investigation I-II, trans. Thomas P. Whitney (New York:  Harper & Row, 1973), 96-97.  Martin Ivanovich Latsis, born in 1888, was himself executed as a counter-revolutionary in 1938.

"Is there any truth to this claim?"

"In the course of time the Easter dance came [for a period] to be directed to and confined within the labyrinths that were set within the nave of the church, at least at several of the cathedrals of northern France.  We do not know exactly where or when this first occurred.  What can be said with certainty is that all of the extant references to the use of the labyrinth in the church prior to the seventeenth century pertain to the ceremony of the Easter dance and no other."

. . .

"Most guidebooks explain the presence of the maze on a cathedral floor in something like the following terms:  'In the Middle Ages the labyrinth served as a place where devout souls carried out a vicarious pilgrimage to Jerusalem, praying as they followed the path of the maze on their knees.' . . .  Is there truth to this claim that the maze entered the church as a site for substitute pilgrimage?  None at all.
     "In fact, the church maze was used as a place of fictive pilgrimage not at the beginning of its history, but at its end.  The two earliest documents to refer to the labyrinth as a 'path to Jerusalem' date from the late eighteenth century" and refer back to a "ritual . . . performed at Chartres" no earlier than the seventeenth century.

. . .

"During the sixteenth century . . . the labyrinth lost some of the Christological associations it had acquired during the Middle Ages.  It became, as it once was long ago with the patristic fathers, a simple [and almost purely literary?] metaphor for the route along which the solitary soul must pass. . . .  [T]he maze evolved from a medieval symbol of noisy Hell and Purgatory to a post-Reformation place of quiet, where a more personal, possibly nonsectarian experience might take place. . . .  This maze has no demonic center.  There is no implication of a round-trip journey by Christ.  There are neither militaristic nor eucharistic overtones.  There are no praises to martyrs of the Christian cause.  This maze has no special relevance to the season of Easter.  The pilgrim may set forth to Jerusalem at any time.
     "As he does so, he will find himself alone.  In this early-modern maze, the emphasis has shifted from a collective symbol seen from without to an object for individual meditation experienced from within.  We should recall that there are no records attesting to, or even suggesting, a personal journey on a church maze prior to the seventeenth century.  [Though I (Steve Perisho) find some of Wright's interpretative work speculative, too,] All earlier accounts speak of clerics dancing on the maze or processing across it on Easter as part of the liturgy of the Roman Catholic Church.  Allusions to a meditative experience for laymen begin to appear only in the seventeenth century.  Not coincidentally, it is in this period that the 'pilgrim on the maze' sets forth in emblem books in the West."  Etc.

     Craig Wright, The maze and the warrior:  symbols in architecture, theology, and music (Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press, 2001), 138 (chap. 5, The Dance of the Maze), all italics and underscoring mine, and then 208-210 and 213 and following.
     That was in 2001.  In 2004 Connolly challenged this, asserting that "We should not let [the absence of] texts do all of our [art-historical] work for us" ("At the center of the world:  the labyrinth pavement of Chartres cathedral," in Art and architecture of late medieval pilgrimage in northern Europe and the British Isles, ed. Sarah Blick & Rita Teppike, Studies in medieval and Reformation traditions:  history, culture, religion, ideas 104  (Leiden:  Brill, 2004), 293n25)).  I have yet to grapple fully with the serious argument made by Connolly, or with any other serious counter-arguments for that matter, but my point is that too much of what "the 'ecumenicalists' of the New Age" (Wright, 271) have claimed for the purpose and use of the large pavement maze (the relatively time- and space-bound occurrence of that phenomenon) in the history of Christian spirituality seems to have been theoretical at best and fanciful at worst, or, in other words, perfectly contestable.