Examining
the theoretical foundation of literature written by Chicana/o community
intellectuals could lead to an understanding of why Chicana/o resistance
literature in the past and present situates itself within the overall struggle
of third world liberation movements across the globe. Frantz Fanon, the
Martinique born anti colonial writer, psychologist and liberation theorist
outlines the stages of literary development within an emerging national culture
after centuries of military and economic domination. Writing resistance to
colonial oppression for Fanon is inextricably linked with physical resistance,
which is inextricably linked with the material conditions of the oppressed.
Fanon writes that when the native knows “he is not an animal”[i]
(it is at this moment of understanding or epiphany resistance is born, that “he
realizes his humanity [and] begins to sharpen the weapons with which he will
secure its victory”[ii] Fanon
continues later by giving intellectual body and substance to this process of
struggle sharpening tools both physical and rhetorically when he writes
concerning the national struggle,
In
the first phase, the native intellectual gives proof that he has assimilated
the culture of the occupying powers. His writings correspond point by point
with those of his opposite number in the mother country…In the second phase we
find the native is disturbed; he decides to remember what he is … sometimes
this literature of just-before-the-battle is dominated by humor and by
allegory; but often too it is symptomatic of a period of distress and
difficulty … Finally, in the third phase, which is called the fighting phases,
the native, after having tried to lose himself in the people and with the
people, will on the contrary shake the people. Instead of according the
people’s lethargy an honored place in his esteem, he turns himself into an
awakener of the people; hence comes a fighting literature, a revolutionary
literature, and a national literature.[iii]
Fanon describes the
suspicion this allegiance to a long conqueror culture arouses within the
“occupying power, which interprets attachment to traditions as faithfulness to
the spirit of the nation and as a refusal to submit,”[iv]
in other words the seed of national liberation. The same attitudes are
prominent in Anglo and Chicana/o relations today as charges of slow assimilation
are levied against third even fourth generation Mexican Americans.[v]
Over 40 years after Fanon observations during the Algerian/Franco conflict,
Samuel P. Huntington[vi], past
chairman of the Havard Academy of International and Area Studies and author of
the 2004 Foreign Policy article “The Hispanic Challenge”, documents U.S. Anglo
recognition of this lingering memory of U.S. historical thievery when he
compares the Southwest of the United States to other irredentist[vii]
movements across the globe writing “History shows that serious potential for
conflict exists when people in one country begin referring to territory in a
neighboring country in proprietary terms and to assert special rights and
claims to that territory.”[viii]
The downward spiral toward the complete elimination
of a people’s original culture is inevitable in a colonial setting. All around
us we see the impact of 500 years of genocide and cultural devastation. Fanon
is clear on the status of culture among oppressed colonized peoples. His words
set the stage for long-term political action on the part of the native against
the hegemony of colonial domination
The native intellectual who decides to give battle
to colonial lies fights on the field of the whole continent. The past is given
back its value. Culture, extracted from the past to be displayed in all its
splendor, is not necessarily that of his own country… For colonialism, this
vast continent was the haunt of savages, a country riddled with superstitions
and fanaticism, destined for contempt, weighed down by the curse of God.[ix]
Fanon,
who trained as a psychologist in France[x],
understood and documented the mental dilemmas facing colonized Third World
people during their occupation. Many scholars and liberationist since the
publishing of his work to the present regards his critique of the mental and
physical circumstances endured by the colonized under an occupying colonial
government to be as critical and pertinent today as then. Fanon removes the
onus of maintaining personal legitimacy through culture off the colonized by
demonstrating how the slowly and inevitably declining indigenous culture is
inescapably replaced by a colonial culture, century after century, until it
becomes obvious the original “national culture under colonial domination is a contested
culture whose destruction is sought in a systematic fashion”[xi]
so much so, Fanon writes, that in the end before the emergence of the national
liberation movement all that is left for the natives is “simply a concentration on a hard core
of culture which is becoming more and more shriveled up, inert and empty.”[xii]
Amilicar
Cabral[xiii]
the Papua New Guinea liberationist as the keynote speaker for the Eduardo
Mondlane Speech at Syracuse University on October 14, 1970 in a speech titled
“National Liberation and Culture” said in part, “the national liberation of a
people is the regaining of the historical personality of that people, it is a
return to history through the destruction of the imperialist domination to
which they have been subjected” (Cabral, p. 7). Like all soldiers/scholars of
third world national liberation struggles Cabral understood the actual return
to history (cultural reawakening through a national liberation struggle) is
subjective in that each national liberation struggle along with the strategies
to victory are by necessity unique to the country where the struggle
originates. This does not mean however, that lessons cannot be learned or
shouldn’t be taken from other national liberation struggles.
By
examining the histories of colonial struggles around the world we see that
material conditions play a major role in both the decisions of the oppressed
and the reaction of the oppressor in this return to history. The material,
social and cultural conditions created by colonialism allow limited avenues of
response to the oppressed. In terms of how this return to history is
accomplished it is vital to understand that every revolutionary situation is
different because according to Mao “war in any country is waged in the special
environment of that country and it has special circumstances and
characteristics.”[xiv] It stands
to reason though any “return to history” is prefigured by a departure from
history – for purposes of our discussion we will call this departure
“colonialism” and focus on the process of return – known as the national
liberation struggle.
The
history of the Chicana/o has been for the past 162 years the history of the
United States, plenty of time to experience the inability of liberal democracy
in the U.S. to fulfill its promise of citizenship guaranteed in the Treaty of
Guadalupe Hidalgo. The failure to included Chicana/os in full citizenship
rhetorically and in political practice along with increasingly stark power
differentials in terms of socio-economic status within a colonial framework are
vital in placing Chicana/o resistance literature as a first step toward Cabral’s
“return to history.”
It
is vital to understand that for Cabral the national liberation struggle, which
at is base is a cultureal/material production and is inextricably linked with a
“return to history” are consequences of each other. In the case of Chicana/os
the history being created is an Indigenist history. Indigenist history is
defined as an evolving liberation history, the making of a set of events that
is unfolding; history that is happening as an emerging vision written by an
emerging people. Ward Churchill helps us to frame the Indigenist outlook when
he writes about his definition of the word indigenist,
By
this, I mean that I am one that not only takes the rights of indigenous peoples
as the highest priority of my political life, but who draws upon the traditions
– the bodies of knowledge and corresponding codes of values – evolved over many
thousands of years by native peoples the world over.[xv]
It
is also important to understand that the process of national liberation, the
physical and intellectual freeing of a people from colonial domination, is by
necessity a long one shrouded many times in secrecy. For any cultural movement
when this return to history begins is difficult to pinpoint and perhaps
unnecessary since it evident through an examination of national liberation
struggles there are usually multiple players working independent of each other
for long periods of time. This is only one reason why the examination of
resistance literature is so vital. Action spring from dialogue; without true
dialogue, education and organization there can be no struggle. Without struggle
there is no national culture, struggle for the oppressed being the material
production of history or as Cabral writes “because it is history, culture has
as its material base the level of the productive forces and the mode of
production.”[xvi]
The material foundation of struggle in terms of the production of culture and
the will to resist is vital to understanding of how revolutionary culture is
formed and revolutionary history is written.
At
what point does Chicana/o resistance literature abandon the imposed modernizing
project of western civilization to return to its own process of collective
history? Whose literature speaks to the future or to the past? Whose is
obsessed with reexamining history or building toward a new history? It is
important to understand that Cabals’ return to history is not a wish to return
to the conditions that existed before the European arrived. Cabral’s and
Fanon’s desire is that as a distinct people the colonized will emerge from a
culturally obscure position to a position of authority on their land by
reclaiming and rebuilding a national culture apart from the colonizer.
[i] Fanon, Frantz. (1961) “Wretched
of the Earth” p. 43
[ii] Fanon, p. 43
[iii] Fanon, p. 222-223
[iv] Fanon, p. 237
[v] Huntington, Samuel. “The
Hispanic Challenge” p. 6-8
[vi] (deceased)
[vii] The Encarata World English
Dictionary defines the word irredentist as “a member of a group of people who
support the return to their country of territories that used to belong to it
but are now under foreign rule.”
“Harry
Beran has argued that the consent model leaves ample room for a right to secede
from those states to which no consent was given. The idea here is that if each
individual enjoys complete dominion regarding herself, then only her consent is
sufficient to determine her membership in a political union. Beran writes,
“Liberal democratic theory is committed to the permissibility of secession
quite independently of its desirability in order to increase the possibility of consent-based political authority. The
claim is this: if persons have a right to personal and political
self-determination, then secession must be permitted if it is effectively
desired by a territorially concentrated group and if it is morally and
practically possible.” Thus Beran concludes that the consent theory of
political legitimacy entails that individuals have a moral right to emigrate
and change their nationality and that “any territorially concentrated group
within a state should be permitted to secede if it wants to and it is morally
and practically possible”
[viii] Huntington, Samuel. “The
Hispanic Challenge” p. 5
[ix] Fanon, Frantz. (1961) “Wretched
of the Earth” p. 211
[x] Gibson, Nigel. Ed. (1999)
“Rethinking Fanon: The Continuing Dialogue” Humanity Books, Amherst, NY. P.
60-68
[xi] Fanon, Frantz. (1961) “Wretched
of the Earth” p. 237
[xii] Ibid. p. 238
[xiii] Cabral was the Secretary General
of the Partido Africana do Independencia de Guiné e Cabo Verde. He was
assassinated January 20, 1973.
[xiv] Mao Tse Tung “Laws of war”
[xv] Churchill “Struggle for the
Land” p. 403
[xvi] (Cabral, p. 5). This point is particularly salient for
Chicana/os in terms of production since Chicana/os do not have widespread
ownership of the means of material production. They do have, however, and are
engaged in the widespread production of culture. Meanwhile, it's becoming clear
to me that that one of the most complex and compelling axes you want to grind
is to defend cultural nationalism against that which has supplanted it:
mestizaje (we're all mixed and therefore, finally, all the same), and
multiculturalism (we agree that we're all different and that we all like each
other's differences).
