On Pacifism, Fanon, and staying haunted

A political life among the ghosts of Series B, Case 1

this essay mentions sexual, domestic, and colonial violence

Just after George Floyd was murdered by Minneapolis police, as the United States was grappling with severe police brutality directed at Black and brown people, a person who sporadically attended my church told me he wouldn’t be coming back. I’d offered a book study of The End of Policing, an incredible book about our imagination for a world beyond policing, one where accountability and restoration happened outside the bounds of the state’s punishment apparatus. We participated as a church in the Black Lives Matter movement. I’d taken steps to invite members of our church into prison work, to see first-hand the degradation of the system.

This had been my world for a while. And it made sense for our lives as Mennonites. As a peace church, we had long-standing convictions about the role of the state’s violent incursion into international politics (we resist), in pledging allegiance to the state (our allegiance is pledged elsewhere), and in submitting our morality to a commander (we cannot). War is the form of state violence enacted internationally. Policing is the form of state violence enacted locally.

Not everyone in my church is aligned around abolition politics -- far from the case. But most of us were shaken by the murder of Floyd, many of us were willing to revisit our Anabaptist convictions, to let ourselves be disrupted by what we saw.

But the man who stopped attending church was a member of a volunteer police unit. He had a deep belief that the state should be empowered to control human behavior. I have no doubt he was alarmed by police brutality, but he was upset by the idea that there was something intrinsically broken in policing.

Pacifism, which is the root of this disruption and reorientation we made space for after George Floyd, is one of the toughest parts of the Mennonite church for a number of people who have considered our church. Pacifism is often the reason people have expressed to me their hesitancy to join the church, or the reason they are going to look elsewhere (although I’m sure there are many other reasons that are not expressed to me).

The concerns shared with me break in two directions, both that concern the redemptive nature of violence. The first is the need for violence in the hands of the state to control bad people. We need prisons to stop others from causing harm. We need armies to keep us safe from countries that want to do us harm. We may even need torture to get information to keep others safe. It is naïve and dangerous to be a part of a church that suggests otherwise. Often people in this camp talk about the need for just warfare.

The other group believes redemptive violence in the hands of individuals and collectives is necessary to resist the state and other powerful actors. We need to carry weapons to keep us safe from white supremacists. Violent revolution is the only way to stop oppressors. Often these concerns are intertwined with interpersonal question: would you not defend yourself if you were being attacked? Wouldn’t you defend someone else?

One reason these conversations are difficult is that we don’t have consensus on what we mean by pacifism. And in the Mennonite church, the contours of pacifism change over time because we are confronted by new questions. One example is from the modern Civil Rights period when many white Mennonites refused to participate in the movement. Much of the Mennonite Church at this time saw itself aligned with non-resistance – as robust a break from the political realities of the world as we could manage. This included not voting, intentionally not making enough money to pay taxes that went to war, and non-participation in political life like school boards or city council meetings.

Our church owes a debt to Black Mennonites, most notably Vincent Harding, for unsettling the church, asking us to see the ways non-resistance was tantamount to active participation in the race war. Sitting out was a form of violence. We shifted as a tradition from non-resistance to pacifism in part through the witness of people like Harding.

Most of the time when people in my world have questions about pacifism they boil down to scenarios. What would you do if you were holding a gun and man was about to push your daughter off a cliff but you had a clear shot? I can truthfully answer that I have no idea what I would do. But I also remind the person that this is not the kind of violence I negotiate. The kind I confront, in myself and around me, is daily, intrinsic, systemic, and all-encompassing.

A life of anti-violence requires a lot more discernment than coming up with a list of rules, policing unrealistic scenarios, or offering opinions on how we might have acted in events of the past. It is one thing to refuse to carry a gun and another to confront the use of violence by the state to enforce the right to private property. It is work to see the web of violence connected by strands of racism, gentrification, corporate power, defunding the social safety net, and environmental degradation. And it is work to address our own complicity in these vast systems.

But I also don’t mean this as a way to evade the question of revolutionary violence, questions I struggle with, that disturb me, that confront me. I first read Frantz Fanon in graduate school, at twenty-three, in a class on postcolonial theory. Fanon is the great theorizer of revolutionary, anti-colonial violence and his work deeply affected me. With Fanon I could see how violence was not reducible to interpersonal conflict but instead is shot through the whole of our political and social systems. I shared (and still share) his Marxist political thought.

For Fanon the way out is violence, greater and intentionally enacted violence, forms of violence that overwhelm the “naked violence” of the colonial oppressor. Fanon, a psychiatrist by training, believed that these acts of greater violence could not only unmake colonial political relations but psychically free the colonized subject. Violence is a tool to remake the world and the subject.

Fanon speaks from his life. He was born and raised in Martinique before going to France for medical school. After, he took employment in Algeria before joining the revolution against the French. Fanon saw colonial violence up close, how it shaped the mind and country of the colonial subject through dehumanization, a necessary turn for the colonizer to enact violence.

I’ve always loved reading Fanon because his attentiveness to the connection between the body, the mind, and the political. Through his psychiatric work he witnessed disorders suffered by those subjected to routine and extraordinary colonial violence. I’ve witnessed this first-hand living (for a short time) near Aida Camp in the West Bank and living near to organizations like Aida Youth Center who attempt to combat the psychic trauma of colonization through a variety of anti-violence practices. But I know in my bones that the daily trauma of life in Palestine is a radicalizing force.

But if we only read the first chapter of The Wretched of the Earth, we would walk away with an incomplete picture of the effect of violence on the futures of colonized subjects. Reading to the end, Fanon’s ideology of violence becomes complex and, for me, a specter haunting our political relations.

That final chapter, chapter five, is titled “Colonial War and Mental Disorders,” and it is a list of case notes. Fanon records “psychotic reactions” in “cases of Algerian and French patients under our care which we think are particularly meaningful.” What happens to the body and mind not only under colonization but through the liberation movements that are “witnessing a veritable apocalypse?”

What follows are cases of psychological disorder emerging from horrific violence and counter acts of violence. A man who is impotent with his wife after she is raped by French soldiers during an interrogation to find the location of her husband. Homicidal impulse in the survivor of a massacre. Suicidal tendency and insomnia in a teenage ALN fighter. Domestic violence enacted by an Algerian freedom fighter on his wife and children. Each is presented without commentary beyond the analysis, at least until the end of the chapter.

Fanon includes examples of both French and Algerian psychological causalities (although I should note that Fanon’s frustration and anger at this arrangement led him to leave the hospital he served). Why note here that the European police officer hears the screams of his victims at home, that he cannot escape his horrors? Fanon recalls that the officer signed up for a job, not a cause, and now he’s sick. He wants to leave.

But the case that I think of most, the one that arises in my mind without my willing it, the haunting that returns to me when someone praise revolutionary violence is Series B, Case 1 – a legal and medical examination in which two children, 13 and 14 year old Algerian boys, have killed their 13 year old European friend. They admit to the crime. There are pictures of the Algerian children holding down their French playmate and stabbing him with a knife. Fanon includes the interview:

“We were not angry with him. Every Thursday we used to go and hunt together with a slingshot up on the hill behind the village. He was our best friend.”

The child continues: “One day we decided to kill him because the Europeans want to kill all the Arabs. We can’t kill the ‘grown-ups,’ but we can kill someone like him because he’s our own age.”

When asked why they chose him, their best friend, the boy replied he was chosen because he was a friend and would trust them. He would be willing to go away with them.

“But he was a friend of yours?”

“So, why do they want to kill us? His father’s in the militia and says we all ought to have our throats slit.”

“But he didn’t say anything like that to you?”

“Him? No.”

“You know he’s dead now.”

“Yes.”

“What does being dead mean?”

“It means it’s all over, you go to Heaven.”

“Did you kill him?”

“Yes.”

“Are you sorry you killed someone?”

“No, because they want to kill us, so…”

“Do you mind being in prison?”

“No.”

In her article about Fanon and trauma, Maggie FitzGerald describes chapter five as an “accidental,” a musical term to mark a scale or mode that is not a member of the applied key signature. Chapter five sits in dissonance with the rest of the theory of violence in the earlier part of t the work. Whatever the promise of seizing hold of violence to transform the subject, we are left to see here how it works out in the world. Violence produces not a break but a repetition of violence. It is revisited upon family members and echoes through generations.

I don’t think about pacifism as a set of rules to follow or a way to keep one’s self pure from violence. Instead, my pacifism is a life haunted by the three children of Series B, Case 1, to find my politics unfolding within their memory. My grasp on what this means as a project eludes me most of the time. I fail. We fail. We tremble and return and begin again.

In the last paragraph of Wretched Fanon offers this assessment: “Once again, the colonized subject fights in order to put an end to domination. But he must also ensure that all the untruths planted within hum by the oppressor are eliminates. In a colonial regime such as the one in Algeria the ideas taught by colonialism impacted not only the European minority but also the Algerian. Total liberation involves every facet of the personality.” This is a challenge I attended to with conviction.

I don’t think I am betraying Fanon by centering my resistance to violence on these three children. Instead, I hope I honor the legacy he left behind. I remember reading that Fanon, very ill at the time, read Jean-Paul Sartre’s preface to Wretched, and put it down without saying a word. Later, his widow had it removed from the book, and a later biographer, Alice Cherki, called the preface a distortion and betrayal. I suspect there is a kind of anti-blackness at work in reducing Fanon to an ethically useless proponent of naked violence.

Fanon may seem like an unlikely guide for a Mennonite pacifist, yet he has been my teacher and my thought companion for decades. This, too, is a form of non-violence, to let him continue to speak, to the receive the enormity of the breaking, and to find a way to wrestle with its challenge again.