Feminism and Fanon

I really enjoyed reading Fanon’s chapter “Algeria Unveiled” from his book A Dying Colonialism. Having read his article knowing that I was going to transform his words into a poem “Shange style,” gave me a new appreciation for his words. Personally, I find reading pieces by theorists like Marx and Foucault quite difficult because the writing is not as approachable as some other more contemporary authors. I expected Fanon’s work to be much of the same but I was pleasantly surprised to find that I enjoyed this piece in particular—specifically, the style of it. Fanon discusses the Western notion that women who wear the veil are in need of saving and how this idea has become militarized to justify white intervention in the Middle East. In previous courses I have read Lila Abu-Lughod’s “Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving,” and this piece echoed the sentiment of contemporary Middle Eastern scholars, which was refreshing to read from a male scholar writing in 1965. He describes how the veil is understood in the West as a mechanism of oppression, and by intervening in the Algeria and “saving” these women, they were “symbolically unveiled.” (Fanon 42) However, from the perspective of the colonized this symbolic unveiling can also be understood as rape—of both body and culture. What the colonizer understands as “freedom,” (as motivated by military goals,) the colonized sees this same action as an expression of violence against a physical and mental space. Fanon writes, in regards to the “saving” of Algerian women by the colonizers, “every face that offered itself to the bold and impatient glance of the occupier, was a negative expression of the fact that Algeria was beginning to deny herself and was accepting the rape of the colonizer.” (Fanon 43) Essentially, that the unveiling of women was the acceptance of colonization and one’s position as subordinate to the colonizer. Fanon then explores the effect of this, which was the choice to employ women in the fight against the colonizer. Fanon writes that “this decision to involve women in active elements of the Algerian Revolution was not reached lightly” and that at the start, female involvement in the war was restricted to “married women whose husbands were militants,” then gradually expanded to include “widows or divorced women.” (Fanon 51) Eventually, the volunteering of unmarried girls grew so high that “the political leaders…. Removed all restrictions to accept indiscriminately the support of all Algerian women.” (Fanon 51) While unveiling of women was a violent action in the name of Western perceptions of freedom, this permission to fight against the colonizer was the type of freedom that Algerian woman wanted. Fanon illuminates the key difference between Western perceptions of freedom and what women in Algeria truly want.

Women then became an instrumental part of the war and proved to be key militants in the fight against colonization. Fanon spends the later portion of his piece describing how it is that these Western stereotype of “innocence” among women who wear the veil was then militarized by Algerian women in their fight for independence. By mobilizing notions of femininity and its stereotypical ties to weakness and the veil, Algerian women became key players in the resistance, unassuming soldiers that were able to infiltrate European’s by using their own misinformed notions against them.

The idea of “saving women” at the surface level can be understood as feminist as freeing an entire country of women from the oppressive man, but in actuality, the story is quite different, and this is what Fanon attempts to make clear. The veil is a garment worn by women throughout history. It is just as anti-feminist to force a woman to wear a veil as it is to force her not to wear the veil. By forcing women to remove the veil, woman by woman, “piece by piece, the flesh of Algeria laid bare.” (Fanon 32) This physical removal of a garments, against the will of the wearer, is extremely possessive, dangerous, and anti-feminist. Fanon does the work of demonstrating how this is the case, and in my opinion his work can be understood as an attempt at an early, male’s feminist critique of colonialism.

Having read Shange’s works and understanding her emphasis on movement in literature, I began to see that in Fanon’s work as well. His piece is written in a very approachable and lyrical way, yet his words reflect the mood of the piece. His words of conquer are violent and the language he picks to illuminate this are visible throughout this piece. He uses words like “flesh,” “eroticism,” “brutality,” and “sadism” throughout his piece to evoke a feeling of forced entry—encroachment on physical space and culture. I tried to use the same type of forceful language throughout my poem to produce the same kind of effect. This exercise demonstrated to me how important a “mood” of a piece is—how choosing very specific words have a certain effect that is a deliberate choice made by the author to make the readers feel a certain way.