By George Mentore
George Mentore is a Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Virginia, and author Of Passionate Curves and Desirable Cadences: Themes on Waiwai Social Being (2005). He has worked for many years in Guyana and Brazil with the Waiwai, Wapishana and Makushi peoples. His research has appeared in Anthropology and Humanism, and Tipití: Journal of the Society for the Anthropology of Lowland South America. Currently, he is working on the social and cultural presence of human cruelty with a general focus on the cross-cultural understanding of apology and forgiveness.
The Social Clothes of Abjection
“Two centuries ago, a former European colony decided to catch up with Europe. It succeeded so well that the United States of America became a monster, in which the taints, the sickness and the inhumanity of Europe have grown to appalling dimensions” (Frantz Fanon, 1974).
These words, from The Wretched of the Earth, written by Martinican psychiatrist and philosopher Frantz Fanon, remain as true today for the prospects of the Republic of Guyana as they did for the USA. That we Guyanese remain “hardears” to Fanon’s plaintive appeal might well be a contagious trait of most, if not all, post-colonial peoples. It seems, Fanon notes, that in post-colonialities we find it difficult, if not impossible, “to stop talking about output, and intensification, and the rhythm of work”. As he pointed out, we seem to spend most of our efforts paying “tribute to Europe by creating states, institutions and societies which draw their inspiration from her,” concluding that “If we wish to live up to our peoples’ expectations, we must seek the response elsewhere than in Europe”. As Fanon concludes, “to advance a step farther … to bring it up to a different level than that which Europe has shown it, then we must invent and we must make discoveries”.
It becomes increasingly evident that the monstrosity that former European colonies have become in their pursuit to “catch up” has not only continued to place the planet in its current precarious position of global warming and relentless warfare, but has perhaps, more significantly, also enabled the squandering of possibilities to be a more attractive kind of earthling. Indeed, where do the aspirations of betterment turn to avoid the enduring accusation of being called monstrous? Even more challenging, how can a collectivity of people avoid the wickedness or cruelty their monstrosity provokes or elicits, to be better, to feel good, and to inspire others toward betterment? To me, Fanon’s answer seems to be in breaking the habit of copying the spirit of so-called “progress” and disobeying the appeal to “catch up” with Euro-American-inspired modernity. An easier said than done solution, right?
Let us take it for granted that postcolonial “people’s expectations” are for betterment, not the one promised in the appeal to Euro-American progress, which does no more than deepen the continued wretchedness of humiliation and suffering as experienced in the astutely defined “deathworld” of “necropolitics”: terms coined by African philosopher Achille Mbembe. In Mbembe’s definition, the modern nation-state and its competing forces of neoliberalism, which set and enforce the standards for human progress and economic growth, contend with one another over the making and remaking of lives in whose image they have privileged their form. For those bodies not deemed part of this population of the privileged, the consequence is to be relegated to a life of the living dead or reduced to corpses. The life that is allowed to suffer or “let die” is the one ranked below, conscious of its inferior wretched status. If the appeal of progress has in it the attractive promise of embodied betterment that has never actually delivered the wretched from their misery, it is primarily because it can only be imagined from the space of wretchedness that cannot exist without the ranked superiority of a sovereign well-being detached from it and exclusively reserved for the privileged.
Take, for example, an agrarian life lived as a pedestrian, a walker without any means of transportation, or even as one transported only by oxcart on sand and dirt trails through the southern savannas. When such a life is separated, compared, and ranked below the urban life of a motorist on smooth, speedy, paved roads, it quickly becomes seen as undeveloped and in need of “infrastructural improvement”. The desire for progress in this infrastructural form makes itself appealing by first devaluing that which came before and fixing the one who lived it in an accusatory state of inferiority. Keep in mind that, in stark contrast to the planet-friendly sand and dirt trails of the so-called undeveloped world, tarmac roads absorb high amounts of solar energy, trap heat, and intensify both global and local warming while making concrete pavements where trees have been removed vulnerable to melting. Add to this the impending and intended life of urban living, where streets are devoted primarily to motor vehicles, born directly of the imagination of those who see themselves in the social space of advanced superiority. Some have argued that the principal gain of motorists’ triumph in our city streets has been the tyranny of clock time, where subordination to speed and getting to one’s destination has defeated the more human living of real time that celebrates moving with time and between places. Regaining a dignified human life from the stigma of modernity’s regimes that devalue meaningful co-existence requires reclaiming the treasured values of living with the world rather than against it.
To convince ourselves, however, that the shiny new products of progress, like the emperor’s new clothes, rely only on our capacity to provide them with their value rather than possessing such qualities naturally or dictated to us by precedent, we would have to tap into how nature and precedent work to provide their meanings of value. Also consider that, as part of the structure of colonial power, the colonized have never been allowed to determine what counts as the valued standards of progress. So, how do the history and culture of colonization function to produce the effect of valuing progress while also making those without it feel left behind and thus desiring to catch up?
Despite the normative practice of attributing to the world a nature of its own, said to be driven by either forces of Divine Design or their discoverable scientific codes, and then settling on the view that nature and its essential truths govern effects in the world, much of what we know alternatively and have come to believe in from the vast scholarly literature within social studies is that humans give meaning to the world, not the other way around. Proceeding to scapegoat human invention of such powers by claiming innocence in propagating their determinism has justified a good deal of the cruelty encountered in the Age of Reason. When colonized peoples have been placed in this worldview as recipients of an essentially inferior or underdeveloped nature and then made to believe in it as a political tactic for maintaining the superiority of the colonizer, it becomes very easy to divert blame for their wretchedness in the world away from the inventors of such views to the so-called inferior or undeveloped nature of the wretched. But again, like the emperor’s clothes, to live this interpretation of Being means being convincingly persuaded by the invented “truth” of the claim rather than the claim itself.
We are all born into worlds that existed before our birth. Worlds that, in and of themselves, have had to repeat their signifying elements to sustain their existence. We tend to call the product of such efforts tradition and to endorse them with high moral worth simply because they “came before”. When we enter these worlds, the meaningful signs of what constitutes living are already waiting for us as normative representations, which, when we copy them, lay out the grounds of responsibility we must have to ourselves and to others with whom we live. In my own case, the British Guiana document that helped authorize the “truth” of who I am (and thus who I must believe I am) was my official birth certificate, which informed me, even before I became conscious of being in the world, not only of the names, gender, and occupation of my parents but also my race and gender, as well as the date, place, and numerical order of my birth in the colony.
Thus, the social garments (or if you prefer Fanon’s “Masks”) I had to wear were already laid out for me, without which my performance of presence in the world could not be of any significance. These garments carried not only meanings of difference but also expectations of fixed differences in social rank and status. In other words, the intended catastrophic nakedness of modern social non-existence came covered not with neutral signs but with varying degrees of stigma and grace, depending on where one was classified in the colonial hierarchy of being.
Contesting or resisting these signs often reinforced the reality they imposed. Could it be that dispositioning (or dispossessing) the viability and value of their reality would better serve in creating and discovering new, less monstrous ways of living? Often, aspirations of well-being rely exclusively on the depths of a reality given credence as despair by a cultural process of shared thoughts rather than of shared flesh. Imagine how quickly we would reduce the violence practiced on others if, in the same way that we all share the same oxygen and similar capacity to breathe it to live, we all shared in the same suffering body of the victim of violence.
Beyond the Books
Once during his presidency in Guyana, Cheddi Jagan visited Virginia Tech to drum up U.S. support for Guyanese development. If I remember correctly, his visit then focused on the forestry industry. I had made the trip to Virginia Tech from my own nearby institution with a group of colleagues curious to hear what Cheddi had to say. At the end of his appeal, during question time, I dared to ask why he had come all this way to ask for support from the so-called academic “experts” when he knew full well that the first thing they would do (if they had any credibility) would be to ask the local folks in Guyana what they thought best? True to character, Cheddi looked me straight in the eye with that wry smile and said the funding he needed for Guyanese development would never come his way if the distributing agents didn’t have the expertise of Euro-American-trained specialists leading the project. This was one of my early examples of impactful knowledge learned outside of scholarly books about what it takes to lead a post-colonial country. Still, it was also a telling moment in understanding what Fanon meant by the difficulties of carving out a path forward independent of the colonial monster. My other impactful moment of learning beyond the books came from a local Guyanese who helped me fully understand the differences between social and economic class.
A Guyanese friend invited my wife and me to visit Wakapau in Region Two. During our tour, we stopped at the homestead of a woman farmer who, upon introductions, kept apologizing for her humble abode and poverty. Interested in her farm, we asked to see her plot of cultivated land. Because she insisted she was poor, we expected to see a lean, weed-filled plot. Instead, we were shocked to find a well-kept garden, with almost every patch filled with cassava, fruits, and a variety of greens. After our initial surprise at seeing one of the best-kept farms we had ever encountered, and our hostess’s continued insistence and embarrassment about her poverty, we tried to convince her she was mistaken about her status. To no avail, we could not stop her from seeing herself as a person of low social status. Try as hard as we could, we could not convince her to reimagine herself as a wealthy person, not in terms of monetary riches but in the more relevant, abundant terms of subsistence needs and moral goodness. Here again was the challenge of breaking out of a colonial value system that ranked humanity by worth in a wage economy and dependence on money and the ability to accumulate and display ‘things.’
A new technique for recognizing self-worth and discovering new ways of providing value for such worth and thus avoiding the pathway of monstrosity that seeks for us to “catch up” by constantly mimicking the Whiteman, begins with denouncing the value of the moral garments we have been given cause to wear by modernity. As in the Christian philosophy that morally sustains much of Capitalist logic, where, to maintain the sovereign superiority of goodness, one must apply strenuous effort to providing it with valued meaning by insisting both on having relations with its complementary opposite and making sure such relations have no intimacy or mixture with each other. The angel and the demon provide meaning for each other, but their respective constitutions of goodness and badness cannot be allowed to contaminate each other. Angelic wealth and demonic poverty cannot be confused. Where there is God, there will also be the Devil, but to believe in one is to believe in the other. The tactic of establishing such belief begins by separating their moral base, ensuring they maintain sovereign spaces of difference, and repeating the context and relation often enough that they need no confirmation of their existence beyond the mere idea of them. In modernity, the tactic of establishing self-supremacy over the other depends on sustaining relationships as a form of embattlement, where defeating or suppressing the force of the other aims to produce the effect of self-dominance.
Exorcising the ghost of the colonizer requires dismantling the war machine that keeps on repeating the values of wretchedness he brought with his narcissistic self to comfort his sense of superiority. Undoing the cycle of ranked difference perpetuated inside the so-called “truth” of progress requires disengaging from modernist progress as a valued sense of a future acquisition of supremacy. Knowing how and why the inventor put the cogs in the machine to mimic the cause-and-effect relationship between command and obedience can help here. The political economy of modernist systems has brought the planet to the event horizon of global warming, primarily because its war machine drove it to the precipice, believing it would lead to betterment and triumphant glory over wretchedness, only to discover its very mechanism produced abject suffering. The monstrous ghost can only imagine a life like the one he lived, peopled by subservience to whatever he commands. Post-colonial scholars have long pleaded with our political leaders to find new ways of communion without confusion and conflict, but our academic pleas seem just as repetitively to fall on deaf ears. No matter how idealistic it might sound, however, my hopeful inspiration for salvation from the modernist black hole of relentless suffering remains with the still-remaining voices of Guyanese Indigenous peoples, not yet fully cursed by the repeated last iterations of the prevailing values of the colonizer. But are we too hard of hearing even for such wisdom?
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