Notes on Jean-Paul Sartre's Preface to Frantz Fanon's Wretched of the Earth

 Jean Paul Sartre's Preface to Frantz Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, Grove Press, New York, 2004

Colonialism, Scars and Chains

"…our victims know us by their scars and by their chains, and it is this that makes their evidence irrefutable. It is enough that they show us what we have made of them for us to realize what we have made of ourselves" (13).

Decolonization as the Recreation of Man

"They would do well to read Fanon; for he shows clearly that this irrepressible violence is neither sound nor fury, nor the resurrection of savage instincts, nor even the effect of resentment; it is man recreating himself" (21).

Decolonization, Responsibility, Structure

"The war, by merely setting the question of command and responsibility, institutes new structures which will become the first institutions of peace. Here, then, is man even now established in new traditions, the future children of a horrible present" (23).

Violence Abroad, Breakup at Home

"Today violence, blocked everywhere, comes back on us though our soldiers, comes inside and takes possession of us. Involution starts; the native recreates himself, and we, settlers and Europeans, ultras and liberals, we break up"(28).