Frantz Fanon among the Prophets: Prophetic Violence or Christian Nonviolence?

One day, after Moses had grown up, he went out to his people and saw their forced labor. He saw an Egyptian beating a Hebrew, one of his kinsfolk. He looked this way and that, and seeing no one he killed the Egyptian and hid him in the sand. (Exodus 2:11-12, NRSV )

Elijah said to them, “Seize the prophets of Baal; do not let one of them escape.” Then they seized them; and Elijah brought them down to the Wadi Kishon, and killed them there. (1^st Kings 18:40, NRSV)

Then the Lord said to him [Elijah], “Go, return on your way to the wilderness of Damascus; when you arrive, you shall anoint Hazael as king over Aram. Also you shall anoint Jehu son of Nimshi as king over Israel; and you shall anoint Elisha son of Shaphat of Abel-meholah as prophet in your place. Whoever escapes from the sword of Hazael, Jehu shall kill; and whoever escapes from the sword of Jehu, Elisha shall kill.” (1^st Kings 19:15-17, NRSV)

Originally posted at the Postcolonial Theology Network on facebook.

Over the past few years, I have gained a reputation among my peers as being a person dedicated to nonviolence.  In fact, according to one of my friends, he says that I am a person who believes Christian nonviolence is the only orthodoxy and I judge everything according certain standards of peacemaking in the Christian tradition.  Also this summer as I was visiting the blog of a friend, I was accused by one particular commenter, of being one of “those Christians,” you know, the kind that believes the Church ought to say something about peace issues, like racism and sexism.  To accentuate my point, some of my peers often deride my dedication to Christian nonviolence because I, they argue, would not be able to apply this ethic to the Hebrew Bible.

But to say that I could universalize an ethic of nonviolence in the reading of both history and scripture is an error.  I confess Christian nonviolent resistance because I recognize the histories of gender and racial violence that have occur and continue to happen in the context of American imperialism.  One of my favorite enslaved African preachers to study is Nat Turner, a preacher who inspired his followers to violent revolution against their enslavers through the use of homilies on the judges and Joshua narratives.  Frantz Fanon, in his Wretched Of The Earth (WOTE), argues that for the colonized subject who is forced to understand violence as praxis (44), the death of the colonizer means that life has emerged (50).  The decolonization process makes violence necessary because the colonial world is a violent, compartmentalized society where the colonized have no space to move (3-5).  Land (spaciality) is important because it allows human beings space to express their freedom.  Land allows the dehumanized to discover their humanity by recovering and discovering their own cultures.  Cultural suppression, then, as a form of violence, only intensifies the outrage of the colonized (172).

If violence is the beginning of the story for the colonized subject who dreams of freedom, that violence must be justified somehow, and this process of justification is found in the stories that are constructed during the creation of a national culture.  “National culture is the collective thought process of a people to describe, justify, and extol the actions whereby they [the various regions that make up the nations] have joined forces and remained strong” (168).  For example, perhaps one person has learned in AP US History class that Abraham Lincoln was right in violating the U.S. Constitution as he waged war with the Confederacy because, by his actions, he is justified because the nation was saved, united, and made stronger and prosperous.  Maybe you did not hear that version of the story; I know I did.  In the same way, maybe the Hebrew Bible in the prophetic tradition particularly, justifies the murderous actions and violent visions of the prophets.  Normatively, one is taught to believe that Moses is wrong for killing the Egyptian in Exodus 2, but do we hear protests about Elisha being commissioned by God to kill God’s enemies? If the prophetic tradition remains true, and Jesus of Nazareth, according to Christian tradition continues and (for some Christians) “fulfills” the prophetic tradition, but at the same time, a group of Christians claim that nonviolence was normative in the life of Christ, how is one to deal with this paradox?

Fanon notes in his final chapter the horrendous mental disorders caused by imperial subjugation.  Issues of race (the stereotype of North African Criminality, 222-223) as well as gender and sexuality (the prevalence of sexual violence against women, 186-189) call into question universal cases for nonviolence in political and religious circles.  Fanon, like the prophets of old, concerned himself with the issues of the day, in the here and not, and not the great by-and-by.  “Up above, Heaven with its promises of an afterlife, down below the French with their firm promises of jail, beatings and executions.  Inevitably, you stumble upon against yourself.  Here lies this core of self-hatred that characterizes racial conflict in segregated societies” (232). The Egyptians were oppressing the Israelites on this Earth, in ancient Egypt; the drought in Elijah’s day had real life consequences for those who were hungry and on the margins, like the widow that Elijah fellowshipped with during those three years of no rain.  The prophets Moses, Elijah, and Elisha did not bother to meditate on some abstract notion of a relationship with a deity above; rather, God was with them, as their contemporary, in their struggle against their enemies.

Truth and Peace,

Rod