decolonIzIng mAstery 59from this attachment to mastery? To grapple with Fanon’s self- conception
through explicitly natural imagery—his “soul” and body living as “cripple”
when in fact a master is “felt” therein—is to confront a desire for decolo-
nization in which a “new type of man” will always emerge through the
rightful subjugation of otherness. While Fanon employs nature metaphor-
ically in his formulation of colonial racism, his humanism trails away from
an ecological worldview, one that holds out the possibility of angling away
from the dialectic of mastery.
Fanon’s Cripple
Fanon’s masterful self, “crippled” by colonial racism, is oriented in very par-
ticular ways toward and against other bodies. Beyond the prohibitions of
the black male body’s orientation in colonial space, the figure of the cripple
also signals a disavowal that “cripples” the universal reach of Fanon’s own
anticolonial desire. His reliance on the cripple in “The Fact of Blackness” is
among the least explored and most perplexing of his narrative disablings.
Earlier in the chapter, when Fanon writes of his experience of alienation on
the train, he asks: “What else could it be for me but an amputation, an exci-
sion, a hemorrhage that spattered my whole body with black blood? But I
did not want this revision, this thematization. All I wanted was to be a man
among other men. I wanted to come lithe and young into a world that was
ours and to help to build it together” (1967c, 112). Here we witness Fanon’s
utopian spirit, his embodied desire to be “lithe and young” and to build
collectively an inclusive world of men “among other men.” Fanon explains
the break of his utopian spirit via a “historico- racial schema” that produces
an affective feeling of corporeal amputation, of excision, of hemorrhage. He
employs the figure of the cripple—of amputation—to symbolize a racially
embodied subject whose existence is one of bodily erasure, lack, and de-
pletion. Set against the properly masterful white embodied subject, Fanon
is crippled by the force and play of colonization. The cripple becomes, in
effect, the mastered body, the one subjected to mastery, the one whose em-
bodiment always performs and reveals externally its subjugation, the one
who is, in effect, not fully man, and thus the one with whom Fanon cannot
ally himself.
At the end of “The Fact of Blackness,” Fanon turns again to the cripple,
pronouncing: “I am a master and I am advised to adopt the humility of the