Some Quotes from Frantz Fanon

Bruce Lee with Nunchaku in Way of the Dragon (1972)

A while back at the University I gave a lecture on Bruce Lee and the Postcolonial. Here are some quotations from Frantz Fanon's Wretched of the Earth that chime with my theme:

"And it is clear that in the colonial countries the peasants alone are revolutionary, for they have nothing to lose and everything to gain. The starving peasant, outside the class system is the first among the exploited to discover that only violence pays. For him there is no compromise, no possible coming to terms; colonization and decolonization are simply a question of relative strength."

“[In the colonial situation,] the dreams of the native are always of muscular prowess; his dreams are of action and aggression. I dream I am jumping, swimming, running, climbing; […] that I span a river in one stride, or that I am followed by a flood of motor cars which never catch up with me. […] The native’s muscles are always tensed. You can't say that he is terrorized, or even apprehensive. He is in fact ready at a moment’s notice to exchange the role of the quarry for that of the hunter” (40).

“[In the colonial situation,] at the level of individuals, violence is a cleansing force. It frees the native from his inferiority complex, and from his despair and inaction; it makes him fearless and restores his self respect” (74).

“Violence […] is Man recreating himself.” Sartre, in his Preface to the book, p.18.

Peasant weapons

The above image is from Paulus Hector Mair's sixteenth-century encyclopedia of German martial arts. (A number of such Fechtbücher were produced during the late middle ages and early Renaissance). As well as including instructions for knightly techniques, Mair's encyclopedia discusses peasant weapons such as scythes, sickles and cudgels (pictured above).

For scans of the first two volumes see:

http://mdz10.bib-bvb.de/~db/bsb00006570/images/index.html

http://mdz10.bib-bvb.de/~db/bsb00007894/images/index.html

There are youtube clips of reconstructions of some of the techniques described by Mair for European peasant weaponry at:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3-cgClKJbGg

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ef9Xuzu3aa0

In the Chinese martial arts, there are also, of course, a number of weapons that derive not from military use, but from peasant tools: scythes, spades, staffs, knives, hoes, rakes, and, of course, rice flails – the iconic nunchaku of Bruce Lee derives from the Okinawan version of this last tool, and as M.T. Kato points out in From Kung Fu to Hip Hop: Globalisation, Revolution and Popular Culture (New York: SUNY Press, 2007), the development of the nunchaku as a weapon harks back to the ban on the native population carrying bladed weapons under Japan's occupation of Okinawa during the seventeenth century (pp.42-3).

Such weapons, then, were adaptations used for village self-defence, and speak of an 'other' martial art, aside from that created by the military. Kato even goes as far as to argue for two opposing categories: the officially-instituted, drilled, imperialist martial arts of order and discipline such as judo or the samurai sword on the one hand, and a more improvisatory and informal decolonising martial arts of resistance or revolt on the other – 'martial arts from below' as it were. (Of course, such an opposition seems to beg for deconstruction or dialecticisation...)

Monkey: What is that thing?

Pigsy: This? It was made for me by Lao Tzu.

Monkey: The Venerable Lao?!

Pigsy: It was to comepensate me for this incarnation. It's my muck rake...