In Excess of Decolonization: The Sovereignty of Childhood in The Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon

‘Little Culprits’ and ‘Grown-Ups’

Case B.1 focuses on ‘two young Algerians, one of 13 and one of 14’, who have committed a murder. ² The case is preceded by an introductory note in which Fanon informs us that the two ‘young Algerians’ did not deny the murder, and that Fanon met them for ‘medico-legal examination’. In this note, Fanon describes the two Algerians as ‘little culprits’ and ‘children’. The case is divided into two dialogues, each dialogue being between Fanon and one of the two ‘little culprits’, the first dialogue with the 13-year-old Algerian, and the second with the 14-year-old Algerian. Both dialogues revolve around the rationale for the murder.

The two ‘little culprits’ have killed. Who? Another child, someone of their age, a white ‘playmate’, even better, a ‘buddy’. From there, a definition of what a ‘little one’, i.e. a child, is in this case of The Wretched can be deduced: the ‘little one’ is the one who plays and plays with someone else, the ‘buddy’. The ‘buddy’ is the one with whom the ‘little one’ plays par excellence: he is the privileged playmate, the one who ‘played with us’. The ‘buddy’ is the fellow of the ‘little one’. But their game was a violent game. The 13-year-old Algerian states: ‘Every Thursday we used to go and hunt together with a slingshot up on the hill behind the village.’ Nevertheless, if they played a violent game, this game would still be a game; the victims would be in all likelihood these others that bear the noun ‘animal’ or ‘game’. To play a violent game does not imply knowing how to kill the fellow. The 13-year-old Algerian adds: ‘We didn’t know how to go about killing him [the white ‘buddy’].’ There are at least two ways to hear this lack of knowledge, as a practical one (not knowing the manner) or as an ethical, because ontological, one (not knowing how to construe the world in such a manner that murder is allowed). Going from game to murder, from hunting game to killing the fellow, required finding a new way of killing, to move past the game and to become serious, which resulted in the two Algerians stabbing their white ‘buddy’.

But in doing so, the ‘little culprits’ acted in the manner of what is being called in this case ‘grown-ups’. Fanon states while talking to the 14-year-old Algerian: ‘But you are a child and the things that are going on are for grown-ups’, and the Algerian answers: ‘But they kill children too.’ This ‘they’ refers explicitly to the ‘grown-ups’, those who do the ‘things’ of ‘grown-ups’. ‘Things’ here is obviously a euphemism for war. As the 13-year-old Algerian explains: ‘His father [of the victim] is in the militia and says we all ought to have our throats slit.’ Here, then, to be a ‘grown-up’ is therefore to practice war, but a war between an absolutely divided ‘us’ and ‘them’, a war against the other. This type of war is called a ‘colonial war’ in The Wretched, and the category that allows, produces and regulates such a division between ‘us’ and ‘them’ in this war is race.

As Marriott (2018) reminds us, for Fanon the other must be understood ‘to be expressly the seat of anxiety’ (p. 41) and race is a way of assigning and therefore of phantasmatically controlling this seat of anxiety. If colonization is a process of conquering and declaring oneself sovereign over a territory and the bodies that live there, from a psychological angle this taking over could be intended to master this ‘seat of anxiety’ by assigning it to the conquered bodies. Thus race operates in a similar manner to the famous ‘splitting process’ of Melanie Klein. For Klein (1964) the ‘infant’ first ‘introjects’, i.e. takes into their self or ‘ego’, objects – some good, some bad – to then realize that many, if not all, of these objects are both good and bad. But such a realization is unbearable – this ambiguity cannot be assimilated by the ego. Thus the ambiguous objects are ‘split’ into ‘good’ and ‘bad object[s]’, in order to separate what gives discomfort, anxiety, distress, etc., from what gives joy, security, happiness, etc., despite the fact that these objects happen to give both at once. This splitting is done in order to cancel the ambiguity and control the anxiety produced by the ‘bad’ as much as to cancel the very fact of ambiguity and thus ambivalence.

In The Wretched, the colonial situation tends to act similarly, dividing human bodies into fellow and other, self and stranger, those to whom good is assigned and those to whom bad is – fellow and other that are then made into groups that are named ‘race’. Each race gathers images, feelings, thoughts – they become ‘imago’ and, as such, a priori, any object being only perceived through ‘imago’ or unconscious images (Freud, 2001). Mudimbe (1997) summarizes in Tales of Faith the result of this racial division into dichotomized imagos thus: ‘We face a postulation already given and understood as an a priori evidence justifying the European mission: white versus Black, order versus disorder, and heaven versus hell’ (p. 45). Or as Fanon (2004) states in The Wretched: ‘The colonizer turns the colonized into a kid, a quintessence of evil’ (p. 6). Through this psychical construct, ambiguity and ambivalence vanish, because the good is as if absolutely separated from the bad, allowing the bad, and thus anxiety, to be mastered. It is now a question of taking over and dominating the bad bodies and their land.

In the case B.1, to be a ‘grown-up’ is to practice such a process of splitting the other by race, and to act accordingly, i.e. to dispose of the other in order to secure separation from it. The relation towards the other is first conceived as a dichotomous enmity – one in which warfare is the horizon. The other is before anything else a threat, and society has to be ordered based on this premise. The result of such a construct is summarized by Mbembe (2019) in Necropolitics when looking at examples of past Western colonial societies: ‘Colonizing broadly consisted in a permanent work of separation’ (p. 46). But the colonial situation is such that separation can only remain incomplete, as Achille Mbembe points out: ‘If every form of inclusion is necessarily disjunctive, separation can conversely only ever be partial. Wholesale separation would have undermined the very survival of the oppressor’ (Mbembe, 2019: 44). And this because the colonial societies analyzed by Mbembe depended at every level upon the existence of the colonized. Despite the primacy of enmity, in theory, ‘grown-ups’ have to stop short of enacting absolute separation from the other lest they undo the colonial situation.

Indeed, historically, because of the necessity to be separated from the other as much as by the practical limit of colonial powers, Western colonization often relied on indirect rule. As Berry (1998) notes: ‘for reasons of financial and administrative expediency, most colonial regimes in Africa practiced indirect rule, whether or not they had articulated it as their philosophy of imperial governance’ (p. 329). Scales were created out of these dichotomized imagos – ethnicities, tribes, colors, etc. – offering in-between positions to ensure that indirect rule, and thus colonization, could go on, but these dichotomies remained as end-points, and could return in their brute form. This was also true at the psychological level. The other had to remain present, otherwise the bad would no longer be phantasmatically located, and the whole structure preventing anxiety would have fallen apart. In The Wretched, the colonial war is conceived as the point at which such disjunctive inclusion does not hold anymore. Suppressing (be it via deportation, massacre, etc.) the other appears as the only viable solution to forsake the ‘evil’ that the presence of the other is supposed to cause, despite the fact that such suppression would suppress the colonial situation. And of course would not do away with the ‘evil’.

And effectively, like ‘grown-ups’, when the two Algerians jumped into the colonial war, they could not have, or at least show, remorse or regret for killing the one who had become the other: ‘But that’s no reason for killing your buddy. – Well, I killed him. Now you can do what you like. – Did this friend do anything to you? – No. He didn’t do anything. – Well? – That’s all there is to it.’ There was no longer any ‘little one’ or ‘buddy’ or ‘play’, any childhood defined as the realm of the ‘little one’ who ‘plays’ with the ‘buddy’, to be seen here. In other words, colonial war is an instance of what has been called ‘adultification’ or ‘unchilding’ in critical race theory and decolonial thought: a racist and/or colonialist event that throws children into adulthood, forcing them too early, too quickly to adopt behaviors and practices and/or to face violences and situations regarded as adult (Epstein et al., 2017; Shalhoub-Kevorkian, 2019). In the case B.1, adulthood, or more precisely being a ‘grown-up’, is understood as a space of racial division, violence against the other and muscular expenditures, and has reached its monstruous conclusion in colonial warfare: the systematic murder of the other.

The Denial of Justice

The two Algerians give a straightforward explanation for this casting away of childhood and entering into the world of ‘grown-ups’, i.e. the colonial war. When Fanon says to the 14-year-old Algerian: ‘but tell me why you killed this boy who was your buddy’, the 14-year-old Algerian recalls to Fanon the Rivet Massacre as a denial of justice: ‘I’ll tell you . . . Have you heard about the Rivet business? [. . .] Two of my family were killed that day [. . .] Has any Frenchman been arrested for all those Algerians that were killed?’ There was first murder, the brutal and arbitrary death of a fellow at the hand of other humans. When a crime is done in the space of the law, the law allows in theory to demand reparation and retribution. To follow Lyotard’s (1989) terminology in The Differend, a crime is then a ‘harm’. It becomes a ‘wrong’ when justice cannot occur, when no reparation and retribution can fully cover the harm done, whatever the reason is for this impossibility. The crime suffered by the 14-year-old Algerian in the murder of his family members during the Rivet Massacre was always already a ‘wrong’, since death is, obviously, permanent, and thus beyond the possibility of repair. This murder nevertheless had the chance to be doubly a wrong in the space of colonial law for the colonized, because any harm when done by Western colonization on a colonized happened above an abyss. For justice to be done, one needs to have a recognized politico-juridical voice which bears authority and the power and right to use it (Lyotard, 1989); but when the colony was at stake, colonial justice took place by and in the universe of the colonizer, a universe that denied the colonized a priori a voice in the first place, and that, at the level of metaphysics as much as the imaginary, is because the colonized was deemed a child, the savage, primitive, before the being of reason, the human.

Justice since the advent of modernity occurs in and through the word of the law as sanctioned, promulgated and applied by a sovereign power, that is to say, occurs in and through the articulation of reason as constructed and organized by those who declare themselves in power. The universe of human justice is a simultaneous delimitation of verbal articulation, reason, freedom and authority (or sovereignty) (Lyotard, 1989). In this universe only justice can be served. In Western metaphysics, it is the adult who is the free, sovereign being of reason, the adult (white, male, upper-class, educated, etc.) thus who has access to this universe. Justice is conceived as a matter for adults. Consequently to be a child is to be outside of sovereignty, justice, power, etc., in league with savage, primitive, nature, animal, emotion, etc. The child is still always something like an infant: they cannot yet fully express themselves. Thus childhood is what has to be left (whatever the mode, erasure, overcoming, etc.) in order for the free sovereign being of reason, the human, to be.

This metaphysical construction of childhood is at least as old and wide as Western modernity and has known endless variations. One of the most famous, lasting and foundational variations of such a construction of childhood is found in Discourse on Method by René Descartes. Seen often as the foundation of modern philosophy and science (and setting a new iteration of Western metaphysics), Descartes states in it:

In the same way I thought that because we were all children before we were men and because it was necessary for us to be governed for a long time by our appetites once and our tutors, [. . .] it is almost impossible that our judgments are as pure and solid as they would have been if we had had the total use of our reason from the moment of our birth and had never been led by anything but our reason.

To be a ‘man’ is to no longer be a child, and to be a child is to not be a man. Not solely an adult. A man, a human. But to be a man, a man has inevitably to go through childhood. This belatedness is one of the major pitfalls of humanity. The judgments of the child, and thus those that any man inherits, are flawed because the child does not possess reason. In the absence of reason, the child is ‘governed’ – and thus prey to – his ‘appetites’ and his ‘tutors’. Only a being of reason would be capable of governing oneself, to be sovereign. The birth of reason inside the child (whatever the mode of birth, internal or external, at once or gradual, etc.) is the abandonment of childhood and the birth of the adult, but, coming after childhood, the adult inherits his own childhood and thus childhood’s flaws. This flaw, his childhood, stands between him and reason, him and sovereignty. The conclusion of such a definition is clear: childhood is always already too much, it is an excess; to actualize Western metaphysics demands to leave forever childhood, but childhood still forever haunts, judgments remaining never ‘as pure and as solid’ as they would have been if childhood never was.

Fanon is not foreign to such a definition in the case B.1. Childhood is far from being a purely chronological period here. In the note preceding the interview with the 14-year-old Algerian, Fanon declares this Algerian ‘almost a man, an adult, judging from his muscular control, his physiognomy, and the tone and content of his answers’, answers that are syntactically complex sentences articulating an argument via demonstrated facts. Adults are thus here defined as beings of reason and thus sovereign over themselves. Children have to be the opposite of this. And effectively as shown in the case B.1, the ‘little one’, synonym of children, is the one who plays in blissful ignorance, dependent upon the ‘grown-ups’ to take care of ‘things’. To become a man, then, one has to gain reason, which results in leaving childhood.

This conceptualization of childhood was one of the grounds of Western colonization and is integral to racialization. The colonized could not a priori have a say, be it at the political, juridical, sociological, economical, philosophical – and even sometimes linguistic – levels, and any revision of this a priori remained in theory under the power of the colonizer, because the colonized was conceptualized as a childish being lacking reason and prey thus to irrationality (Mannoni, 1990; Mehta, 1999). If the infant is the one that cannot speak, this equation between child and colonized conceived the colonized population as infants. Through this infantilization, racial assignment could indefinitely justify to not respond to the colonized (there is no necessity to follow up on whatever the colonized expressed), and to deny what is opened via speech as the articulation of reason in Western metaphysics (law, justice, right, property, etc.). Or as Spivak (1988) has famously claimed: ‘The subaltern cannot speak’ (p. 308). The only hypothetical – and possible of indefinite postponement – obtention of a voice for the colonized (politically, judicially, philosophically, etc.) in the colonial metaphysics was for this voice to be an echo of the articulate speech of reason conceived as the adult white male colonizer.

Fanon goes a step further. He isolates in The Wretched a colonial desire in the colonizer unconscious of being the good (foster) parents for the perverse, self-destructive childish colonized: ‘At the level of the unconscious, therefore, colonialism was [. . .] seeking to be perceived by the indigenous population as a mother who constantly prevents her basically perverse child from committing suicide or giving free rein to its malevolent instincts’ (p. 149). The colonizer was the parent, the colonized the child. But the childhood to which the colonized was assigned was a perverse one, or rather it was a perversion of childhood as conceived in Western metaphysics. ‘African mind’, ‘mentalité primitive’, ‘congenital degeneration’, ‘primitivism’, whatever discursive variation of racism, the colonized was deemed a dependent, immature, anachronistic being prey to its desires and lacking reason due to a refusal, or even an impossibility, to move past childhood and become a man (Fanon, 2004: 219–34; Mudimbe, 1991, 1997; Wynter, 2003). For Fanon, due to this supposed refusal to acquire reason, the colonized was regarded as bound to be self-destructive, prey to its irrational desires up to its death. This perversion of childhood, this anachronism of the history of the human, by not leaving itself behind in order to enter reason, history and consciousness, ran the risk to return to an absolute void at every moment, and with it the world.

Of course, no metaphysics is absolute, and any colonial situation was and will be always more messy than metaphysics would wish, especially when indirect rule enters the picture (Berry, 1998; Conklin, 1997; Willis, 2005). Obviously, economic and political necessities as much as critics of and oppositions to colonialism forced modulations of this metaphysics and altered colonial situations. Nevertheless, despite these alterations, metaphysically, and in so many actual ways, the colonized were entrapped in a forever childhood, a margin within, simultaneously at home in the colony and an excess whose integration threatened to cancel the colony (Mamdani, 2018; Mann, 2009; Mehta, 1999). Marker (2022) has shown that the choice between a federal, multiracial and equalitarian empire, and a ‘European raceless’ France, i.e. white and Christian, was a central rational for France letting go of its formal empire. For the colony to judge the harm it had done upon a colonized would have inevitably demanded that the colony judge itself, reintegrating the colonized in its universe. Such a twist towards itself ran the risk of making the colony cancel itself out, since it would have demanded of the colony to recognize its universe not as the universe of reason but as a world of arbitrariness and injustice. Furthermore, if Fanon, among others, is right, the colony was even less likely to judge itself since the colonized was a priori something like evil, i.e. a perverse child, was a priori in the wrong, a priori guilty, even if the colonized did not know guilty of what or why. As Marriott (2018) analyzes in Whither Fanon?: ‘The law that prescribes blackness as flaw thus also makes it de facto impossible to identify with that law, hence the unfathomable feeling of guilt’ (p. 161). To be colonized was to be a priori a wrong, thus to be a priori in the wrong. The colonized demands of retribution, reparation and contrition for the murder perpetuated on him by colonization fell a priori in an abyss.

This is exactly what the Rivet Massacre names here for the 14-year-old Algerian. No justice can be happening inside this situation. In two dialogues, the case is presented as a dichotomy: on the one hand the 14-year-old Algerian who is ‘almost a man’, on the other hand the 13-year-old Algerian who is not at all ‘a man’, i.e. an adult, if judged by the ‘content’ and the ‘tone’ of his answers. Not only does the 13-year-old use a lexicon that can be regarded as being childish (not a playmate but a ‘buddy’, not adults but ‘grown-ups’, etc.), but the syntax of the 13-year-old Algerian could be deemed clumsy (‘because the European they want to kill all the Algerians’, ‘it’s when it’s over’, etc.). Furthermore, whereas the answers of the 14-year-old Algerian are long and elaborate, the answers of the 13-year-old Algerian are barely more than mumbles. Out of eight answers, three are monosyllabic – simple affirmation and negation – and one bisyllabic, composed of an interjection (‘him’) followed by a negation. The 14-year-old Algerian would articulate an almost adult response, and the 13-year-old Algerian would mumble into infancy towards silence, incapable of articulating either a sentence, an argument, or a world. But having said that, what is the difference? The 14-year-old Algerian with articulate sentences could still no more make his wrong heard, seek justice, and receive compensation in the colony for the crime done by colonization than the 13-year-old Algerian with his near silence.

This denial of justice is given as the rationale not solely because of any personal wrong, but because the wrong evoked by the 14-year-old Algerian is an image of the wrong in general in the colony. It is in fact the very first point that the Algerian underlines when Fanon asks the 14-year-old Algerian why he killed his playmate. The 14-year-old Algerian states: ‘Has there ever been a European arrested and imprisoned for the murder of an Algerian?’ The murder of the parents would never receive justice, like countless other murders done by the colonizer to the colonized, by the colony to the people it intended to dominate, because the colonizer had declared the colonized outside the law, in fact dangerous to the law since outside of reason, and the colonizer contended that it rested on him alone to decide otherwise. Such a crime could be called a ‘colonial crime’, a crime occurring from/by/in colonization, which renders all justice for this crime always already suspended above the abyss, suspension which at the same time redoubles the crime and confirms colonization, as it excludes the colonized from political, civil, and ultimately ontological existence, from ‘self-determination’, to follow the wording of the independence era. To be a colonized was to ultimately be an outsider inside one own’s country, to be a minority and yet to be numerically a majority, a priori guilty since a priori this strange evil, the ‘perverse child’.

Faced with such a colonial denial of justice which threatened them not only ontologically and politically, but also in their bodily integrity, the two Algerians concluded that something like sovereignty or self-determination needed to be (re)conquered. Without sovereignty over oneself, life would not be secured. Justice did not arrive, the murder remained unpunished, therefore murders could only spread as long as the colonial situation, which precisely had produced this suspension of justice, remained. Freedom in such a situation could not be. The answer of the two Algerians was to join the answer given by the ‘grown-ups’ fighting because of this situation, the colonial war. Infantilization unchilded the two Algerians but such unchilding was bound to renew colonial infantilization since the result of this unchilding is a wrong: the murder of an innocent white child proving the two Algerians as a wrong. Gordon (2015) in What Fanon Said reads the act of the two Algerians (using the contemporary noun ‘agency’ rather than ‘self-determination’) in a similar manner: ‘he [Fanon] offers the case of Arab boys who killed their close friend, a white French boy, as an assertion of their agency in an environment of nihilistic disregard for Arab life’ (p. 123). The reconquest of self-determination cost everything, since its cost was to reiterate the colonial situation, the interminable process of splitting the other, this war against the other, and its interminable production of injustice. Or as Gordon (2015) writes: ‘Fanon’s sobriety emerges from his admitting and demonstrating that even its overcoming is monstrous. Monsters are symptomatic of something gone awry’ (p. 124). The colonial situation suspended the possibility of justice for the colonized vis-à-vis the colonizer; the colonial war abolished all possibility of justice, other than murder by reciprocity, which was therefore a new injustice, a problem that Fanon stumbled upon in The Wretched (Arnall, 2020: 191–9; Watson, 2019). Through such a reading, colonial war appears as a perverse actualization of Western metaphysics, because effectively childhood is being erased, with only adults to be seen, but these adults are all monsters fighting each other to the death: devastation is the only horizon.

The Ambiguity of the Case

But to write all this implies to ignore an ambiguity in the case. I have written as if it were a given that the two Algerians are children, whereas what should confirm this given could also prove its exact opposite. Of course the colonial power regarded them as children because it sociologically imposed on them childhood. They were 13 and 14, they both went to school, they depended on parents, thus for the French state in the 1950s they were children. Which did not mean that as children, they were outside of colonial and racial violence, of course. As the 14-year-old Algerian points out: ‘But they kill children too.’ And being conceived as children of a particular race, their sovereignty was thus twice erased, as children based on the Western metaphysical definition of childhood and as racialized beings. They were thus twice infantilized, doubly children, their self-determination repeatedly erased.

But that they were actual children is undecidable in this case, at least based on a Western metaphysical definition of childhood, the very one that Fanon is reiterating. For example the ‘childish’ vocabulary I have been using following the case – ‘little ones’, ‘grown-ups’, ‘buddy’, etc. – could be the actual language of the 13-year-old as much as there in echo to Fanon who uses also these words. More importantly, the usage of a language deemed childish does not prove that someone is a child, whatever the age and whatever definition of childhood is given – except if one would simplistically equate such language and childhood, making anyone using this language a child. Also strikingly, the 14-year-old Algerian refuses this language altogether, not using any of the childish words that Fanon uses. Fanon can repeat ‘buddy’ to the 14-year-old Algerian, but the latter continues to use a third person pronoun to designate the said ‘buddy’: ‘But that’s no reason for killing your buddy – Well I killed him.’ Yet Fanon continues to use this language with him.

Furthermore, nowhere in the text do the two Algerians declare themselves children (or whatever noun that comes before ‘adult’). The only references given to something like childhood comes from the 13-year-old Algerian when he mentions that commonality of ‘age’ is one of the reasons they could kill their playmate. But the implication of this ‘age’ remains to be defined. It is a number, not an ontological category. Furthermore, as I have already pointed out, Fanon congratulates the 14-year-old Algerian for being ‘almost a man’. And the same goes for going to school, which proves only that the state regarded them as children, not that they were children, and as for the importance of the parents, this importance implies investment, not necessarily dependency, a dependency that could have been imposed.

The very game of hunting is itself a ground for another ambiguity. When Fanon asks ‘But why did you pick him?’, the 13-year-old Algerian answers: ‘Because he used to play with us.’ The ‘buddy’ ‘plays’ with the ‘little ones’, therefore one can suppose that the ‘little ones’ play with the ‘buddy’. But in reality, the 13-year-old Algerian said that the fellow ‘plays with them’, not that they were playing together. It is a ‘he played’ not a ‘we played’. Never in the whole of the two dialogues did the ‘little ones’ include the ‘buddy’ in a plural pronoun with them to speak about playing. In fact, the only ‘us’ that includes the two Algerians and their victim is the informal plural French ‘on’ in ‘we [on] used to go and hunt together with a slingshot’. What they do together is hunting, that it is a game remains open. If ‘little ones’ are defined by the fact of playing with playmates while being blissfully ignorant and dependent, then here again what should prove that the two Algerians are children could prove its exact opposite.

The very mise en scène of this case related by Fanon ensures that childhood is a given, instead of being first defined and then demonstrated. In his introductory note, Fanon names the two Algerian ‘children’ and ‘little culprits’ as if it were obvious, despite later qualifying the 14-year-old as ‘almost a man’. And Fanon insists that the two Algerians are children, that here is childhood. As I have already quoted, Fanon says ‘but you are a child’ to the 14-year-old Algerian, the one who refuses to repeat Fanon’s childish language. In a vein similar to the famous racial imposition of ‘look, a negro’ explored by Fanon in Black Skin, Fanon has always already trapped the two Algerians in a category supposedly offering the knowledge of who they are, but in fact making of them ghosts. But with the added twist that, while in the ‘look, a negro’ scene it is a white child talking to his white mother imposing Blackness on the Black man, here it is the decolonizer adult who is imposing childhood on the two colonized young Algerians. It is as if Fanon reverses the confusion isolated by Ferenczi (1955) in his famous ‘Confusion of Tongues between Adults and the Child’ to explain the logic of pedophilia: ‘This play [of the child] may assume erotic forms but remains, nevertheless, on the level of tenderness. [. . .] They [pedophiles] mistake the play of children for the desires of a sexually mature person or even allow themselves – irrespective of any consequences – to be carried away’ (p. 161). ³ In the case B.1, it is not the adult who takes the tenderness of the child for the passion of genital desire, but the self-declared adult, i.e. Fanon, who, on the contrary, can only see in front of him childhood, whatever there is in front of him ultimately. This gesture forecloses the two Algerians in an original cocoon where they should play blissfully ignorant and untouched by the world. In this sense, Fanon acts in a similar manner to Western colonialism, not only by imposing childhood on colonized beings, but by imposing a childhood whose definition is reminiscent of the Western metaphysical one.

Nothing makes Fanon’s gesture clearer that the homophones of ‘tu es’ [you are], made famous by Jacques Lacan. Fanon declares: ‘tu es un enfant’ [but you are a child]. What does Fanon say here? ‘Tu es un enfant/tuer un enfant/tuez un enfant’ [You are a child/to kill a child/kill a child]. ⁴ As I have already mentioned, in The Wretched one of the results of decolonization is the decolonized people becoming adult. Therefore in The Wretched, the child is the opposite of what one ought to be, the minority out of which one has to move to become a majority, an unfortunate but inevitable stage of becoming human. But it is during this stage that racism is first encountered in Black Skin and colonialism in The Wretched, albeit unbeknownst to the child. Sociogeny happens already to the child. Thus to have been a child is a ‘misfortune’, a ‘misfortune’ that effectively recalls Descartes’s description of the ‘misfortune’ of having been a child. Once there was an original state of blissful ignorance, and then one enters a world completely unprepared to face it, to realize that one has in fact entered it since birth. One comes out of the blissful ignorance to realize that one arrives too late, the stage already set and the action going on, including inside one’s own psyche, one’s own life. The different temporal modalities of this realization – sudden or gradual – change nothing of this logic nor of its conclusion: childhood is a dangerous delay, exactly as Descartes states in Discourse on Method. Everything has already been decided while the ‘little one’ was playing. In the last three chapters of Black Skin, such a transition and absence of preparation results in unadjusted reactions, melancholy, apathy, and mania in the Black man. And in the case I am reading, the murder of the fellow. Sekyi-Otu (2011) underlines that Fanon works at correcting an ‘existential deviation’ which closes ‘the horizons of a being in any case irrepressibly free’ (p. 50). I contend that childhood is repeatedly conceived throughout Fanon’s work whence this deviation happens. To be sovereign is to be free and to be sovereign is equated with being an adult, but one would only become an adult through childhood. Decolonization then would mean to become an adult and/or to prove that one is always already one, and in the process to erase what stands between oneself and adulthood, which means in the case B.1 to erase childhood, to ‘kill’ it. Following this logic, to decolonize would mean to kill the ‘child’ in each colonized person, and this murder would be what would make the colonized free. Western metaphysics as much as decolonization amounts here to a metaphysical infanticide.

Then, the metaphysical erasure of childhood is doubled by a phantasma of infanticide of which ‘adultification’ and ‘unchilding’ are societal actualizations. This is not a contradiction: if to be the ‘good’ foster parents one had to transform these ‘perverse’ children that were the colonized into adults, or at least good children, then the impossibility of transforming them would mean that the only solution to end this perverse childhood was to kill these children. A metaphysical imposition of childhood can only result in a simultaneous denial of and entrapment into childhood adultification and infantilization at once. This simultaneous entrapment and denial become a justification to erase, i.e. kill – be it metaphysically, societally, etc., or even literally – those that have been entrapped into and denied childhood, the perverse children. The colonial war is the actualization of this phantasma of infanticide. Indeed, throughout this case, it is not clear if children’s status of target in this colonial war is simply because they are of the opposite race, and/or is a particular, as if more urgent, target. The 13-year-old Algerian explains that the father of the victim said that ‘we all ought to have our throats slit’: ‘we’, the Algerian, the children, both? Furthermore, the 13-year-old Algerian explains that they picked their playmate to kill ‘Because he used to play with us’. Of course, one could read in this statement a simple practical reason; since the ‘buddy’ was playing with them, he would come, which turned out to be the case. But it could be that the ‘buddy’ is targeted for being seen as a child. In this case, the children could represent thus twice the target, as children and as of the other race. Colonizer and colonized both tried to move past the ‘bad’ childhood, which meant in the confusion of what childhood is, to ‘kill’ children: ‘tu es un enfant’.

Nowhere in his oeuvre does Fanon equate colonized and infant, for sure. Fanon wanted to give justice to the two young Algerians as a forensic psychiatrist member of the FLN who refused to see them as always already outside the law, but because he equated them with children, and children with infant, Fanon still confined the two Algerians outside of law, justice and sovereignty. Meanwhile the two Algerians were repeating the colonial situation, and with it the simultaneous adultification and infantilization that goes with it. Fanon avoided the reiteration of racial logic – in fact is quite adamant at denouncing any form of return of this logic in decolonial movement as much as in newly independent nations in The Wretched – but continued implicitly, maybe unwillingly, to use Western dichotomies, to the point of not asking first if actually childhood was here, was never here. And, while the ‘child’ was still killed, neither justice nor sovereignty nor freedom could occur.

Conclusion

Nevertheless, if in the case B.1, Fanon is here to listen to the colonized and support them in the work of cure, mourning, and liberation, why then is he still infantilizing the two Algerians? What game is Fanon playing? Why such an eagerness despite what the ambiguity of everything tells him, i.e. that childhood is possibly not here, was maybe never there in the first place? When Fanon declares to the 14-year-old Algerian: ‘But you are a child and the things that are going on are for grown-ups’, Fanon underlines a discrepancy between what the two Algerians did, that is to say kill a fellow, and what they should have been doing based on Fanon’s definition of childhood: two ‘little ones’ who have a ‘buddy’ with whom they play. This is the edge of metaphysics. It is as if Fanon was desperately trying to hold on to a certain definition of childhood, no matter what, despite everything. Not because he could not explain the violence of decolonization, on the contrary. Not solely because he was here facing the risk of decolonial violence becoming an endless cycle, but because these two Algerians forced him to confront that the answer to ‘Qui suis-je’ given by the decolonial era was not enough. The answer was still the Western answer, it was still the same world, the same history, the same timeline. The disappearance of childhood, far from being freeing, reopened colonial violence, while its ‘misfortune’ was still there, absolute. Worse, childhood, or at least something that bore its name, could well never have been, here or anywhere else; in fact its existence could have been only as an absence, and that could be the real ‘misfortune’ on which the possibility of decolonization depended. In fact, this very insistence of Fanon to find childhood here could well be the mark that childhood suddenly names something that is not heard or said, something that is what is so dearly needed, so urgent. But what? To this, Fanon only answers to the 14-year-old Algerian: ‘je ne sais pas’.