The hand is the last thing one can speak with after the voice has gone, after its writing has been banned; a fist can still be formed, until it too is cut off.
Resistance – the closed fist held up, palm out, is a withholding of the hand and its contribution to the status quo. It is passive, sullen, unyielding: it isn't a horizontal punch, it is a flag held up in a massive objection to whatever it finds itself in.
Adam Shatz’s 2024 The Rebel’s Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon, discusses Fanon’s complex construction of anti-colonialism and his positional role within it. Sam Klug’s review of this book in the Boston Review, March 27, 2024: ‘Who’s Afraid of Franz Fanon’, begins by mentioning ‘a long tradition of Fanon fearmongering among American conservatives and liberals alike. For decades, Fanon has been invoked as a bogeyman in debates about Israel-Palestine, Black activism in the United States, and even the politics of higher education.’
Fanon’s hope was for an existential condition of global equality, not only through the process of decolonisation, but also ‘wresting from the West monopolistic stewardship of the human condition in its concrete instance as the modern project.’
What I find interesting and what I’m groping for here, inadequately I know, is how this wresting invites resistance to the project of equality, and how the far-right in the hegemonic West is appropriating the vocabulary and symbols of decolonisation to support its perception of its own persecution — Replacement Theory. Native becomes nativism. Migrants become occupiers. Indigeneity means white. One can read anything selectively, and Fanon’s statements about processes of violence visited on the colonised and and which rebound on the coloniser are often selected without the deeper psychological and necessary theory in which they are embedded.
Locked into the broad strokes of power, a dialectic of oppressor/oppressed, the tools by which freedom might be achieved – solidarity, resistance, the formation of social movements – tools traditionally of the liberal left, fluid and progressive (the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice) – have been appropriated by the angry, adamantine, resistant right who increasingly see themselves as an ignored indigenous minority. In a Manichaean world, justice, equality, opportunity for all is impossible: there must be winners and losers.
The twentieth-century clenched fist presents solidarity in resistance to ongoing injustice, accompanied by parallel social movements. The twenty-first century MAGA fist presents the grievance of displacement, accompanied by militias. Deterrence does not underly this fist; simmering violence does.
So next time you see a NY real estate baron who owns a many golf courses and plays a LOT of golf, insists he is a multi-billionaire, and in his rise to president of the most powerful nation in the world claimed he could shoot someone on 5th Avenue and his backers and enablers would still support him — next time you see him raise his clenched fist at a rally or outside a courtroom as an oppressed victim, ask whether he is actually entitled to make such a sign.