Epilogue: From Antigua to Algérie: The Particularity and Promise of the Afro-Arab

"Je ne m'enterre pas dans un particularisme étroit. Mais je ne veux pas non plus me perdre dans un universalisme décharné. Il y a deux manières de se perdre: par ségrégation murée dans le particulier ou par dilution dans l'« universel ».

Ma conception de l'universel est celle d'un universel riche de tout le particulier, riche de tous les particuliers, approfondissement et coexistence de tous les particuliers."

"I am not burying myself in a narrow particularism. But neither do I want to lose myself in an emaciated universalism. There are two ways to lose oneself: walled segregation in the particular or dilution in the 'universal.'

My conception of the universal is that of a universal enriched by all that is particular, a universal enriched by every particular: the deepening and coexistence of all particulars."

Aimé Césaire, "Lettre à Maurice Thorez," Paris, le 24 octobre 19561

What does it mean to be a Third Worldist in the midst of forever wars?

I must begin in 1956 at a quiet moment of Afro-Arab resignation. Composed just days before the Israeli invasion of the Egyptian Sinai — a conflict conspired in congress with Britain and France — Martiniquais poet, politician, and philosopher Aimé Césaire's letter of resignation from the French Communist Party (PCF) concludes with his musings on the impossible possibilities of solidarity from the Western left with the colonized of the world, and with Black peoples in particular. Even before three imperial powers attempted to wrest control of the newly nationalized Suez Canal from the new Egyptian president they intended to depose, the PCF had voted in favor of French premier Guy Mollet's request for a "blank check" of special powers to solve the ongoing "Algerian problem." The PCF's counterrevolutionary vote went toward calling up French reserve forces, the suspension of civil liberties within Algeria, and the division of the North African nation into three distinct zones, one of which was designated for forced settlement camps in which to further isolate and terrorize Algerian civilians. Although French Communist politician Jacques Duclos declared this vote was necessary to preserve the republic from further right-wing warmongering and to "arrive at a cease fire in Algeria and in negotiations that will make of the Algerian people a friend and ally of the people of France," the PCF's embrace of French colonial counterinsurgency rung the death knell for the French juridical and cultural policy of assimilation that Césaire had in earlier years supported and for the possibility that Francophone Antillean, African, and Asian anticolonial Third Worldists could rely on Western leftists such as these in the shadow of Bandung.2

Césaire's letter deftly weaves together a cacophony of communisms, from the USSR to China to France, and dashes to pieces the PCF's feeble claims to alliance with any contingent of the non-Euro-American workers of the world, declaring it time instead for colonized peoples ("hommes de couleur," a limitation I choose to ignore) to recognize "the full breadth of our singularity."3 Césaire's notion of singularity gestures to the insufficiency of the universal and the overly specific alike. Singularity instead issues a call to attend to the particularities of the "situation dans le monde . . . aux peuples colonisés," without foreclosing the possibility for colonized peoples to recognize overlapping experiences of oppression and enact a constellation of tactics to resist it in all its forms.

Central to Black anticolonial thought and practice though he was and remains, Aimé Césaire is seldom thought of through the lens of anticolonial North Africa. Although his prose and poetry and outsize role in Black transnational thought and political life indirectly undergirds the various decolonial political and cultural practices concurrently developed and pursued throughout the Arabic-speaking world, and particularly in North Africa, Césaire, like other Black Caribbean thinkers of his time, is rarely imagined to traverse the same intellectual and political geography as his friend and former student, Frantz Fanon, whose own influence in the Algerian war for independence from France remains heralded among freedom dreamers today.

In this moment of a global Black uprising against the murderous institution of white supremacy, we should recognize and retrieve the expansiveness of Césaire's radical anticolonial imagination once more. How might revisiting his turn away from the belief that Black people should maintain a cultural bond with the European world, toward the lifeworlds of an African diaspora that does not pause at the edges of the Sahara or the shores of the Mediterranean, shift our thinking about the other assumed boundaries that inhibit our unity in the face of the forever war and forever disaster? "And what I have said concerning Negroes is not valid only for Negroes," Césaire writes, a sentence that is a paragraph that is in the break between his delineations of the failures of European communism and the particularities of a new path forward. Césaire does not say it is the same. No, it is not the same. But it is not valid only for -. This is the space where new solidarities have the potential to take flight.

Re-reading Black thinkers like Césaire and Édouard Glissant — even the Senegalese poet-president Léopold Sédar Senghor4 — in the light of a capacious diaspora reveals a dialectical space wherein North Africa is less a land across a desert border on the African continent than a continuance of the African diasporic archipelago. I refer to this space as "Afro-Arab," a term used in academic discourse to reference peoples and histories, largely specific communities who are the result of the long history of contact, encounter, and trade — particularly and centrally the trade in enslaved human beings — across and throughout the African continent, the Sahara, the Mediterranean, and the Nile.5 But "Afro-Arab" is also potent, I believe, when imagined as a space. The Afro-Arab is a transnational space and political project articulated within the overlapping diasporic cultural practices that are formed through the encounters between Black and Arab peoples, cultures, and languages. Think, for instance, of the intergalactic pianist Sun Ra and Egyptian military officer and jazz hound Salah Ragab's collaborative 1983 album, "The Sun Ra Arkestra Meets Salah Ragab in Egypt," as an Afro-Arab sound engendered first and foremost through embodied dissonance and then through sonic understanding, or James Baldwin's sudden recognition while living in France before returning to the US to bear witness to the ongoing movement for Black freedom that "vous Américains" included him, a queer Black man, as a tactical grammar intended to alienate Africans, including Algerians, from inhabiting the same particularities as Baldwin: moments in space and time that begin as encounter — deliberate and difficult and fraught as they are, as they perhaps must be — and then strengthen and transform the fibers of Black life, possibility, expanse, and temporality.

And yet, the Afro-Arab — whether invoked as a racial identity, diasporic community, an embodied legacy of heterogeneous blackness and heterogeneous antiblackness, or a space — feels incoherent in the post-Bandung, post-Non-Aligned Movement, post-Cold War, post-9/11, post-post-post and rabidly colonial moment we now find ourselves in. What use is a space like the Afro-Arab when the world has been deliberately kept aflame, the fires stoked from beacon to beacon, metropole to metropole? What good is the camaraderie of the Global South, of the Third World, as we are all increasingly encroached upon by empire in ever innovative ways?

The pretense of the "global" — which tends to erase difference, to subsume the Afro-Arab — is one I depart from, a gesture toward Césaire's call for "the deepening and coexistence of all particulars." I have used the "Third World" in the recent past, as recently as this morning, and yet even this formation consumes the particularism of our emancipatory imagination. I have asked what it means to be a Third Worldist in the midst of forever war. Let me narrow this down further: what does it mean, in the midst of a forever revolution and escalating counterrevolution, to straddle diasporas, to make meaning of the particularity of these diasporas and imagine new meaning in the breaks and bumps and contentions across diaspora?

The forever war6 encapsulates the deceptively eternal assortment of European empires that facilitated the US entry into its own pursuit of global supremacy and warfare. The unity of the forever wars across the Third World and within empire's borders survived international movements for decolonization, even as the project of Third Worldism claimed myriad successes, from Egypt to Vietnam and Cape Verde. The anticolonial commitments of the "non-aligned" nations of the world burrowed deeply beneath the crumbling foundations of French and British and Portuguese empires, fomenting militant, political, and cultural insurgency and insurrection everywhere they would go. The forever war is still and yet: so is the omnipresent fight against it. I locate it and lose it continuously in the "Afro-Arab."

The "Afro-Arab" poses a problem for where studies of the Third World and Black diasporic life meet. Articulating the "Afro-Arab" as a space rather than a discrete set of historic and present encounters forces our attention to the constancy of knowledge production that is always rooted in the African diaspora. This diasporic knowledge production exceeds the geographies of blackness and Arabness alike while reimagining the geographies of blackness and Arabness together. The space of Afro-Arabness, always and at once a part of and peripheral to the African diaspora, poses a problem for how a predominately Anglophone (and Francophone!) postcolonial literary and cultural study envisions itself and the cartographies of blackness. Shaping our mouths to articulate these ever-fluid figurations of space and time allows us to resolve our revolutionary mettle beyond the facile dimensions of a "global" and without dismantling ourselves at the behest of the "particular." We do not "lose ourselves" to either to force recognition of "the other": instead, we devote ourselves to ourselves. I learned this from Frantz Fanon.

From Fanon, we already know the promise of the Afro-Arab. Celebrated today for his role in the Algerian revolution for independence, Fanon has been at once monumentalized and deliberately forgotten in Algeria, a testament to the friction and contention captured in the still limited discourse of encounter. In 1956, Fanon also wrote a letter of resignation. His own letter, addressed to the Resident Minister of the Algerian government, Robert Lacoste, rests the reason for his resignation as Médecin-Chef de service of Blida-Joineville psychiatric hospital squarely on the "systematized de-humanization" endemic to French colonial Algeria that he witnessed throughout his medical career. "Monsieur le Ministre," Fanon writes, "the present-day events that are steeping Algeria in blood do not constitute a scandal for the observer. What is happening is the result neither of an accident nor of a breakdown in the mechanism. The events in Algeria are the logical consequence of an abortive attempt to decerebralize a people."7 "Universalisme décharné," "décérébraliser." The language of struggle, of embodiment, of meanings made not valid only for —, a through-line of these particular revolutions.

Upon resigning, Fanon was formally expelled from Algeria just as he had expelled himself from the "French community," the former expulsion a bureaucratic formality, the latter a testament to Fanon's commitments to the momentum fomented in Afro-Arab space. In addition to his work with the FLN's Press Service and Health Service, Fanon facilitated the FLN's organizational outreach across the African continent, and eventually assumed the post of ambassador to Ghana in 1960. For his travels, Fanon was issued a new passport that cemented his new identity. Now "Omar Ibrahim Fanon," born in Tunis in 1925, Fanon reconciled his identity in the FLN with his own history: the "transparent pseudonym" allowed Fanon to immerse himself entirely in revolutionary fervor.8

Césaire and Fanon's intellectual connection, their shared home of Martinique, their insistent theorization of how the world colonialism built and destroyed would end is well documented. Gary Wilder reminds us that Fanon's earliest writings, including Peau noire, masques blanc (1952), occupy "the very problem space" of competing anticolonial visions "opened by Césaire in the 1930s, even if he sought to go beyond what he believed were the limitations of the Negritude project."9 Even within their limited agreements, divergences and particularities took hold.

But it is the form of the letter of resignation where the link between them remains constant, and in the space of the Afro-Arab where their often-disparate political imaginations are rejoined. Césaire and his life's work is not often thought of alongside anticolonial North Africa, I have claimed, but Césaire's letter of resignation, like Fanon's, centers French colonial terror in Algeria as a point of anticolonial convergence. It is not merely analogy that draws Césaire in. Like Fanon, Césaire identifies in Algeria the promise of a particular struggle ripe for alignment alongside others. The FLN's rapid garnering of support from Third World peoples and nations and its conscious cultivation of these ties was not a unique accomplishment by 1954, but one perfected with the assistance of Fanon's editorial role in El Moudjahid and his willingness to court (largely through antagonism) fellow Black diasporic writers and poets and intellectuals into support for the Algerian cause at conferences from Paris to Rome and Accra. Césaire directed his own growing disenchantment with France at institutions of power, mobilizing his occupation as a politician in a French département to gain entry into the thoughts and minds of the French left he knew well, coolly informing them that their political commitments remained committed only to the maintenance of the colonial state, which condemned the Black and brown proletariat engaged in tearing apart the fabric of French empire.10 Césaire delineates the expansive landscape of this disenchantment, calling out to all "hommes de couleur" of a diaspora constantly in a state of reimagining and reproduction as his possible allies in the movements for liberation at hand and ahead. Césaire and Fanon resigned, but were not resigned. The letter of resignation briefly aligns Césaire and Fanon's otherwise divergent political tactics and practices, imbuing a sense of timeless urgency, that flush of recognition that we feel, today, reading these words in this moment of ongoing insurgency and the constancy of an insurgency still to come.

Fanon did not rely on an "emaciated universalism" to forge the connections he lived. Comparatism, parallel, analogy: these only breathe life into solidarity for as long as the conditions which harm each respective party are permitted to continue. What happens to solidarity when the analogy ends?

No: no to solidarity indebted to the shared conditions of catastrophe. Neither should we tolerate a solidarity trapped in the well-trodden furrows of particularism. As Anthony Alessandrini cogently attests, Fanon gave himself over entirely to the Algerian cause because it was one front in the cosmic battle to upend the entirety of Western civilization.11 Attending to the particular "is not a desire to fight alone and a disdain for alliances," Césaire reminds us. We must dig deeply into our well of particulars to retrieve our collective "desire to distinguish between alliance and subordination, solidarity and resignation."12 The promise of a framework like the Afro-Arab is not that it strikes a balance between the particular and the universal, between fleshlessness and impenetrability. The Afro-Arab is just one space in which we live the reality and dream of the African diaspora as the coexistence of particulars: a totality of commitment to one another that exists beyond the cold, hard planes of disembodied borders or inarticulable languages. The space of the Afro-Arab is yet another particular, yet another link, yet another set of stories and errors and victories that might enable us to envision and understand the forever war as it is now: the "post" colonial, "post" Cold War, "post" 9/11 iteration of the circuitous, galactic twin campaigns of colonization and the pitched battle to destroy it. Fanon knew it in 1956. We can begin to know it again now.

Fanon lived an entire life as a Black Martiniquan that granted him the sight to draw the links between parallel struggles in order to live — and die — pursuing a shared struggle to destroy colonialism. Fanon lived an entire life as a Black Martiniquan subject of France who refused that anyone should be a subject of empire, and so died a Black Martiniquais and Algerian freedom fighter (with a forged Libyan passport and a false birthplace in Tunis): these particulars, ever deepened throughout his short life, never faded or blurred, but held together in tension and in solidarity, enriching the scope and scale of Fanon's vision for Algeria and the African diaspora and the entirety of the world.

It is often in the divergences at the level of their varied implementations that mark the particularity of our revolutions, of many of our movements: fueling all, the battle against white supremacist colonialism and rapacious racial capitalism; fueling less, a mutual understanding of the centrality of both these interlinked structures on the part of the other. Césaire reflected on the legacy of his own poetry and life's work, on how the fires of injustice have always fueled, "a cosmic anger, a creative anger. It is creative . . . It is the land of anger, an exasperated land. A land which spits and spews, which spews life. That is what we must be worthy of . . . this anger must be continued. We must continue."13 The possibilities located within and alongside Afro-Arab space are mere moments located throughout the entirety of a broad and boundary-less African diaspora. We might sustain the cosmic and creative anger through the ebb and flow of our bonds in diaspora by embracing the particularities of these moments and these spaces, in our quest to enact a new history for ourselves.14 We devote ourselves to ourselves without losing ourselves entirely. I learned that from Frantz Fanon, and from Aimé Césaire too.

---

Sophia Azeb is an assistant professor of Black studies in the Department of English at the University of Chicago. Her book project, Another Country: Constellations of Blackness in Afro-Arab Cultural Expression, explores the circuits of transnational and translational blackness charted by African American, African, and Afro-Arab peoples across twentieth century North Africa and Europe.

---

References