A Primer on Mātua Frantz Fanon
Why Mātua Frantz Fanon Matters
Kā tangi te tītī
Kā tangi te kākā
Kā tangi hoki ahau
“Where are the natives? I do not see one native.
They are not here. They are not there. They are nowhere.
I have walked through their country. I have seen their names
Washed from the rocks by rains & the sea’s salt hands.”
— Australia by A. D. Hope
A wind-blistered canvas titled The Last of England by Ford Madox Brown. The pigment itself is flesh drawn taut with winter’s breath. The father’s face, rigid as bone, is painted with veins of iron oxide & stilled blood. The mother’s eyes are womb-dark & ruptured with the salt of separation. Her bonnet curls like torn skin around her forehead. Behind them, a crowd of the soon-to-be forgotten, their features dissolving like tendons in lye, clutching bundles wrapped in muslin swaddling like the flesh of old nations dismembered. Their knuckles are fishhooks in linen. Their breath, smeared upon the sky, is the mist of vanishing tongues. The sea, painted as bruised cartilage & rotten pearl, opens its stomach to receive them. Colonisation is here transubstantiated into oil & cotton: flesh turned paint, memory turned canvas.
The city breathes like a wounded lung in Hard Looks (DC/Vertigo, 1992). Its architecture clutches the ribs like the fingers of the drowned. The comic follows no single vein but rather a circulatory system of lives whose arteries cross beneath the skin of Steel Harbour. A port city, steel-ribbed, spine-bent, with bloodshot alleys & eyes for streetlights.
In issue 1 of Hard Looks (DC/Vertigo, 1992), we meet Officer Hank Garrison, a cop whose nerves are frayed wires strung across domestic silence. His wife, Marla, peels oranges with trembling fingers. Their marriage, stitched like a wound, seeps. Steel Harbor’s police department functions like a diseased spleen, filtering poison through dying law. Issue 2 peels away another layer. Cassandra Troy, an artist, paints victims from memory. Her pigments carry the stench of old bruises. The men she paints have knuckle-memories. Their portraits hang like peeled skin in her gallery, gazed upon by critics whose spines arc with hunger. The art world & the underworld share a palate: grey, red, ulcerous blue. Issue 4 unspools the tale of Lennie Frock, a failed boxer turned debt collector. His fists are meat & gristle. The Mob’s collector, “Mother John,” runs rackets from a beauty salon where peroxide bleaches scalp & soul alike. Lennie smashes teeth like they are glass buttons on a funeral coat. When he breaks, he does so like a hip joint splitting in frost. In issue 7, the journalist Sam Dwyer follows the scent of corruption into the courthouse. His notebooks are intestines unspooled. His editor, Raymond Klaus, a man whose heartbeat flutters like a moth in the throat, cautions him.
But Sam probes deeper. He watches as Judge Filkins signs away sentences with hands smooth as skinned calves. The courthouse is a skull with no jaw. The city’s final sigh comes in issue 9, where a failed heist by the Low Five Syndicate collapses into gunfire. Led by a man known only as Monk, whose mouth twitches like a cauterised wound, the crew falls one by one. Bullets puncture the flesh of narrative. The sidewalk becomes liver. Sirens scream like nerves exposed to air. In the raw meat of Steel Harbour, Mātua Frantz Fanon would see no comic. He would see the exposed tendons of settler reality. The city is not steel but bone, colonised bone, arthritic with history. Mātua Fanon wrote, “Colonialism is not a machine capable of thinking. It is naked violence.” The Mob’s violence, the police’s indifference, the painter’s trauma, are not metaphors. They are lesions. They are ulcers. They are the pus of history compacted into cells & gutters. Hank Garrison’s badge is not law. It is an ossified privilege, a phalanx of whiteness carved into enamel. His silence at home is the silence of the settler, unwilling to hear the screams of the soil. Cassandra Troy’s portraits bleed because the memory of conquest still lives in capillaries. Her canvas is not stretched cotton. It is epidermis stripped from culture. Sam Dwyer writes in ink that dries like blood. He follows trails that stink of gangrene.
Mātua Fanon knew that the colonised “must shoot down the settler or be the victim of a murderous & dehumanising system.” In Steel Harbour, this shooting is slow. It is suicide. It is corruption. It is compromise. The Low Five Syndicate is not a gang. It is the twitch of revolution aborted in the womb. Their failure is not moral. It is anatomical. The body of uprising is strangled in the birth canal. Mātua Fanon’s spirit hovers where steel meets skin. “The colonised man finds his freedom in & through violence.” Yet in Hard Looks, there is no true rupture. Only clotted resistance. Only eyes turned inward like infected gums. Only a mouth filled with the taste of someone else’s victory. The city is a body embalmed alive. It sweats foreign oil. Its hands are calloused with servitude. Its spine is bent not from age but from kneeling too long before a settler god. The reader watches, but does not touch. Yet Mātua Fanon knew. Fiat voluntas tua. He knew the scab must be torn. The wound must scream. The nerves must rebel. Only then will the hand unclench. Only then will the mouth speak. Only then will the body of the colonised no longer be an exhibit, but a resurrection.
Nō reira, tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou katoa!