Nietzsche claimed that the tragedy of man was that he was once a child who is intune with the world and does not realize the constraints placed on him. As this child grows, he realizes that he has to succumb to the world. This creates a longing for the old position of being an innocent because that signifies freedom. The black radical tradition seems to be aspiring towards such a position. It does not only seem to demand freedom from prejudice, slavery, and the ills of colonialism but also from the affixation with binaries. In order to achieve this goal, the black radical tradition presents an archive of stories which answer the question of who these people are. This archive, this tradition, leaves us with a new understanding of storytelling as tool for liberation as stories tend to live on act as constant reminders of loss which fuels our quest to redeem the world. They also help in recognizing the multiplicities of being.
The archive of oppression presented by this tradition is significant for multiple reasons. Telling and retelling stories of suffering embeds them into one’s memory. Even though the people who directly suffered through those miseries will be gone, they will be remembered and someone will be able to bear witness to what they went through. Stories such as these live on and are meant to be retold and extended on and applied to one’s own condition. They describe what has been lost and thus define what needs to be gained. They help in decolonizing the mind as the goal is the regeneration of life. They detail the reduction and dismissal of possibilities that colonialism was responsible for, and then acknowledge a new way of being.
Writers like Toni Morrison and James Baldwin have recognized how the Western language and literary canon have otherized black people, making it difficult for them to find or assert their identities. Storytelling is associated with identity making time and again. Colonialism and other structures like the Western canon aim to decenter the colonized’s ways of knowing and create a hierarchy of knowledge, rejecting any other ways of making sense of the world. They create a singular story that everyone is meant to grow up with and accept. The black radical tradition creates a divergence and acknowledges that there are multiple possibilities of being. They provide different stories to show that Europe’s way of being is not the only one. The split that Europe created in the colored people’s image and essence is healed as they come forward with their stories and demand to be recognized as who they are as opposed to what they were constructed as.
The tradition also acknowledges the trap of essentialism or nativism. Fanon, especially, critiques negritude and suggests that associating a specific way of being with blackness only adds to the binaries created by the white man. Negritude becomes a form of elevated narcissism and a mystification that reduces blackness to some kind of essence. This kind of essentialism is ahistorical and does not account for the evolution everything and everyone experiences. This also creates a singular story. This recognition in the black radical tradition is important because it reflects on the specific kind of freedom they were seeking. The purpose of the tradition was to destroy binaries and create possibilities.
These archives present the horror of oppression faced by black people. It gives us figures that were brave and resilient. It gives us stories of suffering, injustice, and death. In doing so, it gifts us with memories of loss and instructs us to what is left to be redeemed. It builds a history of identity-making and suggests that there is no singular identity for a specific people and there is no hierarchy involved. It suggests that creating binaries only helps one spiral further towards prejudices. And finally, it gives creates multiple possibilities, giving us the freedom to be whoever we want. The black radical tradition thus leaves us with memories, hope, and a responsibility to keep these stories alive and to make conscious choices while writing our own stories.
Decoloniality and Decolonization 