Note from the editors: These remarks were composed by Dr. Marcos in Spanish and delivered at the awards ceremony of the Caribbean Philosophical Association’s annual meeting in Quintana Roo, Mexico, in June 2024, where Dr. Marcos received the Frantz Fanon Lifetime Achievement Award. The original can be found on the CPA’s website. What follows has been translated into English by Thomas Meagher and reformatted to integrate the contents of Dr. Marcos’s footnotes into the body of the essay.
How is it possible to escape the peculiar way of thinking put forth by Modernity? How can we defend ourselves against the tendency to accept what is considered “obvious” in our profoundly colonized worlds? How can we lay bare the mutually exclusive binarisms of dominant thinking? How can we escape the imperatives of industrial capitalist Modernity?
The presence of Frantz Fanon in my journey has been monumental. It has guided me gently and in a very subtle fashion. It has guided me in a manner both reserved and indirect. Here, I will do my best to evoke the voice of myself as a young Latin American woman, one who first read Fanon’s The Damned of the Earth in 1972. In those years, I was what could be described as a guerrillera—a revolutionary for whom the critical approach of Fanon’s book would be immensely inspiring. I felt a great sense of identification with Fanon then (particularly upon reading the chapter, “Colonial War and Mental Disorders”), and that has continued throughout my life.
My initial reading of Fanon, having recently graduated from the clinical psychology program at the Autonomous University of Puebla (UAP), was guided by the direction of the Guatemalan revolutionary Amalia de Rivera. The study of Fanon’s books flooded Latin America in those years. I am the daughter of those early translations that we guerillas of that time read in order to educate ourselves. Fanon’s publisher, François Maspero, had granted Che Guevara rights to translate Fanon into Spanish. In those years, Latin America was inundated with radical opposition movements for social justice. I had contacts in Bolivia and with Guevarist revolutionaries inspired by Fanon. We studied Fanon’s The Damned of the Earth and Towards the African Revolution; I still have them with me, in the editions published by Fondo de Cultura Económica in 1969 and 1972, and have recently re-read them.
Black Skin, White Masks was the treatise on psychopathologies that taught me to recognize those damages to the psyche inflicted by colonialism, to understand how colonialism diminishes and debilitates. It taught me to not make a diagnosis of pathology without first studying the context and, in Fanon’s words, its “sociogenesis.” It immediately broke with the individualization of pathologies as propounded by psychoanalysis. Ever since my initial study of Fanon, I have never accepted such individualization in my career, nor in my clinical practice (even more so in light of how feminist and anti-psychiatric movements have militated assiduously against it). My trajectory has been, in reality, a Fanonian one—although I never expected that anyone would detect it. I didn’t even realize it myself! That is, I didn’t realize it until now; thanks to the Caribbean Philosophical Association and to Lewis Gordon (chair of its awards committee) for detecting the Fanon in me!
I left my reading of Fanon and encountered clinical pathology with an understanding of it informed by Fanon’s critical response. From Fanon I had been inspired to better understand the violence that colonization exerts on the dominated and the exploited, the different modes of clinical and mental alteration possible when born and living subject to colonization. Fanon, a French-trained psychiatrist and representative of French medical knowledge, was an introduction to a way of thinking and, crucially, into the question of how to nurture revolutionaries—something that I was then and still am today.
The study and practice of clinical psychology I confronted was one uncaring toward indigenous peoples and the poor peasants of Mexico. It was shaped by its assumption of their unrestrained violence, their “moral baseness” and labor passivity (as regards capitalist development), taking these to be in some way definitive of the “psychology of the Mexican” (Santiago Ramirez, Francisco Pineda, Octavio Paz). These psychoanalysts and great poets alike didn’t understand the brutality and discrimination imposed by colonization, nor how it had forged the humanity of the colonized as “lazy,” as violent. Fanon is the one I had to turn to in order to understand all of that.
My clinical practice has been guided by the treatment of various “mental” problems, like the ones faced by those who suffer the violence of colonialist regimes. I have also treated some of the pathological effects suffered by those who inflict violence and experience the lasting anguish of having done so, as in Fanon’s analysis of torture in the case of Algeria. I found in my fellow guerrilleros remnants of those experiences.
As narrated by Fanon and read by me, these forms of violence seemed to be the same as my practices in the Psychiatric and General Hospital of Puebla. In my defense of involuntarily-confined psychiatric patients with the anti-psychiatry movement, I began to practice my Fanonian techniques as well as a critical hermeneutics of the origins of mental illnesses and imbalances. This was based quite directly on my reading of Fanon and enabled me, without referring to decolonization at the time, to use the critical techniques employed by Fanon in his psychiatric practice in Algeria. Fanon produced a symbolic and practical fusion of the practice of clinical consultation with the adoption of a revolutionary stance. That fusion is why his critical thought remains not only relevant but a continuing source of inspiration.
Gradually and throughout my life, I have been engaged in the project of recovering spaces in which to recognize and appreciate the ancestral values of these peoples in the Americas. A lifetime of research has confirmed that what Fanon had encountered in Algeria and Tunisia, and in other Arab cultures and other parts of Africa, was not unique to those locales, just as those psychological problems I would encounter in my research were not of indigenous origin.
I was, then, very much created through Fanon’s influence when, as a young psychologist, I looked for paths to liberation and made commitments to the Nahua peoples of the state of Puebla. It was these Nahuas—devalued and immersed in exploitation, indignity and contempt—that I would see on my way to classes at UAP. The university was a Jesuit cloister expropriated by the secular government of Hispanic origin. That was my context.
And so it was that I started down my path. It was out of that that I have constructed and employed an analytic perspective on that which frequently escapes the demands of social activism (which I respect and with which I collaborate). I have worked for the incorporation of a decolonial analysis and a struggle for “epistemic justice.” A search for epistemic matrices hidden in the folds of memory and (ancestral) time, ones that reveal another way of being in the world. It is a form of “undisciplining” that emerges today in the practices of the CIDECI Unitierra in Zapatista Chiapas.
I experiment and I fight—think and write—and am inspired by the concrete Zapatista communal and communitarian praxis. The Zapatista community rebels and fights against exploitation, but it also recovers the epistemic profundities of ancestral Mesoamerican worlds.
My books recognize the values of the indigenous peoples of these lands. Studying oral traditions has, further, made me an international expert in methodologies for studying orally-transmitted traditions.
Embodying practices of knowledge, to perform a mental act with the body, reflects many of the efforts to incorporate the influences of the philosophical worlds one is seeking to encounter in a dialogical relationship. Such efforts seek an épistémè that combines body and mind, material and immaterial, without gaps or contradictions. It is an épistémè of apparent “contraries” working in conjunction. It is not the colonizing “logic of contraries” exposed by Jacqueline Martinez and Lewis Gordon. Here I borrow from Gordon’s profound discussion of Martinez’s work: “[Martinez] joins theorists in the Global South who question the logic of contraries in most colonial epistemes, where a form of Manichaeism dominates thought. The logic there prevails so long as separation could be maintained as self-contained ‘wholes’ in which there is no cultural or, even more radically, any other kind of interaction. The clear collapse of communicability is a consequence.”
My research on Mesoamerican thought and cosmology proves that it does not involve this logic of contraries wherein there is no interaction between self-contained wholes. Complementarity is the node on which this local Mesoamerican indigenous logic is based. This complementarity means that each pole is the referent to the other; they are mutually constitutive. Masculinity, for instance, is defined only in relation to femininity and vice versa. The same holds true for secondary dualities such as hot/cold, right/left, day/night. Hence, the mutual distance between the poles determines the distinctiveness of their oppositions—with a growing distance allowing for a diminishing of their contrast, for ambiguity and even the reversibility of one into the other. The concept of “otroa compañeroa” is one grounding field.
I invite you to read Taken From the Lips to discover the concepts of duality (not dualism), gender fluidity, equilibrium, and complementarity as they fashion Mesoamerican thought.
This characteristic of fusion of contraries is part of the process of epistemic decolonization already underway. It is a search for “cognitive justice,” as I and various other decolonial thinkers have proposed. It consists principally in recovering and giving voice to an aspect of a very different cognitive process. It calls for establishing intermediations articulating epistemic similarities. Flows and cracks are located in order to understand fully.
The so-called “Conquest of Mexico” was a bloody and destructive invasion. Fanon has given me the tools to understand that. Such tools were important, since mine is a country where many professional historians invented for us a colonialist history of the supposed benefits of the abrupt, violent, and destructive arrival of those who came from Europe, catechizing and massacring the ways of being in the world and of being with the environment that they encountered.
That is why I pay tribute to Fanon today. That is why I accept this award. (I am not fond of formal recognition, but from my fellow Fanonians, my heart is open to receiving it.) The greatest honor in my long life is to be able to associate my being and my work with Fanon, who has always guided me and taught me through a vital presence in my subconscious.
I am immensely grateful for the honor of receiving this recognition associated with Frantz Fanon, particularly given how much impact his thought has had on me. Reading his work was deeply revealing: I found in some of its approaches a reflection of intuitions with which I had already been living. Fanon’s work was, without doubt, the impetus to my encounter with anti-psychiatry and my anti-psychiatric struggles alongside of Franco Basaglia, Félix Guattari, Michel Foucault, and David Cooper, dialoguing and traveling across the European continent and then in beginning the movement in Mexico and Latin America.
These critical anti-psychiatric and decolonial perspectives are based in a long period of listening silently and rigorously. Such listening has prompted efforts to escape the axioms of capitalist Modernity’s dominant form of thinking and to substitute with thinking that—though unitary—is genuinely plural, thinking that calls for perceiving and conceiving an epistemic pluriverse that, though existing, needs nonetheless to be discovered.
Frantz Fanon continues to inspire these paths to liberation. And he’s still here with me.
Sylvia Marcos
Sylvia Marcos is a psychologist and scholar committed to Indigenous and feminist movements throughout the Americas and across the globe. She worked at the Universidad Autonoma del Estado de Morelos. She was founder of theCIDHAL Documentation Centerin 1974, and Professor of Psychology at the Benemérita Universidad Autonoma de Puebla (BUAP). Her research and publications contribute to the fields of feminist critical epistemology, Mesoamerican religions, and women within Indigenous movements, while promoting an antihegemonic-feminist practice, theory, and hermeneutics. Her recent book is entitledUna poética de la insurgencia zapatista(AKAL, 2024), and her many other books such as Dialogue and Difference: Feminisms Challenge Globalization(Palgrave Macmillan, 2005),Taken from the Lips: Gender and Eros in Mesoamerican Religions(Brill, 2006), El libro Dialogo y Diferencia: retos feministas a la globalización(2008),Mujeres , Indígenas, Rebeldes Zapatistas(2011),Cruzando Fronteras: mujeres indígenas y feminismos abajo y a la izquierda(Quimantú, 2017). For a full list, please consult thebibliographyon her website. In 2023, Dr. Marcos was honored by the Benemerita Universidad Autonoma de Puebla (BUAP) with the founding ofLa Cátedra Sylvia Marcos(the Sylvia Marcos Chair).
