Colonial conditions make life an incomplete, ever-menaced death

Evidence

All this gnawing at the existence of the colonized tends to make of life something resembling an incomplete death. Acts of refusal or rejection of medical treatment are not a refusal of life, but a greater passivity before that close and contagious death. Seen from another angle, this absence of enlightened behavior reveals the colonized native’s mistrust of the colonizing technician. The technician’s words are always understood in a pejorative way. The truth objectively expressed is constantly vitiated by the lie of the colonial situation. — Frantz Fanon, A Dying Colonialism, 416 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

As for fatalism, a father’s apparent refusal, for example, to admit that he owes his son’s life to the colonizer’s operation, must be studied in two lights. There is, first of all, the fact that the colonized person, who in this respect is like the men in underdeveloped countries or the disinherited in all parts of the world, perceives life not as a flowering or a development of an essential productiveness, but as a permanent struggle against an omnipresent death. This ever-menacing death is experienced as endemic famine, unemployment, a high death rate, an inferiority complex and the absence of any hope for the future. — Frantz Fanon, A Dying Colonialism, 415 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

A feeling of inferiority? No, a feeling of nonexistence. Sin is Negro as virtue is white. All those white men in a group, guns in their hands, cannot be wrong. I am guilty. I do not know of what, but I know that I am no good. — Frantz Fanon, Constance Farrington, Black skin, white masks, 547 (#expands, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Colonial violence destroyed traditional mourning rites by making every death colonial; Colonial life resembles incomplete death, and rejecting treatment is passive surrender — Frantz Fanon, A Dying Colonialism, 416; The colonized perceive life as permanent struggle against omnipresent death — Frantz Fanon, A Dying Colonialism, 415 (+3 more)

Related

• Colonial life resembles incomplete death, and rejecting treatment is passive surrender (similarity 0.94)
• The colonized perceive life as permanent struggle against omnipresent death (similarity 0.89)
• Colonial trauma produces a feeling of nonexistence, not mere inferiority (similarity 0.86)
• Colonial life was structurally split between settler existence and colonized agony (similarity 0.85)
• Colonial domination distorts the colonized’s relationship with their own culture and traditions (similarity 0.83)
• Colonized people reject the occupier’s values even when objectively worth choosing (similarity 0.83)
• Peoples habituated to colonial death do not fear atomic menace (similarity 0.82)
• Colonial identity formation proceeds through refusal of the dominant cultural models on offer. (similarity 0.81)
• Colonial domination is undone first in the colonized subject’s inner life (similarity 0.79)
• Colonial subjects resist the amputation of their identity yet find agency impossible (similarity 0.79)
• The colonial situation forces colonized people to reject even beneficial medicine categorically. (similarity 0.79)
• Colonialism occupies the individual’s psyche, not merely the territory (similarity 0.79)
• Colonial formation produces a felt sense of being out of place (similarity 0.78)

Broader Connections

• Colonial life resembles incomplete death, and rejecting treatment is passive surrender #corroborates (0.85) — Frantz Fanon, A Dying Colonialism, 416
• The colonized perceive life as permanent struggle against omnipresent death #corroborates (0.80) — Frantz Fanon, A Dying Colonialism, 415
• Colonial trauma produces a feeling of nonexistence, not mere inferiority #expands (0.60) — Frantz Fanon, Constance Farrington, Black skin, white masks, 547
• Colonial subjects resist the amputation of their identity yet find agency impossible #expands (0.55) — Frantz Fanon, Constance Farrington, Black skin, white masks, 556