The Wretched of The Earth
The scene goes as follows: First of all, the psychiatrist states, “I am a doctor, not a policeman. I’m here to help you.” Thus the prisoner’s trust is won after a few days.33 Then: “I’m going to give you a few shots to clear your head.” For several days all kinds of vitamins, heart stimulants and other placebos are administered. On the fourth or fifth day the Pentothal is injected intravenously. The interrogation begins.
Psychiatric Symptoms Encountered
a. Verbal stereotypy
The patient continually repeats phrases such as: “I didn’t tell them anything. You have to believe me, I didn’t talk.” This stereotypy is accompanied by a permanent anxiety. Very often in fact the patient is unaware of whether he has given any information away. Guilt toward the cause he stands for and the comrades whose names and addresses he might have given, here takes on dramatic proportions. No reassurance can restore peace of mind to these ruined consciences.
b. Blurred mental and sensory perception
The patient cannot ascertain the existence of an object. Reasoning is assimilated without making any distinctions. There is a basic indistinction between true and false. Everything is both true and false.
c. A phobia of any one-on-one conversation
This fear stems from the acute impression that he can be interrogated again at any time.
d. Inhibition
The patient is on his guard. He registers a question word by word and elaborates his answer word by word. Hence the impression of virtual inhibition together with psychological slowing down, interrupted sentences, and repetition, etc. . . .
It is obvious these patients stubbornly refuse any type of intravenous injection.
Group No. 4—After brainwashing
There has been much talk recently about “psychological warfare” in Algeria. We have no intention of conducting a critical study of these methods. We shall merely highlight here their psychiatric consequences. There are two categories of brainwashing centers in Algeria.
I. For Intellectuals
The principle here is to induce the intellectual into role-playing. It is clear to which psychotherapy school this refers.34
a. Play the game of collaborator.
The intellectual is induced to collaborate by establishing a justification for his collaboration. He is therefore obliged to live a dual personality and play the part of a well-known patriot who has been taken out of circulation as a precautionary measure. The aim of the operation is to attack from the inside those elements that constitute the national consciousness. Not only must he collaborate, but he is given orders to discuss “freely” with opponents and holdouts in order to win them over. This is an efficient way of getting him to give leads on patriots and using him, therefore, as an informer. If by chance he claims he didn’t find any opponents, they are designated for him or else he is asked to behave as if they were.
b. Give talks on the value of French accomplishments and the merits of colonization.
In order to achieve his job effectively, the intellectual is counseled by a broad spectrum of “political advisors” such as officers for Native Affairs or better still psychologists, therapists and sociologists, etc.
c. Take the arguments for the Algerian Revolution and eliminate them one by one.
Algeria is not a nation, has never been a nation, and never will be.
There is no such thing as the “Algerian people.”
Algerian patriotism is devoid of meaning.
The fellagas are schemers, criminals, and have had the wool pulled over their eyes.
The intellectuals have to take turns giving a presentation on these topics and each has to be convincing. Grades (the infamous “awards”) are allocated and totalled at the end of the month. They are used to evaluate whether the intellectual will be released.
d. Lead an absolutely pathological communal life.
To remain alone is an act of rebellion. The individual must always be in the presence of somebody. Silence is also prohibited. The individual must think out loud.
Testimony
This is the case of an academic who was interned and subjected to months of brainwashing. One day the camp officials congratulated him on his progress and announced he would soon be set free.
Familiar with the enemy’s tactics, he was wary of taking the news too seriously. The stratagem, in fact, was to announce to the prisoners they were going to be freed and a few days before the set date organize a group session of self-criticism. At the end of the session it was often decided to postpone release since the prisoner showed no signs of being definitely cured. The session, according to the psychologists present, highlighted a single-minded nationalist virus.
This time, however, there was no subterfuge. The prisoner was well and truly freed. Once outside, in town and with his family, the former prisoner congratulated himself on having played his role so well. He was overjoyed at the idea of taking part again in the national struggle and endeavored to get back in touch with the leaders. It was then that a terrible, nagging idea crossed his mind. Perhaps nobody had been duped—neither his captors, nor his co-inmates, nor even himself.
Where was the game supposed to end?
Once again we had to reassure the patient and free him from the burden of guilt.
Psychiatric Symptoms Encountered
a. Phobia of any collective discussion. As soon as three or four people got together, the inhibition reappeared, and mistrust and reticence reasserted themselves.
b. The subject finds it impossible to explain and defend a given viewpoint. An antithetical thought process. Anything which is affirmed can be simultaneously denied with the same force. This is certainly the most painful legacy we have encountered in this war. The obsessive personality is the fruit of the “psychological warfare” used in the service of colonialism in Algeria.
II.—For Nonintellectuals
In centers like Berrouaghia, subjectivity is no longer taken as the starting point for modifying the individual’s attitude. On the contrary, emphasis is on the body, which is broken in the hope that the national consciousness will disintegrate. The individual is “knocked” into shape. The individual’s reward is being spared torture or being allowed to eat.
a. You must confess you are not a member of the FLN. It has to be shouted collectively and repeated for hours.
b. Then you have to confess to being in the FLN and now admit it was wrong. Down with the FLN.
Then comes the next stage: the future of Algeria is French, it can only be French. Without France, Algeria would return to the Dark Ages.
Finally, you are French. Long live France.
The disorders encountered here are not serious. It is the bruised, suffering body which cries out for peace and calm.
SERIES D
PSYCHOSOMATIC DISORDERS
The increasing occurrence of mental illness and the rampant development of specific pathological conditions are not the only legacy of the colonial war in Algeria. Apart from the pathology of torture, the pathology of the tortured and that of the perpetrator, there is a pathology of the entire atmosphere in Algeria, a condition which leads the attending physician to say when confronted with a case they cannot understand: “This will all be cleared up once the damned war is over.”
We propose grouping in this fourth series the illnesses encountered in Algerians some of whom were sent to internment camps. They can all be characterized as being psychosomatic.
The name psychosomatic pathology is given to the general body of organic disorders developed in response to a situation of conflict.35 Psychosomatic, because its determinism is psychic in origin. This pathology is considered a way the organism can respond, in other words how it adapts to the conflict, the disorder being both a symptom and a cure. More exactly it is generally agreed that the organism (here again it is the former psychosomatic, cortico-visceral body) outwits the conflict using the wrong, but nevertheless economic, channels. The organism chooses the lesser evil in order to avoid a complete
breakdown.
On the whole this pathology is widely accepted today, although the various therapeutic methods such as relaxation and suggestion are highly uncertain. During the Second World War air raids on England and the siege of Stalingrad, for example, in the Soviet Union, the number of disorders reported increased dramatically. We now know perfectly well that there is no need to be wounded by a bullet to suffer from the effects of war in body and soul. Like any war, the war in Algeria has created its contingent of cortico-visceral illnesses. Except for group g below all the disorders encountered in Algeria have been reported during “conventional” wars. We found group g specific to the colonial war in Algeria. This particular form of pathology (systemic muscular contraction) already caught our attention before the revolution began. But the doctors who described it turned it into a congenital stigma of the “native,” an original feature of his nervous system, manifest proof of a predominant extrapyramidal system in the colonized.36 This contraction, in fact, is quite simply a postural concurrence and evidence in the colonized’s muscles of their rigidity, their reticence and refusal in the face of the colonial authorities.
Psychosomatic Symptoms Encountered
a. Stomach ulcers
Very numerous. The pain is mainly felt at night accompanied by severe vomiting, loss of weight, melancholia and depression; irritability is rare. Most of the patients are very young, between eighteen and twenty-five years old. As a rule we never advise surgery. A gastrectomy was conducted twice and each time we had to reoperate within the year.
b. Renal colic
Here again the pain reaches its height during the night. Obviously there are never any kidney stones. These colics can occur in fourteen- to sixteen-year-olds, but this is rare.
c. Disturbed menstrual cycles
These symptoms are very common and we will be brief. Either the women go three to four months without their periods, or menstruation is so painful it affects the women’s character and behavior.
d. Hypersomnia due to idiopathic tremors
These are cases of young adults who are denied any rest owing to tiny systemic tremors resembling Parkinson’s disease. Here again, some “great scientific minds” might be tempted to suggest an extrapyramidal determinism.
e. Premature whitening of hair
The hair of survivors of the interrogation centers suddenly turns white in patches, in specific areas or all over. Very often this disorder is accompanied by deep asthenia plus loss of interest and impotence.
f. Paroxysmal tachycardia
The heart rate suddenly accelerates to 120, 130, and 140 beats per minute. This tachycardia is accompanied by panic attacks, an impression of imminent death, and the end of the attack is marked by heavy sweating.
g. Systemic contraction, muscular stiffness
These are male patients who slowly have difficulty making certain movements such as climbing stairs, walking quickly, or running (in two cases it was very sudden). The cause of this difficulty lies in a characteristic rigidity which inevitably suggests an attack on certain areas of the brain (central gray matter). Walking becomes contracted and turns into a shuffle. Passive bending of the lower limbs is practically impossible. No relaxation can be achieved. Immediately rigid and incapable of relaxing of his own free will, the patient seems to be made in one piece. The face is set, but expresses a marked degree of bewilderment.
The patient does not seem to be able to “demobilize his nerves.” He is constantly tense, on hold, between life and death. As one of them told us: “You see, I’m as stiff as a corpse.”37
FROM THE NORTH AFRICAN’S CRIMINAL IMPULSIVENESS
TO THE WAR OF NATIONAL LIBERATION
Fighting for the freedom of one’s people is not the only necessity. As long as the fight goes on you must reenlighten not only the people but also, and above all, yourself on the full measure of man. You must retrace the paths of history, the history of man damned by other men, and initiate, bring about, the encounter between your own people and others.
In fact the aim of the militant engaged in armed combat, in a national struggle, is to assess the daily humiliations inflicted on man by colonial oppression. The militant sometimes has the grueling impression he has to drag his people back, up from the pit and out of the cave. The militant very often realizes that not only must he hunt down the enemy forces but also the core of despair crystallized in the body of the colonized. The period of oppression is harrowing, but the liberation struggle’s rehabilitation of man fosters a process of reintegration that is extremely productive and decisive. The victorious combat of a people is not just the crowning triumph of their rights. It procures them substance, coherence, and homogeneity. For colonialism has not simply depersonalized the colonized. The very structure of society has been depersonalized on a collective level. A colonized people is thus reduced to a collection of individuals who owe their very existence to the presence of the colonizer.
The combat waged by a people for their liberation leads them, depending on the circumstances, either to reject or to explode the so-called truths sown in their consciousness by the colonial regime, military occupation, and economic exploitation. And only the armed struggle can effectively exorcize these lies about man that subordinate and literally mutilate the more conscious-minded among us.
How many times in Paris or Aix, in Algiers or Basse-Terre have we seen the colonized vehemently protest the so-called indolence of the black, the Algerian, and the Vietnamese. And yet in a colonial regime if a fellah were a zealous worker or a black were to refuse a break from work, they would be quite simply considered pathological cases. The colonized’s indolence is a conscious way of sabotaging the colonial machine; on the biological level it is a remarkable system of self-preservation and, if nothing else, a positive curb on the occupier’s stranglehold over the entire country.
The resistance of the forests and swamps to foreign penetration is the natural ally of the colonized. Put yourself in his shoes and stop reasoning and claiming that the “nigger” is a hard worker and the “towelhead” great at clearing land. In a colonial regime the reality of the “towelhead,” the reality of the “nigger,” is not to lift a finger, not to help the oppressor sink his claws into his prey. The duty of the colonized subject, who has not yet arrived at a political consciousness or a decision to reject the oppressor, is to have the slightest effort literally dragged out of him. This is where non-cooperation or at least minimal cooperation clearly materializes.
These observations regarding the colonized’s disposition to work could also be applied to the colonized’s attitude toward the colonizer’s laws, his taxes, and the colonial system. Under a colonial regime, gratitude, sincerity, and honor are hollow words. Over recent years I have had the opportunity to verify the fundamental fact that honor, dignity and integrity are only truly evident in the context of national and international unity. As soon as you and your fellow men are cut down like dogs there is no other solution but to use every means available to reestablish your weight as a human being. You must therefore weigh as heavily as possible on your torturer’s body so that his wits, which have wandered off somewhere, can at last be restored to their human dimension. During the course of recent years I have had the opportunity to witness the extraordinary examples of honor, self-sacrifice, love of life, and disregard for death in an Algeria at war. No, I am not going to sing the praises of the freedom fighters. A common observation the most hard-lined colonialists have not failed to note is that the Algerian fighter has an unusual way of fighting and dying, and no reference to Islam or Paradise can explain this spirit of self-sacrifice when it comes to protecting his people or shielding his comrades. Then there is this deathly silence—the body of course cries out—the silence that suffocates the torturer. Here we find the old law stating that anything alive cannot afford to remain still while the nation is set in motion, while man both demands and claims his infinite humanity.
One of the characteristics of the Algerian people established by coloni
alism is their appalling criminality. Prior to 1954 magistrates, police, lawyers, journalists, and medical examiners were unanimous that the Algerian’s criminality posed a problem. The Algerian, it was claimed, was a born criminal. A theory was elaborated and scientific proof was furnished. This theory was taught at universities for more than twenty years. Algerian medical students received this education, and slowly and imperceptibly the elite, after having consented to colonialism, consented to the natural defects of the Algerian people: born idlers, born liars, born thieves, and born criminals.
We propose here to expound this official theory, to recall its basis and scientific reasoning. In a second stage we shall review the facts and endeavor to reinterpret them.
The Algerian is an habitual killer: It’s a fact, the magistrates will tell you, that four fifths of the cases heard involve assault and battery. The crime rate in Algeria is one of the highest in the world, they claim. There are no petty delinquents. When the Algerian, and this applies to all North Africans, puts himself on the wrong side of the law, he always goes to extremes.
The Algerian is a savage killer: And his weapon of choice is the knife. The magistrates “who know the country” have elaborated their own theory on the subject. The Kabyles, for example, prefer a revolver or shotgun. The Arabs from the plains have a preference for the knife. Some magistrates wonder whether the Algerian does not have a need to see blood. The Algerian, they will tell you, needs to feel the heat of blood and steep himself in his victim’s blood. These magistrates and police officers very seriously hold forth on the connections between the Muslim psyche and blood.38 A number of magistrates even go so far as to say that killing a man for an Algerian means first and foremost slitting his throat. The savagery of the Algerian manifests itself in particular by the number of wounds, many of them inflicted unnecessarily after the victim’s death. Autopsies undeniably establish this fact: the killer gives the impression he wanted to kill an incalculable number of times given the equal deadliness of the wounds inflicted.