The Psychology of the Oppressor and the Oppressed in Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970)

The Psychology of the Oppressor and the Oppressed in Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970)

The Fallacy in the Leitmotif of Difference Ideologically, colonialism could not demarcate itself from political exclusivism which in its essence deprives the colonized of their own identity and construct another for them. The insatiable need to justify the colonial existence on legal terms, compels the colonial system to coin ready-made differences ad hoc and overemphasize them so much so that they become leitmotifs for the colonizer to legalize their inhuman oppression. In fact, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970) and The Colonizer and the Colonized (1974) have shed light on the impending propensity of the colonial apparatus to attribute a negative image to the colonized which, in the opinion of the authors ranks among the psychological factors that have birthed the colonial existence. Do you know the reason why Blacks are oppressed? In a Freirean and a Memmian point of view, is it because they are black and that the oppressor is white? But are black people the only one community trekking the Way of the Cross? So according to Freire, if Mr. Marx‘s lumpenproletariat are browbeaten is it a matter of color, of sex, of fate or of race? And what of the permanent genocides, the ethnic cleansings perpetrated in the sacred innocuous soils of Africa? In these perspectives why did Leon Trotsky make ‗an appeal to the toiling, oppressed and exhausted peoples of Europe‘ (Trotsky, 1972)? So, under which basis are people especially the Blacks treated? Accordingly, people are proportionally no longer oppressed in terms of phenotypical differences, but in terms of other factors which are relative to the oppressors. Albert Memmi, in unison with Paulo Freire decry that “The true reason, the principal reason for most deficiencies” is that: the colonialist never planned to transform the colony into the image of his homeland, nor to remake the colonized in his own image! He cannot allow such an equation-it would destroy the principle of his privileges. The colonialist always clearly states that this similarity is unthinkable. […] But the explanation which the colonialist feels he must give (itself extremely significant) is entirely different. This equality is impossible because of the nature of the colonized. In other words, and this is the characteristic which completes this portrait, the colonialist resorts to racism (Memmi, 1974: 113). Paulo Freire has it that “[…] African functionaries who assimilate to colonial cultural values constitute a distinct class with very different ideological cultural values and aspirations than 27 the bulk of the population. Likewise, it would be a mistake to view all African Americans as one monolithic cultural group without marked differences” (Freire, 1970: 14). But the oppressor keeps harping on about their inexistent difference through a stereotypy to the point that it becomes a topos, a formula, and whitewashes themself more than necessary as they tar the other pitch-black. When Prospero reached Caliban‘s territory, he knew he was half a dozen of the other. It dawned on him that he could not subdue him without dragooning him into being convinced of his difference from his settler. In Freire‘s and Memmi‘s views, the emphasis of the colonial difference was consubstantial in the functionality of the colonial system. The depictions of the colonized being through the power of the verbal channel preexists the existence of the colonizer. Memmi argues: ―I have always thought that ideas take form from things and that the ideas are already within man when he awakens them and expresses them to elucidate his situation” (Memmi, 1974: 21). Hence, ―the colonizer’s « conservatism » and « racism, » his ambiguous relations with the mother country-such things are given first, before he revives them into Nero complexes” (Memmi, 1974: 21). Such ―colonial nonsense‖ (Bhabha, 1994: 132) is illustrated in Memmi‘s tireless efforts to draw the “mythical portrait of the colonized” (Memmi, 1974: 123) and in Freire‘s minute depiction of the ―internalized oppression‖ (Freire, 1970: 61) of the oppressed indelibly carved up in the agenda of the ―colonial truth‖ (Bhabha, 1994: 123). Philip Chassler in his article Reading Mannoni‟s Prospero and Caliban Before Reading Black Skin, White Masks (2007) sheds light on the lynchpin of colonization which The Colonizer and the Colonized (1974) and Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970) explore: I argue that Mannoni‘s more meaningful premise is that colonization can be described and understood as a process of psychological projection— that it is the European, who goes forth seeking compensation for the ―inferiority complex‖ that accompanies the struggle of the autonomous individual typical of modern European society and who then ―projects‖ his desires and fears on the people he colonizes. This results in relationships that lead to the racism, exploitation, and violence that characterize colonization (Chassler, 2007: 71). While the difference of the oppressor from the oppressed is obvious if one takes into consideration their phenotypes and skin color as distinctive features, it does not prove the natural superiority of the former to the latter, Freire and Memmi maintain. Yet there is a motley of differential criteria which subtend the colonial leather; the most adopted one is that 28 of racial difference (Freire, 1970: 15). Needless to add that this difference was reinforced and most implemented by slavery (Rodney, 1973; Williams, 1944). Stereotypes and clichés are common in the colonial machinery to promulgate their baneful polities. The only loophole used to absolve themselves resides in their self-glorification. One can notice very easily how Prospero denigrates Caliban to build his self-worth. In the same way as Freire conceives it, Memmi declares that the colonizer never forgets to make a public show of his own virtues, and will argue with vehemence to appear heroic· and great. At the same time his privileges arise just as much from his glory as from degrading the colonized. He will persist in degrading them, using the darkest colors to depict them. If need be, he will act to devalue them, annihilate them (Memmi, 1974: 99). In the same analytical line as Freire and Memmi, Homi Bhabha states that “An important feature of colonial discourse is its dependence on the concept of „fixity‟ in the ideological construction of otherness” (Bhabha, 1994: 66). He pursues: Fixity, as the sign of cultural/ historical/ racial difference in the discourse of colonialism, is a paradoxical mode of representation: it connotes rigidity and an unchanging order as well as disorder, degeneracy and daemonic repetition. Likewise the stereotype, which is its major discursive strategy, is a form of knowledge and identification that vacillates between what is already ‗in place‘, already known, and something that must be anxiously repeated … as if the essential duplicity of the Asiatic or the bestial sexual licence of the African that needs no proof, can never really, in discourse, be proved (Bhabha, 1994: 66). Difference in this context, is the perception of the factors that have brought about “the social, political and economic contradiction” (Freire, 1970: 35) between the two agents shored up by binary oppositions, overgeneralizations and or egregious essentialisms. The colonial quest for difference necessitates the production of negativistic assumptions on the colonial subject and an endeavor to distort the reality of states and affairs in favor of the distorter. As an evidence, Memmi assert: “It is common knowledge that the ideology of a governing class is adopted in large measure by the governed classes. […] By agreeing to this ideology, the dominated classes practically confirm the role assigned to them” (Memmi, 1974: 29 132). While this indoctrination also involves the representation of a warped view of the reality, Hussein A. Bulhan assumes that: The contest over reality and memory becomes most intense in conditions of oppression where both reality and memory distort to preserve the status quo of domination and exploitation. […] it enlarges the distortion of events in memory because written history is mostly about the valor and benevolence of the European colonizer (Bulhan, 2015: 245). While Freire reckons that the ―colonial nonsense‖ feeds itself upon the ―dehumanization‖ and ―depersonalization‖ (Freire, 1970: 145) of the oppressed, Memmi observes that colonial racism finds itself hoist in its own petard but manages to extricate itself to cling on these “three major ideological components: one, the gulf between the culture of the colonialist and the colonized; two, the exploitation of these differences for the benefit of the colonialist; three, the use of these supposed differences as standards of absolute fact” (Memmi, 1974: 71). In order to exist, colonialism had to fall back on recurrent themes and widen the gap between their culture and that of the colonized; and this created a chasm by dint of separation. But this was not enough as Freire and Memmi discern, for the colonialists had to ‗invade the mind‘ of the colonized (Freire, 1970: 152), put much color on these putative differences to convince them of their dissimilarity; and so, materialize and absolutize them by trumpeting them abroad. This pathetic fallacy, illustrated in Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970) and The Colonizer and the Colonized (1974), which is quintessential in the colonial discourse, is underscored by Edward Said in his canonical work Orientalism (1978). He puts that “physiological and moral characteristics are distributed more or less equally: the American is „red, choleric, erect‟, the Asiatic „yellow, melancholic, rigid‟, the African „black, phlegmatic, lax‟” (Said, 1978: 119). Basically, the colonizer‘s tendency to reify the native implies a calcified racism. The authors of Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970) and The Colonizer and The Colonized (1974) have devoted their life on working on this phenomenon which plagues humanity. The results of their works have been notably fructuous metanalyses which cannot be denied. Memmi parses this ―ideological aggression‖ (Memmi, 1974: 136) administered by an ‗allinclusiveness‘ stratagem which Freire effects through class analyses: “Another sign of the colonized’s depersonalization is what one might call the mark of the plural. The colonized is never characterized in an individual manner; he is entitled only to drown in an anonymous collectivity (« They are this. » « They are all the same. »)” (Memmi, 1974: 129)

Oppressive Colonial Paternalism

Part of the post-colonial syndromes are the lingering effects of colonial paternalism which have brought into being the supposed colonized‘s dependency and inferiority complex. The colonial enterprise would not have seen the light of “profit, privilege and usurpation” (Memmi, 1974: 53) if it had not consistently pretended to rank on the side of the oppressed. Albert Memmi and Paulo Freire, in respectively Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970) and The Colonizer and the Colonized (1974), have demonstrated how the colonial paternalist systems, which are still operative in post-colonial societies, mar the political, economic, social and psychological emancipation of the oppressed. It is problematic to predict out the doomed fate of the post-colonial man, or, by the machinations of the colonizer which Freire deductively terms ‗the post-oppressed‘ destiny (FREIRE, 1970: 49), is one not bound to call this colonized man continuously on transformation process, in the words of Simon During, ―the post-colonized‖ (Ashcroft et al., 1995: 127)? In this stance, the Big Bad Wolf did not devour at once the Little Red Riding Hood, he not only cloaks himself through a sheep‘s skin but entices her with daily feint services to the extent that the prey believes that the predator was cosseting their soul. Alas, the servicification! As this act undertones a soft paternalism, Freire and Memmi inform us that the colonized fell easy prey to the hideous ambushes of the colonizer‘s inimical friendship (Memmi, 1974: 120). Octave Mannoni puts forth that the Malagasy would doff their hat off for the self-proclaimed messiah and say ‗I am your protégé and you are my protector‘. How much cunning did he colonizer have to be to domesticate the colonized? How many marrowless bones did the oppressor throw to the oppressed to tame them? Oh, the faithful pet! With this gnawed marrowless bone, the oppressed is rendered spineless. Such is the inbred colonial paternalism which, according to Freire and Memmi, has bereft the colonized of the will to power, the resolve to take their destiny in hand. In the mischievous ambition to emphasize the “political powerlessness” (Memmi, 1974: 86) of the colonized, the paternalist ostentatiously proves to work for the latter‘s socio-economic transition while they only keep them on the breadline. In this sense, for Freire and Memmi, “to the irritated astonishment of the colonized,” the paternalist colonizer “will loudly excuse what the latter condemn in himself. Thus, while refusing the sinister, the benevolent colonizer can never attain the good, for his only choice is not between good and evil, but between evil and uneasiness” (Memmi, 1974: 86-87). 40 Still, along with Freire‘s and with Memmi‘s line of thought, Ousmane Sembene demonstrates it in almost all his works notably in his remarkable film Guelwaar (1997) in which, the eponymous protagonist embodies the voice of the awakened masses resurrected from a political and diplomatic near-death-experience advened by neocolonial paternalism, this time instantiated by the “local watchdogs” (Thiong‘o, 1987: 28) of the western pandemonium. The oppressor‘s economic dependency on the oppressed, as emphasized by Memmi and Freire through the colonizer‘s ―false generosity‖ (Freire, 1970: 54) and deceitful ―humanitarian romanticism‖ (Memmi, 1974: 65) to build up their worth and take the latter round the neck, conditions them to disguise it with a feeling of pride and self-sufficiency and with a permanently recurrent depreciation of the latter. Prospero knows that in order to implement this paternalistic malware, the Caliban(s) should first become convinced of their inherent inferiority and dependency. Nonetheless, the oppressor may cease beating them down while treacherously befriending them, and hence can provide them with tips and extra pennies for their work. Spoon-fed with the belief that they are incapable of self-governance and that their entire existence is contingent upon their oppressor, the oppressed not only incorporates it but internalizes it as well. The very sign of a latently insidious oppression has taken its course. The oppressor thus, keeps stuffing them with the daily syrup of dependency until the colonized become full and why not beyond despair. Therefore, as foreseen by Freire and Memmi, the oppressed begins showing symptoms of abulia and self-abnegation. They set themself that they cannot go without the colonizer, that as it were, the Gobineau are the élan vital of their life. As this tempestuous juggernaut is launched by the oppressor, “so often do they hear that they are good for nothing, know nothing and are incapable of learning anything—that they are sick, lazy, and unproductive—that in the end they become convinced of their own unfitness” (Freire, 1970: 63). These redundant clear-cut phrases inscribed in the colonized‘s dictionary somersault them into the most abysmal chasms of silence and impotence. It is believed that their voluntary forfeit in the participation of world history is signed unconsciously by their regular consumption of the poisonous and ataractic aids that stealthily kills their dignity. As theorized by Freire and Memmi in Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970) and The Colonizer and the Colonized (1974), this fact is clearly illustrated by Sembene when Pierre Henry Thioune Guelwaar rebels against people‘s dependence on foreign aids and the deprecatory charities coming from the devil‘s marrow-corrupted local henchmen. Freire, who is conscious of the nefarious consequences of paternalism lets Memmi lay it bare: “A paternalist is one who 41 wants to stretch racism and inequality farther—once admitted. It is, if you like, a charitable racism-which is not thereby less skillful nor less profitable” (Memmi, 1974:120). Sembene seeking to speak to all those who are exploited and silenced by the combined external forces of colonialism and the internal yoke of African traditions, declares through the voice of Guelwaar: You point your finger to show someone the way, but opening your five fingers to a passer-by, that‘s begging […] This aid has been going on for thirty years here and there. This aid they are distributing to us, will kill us. It has killed all our dignity and pride. […] Our ancestor Kocc Barma says: ‗if you want to kill a man of great dignity, give him every day what he needs to live and you will make him a slave‘ (Sembene, 1997). Guelwaar adds that: “if a country is always taking aid from other people, that country, from generation to generation will be able to say only one thing: „thank you‟, „thank you‟, „thank you‟” (Sembene, 1997). And obviously this wraps it up, needless to deduce that colonial paternalism reduces the conned exploited rich beggar into a slave. Worse though, for Freire, it not only gestates a slavocratic society whose humble income is reaped from disguised panhandling, but also “it interferes with the individual’s ontological and historical vocation to be more fully human” (Freire, 1970: 55). Memmi defending Freire‘s view hails: For the most generous paternalism revolts as soon as the colonized demands his union rights, for example. If he increases his wages, if his wife looks after the colonized, these are gifts and never duties. If he recognized duties, he would have to admit that the colonized have rights. But it is clear from everything above that he has no duties and the colonized have no rights (Memmi, 1974: 120). In an aside Freire underlined Pope John XXIII‘s contention concerning the poisonous alms offered by the surreptitious largesse of the international political chaplaincy whose deeds are cloaked in a cloth of deceit and hypocrisy knit by imperialism whose psychopathic lust is to maintain their stranglehold tighter than ever: Moreover, economically developed countries should take particular care lest, in giving aid to poorer countries, they endeavor to turn the prevailing political 42 situation to their own advantage, and seek to dominate them. Should perchance such attempts be made, this clearly would be but another form of colonialism which, although disguised in name, merely reflects their earlier but outdated dominion, now abandoned by many countries. When international relations are thus obstructed, the orderly progress of all peoples is endangered (Freire, 1970: 140). Consequently, how can a nation prosper if it ekes out its existence through scavenging western garbage cans? As the oppressed is instilled with the habitus to be for the oppressor and not for themselves, Hegel contends respectively defending Freire‘s and Memmi‘s critical considerations on the problem: “The one is independent, and its essential nature is to be for itself; the other is dependent, and its essence is life or existence for another. The former is the Master, or Lord, the latter the Bondsman” (Hegel, 1807: 113). This begs the question of whether the colonized has agreed to become the butler of the knight errant. Consistent with Freire‘s and Memmi‘s posture concerning this issue, the colonized, by finally accepting to being the devoted valet, they get to be devil‘s advocate. And so, do you know why the oppressed being caught in the maws of contradictions refuse to recognize their economic decadence? Is it because they cannot distinguish themself from beggars or that they have endorsed the festering idea according to which the ‗colonized is beggar-born‘? Be it as it may, Freire and Memmi assert that they cannot surpass these liminal premises which confines them in a static state of economic decay, for paternalism “is looked upon in the colonies as a serious illness, the worst of all dangers” (Memmi, 1974: 65). And then, the colonized is shanghaied into believing in their natural inaptitude to develop and they operationalize it. The paternalist whispered them that they are to live under their shadow and scramble for their leftovers. This paternalism Freire calls ―false generosity‖ in other terms, rouses the sleeping duality of the oppressor who, while invigorating their ‗generosity‘, “perpetuate injustice” which is “nourished by death, despair, and poverty” (Freire, 1970: 44). In so being, it proceeds onto Hegel‘s master-slave dialectic and issues into a blind alley of Brutus-Britannicus encounter. Freire and Memmi believe that both the colonizer and the colonized, become deluded because of their phantasmagorical relationship and the more the oppressed is dependent the more the oppressor‘s super-brutality increases. Again, their ambivalence begets on the colonized‘s side their love and hatred of their oppressor, and on the oppressor‘s part their dependence and hostility on the latter. The oppressed also will keep negating themself as long as their oppressor does not stop making them swallow up the normalcy of their constructed poverty and their socioeconomic and political inertia

OPPRESSION AND ITS MULTIDIMENSIONAL FORMS

Oppression, given its wide scope, deserves an exhaustive analysis in order to lay emphasis on its topicality and its phenomenality. To restrain the analysis of oppression to its agents is to overlook the most sensitive factors which shape up its mindset and the different compartments in which it operates. In this context, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970) and The Colonizer and the Colonized (1974) have methodically corrected this literary misreckoning by successfully elucidating the multidimensional forms of oppression which, in their complexity, drive the colonized‘s tragic fate into a vanishing point. Studying a phenomenon requires systematically providing an axiological analysis in order to explore its underbellies. Along with Freire‘s and Memmi‘s works, colonialism in its multifaceted width, impinges on variegated sectors. Therefore, colonialism as Cesaire hinted at, could not demarcate itself from its balefully putrid civilization which demonstrates its highest stage of barbarism through its noble morale of usurping, spoliating, violating people‘s rights, trampling the autochthonous inhabitants to death and reducing dignified peoples into automatons while gangrening the sacred cultures of its colonies. In the cultural realm, following Freire‘s and Memmi‘s analytical line, the so-called ‗civilizing mission‘ was a sheer bluff because civilization and colonization were poles apart. For them, there was no attempt at civilizing already civilized peoples of high mores, because the devil bedevils only those who seek refuge with their Lord from him and not those who are already as evil as he is. So to speak, if according to Memmi the colonized is uncivilized, it is because western civilization “decivilized the colonizer, to brutalize him in the true sense of the word, to degrade him, to awaken him to buried instincts, to covetousness, violence, race hatred, and moral relativism” (Cesaire, 1972: 2) who in his turn passed the buck to the colonized. So far, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970) and The Colonizer and the Colonized (1974) are works that have expounded much on the issue of western civilization which imposes strict norms to the dominated (Freud, 1961: 21) who constantly ask themselves the question: “In reality, who am I”? (Fanon, 1963. 150). Colonialism, instead has brought about the oppressed‘s cultural displacement through its new guises working under the name of syncretism and globalization. In reality, what is implied by Freire and Memmi is that, with the new forms of socialization process initiated by the imperial enterprise, cultural imperialism turns out to be a destructive instrument of cultural oppression. 53 From a political standpoint, Freire and Memmi maintain that colonization would be devoid of sense if it is narrowed down to the connotative significand its precursors and entrepreneurs assigned it. One would understand colonialism only superficially if they dissociate it from its backwardness and immoral incivility. The gist is that, if colonialism did not encyst other pernicious doctrinaires, agents and connivers it would not succeed. Paulo Freire‘s and Albert Memmi‘s sociopolitical position concerning the colonized‘s and the postcolonized‘s permanent political oppression is shored up by Hussein A. Bulhan in his article entitled Stages of Colonialism in Africa: From Occupation of Land to Occupation of Being (2005). Bulhan contends: Still others narrow it to a system imposed by and serving only inhabitants and descendants of Europe, ignoring that colonialism would not succeed or sustain in the past and present without local collaborators, minions, and conveyor belts essential for all forms of oppression to take root and persist (Bulhan, 2015: 240). Those who have scanty inklings in this entity would aver that political oppression involved soft power while this diplomatic conquest began its course only after the preys have been long subdued with hard power. Nevertheless, the amalgamation of soft power (diplomatic conquest) and hard power (military force) constitute the very nucleus of colonialism to sequester the colonized in the culture of silence and indigence after a century of operation. For Bulhan, as for Memmi and Freire, the ―occupation of land‖ by force of arms led to the ―occupation of being‖ marked by the oppressed‘s internalization of the colonial authority. As it is underlined in Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970) and The Colonizer and the Colonized (1974), the effectiveness of the oppressive politics of colonialism leans on the fact that it left psychological stretchmarks on its victims by exerting inflectional powers over its targets: power politics and power economy which were the touchstone of colonialism were expedited by the cultural and thus psychical annihilation of the native. As a matter of fact, there are different forms of oppression, which ironically means that all oppressions are identical but they are operated by different agents in different fields. Its polymorphic masks moult from realm to realm according to the category of prey they face. From an economic angle, Freire and Memmi consider cultural oppression and political oppression as the factorial ensembles which sketch the gloomy ends of an economic oppression. Nevertheless, being all integral and elemental in a multi-factor analysis of 54 oppression, according to the authors of Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970) and The Colonizer and the Colonized (1974), economic oppression in post-colonial societies was mainly caused by the long crystallization and bureaucratic incorporation of the colonial oppressive systems incarnated by the elite and the governmental ruling party. As observed by Freire and Memmi oppression has been conceived as a noumenon, as a thing-in-itself; yet the misconception and unconscious undervaluation of its scope as a onedimensional entity may provoke rueful and irremediable damage not only in the political and economic domains but also in the psychological matrix of the disadvantaged. Hussein Abdilah Bulhan the coiner of the concept ―metacolonialism‖, still defends Freire‘s and Memmi‘s considerations on the issues, in that he defines it as: a socio-political, economic, cultural, and psychological system that comes after, along with, or among the earlier stages of colonialism […]. One can also define it as a colonial system that goes beyond in scope or behind in depth what classical colonialism and neocolonialism had achieved (Bulhan, 2015: 244). If colonization is believed to have popped its clogs, then from what Bulhan conceptualizes as ―metacoloniality‖, conceived by Freire and Memmi as the highest stage of colonialism foreshadowed by the imperialist‘s project to economically, politically and culturally reconquer the formerly colonized; the colonial process is infinite and engages ‗metacolonializer‘ and their spinoffs, the ‗metacolonized‘. Unexpectedly, colonialism was playing possum while people were reveling for its being missing in action. Ironically, it is difficult to understand how the colonized masses could be playing fiddle while Africa, India, Asia… were burning. And by a tantalizing quirk of fate, instead of taking advantage from this uncanny slumber of the colonial ‗Jabberwocky‘, the giant Goliath, imperialism, woke up abruptly, reinvents himself, endows himself with power, and calls for prophecy. Evidently, as Memmi and Freire believe, if colonialism‘s knell has not been tolled, it is because this colonial God, so omnipotent, has his messengers who are still carrying out its mission to keep its banner afloat. And these messengers are none but the local elites who are the very representatives of colonial master mischief-makers. Accordingly, it is the ―repetition of the past‖ as the singer Sami Yusuf, in his song Try Not to Cry (2010), evokes. The massified populace are again and again brought under duress. This metacolonial system which is worse than its grandfather, effects a biocidal and psychic 55 obliteration of the oppressed for it swims around their cultural, political and economic matrix which, in their magnitude, shape up the multidimensionality of oppression.