Violence can disperse power rather than concentrate it. While violence may initially seem to expand one's power through domination of others, it ultimately serves to divide individuals and weaken unified power. Two examples discussed are the Aztec use of warfare to gain influence, which created internal class divisions and led to their collapse, and Fanon's view that completely destroying colonial influence could further destabilize newly independent states. A better approach to gain power is through progressive movements that appeal to people and encourage unity around a shared cause or identity. Gloria Anzaldua's concept of "tolerance for ambiguity" offers one such model, embracing contradictions to form a new pluralistic culture after colonialism.

1. Violence: Disperser of Power
We live in a world of compartmentalization (Fanon 3), where culturally created
identities, embraced by protective borders, bump and grind, overtake, and fracture.
Among all entities, there resides vicissitudinous power that concentrates and diffuses
between bordering and conflicting entities. These entities can be defined as: nations;
classes; individuals or groups of people of certain traits, heritages, races, genders or
sexualities; or any other categories of people that are subjected to the collisions of
identities and the imbalance of power between them in the divided world. Power, in
definition for this argument, is the allocation of land, resources, and ability to enact
through the unification of people. Power is present within the individual and concentrates
with the communal direction of individual power in a bottom-up structure. Like the
physics of energy, power cannot be created nor destroyed, merely concentrated or
diffused. When power becomes concentrated within certain entities, that power can be
used to expand its reach, through influence or exploitation. In regards to power, violence
is an inherent tool: a disperser of power. The books, The Wretched of the Earth by Frantz
Fanon and Borderlands/La Frontera by Gloria Anzaldua, confront violence associated
with colonization upon the individual, culture, and the nation. Violence can only be used
to subvert the overall power of a group by dispersing its individuals; it can, in no means,
propel the acquisition of power, because violence does not have the capacity to lasso
dispersed individuals, only scatter them. In order to accumulate power, one must direct
the individual power of the majority into a communal cause through a progressive
movement that unifies the people.

2. Violence, which comes in the forms of physical and psychological, is an effective
tool to disperse individuals and ultimately the power they hold in a collective mass.
Physical violence is nothing short of brute force; dropping bombs, flailing machetes, and
rioting in order to cause chaos that causes the masses to diffuse into every which way
with terror. It is the violence that often allows the powerful to mount the natives in
domination and exploit their whole world through colonization after the dispersal of the
natives’ power. It is also the violence that the colonized are forced to use to dismantle
their dominators in hopes to reclaim their land, their culture and ultimately themselves.
Fanon acknowledges this powerful force between the colonizers and native Algerians: “to
blow the colonial world to smithereens… to destroy the colonial world means nothing
less than demolishing the colonial sector, burying it deep within the earth or banishing it
from the territory” (Fanon 6). It is obvious that violence is a powerful force due to the
fact that, when on the other end of the stick, the colonizers plead with the colonized to be
rational during decolonization. They proclaim, “Decolonization should not mean
regression;” that they should use a more peaceful approach with values that are “reliable
and worthwhile” (Fanon 8), however the colonized have discovered the power behind
this violence, and intend to be free. This hopeless attempt of “rationalizing” with the
colonized is merely an attempt to quell the masses. The goal is to reroute the power of the
colonized toward a less effective movement, so that the colonizers can keep in control
and may remain in power.
Psychological violence, which includes cultural violence, emphasizes the
bastardization of an individual, group or culture, in which it attacks the identity, creating
a speciesification or othering, of the target (Fanon 5). Often, this violence effectively

3. “dehumanizes the colonized subject… [They] are reduced to the state of an animal,”
(Fanon 7) yet it is often hard to recognize it as violence. Anzaldua describes cultural
violence against her linguistic identity as “repeated attacks on our native tongue [that]
diminish our sense of self” (Anzaldua 80). Internalization of this psychological violence,
within an individualist sub-sect, can catastrophically diffuse power within a larger
encompassing social sect by deteriorating the individual’s confidence and comfort within
their own skin, due to their cultural practices, beliefs, and languages. Anzaldua points to a
currant Western practice of this type of psychological violence rooted in ethnocentrism.
“An Indian mask in an American museum is transposed into an alien aesthetic…” (Fanon
4). Here the Indian culture is being othered, and cast into a new species, one that is
perceived through the western ethnocentric lens as primal and animalistic, such as
Fanon’s colonized Algerians. “It has become a conquered thing, a dead ‘thing’ separated
from nature and, therefore, its power” (Anzaldua 90).
Violence cannot be used to unify people in order to gain power. Gloria Anzaldua
discusses the Azteca-Mexica belief in Huitzilopochtli, which developed two parallel
paths to the degradation of the tribe through the use of violence in attempt to unify. To
begin, the Azteca tribes’ merger with the Mexitins destroyed the Azteca’s’ “balanced
opposition” (Anzaldua 54) between females and males, through the domination of the
Mexitins’ religion, in which Huitzilopochtli killed his sister and undermined other female
deities. Decolonization, in which the “substitution of one ‘species’ of mankind for
another” (Fanon 1) has taken place: that of men over women. This instigated a split
between the two sexes and eventually produced male dominance through psychological

4. violence, which subordinated women and ultimately dispersed the overall power of the
tribes by splitting its individuals.
At first, it is difficult to feel the loss of power through violence, because violence
is often mistaken to have the ability to “gain and exercise power” (Anzaldua 54). As an
instrument, this is how the Aztecs and the Algerians used violence. In order to save the
human race from extinction, as commanded through Huitzilopochtli, the Azteca-Mexicas
were tasked with preserving human life and unifying all people “into one social,
religious, and administrative organ” through the “wars of flowers” (Anzaldua 54). The
Aztecs perceived the notion of expansion of power through their increased influence, size
and territory gained through the violent wars. This, however, created a class split within
the Aztec tribes between the common people and the Aztec rulers (another envision of
internal decolonization, such as that between the Algerian national bourgeoisie and
common people), who gained all of the tribute from the wars and shared none with the
commoners. This resulted in the collapse of the Aztec nation when attacked by the
Spanish. The ruling elite was unable to marshal the common people to defend the tribes,
because they dispersed their power through violence by “subvert[ing] the solidarity
between men and women and between noble and commoner” (Anzaldua 56).
“Everything has to be started over from scratch, everything has to be rethought”
(Fanon 56). This is an issue with Fanon’s ideology of “false consciousness,” which he
believes needs to be completely rooted out through violent action: the physical
destruction of the colonizer’s world, the psychological destruction of the individual born
in the colonizer’s world, and the complete obliteration and reanimation of the colonized
culture. The violent process to root out the actual colonizers have already weakened the

5. colonized state by the retraction of the “infrastructure,” which leads them towards a state
similar to the “Dark Ages” (Fanon 53). Further, violence will do nothing but continue the
newly freed nation down the spiral further and further into darkness. These violent
processes of rooting out the colonized identity and culture after the actual colonizers have
left, do nothing but continue to disperse power, making it impossible to unify the people
and to create a new identity. Once violence has been used to subvert and disperse the
power of the colonizer, a necessary process, the colonized must then begin a healing
process: a progressive movement to gain and direct the already dispersed power.
The colonizers often gained power through a mischievous progressive movement
by convincing the “ ‘natives’ to love them” (Fanon xliii). It only makes sense to use this
same tactic, in a transparent fashion, to unify people toward nation building. Anzaldua’s
“tolerance of ambiguity” demonstrates a progressive ideology that, in effect, could help
unify a previously colonized nation. The idea is that the inhabitants of a borderland, such
as the mestizo’s of the Mexico and Texas borderlands, or the newly freed of the colonized
and colonizer borderlands, develop “a tolerance for contradictions, a tolerance for
ambiguity… to be an Indian in Mexican culture, to be Mexican from an Anglo point of
view” (Anzaldua 101). The idea follows with Fanon’s colonized. Once free from their
colonizers, the colonized need to create a “pluralistic personality” (Anzaldua 101): that of
a freed nation/tribe and a previously colonized people. As Anzaldua states, “nothing [can
be] thrust out, the good the bad and the ugly, nothing rejected, nothing abandoned”
(Anzaldua 101). Rather, the ambiguity, “the ambivalence,” needs to be turned into
something progressive, something to unify the people, rather than disperse through
violence. Out of this tolerance, a new identity, a new culture and eventually a new

6. infrastructure is born. In a sense, a mestizo culture is born, built upon the trials and
tribulations of the colonized and newly freed identities of the national culture.
Bert Stewart
Hum 160
4/27/14