Raising the question of what a thinker said invites critics, in near knee-jerk reaction, to ask if one’s portrait is of what was “really” said and then to offer the challenge of what could have been “said otherwise.” What someone has said, especially where those words are published, calls for reading the woman or the man. But even in such cases, as we know, what is said is not always what is meant, and to explain the latter often requires those difficult acts of interpretation and the presentation of evidence of a writer’s words and their contextual meaning. To say that the thinker said otherwise, then, is to offer a different and more persuasive interpretation of what she or he meant, and as layers of meaning mount, the eventual formulation of what was “really meant” makes matters more complicated. Such a task is even more difficult where the writer is fearless, ironic, passionate, and poetic.
A humanistic psychiatrist, philosopher, and revolutionary, Frantz Fanon left an indelible mark on twentieth-century thought and politics. His influence continues to grow well into the twenty-first. He was born on the Caribbean island of Martinique in 1925, and after a short life of intense intellectual, professional medical, and political activity—which took him not only to the southern shores of France and the northern shores of Algeria and Tunisia, but also to the then Soviet Union and to his death in the United States—he was laid to rest in 1961 as an Algerian citizen in a grave for martyrs in the desert near one of the Algerian fronts. His death concluded a six-year period on France’s enemy ex-patriot list and several French right-wing assassination groups’ lists.
How did this outlaw intellectual become one of the most influential thinkers of the twentieth century and continue to be so into the twenty-first?
Fanon was a brilliant writer and an extraordinary thinker. His words scratched through the morass of banal rationalizations of political complicity and unveiled a world governed by norms of the living dead—a world of people who “see,” as Søren Kierkegaard once observed, “and still do not see.”1 The anthropologist and sociologist Peter Worsley, along with many other biographers and commentators, called Fanon a poet; his aphoristic, lyrical style was unusual for a philosopher who was not only a scientist but also a clinician.2 Through his words, truth, or something close, was brought to poetic reflection. He had the ability to convey, often persuasively and always passionately, big ideas with an unusual economy of words.
Fanon’s contributions to the history of ideas are manifold. He is influential not only because of the originality of his thought but also because of the astuteness of his criticisms of such contemporaries as the psychologist Alfred Adler, the poet Aimé Césaire, the psychoanalyst Anna Freud, the philosopher and psychiatrist Karl Jaspers, the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, the philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty, the philosopher and novelist Jean-Paul Sartre, the poet and statesman Léopold Senghor, the novelist Richard Wright, and such nineteenth-century predecessors as G. W. F. Hegel, Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, and Friedrich Nietzsche. His originality includes the development of what he called sociogenic explanations, a form of existential phenomenological social analysis that recognizes both the impact of the social world on the emergence of meaning and human identities and how individual situations relate to the development and preservation of social and political institutions. He developed a profound social-existential analysis of antiblack racism, which led him to identify conditions of skewed rationality and reason in contemporary discourses on the human being. His articulation of a problematic rationality led to his developing an explanation of why neocolonialism (instead of postcolonialism) succeeds colonialism and why getting beyond these categories required more commitment than most people would admit or be willing to take on. His bitingly critical analysis enabled him to make a diagnosis of why black and Third World (today, postcolonial and “Global South”) leadership tended to collapse into dependency in the latter half of the twentieth century and unfortunately continues to do so well into the twenty-first, as the waves of protest since the end of 2010 known as the “Arab Spring,” though also the “African Spring,” standing as legacies of his thought, attest. For Fanon, his investigations call for renewed understanding of human possibilities. This renewed understanding requires a conception of radical criticism that challenges the dominance of philosophy as the ultimate critical theory and arbiter. In that regard, he is a major contributor to subsequent reflections on thought and what left-wing revolutionaries call “praxis.” These contributions warrant Fanon’s place as one of the twentieth century’s foremost philosophers.
In the late 1980s and throughout the first decade of the twenty-first century, “Fanon studies” has come into its own in the American and British academies despite the neglect of his work in France and many Francophone countries, though the latter situation is improving.3 In Fanon: A Critical Reader, my coeditors and I characterized five stages in the development of Fanon studies: reaction; biography; social and political science; colonial, anticolonial, and postcolonial critique; and pragmatic use for continued development of thought. These five positions could be rephrased through the following questions: Why is Fanon dangerous for conservatives and liberals and emancipating for some progressives and irksome to others? Why is Fanon’s life interesting biography? How has Fanon contributed to social and political theory? Is Fanon’s thought “postcolonial”? And how is Fanon’s thought useful for contemporary theorists across the spectrum of human studies and critical thought?
For readers who demand names, each of these variations has its share of noteworthy contributors. In the first, the most familiar names make up the unusual grouping of the philosopher and political theorist Hannah Arendt, the philosopher Sidney Hook, the anticolonial writer Albert Memmi, the Black Panther Huey Newton, and the Marxist historian and critic Jack Woddis. In the second, Peter Geismar’s, David Caute’s, and Irene Gendzier’s critical biographies were the most influential, and since then Patrick Ehlen’s spiritual biography, David Macey’s detailed and often acerbic and condescending tome, and Alice Cherki’s intimate portrait offer insights from hitherto unknown material. In the third, among the most note worthy are the writings of the social theorists Peter Worsley and Renate Zahar, the political scientist Emmanuel Hansen, the Africana theorist Chester Fontenot, the political scientist Cedric Robinson, and the political theorist Ato Sekyi-Otu. The undisputed leaders of the fourth stage are the literary theorists Edward Said, Homi Bhabha, and Abdul JanMohamed, but others include the literary theorist Henry Louis Gates Jr., the sociologist and literary scholar Neil Lazarus, and the historian and political theorist Achille Mbembe. The fifth stage was inaugurated by the psychologist Hussein Bulhan’s and Noël Manganyi’s writings on Fanon’s relevance to psychology; they influenced work on Fanon’s relevance to human studies or the humanistic disciplines. In this stage, work also appeared on Fanon’s relevance to feminist theory, albeit with much ambivalence, and to global dependency theory, and his influence is canonical in Africana philosophy and Africana critical thought, Caribbean philosophy and anticolonial thought, Creolization theory, decolonial studies, Latin American philosophy, philosophy of liberation, and what is sometimes called, primarily in literary circles, simply “Theory.” Theorists in these areas include the great social theorist, physician, and political activist Steve Bantu Biko, the philosopher Judith Butler, the political theorist George Ciccariello-Maher, the philosopher and legal theorist Drucilla Cornell, the literary theorist and cultural critic Nathalie Etoke, the political theorist Nigel Gibson, the political and Africana theorist Jane Anna Gordon, the sociologist and philosopher Paget Henry, the philosopher and decolonial theorist Nelson Maldonado-Torres, the decolonial theorist and cultural critic Walter Mignolo, the philosopher Michael Monahan, the philosopher P. Mabogo More, the literary and cultural theorist Alejandro J. De Oto, the political theorist Richard Pithouse, the political and Africana theorist Neil Roberts, the Africana critical theorist Reiland Rabaka, the legal and social theorist Boaventura de Sousa, the cultural critic and political theorist Françoise Vergès, and the literary theorist, novelist, and cultural critic Sylvia Wynter.
One could argue, however, that there is a sixth development: the characterization of the five previous ones. In other words, the sixth development could be the self-reflective realization of Fanon studies itself. That stage is marked by Gates’s reflections on the postcolonial efforts of his colleagues in literature and cultural studies, Anthony Alessandrini’s, Nigel Gibson’s, and Cedric Robinson’s critiques of the same, and by the various critical anthologies on reading Fanon that have emerged since the 1990s.4 Since then, important work by Nigel Gibson, Jane Anna Gordon, Alejandro De Oto, Reiland Rabaka, and a growing body of writings in the French-speaking world by such scholars as the philosopher Imudia Norman Ajari, the literary scholar, cognitive linguist, and political activist Mireille Fanon-Mendès-France, the sociologist and philosopher Sonia Dayan-Herzbrun, the philosopher Étienne Balibar, Achille Mbembe, the philosopher and novelist V. Y. Mudimbe, the political theorist and historian Matthieu Renault, and the literary theorist and critic Jean-Paul Rocchi come to mind.5 This brief survey is, of course, not exhaustive.
The aim of What Fanon Said is to offer a study of Fanon and his ideas in their own right. “What Fanon said,” then, pertains not only to the black-letter words in his writings but also to their spirit, their meaning. This task also involves stepping outside of a tendency that often emerges in the study of intellectuals of African descent—namely, the reduction of their thought to the thinkers they study. For example, Jean-Paul Sartre was able to comment on black intellectuals such as Aimé Césaire, Fanon, and Léopold Sédar Senghor without becoming “Césairian,” “Fanonian,” or “Senghorian”; Simone de Beauvoir could comment on the thought of Richard Wright without becoming “Wrightian”; the German sociologist Max Weber could comment on the African American sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois without becoming “Du Boisian.” Why, then, is there a different story when black authors comment on their (white) European counterparts? “Standard” scholarship has explored whether Du Bois is Herderian, Hegelian, Marxian, or Weberian; whether Senghor is Heideggerian; and whether Fanon is every one of the Europeans on whom he has commented—Adlerian, Bergsonian, Freudian, Hegelian, Husserlian, Lacanian, Marxian, Merleau-Pontian, and Sartrean, to name several.
The problem of subordinated theoretical identity is a theme against which Fanon argued. It is connected to another problem—the tendency to reduce black intellectuals to their biographies. Critics of this approach ask: How many biographies of Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Fanon do we need before it is recognized that they also produced ideas? It is as if to say that white thinkers provide theory and black thinkers provide experience for which all seek explanatory force from the former. As there are many studies of Immanuel Kant without reducing him to Jean-Jacques Rousseau (who had the most influence on the former’s moral philosophy), my approach will be to address Fanon’s life and thought as reflections of his own ideals, with the reminder that no thinker produces ideas in a vacuum. Thus, the focus will not be on who influenced Fanon but on how Fanon developed the ideas of his time to another level in relation to those other thinkers and how that development has enabled him to issue an original set of criticisms of and solutions to theoretical and practical problems that persist into the present.
A problem in Fanon studies in the Anglophone world has been the limitations of the English translations of his writings.6 As a result, I have decided to translate all the passages, sometimes without elegance, from the original French.7 This matter of translation raises an additional question of the title of this book. It is in part dictated by the debates on Fanon’s writings. I have found even distinguished scholars rebuking the man for things he simply did not say (for example, an eminent scholar at one of my presentations once claimed Fanon called his fellow Martinican Mayotte Capécia a “whore”), and in some cases, for things that are the standard, whether spoken by women or men, in the French language. The situation has at times been so bad that I have actually wondered if such scholars have even taken the time to read Fanon in French or, for that matter, in any language beyond secondary sources or hearsay, and to consider his writings beyond a few passages taken out of context, if that much at all.
An additional dimension is what could be called cross-cultural and racial allegiances. The cultural ones emerge where French authors emphasize Fanon’s Frenchness. The racial one focuses on his blackness. What makes matters difficult is that many white scholars tend to want to evade race issues; black scholars want to confront them. To be effective at avoiding race, many white and racial eliminativist scholars tend to emphasize cultural difference or the cultural and class dimensions of the kinds of circumstances about which Fanon wrote. Many black scholars simply point out, however, that if the cultural and class considerations were really supervening, Fanon’s books would not have emerged. In other words, although some white French scholars may stress Fanon’s being a Frenchman, French society was sufficiently racist for Fanon to have the kind of double consciousness about how he was perceived to make him quite at home with the writings and company of people such as the Anglophone African American Richard Wright and the Afro-Barbadian George Lamming, though admittedly primarily so in relation to whites. A stark example of this difference is the portrait of Fanon offered by two specialists in psychology and psychiatry: Hussein Abdilahi Bulhan and Alice Cherki. Racism is very central in the thought of the former, whereas it appears more as an inconvenient intrusion in the portrait of the latter. Although there are those who write otherwise, it is difficult for many white intellectuals to take seriously the notion of a racist society, especially when it is the one that has nurtured their development and through which their identity was formed. If the concept is accepted at all, racist societies are for them always ultimately elsewhere, which is what enabled many in the United States, for example, to look self-righteously at South Africa during the years of apartheid, even though the latter was in fact modeling itself after the former. Overcoming this race versus culture and class divide requires taking seriously Fanon’s own insights on meeting people on the terrain where they live, even if it is, to some extent, alien territory. To look at Fanon’s life and thought as though he were only black or only French would be a distortion of the fact that he was not only both but also a Martinican and much more, given the multitude of roles he played throughout his short life.8 To their credit, Bulhan’s and Cherki’s studies converged more than many other portraits on a topic often elided in the United States and France—namely, slavery.
The objective of this book, then, is to be a useful guide to those entering the world of Fanon’s ideas and to convey the relevance of that thought to problems of today. I will therefore not discuss every one of his writings or even all the dimensions of those included but instead focus on those that have been sites of controversy and others relevant to the illumination of those works and his overall thought, which, I hope, will give the reader much with which to continue study and reflection on her or his own. Fanon’s thought was ironic in that he despised notions of prophecy and destiny, but in the end, the accuracy of his prophecies revealed an existential paradox in the man. He spoke and wrote as truthfully as possible in the hope that he was, in the end, wrong.