Before 1939, the Antillean said he was happy, or at least believed himself to be so. He voted, went to school when he could, took part in the processions, drank rum, and danced the beguine.
—FRANTZ FANON, “Antilleans and Africans”
Think of the body in motion. Dancing. Then think of it standing still. Perhaps leaned back. Consider the body in question or, perhaps, indifferent. Fanon’s body, a troubled, frenetic body that was simultaneously elegant, rhythmic (he did, in spite of his protestations, dance the beguine), and beautiful, is a subtext of all his writings. It gropes at reality, shivers, and quakes. It is at times frozen, often hot with anger while constrained by reflection and realization; a black surface; prodigious; handsome; dangerous, prurient, lustful; strong one moment, lame another; funny, yet often also sad; and, above all—searching.
The body is the man, and the man his body. Anxiety over embodiment is a dimension of Western civilization against which Fanon was in constant battle. The body, he laments, is a denied presence, and black people are a denied people. Writings of a black man, Fanon’s reflections carry an urgency born of intimacy. He and the alienated subjects of his books—denied, often, even of subjectivity—are both body and body denied.
Frantz Omar Fanon, this denied body through being too much body, was born on the 20th of July 1925 in Fort de France, Martinique. Malcolm Little, who then became Malcolm X and eventually El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz, the famed black revolutionary thinker in the United States, was born two months earlier. So, too, was Patrice Lumumba, the martyred father of the Congolese Revolution, as well as the revolutionary Nicaraguan Catholic priest and poet Ernesto Cardenal. If creativity were like wine, one could argue that 1925 was a vintage year.
Frantz’s father, Félix Casimir Fanon, was a customs agent, and his mother, Eléanore Médélice, was a shopkeeper. They were able to provide a lower-middle-class existence for their eight children—four boys and four girls, two of whom died in childhood. His mother, by virtue of race obsession on the part of several commentators, is often distinguished by her biracial status as a woman of a black Martinican mother and a white Alsatian father. His father was the son of a freed black slave and an East Indian woman. Fanon was the youngest of four sons in this once symmetrical family of ten.
One’s biography is a story of wonder if it is occasioned by fame or an allegory of infamy. For the former, each childhood incident tags the hero with heroic qualities: An otherwise banal childhood becomes marked by prophecies of greatness. For the latter, the tragic stage is set, through which prophecy also portends doom. Fanon’s life was such that both readings could apply. As a testament of a great revolutionary, it could easily be read on a level of biblical proportions. There is, for instance, the incident recounted by his brother Félix, where a childhood friend Clébert (then about fourteen years of age) had visited the Fanon household with his father’s revolver to impress the Fanon brothers. Unaware that the gun was loaded, Clébert fired the gun, hurting his index finger and nearly shooting Frantz. The younger boy Frantz calmly tore a sheet, wrapped Clébert’s injured finger, and explained to his mother that the noise was a toy backfiring and that they had decided to take a walk. He then took Clébert to the hospital. Such an incident could be interpreted as marking the “nature” of the future physician and revolutionary, a man who will remain cool in dire circumstances, a man who would find himself training guerrillas in an Algerian hospital basement, despite his philosophical aversion to notions of human “nature” and his moral detestation of violence.
There are, as well, those who despise what Fanon represents. They interpret, as we find in the work of Albert Memmi, early Françoise Vergès, later Stuart Hall, Isaac Julien, and Henry Louis Gates Jr., the unfortunate influence of a very troubled man, a man plagued by self-hatred, fear of miscegenation, and Oedipal anxieties.1 For some, Fanon’s relationship with his mother and her father’s whiteness are central. Did Fanon dream of possessing little white girls while a child and wish, given his critical letters to his father while at war—“Papa, you were sometimes remiss in your duty as a father”—that his father had been white?2 Did Fanon leave Martinique for Dominica to train for the French Resistance during his brother’s wedding to upstage his brother? Was it an act of aggression from a narcissistic scene-stealer?
I will not pretend. I consider such readings of Fanon’s life to be highly problematic. They often fail to address the complexity of human failings and triumphs, as well as the political and historical contexts of the subject’s life. As a human being, Fanon was both heroic and flawed. The combination was expressed in the ways he negotiated his historical situation as a member of a society marked by radical inequalities. Fanon lived in a colonial world, and racial hierarchy was a reality of that world. The Martinique of his day was dominated by the Békés, the approximately 1,000 whites who controlled the political and economic realities, that is, three-fourths of the land and business, of that island of nearly 300,000 blacks and, as some prefer, mulattoes, which that small minority of whites controls to this day. Readings of Fanon simply as a troubled man prioritize the psychological over any other model of human study. Interesting though Fanon’s relationships with his parents may have been, and curious though one may be about his sex life, the fact remains that it is not Fanon’s biography that brings us to his writings and political accomplishments but his writings and political accomplishments that bring us to his biography. Thus, even the model of the charismatic revolutionary is of value, in the end, to the theorist of political charisma. From the standpoints of many approaches, whether political, economic, psychoanalytical, or sociological, seemingly valid interpretations of Fanon’s life could be fallaciously written. What many of his critics fail to realize is that intelligent and strong though Fanon was, his impact on his fellow human beings would be without effect if it were not also for his sense of humor and passion. The elevation of some interpretations to levels of the best interpretation of his life hides the man, and this is so because, in the end, the man could never be completely revealed, although he could, to a great extent, be understood.
Fanon’s biography is, among its many manifestations, a political tale of pedagogical and moral value with ethical challenges. It is so because its engagement teaches us much about how emancipatory projects succeed and fail, and beseeching many of us to be like him would, in the end, demand for many of us to be better than we are. Each stage of his life was decisive in a historically consequential way. Hitler took Paris when Fanon was fifteen and set up the Marshal Pétain–led Vichy government as a puppet for Nazi Germany to rule France and its colonies. This led to several thousand French soldiers and sailors occupying Martinique and unleashing on the local population heavy doses of antiblack racism. These events awakened many Martinicans for a time from their racial naïveté and political slumber. Before that encounter, Martinicans imagined themselves to be a privileged group within the French colonial hierarchy. They regarded themselves as French, not black or African, and expected, if not to be treated as whites, to be acknowledged, at least, to be better than other “real” blacks, especially sub-Saharan Africans. In his essay “Antilleans and Africans,” Fanon describes this period in Martinican history as politically transformative.3 It was marked not only by the historical weight of World War II but also by the poetic philosophical challenge of Aimé Césaire, the famed Martinican poet and statesman, who brought to the island, as Moses did on clay tablets to the Israelites, prescriptions with promises of a Promised Land to a formerly enslaved population: Black was not only beautiful, he declared, but the heart of such darkness—Africa—was also its majestic center at which aesthetic and spiritual emancipation awaits.4 The ugly behavior of the white occupiers subverted white authority and called for Martinicans to imagine the impossible: fighting evil in white face. Were Germans and Frenchmen more than continental cousins?
For many Martinicans deeply invested in French identity, the idea of white Frenchmen identifying more with white Germans than Frenchmen of color was unthinkable, which made reality nothing short of traumatic. Others were, however, skeptical throughout. Some of Fanon’s countrymen regarded World War II as a European in-house affair. According to his brother Joby, Fanon’s response, one that remained with him to his dying day, was resolute: “Each time that liberty is affected, be we whites, blacks, yellows, or kakos . . . I swear to you today that no matter where it may be, each time that Freedom is threatened, I’ll be there.”5 Frantz escaped to the neighboring island of Dominica, where he trained for six months and returned to Martinique. He was then recruited into Battalion 5, a coalition of troops from Guadeloupe, Guyana, and Martinique, to fight against Germany during a recruitment drive that took him to Algeria.6
Fanon’s service in World War II was a rude awakening. Each triumph was tainted by racial indignity. On the ship that took him to North Africa to fight for France, he and his fellow Martinican soldiers received racial insults of varieties that included the degradation of the Martinican Women’s Corps being made into concubines of the white officers. In spite of their efforts to differentiate themselves from the much-despised black soldiers from other regions—which included wearing a special beret—the Martinican divisions found themselves treated as badly as those other blacks. The old joke about a black surgeon applied to them: “What do you call a black surgeon? Answer: Nigger.” According to his good friend Marcel Manville, as related by Hussein Abdilahi Bulhan, “The French subjected us with everyday humiliation in the ranks. Even if we wore the berets, the lesser ranked officers of the French army who were Cretans, imbeciles, and fossils . . . tu-tued us [addressed us informally in the diminutive] as if we were Senegalese and, for us, to be addressed in such a way was humiliating.”7 Tu is the second-person familiar pronoun used by the French to designate intimate acquaintance or lower status (as in an adult addressing a child) as opposed to the respectful form vous. The equivalent is the Anglo use of “boy” or “girl” to address black men and women, which, in effect, is to assert that they are not men and women.
In Europe, the black soldiers found themselves mistreated not only by the white soldiers alongside whom they fought, but also by the whites they liberated from village to village, town to town. At celebration dances of emancipation, many white female celebrants preferred to dance with Italian (fascist) prisoners than the black soldiers who had shed blood and risked their own lives to liberate them. Dear France did not behave significantly better. The black heroes were sent back to Martinique ahead of the white soldiers on the San Mateo, a cargo ship, with short rations, to a return without the fanfare afforded their white counterparts.8
Fanon’s political sensibilities before the Second World War, although patriotic and at times humanistic verging on sentimental and zealous, were no more nor less radical than those of his colleagues, which, for the most part, reflected French liberalism with an awareness of Marxism as its primary challenge. France’s Communist Party enjoyed considerably more influence than other Western European Communist parties in the twentieth century; it thus played a role in national politics that presented communism as a live option. In the colonies, political affiliations were complicated by the impact of race. One could be economically radical but racially conservative. Césaire was among those few who converged radically on both counts in the 1930s and 1940s. Fanon recounted in “Antilleans and Africans,” for instance, that Césaire’s racial radicalism was initially mocked, and for Martinique’s fledgling petit-bourgeois black population—who, because of their education and Martinican status in the prewar racial hierarchy, expected economic rewards as civil servants of French colonialism—Césaire’s radicalism, albeit aesthetically rooted in surrealism, was not welcomed. What is certain, however, is that after his return to Martinique, Fanon publicly allied himself with Césairean politics by working with his brother Joby in the mayoral election campaign for Césaire, who ran as a Communist candidate. Césaire was elected mayor of Fort-de-France in 1945.
Despite his growing involvement in radical politics and admiration for the literary power of Césaire’s writings, interests that suggested work in politics, poetry, and drama, Fanon opted for a scholarship for World War II veterans, no doubt certain also because of his valor (he was twice wounded during the war), which enabled him to go to Paris to study dentistry.
Yes, Fanon at first sought the path of becoming a dentist. A revolutionary dentist? One could imagine the many awful puns and plays on words that would have emerged—from grabbing the “jaws” of history to getting to the “root” of oppression—had he not changed course. He went to Paris with his sister Gabrielle, who chose to study to become a pharmacist. In a short time, however, Fanon left Paris for Lyon, where he took preparatory courses in the natural sciences, studied philosophy, and earned admission to the school of medicine at the university there. Fanon’s biographers appealed to boredom and disgust with the Parisian black population as reasons for his transfer. Perhaps. It is significant, however, that Fanon’s medical training focused on psychiatry and forensics instead of, say, internal or general medicine. In psychiatry, Fanon found a convergence of the natural and human sciences that appealed to his multiple interests, and forensics tapped into his penchant for investigation.
While studying for his medical degree, Fanon attended lectures by the philosopher Jean Lacroix, a proponent of personalism, who argued for the human being overcoming schisms between social essences and idealistic conceptions of individual inner life devoid of social being, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, the famed philosopher who was teaching at Lyon before achieving his venerable post at the Collège de France. Fanon also wrote three plays, Les mains parallèles (“Parallel Hands”), L’oeil se noie (“The Eye Falters,” though more literally, “The Drowning Eye”), and La conspiration (“The Conspiracy”), none of which, at his request, was published after his lifetime, edited a journal, Tam-Tam, and participated in various left-wing political groups attracted to Lyon because of its reputation as a hotbed of radical politics.9
The period of study in France was marked by three important personal events. Its dawn was troubled by his father’s death in 1947. Shortly afterward, Fanon had a brief romantic affair with a Russian Jewish woman whom he met in his philosophy class, which resulted in the birth of his daughter, Mireille, in 1948.10 Now Mireille Fanon-Mendès-France, she is a former lycée professor, with doctorates in classical literature and semiotics, a political activist, and president of the Fondation Frantz Fanon (Frantz Fanon Foundation).11 Fanon had also a relationship with Marie-Josèphe Dublé (“Josie”), a French woman of Corsican and Gypsy descent, who shared his political and literary interests. They married in 1952. Olivier, the only child from that marriage, was born in Algeria in 1955. He worked through to his retirement as an official at the Algerian Embassy in Paris.
Not much is written about Josie Fanon.12 She was his partner in struggle and ideas. Fanon rarely wrote out his work, choosing instead to dictate it to a typist, which explains why his articles and books are often best read aloud. In most instances, that typist was Josie, who also coedited some of his published work.13 She was, then, in many respects the actual reader/listener/audience, the flesh-and-blood presence, to whom the texts were addressed and who, to some extent, haunts his writings as one among their many subtexts. Frantz and Josie’s relationship was marked, as well, by the challenges not only of interracial marriage in a racially hostile world but also of a partnership in which one member was an extraordinarily handsome, passionate, charismatic, and intellectually gifted secularist. Although accounts are not documented, it is informally claimed among Fanon scholars that Fanon was not a monogamous man, and the demands of his professional and later political life were such that he spent much time away from his family.
The period in Lyon was also marked by the publication of a few essays, the most famous of which were “L’expérience vécu du Noir” (“The Lived Experience of the Black”), which appeared in the May 1951 issue of Esprit, and “Le syndrome nord Africain” (“The North African Syndrome”), which appeared in the same review in 1952.14 The second essay, which I will later discuss, came about through Fanon’s initial interest in pursuing a degree in legal medicine under the supervision of Michel Colin, in addition to his work in psychiatry. The essay demonstrates Fanon’s investigative skills, especially in circumstances where the mystery is not physical but social. In the first essay, to which we will soon return, Fanon presents his complex struggle to develop what he calls “ontological resistance” to antiblack racism. His account relates the “explosion” of his identity as a Frenchman through an encounter with a little white boy’s surprise and horror at seeing him on a train, his hopes and despair at the presentation of Négritude as a philosophical ideal in Léopold Senghor’s famous 1948 collection of poetry by black Francophone poets, Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache de langue française (“Anthology of New Negro and Malagasy Poetry in the French Language”), and his disappointment at Jean-Paul Sartre’s famous critical foreword.15 Discussions of Négritude—which was an effort to present a positive, revolutionary conception of black identity—and Sartre’s foreword will come later.
The first Esprit essay was part of Fanon’s premier book, Peau noire, masques blancs (Black Skin, White Masks), which he had proposed as his medical thesis under the title “Essai sur la désalienation du Noir” (“Essay on the Disalienation of the Black”). It was rejected by his doctoral supervisor, Professor Jean Dechaume, who was a proponent of psychosurgery, so he quickly composed and submitted two weeks later a thesis on a neuropsychological disorder titled “Troubles mentaux et syndromes psychiatriques dans l’Hérédo-Dégéneration-Spino-Cérébelleuse: Un cas de maladie de Friedreich avec délire de possession” (“Mental Illness and Psychiatric Syndromes in Hereditary Cerebral Spinal Degeneration: A Case Study of Friedreich Disease with Possession Delirium”), which he defended in 1951.16 As the subtitle states, Friedreich’s disease is a genetic condition involving degeneration or thinning of the spinal cord. Although the title suggests acquiescence to the psychophysiological dictates of his adviser, Fanon in fact offered an element of his original thesis that would remain a foundation of his thought: Drawing on ideas from the anthropologist, philosopher, and sociologist Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, Fanon argued that one should, as a psychiatrist, reach to the patient’s humanity instead of the material nexus of effects or symptoms. Patrick Ehlen offers an excellent summary:
In the context of Fanon’s developing theory of human psychology, his attention to Lévy-Bruhl’s law of participation [the coexistence of logical and prelogical thought] reveals an early understanding of and sympathy for the patient’s cultural worldview above and beyond any medical theory. The task of the psychiatrist, then, becomes not simply to interview the patient and then thumb through a book to uncover the diagnosis and solution, but to make an effort to “reach” the patient through the patient’s own symbols and belief systems. Rather than focusing on symptoms, the approach focuses on the patient, or even beyond the patient, as the psychiatrist struggles to uncover those cultural “participations” at work in the patient’s psyche. Before subscribing to any doctrine, the task of the doctor is to learn the doctrine of the patient.17
Learning the doctrine of the patient is a task to which Fanon devoted the rest of his life through extending it, as we will see, to the environment in which the patient not only lives but also emerges as a patient. Completing his medical degree, Fanon was then free to return to his more complex study. He secured publication that same year for his originally proposed thesis in a fashion characteristic of his personality, as related by Alice Cherki:
On reading the manuscript, [one of the senior editors, Francis Jeanson] promptly wrote Fanon requesting a meeting. Both men recall that first encounter as a stormy affair: Jeanson recalls the tense and touchy young man who turned up at his office that day; he had barely started praising the work when Fanon cut him off with a “not bad for a Nigger!” Jeanson, both angered and hurt by Fanon’s barb, wasted no time in showing Fanon the door, thereby gaining Fanon’s immediate respect. After this disastrous first encounter, work on the manuscript progressed smoothly with Fanon agreeing to Jeanson’s suggestion of Peau noire, masques blancs as the title for the book.18
The publication, reprint, and history of critical assessments of Black Skin, White Masks have been items of discussion and debate among Fanon scholars, particularly regarding questions over which of his writings should receive the most attention. Its availability in English, through the auspices of Grove Press in the United States in 1965 and Paladin in England in 1970, succeeded translations of his subsequent work. That translation had gone out of print in England by the late 1970s but was soon brought back into print in 1986 by Pluto Press with a controversial foreword by Homi Bhabha, the famed Lacanian literary postcolonial theorist. By the 1980s, the work ascended in postcolonial and cultural studies, primarily as the subject of criticisms regarding its lack of political correctness on gender and sexual orientation and mixed-racial identities. From Bhabha’s Lacanian psychoanalytical reading of Fanon’s writings to subsequent criticism by others, such as the literary theorist Gwen Bergner, the novelist Maryse Condé, and the filmmaker Isaac Julien, there also followed a discussion of the usefulness of the text itself. The search for postcoloniality may require more than Black Skin, White Masks offers. Henry Louis Gates Jr. criticized the critics for failing to see that Fanon was supposedly not a “global theorist,” a theorist who could supply a “unified field theory” of oppression and postcoloniality. He counseled readers to concentrate on the biographical resources of the text. In response, Cedric Robinson criticized Gates for focusing on the supposedly “petit-bourgeois” Black Skin, White Masks in his essay.19 What is needed, he argued, is a Marxist-informed critique that reputedly emerges in Fanon’s later work. More, Robinson castigated the contemporary postcolonial critics as ultimately anxious about what Fanon historically represents and, as in the case of, say, W. E. B. Du Bois, who seems, from the standpoint of contemporary scholarship, not to have lived past thirty-five, for preferring to focus on the young petit-bourgeois black doctor at this stage in his career and thought rather than on the mature revolutionary. They wanted, in other words, the man in a period of his life that most reflected their own condition and politics.
I joined the fray on two occasions. In the first, my Fanon and the Crisis of European Man, I argued that Gates represented the tendency to privilege literary theory as theory in contemporary thought and Robinson represented the tendency of political thought to advance politics as the sine qua non of theory. Both positions I characterized as “disciplinarily decadent,” where the theorists criticize other theorists for not focusing on the critic’s discipline. Such positions, I argued, exemplified a failure to realize that Fanon’s project was larger than such concerns. That is why his writings drew from so many sources; a radical critique was simultaneously metatheoretical and metacritical—that is, self-critical and concerned with how the project of thought could be realized or how it could fail. In the second instance, I argued that Gates’s position advanced an insidious fallacy: that Fanon (the black writer) offered, by virtue of his biography, “experience,” which, in effect, left theory to white theorists. Literary and cultural critics often advance white philosophers such as Pierre Bourdieu, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, and Michel Foucault in literary and cultural theoretical studies of society without reservation and reduction to their European experiences and historical time, whereas many of Fanon’s critics studied him as though he were trapped in his. The famed Luo philosopher D. A. Masolo, for instance, appealed to Fanon’s remark, in the introduction to Black Skin, White Masks, that he did not come with “timeless truths,” to mean that Fanon offers no ideas that transcended his time. Fanon was not, however, a reductive historicist. A relativistic reading of his remark is, therefore, problematic. Fanon was also not a philosophical idealist, a thinker who reduces reality to “ideas.”
Here, we should bear in mind some of the contradictions of how great thinkers are read across racial lines. Foucault, for instance, read Marx as trapped in the nineteenth century, yet he built his ideas on Nietzsche’s thought (which was in turn built on Hegel’s contemporary, Arthur Schopenhauer). Why was Nietzsche a nineteenth-century writer who was able to speak to the later twentieth century but Marx supposedly not? In similar kind, why is Foucault, a contemporary of Fanon, appealed to at the end of the twentieth century and well into the twenty-first with less suspicion than Fanon? Cedric Robinson’s criticism returns with ironic force: Marx and Fanon were revolutionaries and are thus held suspect at the end of a century that began with the call to revolution, became wary, and came to a close with antirevolutionary (if not counterrevolutionary) suspicion.20 But without such a charge, the obvious criticism holds: A short treatise exploring the lived dynamics of antiblack racism and colonialism in the 1950s is, nevertheless, a twentieth-century text that should have some relevance for late twentieth-century and early twenty-first-century thought on the human condition, if but for the fact that so-called “postracialism,” a buzzword into the second decade of the twenty-first century, is little more than a way of referring to continued racism that is simply now ashamed of itself.
Many interpretations of Black Skin, White Masks have emerged since the turn of the millennium.21 Let us now turn, in the next chapter, to a close reading of what, in this inaugural work of his career, Fanon argued and, thus, said.