Fanon . . . was never just committed to a cause. He gave himself whole, undivided, without hesitation. He was absolutely passionate.
—AIMÉ CÉSAIRE
As his body deteriorated from his illness, Fanon’s comrades urged him to take the advice of the Soviet doctors and seek treatment in the United States. He finally agreed. He faced, however, another problem. How was he to get there when it was clear, given the U.S. government’s increased involvement in Vietnam, that it was a staunch ally of France? It had to be done with secrecy and with the aid of the reconnaissance division of the government he often criticized. Peter Geismar related the situation:
The black doctor was a nice catch for the intelligence services. . . . Washington would be able to fatten its dossiers on the leftist segment of the FLN; Fanon knew a lot about other African liberation movements. His kind of thinking and activities were a threat to Western interests in the Third World.1
The CIA agent Oliver Iselin stewarded “Ibrahim” Fanon into the United States with the promised stealth.2 What followed, however, is unclear among Fanon scholars. Reports have ranged from Fanon’s visiting and subsequently dying in New York City to his remaining in Washington, D.C. What has become orthodoxy, however, is that he was kept in the Dupont Plaza Hotel in Washington, D.C., without treatment for several days until he contracted pneumonia. Who knows what information the CIA may have received from Fanon under the delirium of his illness? It is possible that they didn’t receive much, if any, information, for Fanon was a specialist in techniques for resisting torture. Teaching these techniques to the FLN when he was the head physician at Blida-Joinville had led to his eventual resignation and public enlistment in their cause. He trained guerrillas how not to divulge secrets under the worst of conditions. His time in CIA custody was such an instance. By the time Fanon was taken to Bethesda, he was on the verge of death.
The prize was put through several blood transfusions. After the last instance, he declared to Josie, “They put me through the cleaners last night.”3
There is irony in Fanon—a man who devoted much theoretical and political energy to de-fanging the impact of race and racism, concepts marked from their inception by proscriptions premised on blood—facing death from a blood disease.
“Race” has etymological roots in the word raza, a term used by Christians in Andalusia, Muslim-ruled Iberia, to refer to breeds of dogs, horses, and, when referring to human populations, Moors and Jews. As Muslims from North Africa, the Moors, along with the Jews (many of whom were determined by fourth-century Roman edicts limiting Jewish proselytizing and intermixing with Christians), represented a deviation from Christian normativity. Given that history, there is much insight in Fanon’s observation that he who hates Jews invariably hates blacks as well. The defeat of the Moors in Grenada in 1492 was followed by the Inquisition to assess the Christian authenticity of the remaining conversos, converted populations, a process that led to demands for demonstrations of “purity of blood” (limpieza de sangre).4 The standard was individuals whose origins were “purely” Christian. The notion of purity here emerged from theological naturalism, where the natural was determined by its alignment with theological dogma. Since all that was natural emanated from the theological center, Moors and Jews stood as prototypical instances of the anthropology of damnation that took a path to the modern term race, as used by François Bernier in his 1684 account, “A New Division of the Earth.”
In today’s terms, the dormant genes of self-destruction in Fanon’s body were awakened. His body, saturated with a flowing cancer, was eating itself. The genes linked Fanon to some of his ancestors, to his “blood relatives,” in a way that repeated his famous reflections in Black Skin, White Masks on the body, blood, and the salty fluids of desperation. It’s worth recounting his analysis, with some elaboration. Let us, in an act of blues repetition, revisit thoughts from his youth. Recall that in its fifth chapter, Fanon thematized the previous ones through autobiographical reflections on the forms of self-consciousness stimulated and struggled for from the crisis occasioned by a little boy pointing at him and shouting, “Look, un nègre!” Fanon’s presupposition of nonraciality, which he realized was the presumption of a white normative standpoint on reality, was shattered as the imago of le nègre latched onto him as its referent.
“Who? Me?” he seemed to ask, while the world encircled him and closed in to offer no exit.
That body, his body, wanted refuge, a world in which it could move with the flowing certainty of its own worth and conviction, but he found himself caught, enmeshed in a web of designations, none of which he wanted, but all of which imposed themselves, enwrapping him in what seemed to be a sealed fate by which he fell to the ground, ready for the role set for him to play: Le nègre was a black body offered as one manqué, as a body gone bad. In such a body flowed bad blood, that which, as fluid, offered a constant risk of spilling beyond its bounds, of pollution. Thus, whether as le nègre psychiatrist, le nègre writer, le nègre singer, le nègre a-host-of-other-things, the neurotic role was unveiled in the folly of illegitimating membership: His presence constituted the absence. He was, by definition, that which was illegitimate in relation to everything but his own illegitimacy, although, as the success of white minstrels suggests, more radical forms of illegitimacy were demanded: Le nègre was apparently even bad at being himself.5 The paradox of his existence was its nonexistence. Even his efforts to claim it, as Fanon’s forays into Négritude revealed, manifested failure. Understandably, the situation occasioned despair and led him to weep. But, we should remember, getting to that point was circuitous.
As we saw, the body is of central importance in Fanon’s thought. This is because the body is a necessary condition of appearance, since to be seen is to be seen somewhere. Much of his writing explores illicit dimensions of black appearance, including its neurotic, self-defeating structure: As illegitimate-in-itself, black existence attempts to be seen in a world in which its appearance is a violation of societal norms. Compared with our earlier observations on Christendom and damnation, the black thus faces a twice-fallen reality, which Fanon, as we know, described as a zone of nonbeing. This is more of a collapse than a fall that places the black body into a schema of deviations and imitation. As deviation, it falls from a presumed original white body, which raises the question: Why doesn’t it rise from the white body?
As the standard, the white body would make illegitimate the movement in any direction of deviation; whether up or down, the consequence is failure. The path, then, seems to be to overcome the deviation by reclaiming an original unity. The white, however, denies the original unity, because that would entail a potential blackness at the heart of whiteness, which makes the claimed reclamation imitation. As imitation, what is lacked is the original advantage of the self as standard. The imitation, in other words, is not its own standard. It is a failure, as we have seen, even of its achievement. To achieve imitation is to fail at what an imitation imitates, namely, an original.
Recall that “Failure,” for Fanon, requires a sociodiagnosis, since, as Fanon argues, racism and colonialism are sociogenic. Working at the level of failure summons psychoanalytical resources of interpretation. Working with failure carries the danger, however, of resignation, for implicit in such a conception is the preference for its overcoming: To fail at failure offers its own paradoxes. So Fanon ventured through the minefield of failures. The social diagnostics of failure in an antiblack and colonial world rely on the human capacity to construct a symbolic world that transcends, at least at the construction of meaning, reductive biological and other natural forces. The black body, here also marked as “the black soul,” demands demystification at its source. This construction, a failure of human understanding, asserts itself through a variety of idolatrous offerings: language, bad-faith love, and lawlike constitutional theories of psychic life. Deviation and imitation reveal themselves in the failure of each movement: To speak, the black appears as an echo of white speech.
Yet to speak, to reach out, offers the possibility of love. To love is to seek a reflection that is not one’s own, but the quest for recognition leads such blacks, whether female or male, to the arms and reflecting eyes of white men. To dream is to rehearse the trauma of collapsed and closed symbols; in the dream life of colonial subjects, a gun is, as we saw, a gun. These series of failures recur in Fanon’s autobiographical reflection that is also not autobiography. This seemingly awkward formulation is connected to an additional underlying thesis: That a black means the black, which means a collapse of differentiation from the encroaching nègre. Autobiography is an individuated narrative hindered by the racial and colonial situation of the narrative; as an effort to unveil an inner world whose legitimacy is denied by the social circumstances, Fanon, as the black and le nègre, performed the supposedly impossible. He achieved magic.
Magic is the effort to control and dominate reality by producing something seemingly from nothing.6 Fanon’s magical reflection announced itself immediately from the body, but one marked for nonappearance because of its illegitimacy. To see that body is to acknowledge what should be disavowed. Thus, it is those susceptible to the prereflective, those not yet socialized into self-deceiving norms of social propriety, who belch out the image, including the self-image, that the society prefers to repress: “Look, a nègre!”
The encounter is reminiscent of the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale, “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” Duped by the system, Fanon walked with a white imago, and its being white meant that its identification would be redundant because supposedly encompassed by the term “normal.” Thus, being normal, Fanon presumed others would see the white skin that should have come along with his white mask. Like the emperor’s new suit, Fanon’s wasn’t there. The effect was collapse and disintegration.
The assembling of the self, or effort to re-assemble, to re-collect, to remember the self, was Fanon’s body offered back to him. He then saw that body, although looked at before in mirrors, differently. The mirror of the self as white and whole was shattered, and the realization of how he was seen by whites challenged anti-nègreness through the offering of the nègre self. That self, that body, not associated before with his body, fell from the fallen into his transformed consciousness. The result, in Fanon’s reflection, brought him to two stages of double consciousness. The first involved seeing himself through the eyes of the alienating Other. The second was the realization of the first as a constructed reality. That involved demonstration of the contradictions of the imposed self (the fall after the collapse) on the lived reality of the everyday self. For Fanon, this demonstration had already begun with the appeal to social diagnostics, with his observation of the black as a white construction, and continued through the analysis of failures and the body. At the point of bodily identification, of the image of himself in the little white boy’s eyes as the nègre, Fanon confessed being locked in a state of certain uncertainty as compared, in existential terms, to the original condition, the body at home with itself. That body, fluid in its movements, was free to reach to the world with expectations without fear of collapsing into itself. White normativity, however, bogged that body down with a “historical-racial schema,” constructing the body of the nègre, a body turned inward in conflict with itself, devouring itself. For such a body, the ordinary is always an extraordinary achievement. The result was a body marred by endless self-negations, a body de trop, a body that was too much. Overdetermined, de trop historical forces had a role for Fanon to play as the nègre. Fanon thus faced the bizarre logic of racist systems, where the system could be maintained despite individual progress by a subversion of rules and exceptions: Regarding an accomplished black person as an exception to a rule of black inferiority maintained the rule. The logic was preserved through an inversion with whites: A white person’s failure was, and for the most part continues to be, treated as an exception to the rule of white superiority. This logic enabled the emergence of a black body as an exception to black bodies, yet as an exception, it was at war with its inner functioning principles. The consequence was a resigned effort at repressed pathology: The exception was the absoluteness of the rule waiting to come out. That lurking reassertion of mythic cohesion led to the heaviness of action under the racial-historical schema.
Fanon dedicated his life to breaking free of the weighted expectations of consciousness without freedom. In each instance, the potential of cultural transformation as a bodily phenomenon came to the fore. We saw, in Year V of the Algerian Revolution, that the Algerian women’s various transformations of bodily representation presented new considerations for the postcolonial state, for the Algerian women who carried bombs, who experienced themselves in Western clothing, who learned acts of comportment in military campaigns, exemplified an upsurge whose containment was a dialectic of body and world beyond a consciousness without freedom to one fighting for it. In The Damned of the Earth, the plea took the form of asking, in the concluding sentence, for the development of a new skin, through which a new humanity could be born. Yet in the early Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon had concluded with a consideration of bodily freedom.
When oppressed, embodied consciousness is overly determined inward, the direction of one marked by questioning that oppression pointed outward; it was that second form of double consciousness born of dialectical critique. Fanon’s first book offered this prayer, and his life, as it came to a close, never stopped him from asking, questioning, and exemplifying his humanistic commitment, ultimately, to life.
His wife, Josie, and his son, Olivier, were brought to him. He spoke, occasionally, of his future projects. He managed to write a letter to his friend Roger Taïeb:
What I wanted to tell you, Roger, is that death is always with us and the important thing is not to know how to avoid it but to make sure we do our utmost for the ideas we believe in. The thing that shocks me as I lie here in this bed, feeling the strength exiting my body, is not that I’m dying but that I’m dying of acute leukemia in Washington, D.C., when I could have died three months ago facing the enemy on a battlefield, when I already knew I had this disease. We are nothing on this earth if we do not first and foremost serve a cause, the cause of the people, the cause of freedom and justice. I want you to know that even when the doctors had lost all hope, I was still thinking, in a fog granted, but thinking, nonetheless, of the Algerian people, of the people of the Third World, and if I managed to hold on, it was because of them.7
The tragedy of Fanon’s situation was that his intense relationship with his body had come full circle through the drama of dying. From earlier reflections on the dreaded epidermal schema, his vital spirit was now under the scrutiny of those microtomes he feared but a decade earlier. No longer facing an explosion, he found himself suffering the experience of dissolution, of dissolving, of withering away. The metaphors he used in his unfinished play Les mains parallèles, written during his years as a medical student, were remarkably prescient:
Hemorrhaging stars that condemn me
Stop! . . .
To no longer see mute whiteness
To no longer see death.8
On December 6, 1961, a few days after composing his letter to Taïeb, Fanon’s fight against “mute whiteness,” which for him was death itself, was over. He had survived many life-threatening episodes: during childhood, a gun accident that could have been worse; two instances of serious injury on the battlefield for which he was honored for valor in World War II; being thrown by the explosion from a jeep on expedition in Tunisia; and assassins from the Main Rouge seeking him out over North Africa and in southern Europe. He survived all that, but in the end, it was in his body, in the cells of his blood, and the micro-assassins of bacteria and viruses that prevailed.
Figure 11. Procession to Fanon’s burial.
His brother Joby received a note from him a few days after the telegram announcing his death. The letter, Joby explained, had his full address. Frantz never placed his address in a letter till then. Joby’s interpretation is that it was a cry for help.9 Frantz probably would have preferred his dead body to have been hurled at the enemy. Joby agreed. It was, however, brought instead to Tunis and then on to Algeria, where, after a long procession with military rituals befitting an honored soldier and martyr, he was laid to rest.
There is an expression: “What’s in a name?”
Yet Fanon’s first and middle names have prophetic significance at his life’s end. “Frantz” was a way of identifying his maternal Alsatian ancestry through an act of pronunciation. It is the way “France” is said in Alsace. And “Omar” is of Arabic and Hebrew origin. In the former, it means “flourishing,” used in phrases such as “to live a long life” and “ultimate devotee.” Traced further to Hebrew, the name also means “eloquent speaker.” To have names bringing together France, Arabia, and Israel/Palestine was honored by the man. His eloquence was legendary. Yet there is something at first strange in a middle name also signifying longevity for someone whose brain and heart stopped at the age of thirty-six. The paradox, however, is manifold. At his death, Fanon’s impact was profound. So much, ranging from a country and its institutions to the generative potential of thought, flourished out of his actions and words in his short life. There is no longer a Blida-Joinville Hospital in Algeria but instead, amid many Fanonian legacies, including the avenue on which the National Library of Algeria is located, there is a hospital that now bears the name of that young man, a fusion of so many worlds, whose prayers continue to make us question.