I suppose I first met Frantz Fanon when I went to Africa, to Senegal in 1968 as an English teacher. At the age of twenty-three I was a naive young Englishman leading a sheltered life who was about to discover the meaning of underdevelopment and colonization. My vision of Africa was nil and I had as much insight into Senegalese society as a brochure at a travel agent. Rereading some of the notes I made at the time I appeared to be more interested in finding a fan, buying a moped and renting an apartment than what was going on around me. The fact that the school textbooks I had to use talked about daffodils and snow or that half of my forty pupils to a class fell asleep at three in the afternoon when the thermometer reached forty degrees Celsius seemed odd but it took me two years of teaching to put two and two together and confront the issues of underdevelopment and colonization. My political consciousness was aroused and I returned home with more questions than answers: one of them being, What on earth am I doing here? to paraphrase Bruce Chatwin. Eight years after independence Senegal still had all the trappings of a French colony and Dakar was a compartmentalized world, which Fanon described so vividly in the opening chapter on violence in The Wretched of the Earth.
This was the world I was destined to work in, live in, and play in, and the other sector, the “native” sector, could only be glimpsed through the windows of the embassy’s chauffeur-driven car or perhaps when we strayed on our mopeds into areas where friends working for the American Peace Corps used to live. And when at embassy receptions or dinner parties the conversation would inevitably revolve around “them,” the others, it was, as Fanon says, often couched in zoological terms, referring to the odors, the stink, the hordes, the swarming, seething, sprawling population vegetating under the sun.
The year was 1968 and, true to the assimilation of a French colony, Senegal mimicked the events of May 1968 in France. Except they lasted for an entire year and both school pupils and university students deserted their classrooms in a vague attempt to change the order of their world and forge ahead with a genuine decolonization. But this was no revolution in the Fanonian sense and the students were content merely to sit and wait, instead of “blowing the colonial world to smithereens” and creating an agenda for total disorder. Just south of Senegal’s border, in Guinea, Sékou Touré’s resounding “No” to France, which met with admiration and applause from Third World revolutionaries, evidently had little chance of repeating itself in Senghor’s Senegal.
My second encounter with Fanon must have been on my return to France in 1971. One year before Britain joined the Common Market I was not only forced to apply for a work permit, but also undergo a series of medicals, mandatory for immigrants from nonmember European Union countries. Most of the immigrants, of course, were from North Africa, and Algeria in particular. And it was here I witnessed that very special relationship, based on humiliation and contempt, that exists between the French and the Algerians. We were all made to line up in front of a nondescript building near the boulevard périphérique and once inside, submitted to a series of humiliating medical examinations that would allow us to apply for a work permit at another line at the Paris Préfecture. It was obvious that all the clichés about the Algerian’s criminal impulsiveness, his indolence, his thefts, his lies and rapes, which had been inculcated into the French bureaucrats’ minds before, during, and after the Algerian war, rose to the surface and treatment was dealt out accordingly. There was a long way to go before that colossal task, described by Fanon, of rein-troducing man into the world, a man in full, could be achieved with the crucial help of the European masses who still rallied behind the position of their governments and media on colonial issues.
My third encounter with Fanon came with my many visits to Martinique and Guadeloupe, the island contexts that were to shape and mold the young Fanon. The sheer assimilation to France’s cultural, educational, and political penetration not only turned him into a French intellectual (The New York Review of Books in 1966 described him as a “Black Rousseau . . . His call for national revolutions is Jacobin in method, Rousseauist in spirit, and Sartrian in language —altogether as French as can be.”) but also forced him to question and challenge the very nature of the colonized subject. The alienation of his black-skinned, white-masked fellow islanders made him realize that if colonialism was not fought and defeated, then the islands of Martinique and Guadeloupe would disappear, swallowed up by the tide of assimilation. He somehow sensed that the bravado of the Martinicans was a lot of hot air, that they would never rise up against their colonizers and he’d do better to put his ideas into practice in the French departement of Algeria where the men had the guts of their convictions. On his return from his final visit to Martinique in 1951, Alice Cherki (Frantz Fanon: Portrait, Paris: Editions du Seuil, 2000) quotes him as saying, “I met more milquetoasts than men.” Commenting on the tragic events of 1959 in Martinique to his friend Bertene Juminer while in Tunis, he told him: “Let them pick up their dead, rip their insides out and parade them in open trucks through the town. . . . Let them yell out: ‘Look what the colonialists have done!’ But they won’t do anything of the sort. They’ll vote a series of symbolic motions and start dying of poverty all over again. In the end, this outburst of anger reassures the colonialists. It’s merely a way of letting off steam, a bit like a wet dream. You make love to a shadow. You soil the bed. But the next morning everything is back to normal. And you don’t think any more about it” (Présence Africaine, 1st semester 1962: “Hommage à Frantz Fanon,” p. 127).
Any visitor from outside France visiting the French islands of the Caribbean is immediately struck by the overwhelming presence of a metropolis seven thousand kilometers away, the extraordinary alienation of a petite bourgeoisie more attuned to France than their own destiny, and he or she cannot but admire Fanon’s lucidity. Perhaps this is one of the reasons why he is studied more in the universities of the English-speaking world than in France and the French Caribbean where the skeletons of the Algerian war and the color hierarchy, respectively, are too close for comfort. Perhaps this is one of the reasons why Fanon’s latest biographer, David Macey, and his new translator are two Englishmen, two islanders, who not only understand Fanon’s love-hate, off-again/on-again relationship with France, but are also fascinated by the only French-speaking Caribbean intellectual who, as Edouard Glissant says, “really matched action to words by espousing the Algerian cause” (Le Discours Antillais, Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1981, p. 36). As David Macey says, “It was his anger that was so attractive.” After all we Brits have a long history of angry young men. And then there is the way he has been treated — pulled in all directions by postcolonial scholars, made to fit their ideas and interpretations—and a great sense of injustice comes to mind every time Fanon is mentioned.
So this brings me to why I have crusaded for a new English translation of Fanon. First of all I was tired of people asking me if I translated anyone else besides Maryse Conde. But more important, I felt the need to challenge my skills at translating another type of text, one that defined as a theory the subject matter of alienation, colonization, and the color complex in so many of the French Caribbean novels I had already translated. Secondly, I felt that Fanon’s had not done him justice. I felt that his voice had got distorted and he should be given a second chance to be heard. John Felstiner wrote in his book Translating Neruda: The Way to Macchu Picchu that “perhaps the real ‘original’ behind any translation occurs not in the written poem, but in the poet’s voice speaking the verse aloud . . . a translator may also pick up vocal tones, intensities, rhythms, and pauses that will reveal how the poet heard a word, a phrase, a line, a passage. . . . What translation comes down to is listening.” I have the good fortune to be in possession of a tape of Fanon’s address to the First Congress of Black Writers and Artists in Paris in 1956. I have listened to that tape over and over again, and although Fanon’s voice is not particularly charismatic, in fact it is rather bland, I was struck by the way he uses language and the emphasis he places on many of the words. He hammers his thoughts home in a very precise, cut-and-dried manner. There is even the slightest hint of hysteria, a controlled anger, of someone who would not like to be contradicted, perhaps even the voice of an écorché vif, a tormented soul, as Francis Jeanson thought of him. Ato Sekyi-Otu, who wrote Fanon’s Dialectic of Experience (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996) argues that we should read Fanon’s texts “as though they form one dramatic dialectical experience” rather than considering his statements “irrevocable propositions and doctrinal statements.” “With what immensely complex and compelling force Fanon’s texts speak to us when we read their contents as speech acts in the moving body of a dramatic narrative!” And there is drama behind his voice born out of urgency as he worked against the clock. Knowing that Les Damnés de la Terre had been dictated to his wife during his final year, I used the oral tone I had captured over the tape in my translation of The Wretched of the Earth and endeavored to make it read more like an oral presentation with that earnestness of voice he was known for. In fact the many repetitions and lyrical, not to say delirious, digressions in Les Damnés de la Terre are proof of a man dictating his text with the knowledge that he has little time left to live and desperate to put his thoughts, every single one of them, down on paper.
In his Preface to the first edition of Peau noire, masques blancs Francis Jeanson tells how one day he wrote to Fanon asking for clarification of a particularly obscure passage in the book. An answer was duly furnished and Fanon added: “This passage is inexplicable. When I write such things I seek to touch my reader in his emotions, i.e., irrationally, almost sensually.”
Further on in his letter Fanon goes on to confess how he is drawn to the magic of words and that for him language is the ultimate refuge, once it is freed from conventions, from its voice of reason and the terror of coming face-to-face with oneself. “Words for me have a powerful effect. I feel it impossible to escape from the sting of a word or the vertigo of a question mark.” He went on to say that, like Césaire, he wanted to sink beneath the stupefying lava of words that have the color of quivering flesh.
When it came to translating Fanon I was constantly aware of the man as a doctor, as a humanist and an intellectual from the Third World. He would never let me forget it. His use of the human anatomy to illustrate the colonized’s behavior can be seen throughout his work.
I now had to develop a strategy for my own translation. I had a choice of keeping the rather heavy, pompous style and language of the 1950s or deciding to update and modernize it without losing Fanon’s voice. I had in mind a young reader who would be swept along by Fanon’s thoughts in the language of the twenty-first century. Without betraying Fanon I decided to tighten up the text, update the vocabulary, and retrieve his lost voice.
One of the translation problems I had to settle, which came up time amd time again throughout the text, was the translation of “colon,” the European inhabitant of a colony once the colonization process has got under way. I was tempted to use the word colonizer since it sounded right pitted against the word colonized. But a colonizer composes the original force that colonized the country and does not convey the meaning of the European who settled, lived, worked, and was born in the colony. Colonial has two different associations, one for the English, especially in East Africa, and one for the Americans, pertaining to the thirteen British colonies that became the United States of America or to that period; settler was being used by the media in the Mideast crisis to refer to the Jewish settlers and would be the immediate reference for a reader. I first decided on a compromise between the French word colon and the English colonist and coined “colonist.” My editor, however, decided otherwise, and we kept the word colonist. I felt that by keeping the word colon the term not only spoke to the English-speaking reader but also remained faithful to Fanon, for whom Algeria was the constant point of reference. Colon, gendarme, metropole, maquis, indigene; the Arabic terms of çof, zar, djebel, donar, Roumi, razzia, fellah and djemaa. All words from a French colonial context, all terms from an Algerian context which, however hard Fanon tries to universalize, bring us back to his country of origin and his country of adoption.
And finally there is that word dreaded by all translators of French Caribbean texts: negre. Constance Farrington did not deal with the problem or perhaps she didn’t have to at the time: she merely translated negre and noir by the word Negro, which was accepted usage in the 1950s and ’60s, and in the process lost a subtle difference. But if the translator decides to update and modernize his vocabulary, then he is faced with a sticky issue. In Randall Kennedy’s fascinating book Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word (New York: Pantheon Books, 2002) he cites Professor Clarence Major as saying that when it is used by black people among themselves it is a racial term with undertones of warmth and goodwill . . . reflecting a tragicomic sensibility that is aware of black history. It is also “the filthiest, dirtiest, nastiest in the English language.” The word negre would have been used in the same way by Fanon, the Martinican, whether referring to the black man in general or putting it in the mouth of the oppressor as an insult. It was a word rehabilitated by the black intelligentsia of the time and thrown back at the European as the supreme weapon. One of the great achievements of Césaire’s epic poem “Notebook of a Return to My Native Land” is to reappropriate the negative term and give it a positive meaning. In Pour la revolution africaine (Toward the African Revolution), in the chapter “Antillais et Africains” Fanon describes how the word nègre was used for the Africans by both Europeans and French Caribbeans alike. He quotes the example of a boss in Martinique demanding too much from his employee and getting the response: “Si vous voulez un nègre, allez le chercher en Afrique” (“If you’re looking for a nigger, go and find him in Africa”). To quote a more modern example of this, we only have to look at the opening lines of Chris Rock’s signature skit: “I love black people, but I hate niggers. . . . Every time black people want to have a good time, niggers mess it up.” It wasn’t until Césaire came along that “for the first time, we saw a lycée teacher, and therefore an apparently worthy man, simply tell West Indian society that it is ‘good and well to be a nigger.’ Of course it was a scandal.” And Fanon ends his chapter on national culture with the words: “There can be no such thing as rigorously identical cultures. To believe one can create a black culture is to forget oddly enough that ‘Negroes’ are in the process of disappearing, since those who created them are witnessing the demise of their economic and cultural supremacy.” Now that the vocabulary has evolved it places the translator in a twenty-first-century predicament. I have updated the word Negro, when he refers to the peoples of Africa or the diaspora, to black, and used nigger when it is the colonizer referring to the same. In some cases, I have left Negro in its historical context. But I have lost something in the translation of the word nègre, for it has both a sting and an embrace, and that is irretrievable. I have modernized the word indigène to colonized or colonized subject, ridding it of today’s pejorative sense of native although Fanon, in keeping with the colonial vocabulary of his time, uses both terms indifferently in the very same paragraph.
So how relevant is Fanon today? I can remember going into the FNAC bookstore in Paris last year to buy an edition of Les Damnés de la Terre and being asked: Fanon? How do you spell it? Oh yes, here we are, as the girl consulted her computer, Les dames de la terre! Fanon obviously hasn’t left his mark here, I thought, and moved on. But how far can we move on and forget him? We cannot forget the martyrdom of the Palestinians when we read in Fanon’s chapter “On Violence”: “At the individual level, violence is a cleansing force. It rids the colonized of their inferiority complex, of their passive and despairing attitude. It emboldens them and restores their self-confidence.” We cannot forget the lumpenproletariat, the wretched of the earth, who still stream to Europe from Africa, Iraq, Afghanistan, and the countries of the former Eastern bloc, living on the periphery in their shantytowns and refugee centers, waiting for a better life. The bourgeoisie in Africa still unreservedly and enthusiastically adopt the thinking mechanisms characteristic of the West, still has alienated to perfection its own thoughts and grounded its consciousness in typically foreign notions, still turns its back on the majority of its population, vacationing on the French Riviera and building colossal palaces for prestige sake, joining hands in “this huge caravan of corruption” and becoming, as Fanon says: “a bourgeois bourgeoisie that is dismally, inanely, and cynically bourgeois.” And his thoughts on culture differentiating Africa from the Americas, visioning the disappearance of black culture in favor of national cultures, regarding traditions basically stifling whereas a culture is constantly changing, modernizing, and penetrated by other influences. He was wrong of course on many points, especially pan-Africanism, the role of the peasantry in leading a revolution, and the fate of Algeria. But at the time, his analyses of alienation and decolonization were extraordinary eye-openers, not only for a complacent Europe but for his fellow islanders, blinded to reality. It is his anger, conviction, and humanism that will always remain with us.
So this has been my fourth encounter with Fanon, and perhaps the most intimate. The other three were encounters with the others, the colonized, the colonial subjects. This time I had come face-to-face with the man himself and had to take on the extraordinary task of gaining access to the author’s voice and meaning, and initiating communication with the target audience. The very fact that I had lived in Africa, France, and the French Caribbean helped enormously in understanding the society and culture that had shaped and influenced Fanon. But I no longer had the good fortune to be able to pop into the next room and ask him what exactly he meant in such and such a paragraph as I can when translating Maryse Conde. I had accompanied him on his life’s journey, but the closest I could get to the man himself was being in the company of Bertene Juminer, Assia Djebar, Roland Thesauros, Edouard Glissant, Mme Christiane Diop of Présence Africaine, and Aimé Césaire, all of whom had crossed his path. You might think that translating the dead gives you a whole lot of freedom —there’s nobody there looking over your shoulder or making rude comments. But in fact there are crowds of people looking over your shoulder—from the readers of the original translation to the postcolonial scholars who have staked their reputation on Fanon’s ideas. Translating a dead man means stepping very warily through a minefield littered with the debris of another time and another translation. But the very fact of looking back was a driving force to modernize the text and look ahead. In Fanon’s case, translating the dead was a case of translating life itself. I felt I had to bring a dead translation back to life. To quote John Felstiner on Celan, he hoped that in translating Celan’s poems he felt something akin to what Celan felt writing them. Retranslating Fanon, rewriting Fanon almost gives me the same kick. As if I am the one writing down his thoughts in English for the first time.
And then there is that secret feeling that married to a writer from Guadeloupe, from the French Caribbean, I have always known Fanon and understood his dilemma and ambition as a Martinican. No one sums up this personality of the French Caribbean better than Aimé Césaire in “Hommages à Frantz Fanon” published in Presence Africaine in 1962:
Perhaps Fanon reached such heights and his vision was so broad because he was a French Caribbean, in other words he had started off so far down and from such a narrow base. Perhaps only a French Caribbean, in other words one so destitute, so depersonalized could have set off with such determination to conquer himself and plenitude; only a French Caribbean, in other words one so mystified to start off with, could manage to dismantle with such skill the most elusive mechanisms of mystification; only a French Caribbean, finally, could want so desperately to escape powerlessness through action and solitude through fraternity.
— Richard Philcox