Frantz Fanon

Pramod K. Nayar

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781135102494
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Frantz Fanon has established a position as a leading anticolonial thinker, through key texts such as Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth. He has influenced the work of thinkers from Edward Said and Homi Bhabha to Paul Gilroy, but his complex work is often misinterpreted as an apology for violence.

This clear, student-friendly guidebook considers Fanon's key texts and theories, looking at:

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• Postcolonial theory's appropriation of psychoanalysis

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• Anxieties around cultural nationalisms and the rise of native consciousness

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• Postcoloniality's relationship with violence and separatism

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• New humanism and ideas of community.

Introducing the work of this controversial theorist, Pramod K. Nayar also offers alternative readings, charting Fanon's influence on postcolonial studies, literary criticism and cultural studies.

KEY IDEAS

1

FANON

Life in a Revolution

Frantz Fanon's writing is inextricably linked to his political activism in the Algerian freedom struggle. What we now have as Fanons oeuvre consists, in the main, of lectures, journalism and essays he had published in psychiatric journals and radical periodicals or delivered at various political and literary forums. His writing embodies, literally, his life in a revolution.

Frantz Fanon was born in Martinique, on 20 July 1925, the fifth of eight children, and grew up in Fort-de-France. Martinique is a tiny island, about 1,000 square kilometers in area, one of a group of Caribbean islands. It was colonized in the seventeenth century and was, when Fanon was born, an ‘overseas department’ of France. It had been central to the slave economy and trade — a fact of history of which Fanon was very conscious. As he would put it in Black Skin, White Masks: ‘I am not a slave of the Slavery that dehumanized my ancestors’ (179).

Fanon's great-grandfather had been the son of a slave, but had acquired land and taken to farming cocoa. Fanon's father, Félix Casimir, worked for the government in the customs department, and his mother, Eléonore, ran a store. The family was fairly well off with the double income (they even had a second house), but there were several signs of extreme poverty around them. Fanon attended the lycée, and it was at the local library that Fanon may have acquired his wide-ranging education through his voracious reading, especially in philosophy and literature. Classical reading was, of course, easily available, and Fanon seems to have used his time very well.

At school, Creole (a mix of French and African languages) was strictly prohibited, and French alone was acceptable. This linguistic hierarchy might have given the young Fanon an insight into the colonial condition (even though he probably had almost no contact with the Europeans in Martinique). Years later, perhaps recalling this injunction from his school days, Fanon would underscore the centrality of language to colonialism: the first chapter of Black Skin is on ‘the negro and language’.

It was at the lycée that Fanon first encountered the figure who would influence his thought the most at this stage — the African-Martinican poet, writer and politician Aimé Césaire (1913–2008), who had joined the school as a teacher. Césaire, as Fanon would admit, instilled in him and his schoolmates, and perhaps an entire generation, the pride of being black. In 1939 Césaire would publish his Notebook of a Return to My Native Land. Fanon would be deeply influenced by the work, and it is said he could recite long passages from it.

In 1940 France had signed an armistice with the German army, but this was rejected by General Charles de Gaulle. Martinique's governors and mayors pledged their support for the Allies in the war, and offered its services. A few months later the region's port and harbour were locked down under US supervision as part of the war effort. A large number of sailors were therefore deputed to stay on the site — and this would have given the Martinican boys a sight of white military power as never before.

In 1943, at the age of seventeen, Fanon ran away to Dominica to join the French army, but was rejected because of his age and sent back home. His first attempt to be part of the colonial/white set-up had just failed. In the years preceding his attempted military career, the events unfolding around him would have given him more insights into the racial conditions of the region. There had been some unrest in Martinique in this period. In 1942 some of the natives refused to sing the French national anthem, and fights between white sailors and native boys were common.

In July 1944 a decision was taken to send volunteers to fight for the French army. Fanon again volunteered and on 12 March 1944 sailed to Casablanca and was later deputed to Oran. It would be a historic journey, for at the end of it Fanon would understand more about race and colonialism than he had ever had from all his reading and more or less provincial life.

In Algeria Fanon witnessed for the first time colonialism-induced starvation among the Arab natives. The white soldiers and administrators led comfortable lives, while the rest of Morocco languished in poverty and discontent. Christians, Fanon would have seen, lived in fairly pleasant houses while Muslims struggled to feed their families. Soldiers from the Caribbean and Africa were treated (and even dressed) differently. The black soldiers were treated as superior to the Arab ones (Macey 2000: 93). This might have been the moment of Fanons discovery of the cultural politics of colonialism as well, when he saw how particular cultures were tolerated and even protected at the cost of others.

He was later sent on missions to the Rhone Valley. It was winter and Fanon, along with his Senegalese comrades, suffered in the bitter cold. On the front, watching the Senegalese soldiers being sent in first to face enemy fire, while the French merely followed, Fanon discovered the extent of both racism and colonialism. On one such excursion, Fanon was hit by shrapnel and suffered a serious chest injury. For his bravery and injuries he was decorated with the Croix de Guerre, but his army career was definitely over. Fanon had seen what it was to be black in a white army defending a European power and fighting for ‘an obsolete ideal’, as he wrote in a letter from the front (Macey 2000: 103). The war was, literally, an eye-opener for Fanon.

In October of 1945 Fanon headed back to Martinique, and rejoined the lycée to complete his education. It was also in 1945 that Césaire ran for parliament, and Fanon was one of the many who joined forces to help Césaire win his campaign for the post of Mayor of Fort-de-France.

Meanwhile, after the army stint, Fanon was looking at various trajectories for higher studies. He left for Lyon where he first considered the law, but in a complete shift of interest (he spent three weeks studying law!) he turned to dentistry at the University of Lyon. It was in Lyon that Fanon experienced the event from which he would draw his extraordinary observations about racism.

One day in Lyon, Fanon would hear a child cry out, ‘Look, a negro … Mum, look a negro. I'm frightened! Frightened! Frightened!’ It was a defining moment in the making of the postcolonial thinker for he ‘discovers’ his blackness in this incident (Black Skin: 84).

At Lyon Fanon met other Africans. He also noted, after a few months of stay, that the Algerians in the city were often tagged as criminals — many driven to crime due to their poverty. Fanon was yet again experiencing the enormous gap between races, this time in a European setting.

At the University of Lyon Fanon studied medicine but then turned towards psychiatry. It is believed that he may have been an occasional visitor or even a member of the student body of the Communist Party of France during this period, but no proof of this is available (Macey 2000: 124).

Not a very social person, Fanon spent a lot of time reading. Fanon's extensive and voracious reading in philosophy continued — especially new journals like Esprit, and Jean-Paul Sartre's Présence Africaine, but also the African American novelist and essayist, Richard Wright (1908–60), the African American writer of crime fiction (who published much of his early work during his imprisonment for violent crime), and Chester Himes (1909–84) — and he also spent time editing his own magazine, Tam-tam (Macey 2000: 129). Fanon was also reading widely in contemporary psychoanalysis, especially the French Jacques Lacan (1901–81) and Germaine Guex (1904–84), a Swiss psychoanalyst. At the medical school, Fanon was also conducting personal observations and free association tests. He was keen to see what related terms the word ‘negro’ would conjure up among whites. Fanon discovered that of his four hundred participants, nearly all of them used terms from already existing stereotypes about the blacks: sports, penis, boxer, savage, sin, sex, etc. He would also encounter, even among the educated students of the university, absurd prejudices about blacks. Many continued to believe, for instance, myths about black cannibalism and the absence of black culture. That racism revolves around essentialisms now became clear to the young Fanon.

Lyon provided his personal life with its own intrigues and adventures. In what many surely, at the time, viewed as a misalliance, Fanon got involved with a fellow medical student, the French Michelle, with whom he had a daughter. Fanon initially refused to acknowledge the child as his own. It was years later, and after considerable persuasion from his family and friends, that he did, but this daughter, Mirielle, never met her father. Fanon then became involved with Marie-Josephe Dublé (Josie). Josie would become his amanuensis, and the work she transcribed as Fanon dictated his thoughts would become Black Skin, White Masks.

Fanon's clinical training came to an end in 1951 and he took up a temporary post at a hospital in Dôle. At the hospital, Fanon made his first case records of patients with psychotic disorders — cases that would eventually help him formulate theories of colonial psychoanalytic practice.

Fanon was hoping to submit his dissertation to qualify as a doctor of medicine, but his superiors rejected the idea, saying it was too subjective and experimental. This manuscript, which contained Fanon's first engagement, though brief, with Jacques Lacan, would appear as Black Skin. The first essay from this work appeared in the May 1951 issue of Esprit and Editions de Seuil would go on to publish the complete book in 1952. Fanon then took up a more conventional medical topic (Friedrich's disease), worked through it in more acceptable (to the academic system) ways and successfully defended it on 29 November 1951.

Black Skin appeared in print in 1952, and puzzled readers with its mix of literary, psychoanalytic and philosophic observations. Fanon had broken conventions in mixing genres and disciplines here. The year was also significant for another reason. Dr Frantz Fanon and Josie got married in 1952 and Fanon took up a position at the Saint-Alban hospital. Here the doctors, led by François Tosquelles, conducted experiments in psychotherapy, focusing (unusually for the prevalent medical climate of the time) on the social contexts of mental illness. The same year Fanon visited Martinique, perhaps with the idea of setting up psychiatric practice there. Quickly realizing that there were no prospects in his homeland, Fanon returned to Saint-Alban. He would not see Martinique again.

In June 1953 Fanon entered a competitive exam for a medical position, and having passed it, qualified as a psychiatrist. Armed with this Fanon was relatively freer to look for other jobs. In November 1953 he was appointed by the government as a psychiatrist at the Blida-Joinville hospital, Algeria's largest psychiatric facility. Fanon now began living with his wife in a quarter on the campus itself, where their only son, Olivier, would be born in 1955. Alongside his practice Fanon began publishing scholarly essays in psychiatric journals (Macey's biography offers a detailed bibliography; also see Butts 1979, Bulhan 1985, Lebeau 1998, Macey 1999). His hospital life was extremely busy — indeed one of the things that strike us is the amount of energy Fanon seemed to have had.

Around the year he joined Blida, Algeria was beginning to show distinct signs of unrest and tensions against the French ‘occupation’. Fanon now saw how the town was racially segregated between the dirty and poor native segment and the clean and orderly French one — something he would draw attention to in Wretched. In November 1954 violence erupted, French soldiers were killed and explosions rocked Algiers. Guerrillas who had massed in the various regions began attacks on government sites. The Algerian insurgency had begun — it was to become one of the longest and bloodiest wars of the continent. The French army was brutal in its counter-insurgency measures — with disappearances, executions and torture. The Front de Libération Nationale (FLN), the organization for the Algerian freedom struggle, was formed in late 1954/early 1955 and actively took similar brutal executions to their French colonizers, targeting French civilians and families which, in turn, attracted worse reprisals by French troops.

Continuing his interest in the operations of colonial medicine, especially psychiatry, that he had begun at Dôle, Fanon now found the psychiatric practice at Blida problematic. Fanon was unable to come to terms with the role he played in the colonial medical structure that was the hospital. He realized that hospitals such as Blida were not keen on treating the natives. The psychiatric theories followed by doctors and nurses simply assumed the innate savagery, criminality and propensity to violence of the Arab and the black man. Fanon realized in his studies of black patients, that their supposed pathological problems were mainly psychosomatic, the result of mental disturbances induced by the social contexts of racism and colonialism. Policemen (European) came to him for help in strengthening themselves to torture FLN guerrillas without become violent towards their families. Algerian combatants and civilians sought help, having suffered physiological and psychological disturbances after prolonged exposure to violence. Treating French policemen and Ara...