Frantz Fanon

Martinican writer and political theorist

• Born: July 20, 1925
• Birthplace: Fort-de-France, Martinique
• Died: December 6, 1961
• Place of death: Bethesda, Maryland

Fanon was one of the leading intellectual figures of anticolonial resistance in the post-World War II period. A critic of the ethnic self-identity movement known as “negritude,” he instead believed that the liberation of the West Indian and African worlds required revolutionary resistance to imperialism and racism.

Early Life

Frantz Fanon (frahntz fah-noh) was born the fourth of four brothers in a family of eight, to an upper-middle-class family in Fort-de-France, the capital of Martinique. His father was of mixed Indian-Martinican heritage, and his mother, of Alsatian origin, was the illegitimate daughter of racially mixed parents. In a society in which color consciousness was deeply embedded, Fanon was noticeably the darkest-complected of his family. Childhood companions testified to his unusual personal sensitivity, and he was attracted to the concept of “negritude” as formulated in the 1930’s by Aimé Césaire, Léon Damas, and Léopold Senghor. The negritude movement emphasized the distinctive ethnic character of West Indian and African civilizations.

Vichy forces had garrisoned Martinique after the fall of France in 1940, a colonial influx that exacerbated racial tensions on the island. Fanon left Martinique in 1943 to fight with the Free French, first in Dominica and later in Morocco, Algeria, and France, where he was wounded and awarded the Croix de Guerre (war medal). To his disillusionment, however, he found the Free French no less biased against persons of color than were those within the Vichy regime. In 1945, he was mustered out as a corporal, and then returned to Martinique, where he joined Césaire’s circle and campaigned for his election as mayor of Fort-de-France. He returned to France in 1947, studied medicine, and earned his degree in 1951 in psychotherapy. While in France (and unmarried) he had a daughter named Mireille. In 1952 he married Josie Dublé, with whom he had a son named Olivier. Josie, who was Fanon’s close collaborator throughout his career, later settled in Algiers, after his death. She lived there until her suicide in 1989.

Life’s Work

Fanon’s mature career, which lasted only a decade, included being a writer, physician, and political activist, particularly on behalf of the Algerian revolution. In 1952 he published his first book, Peau noire, masques blancs (Black Skin, White Masks , 1967), which offered a partly psychological-psychoanalytical and partly sociological analysis of the false identity imposed on the colonized and the oppressed.

In Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon observed that many black Antilleans had dreamed of themselves as white, and that “whiteness” the standard of value imposed by the colonizers had rendered them “inauthentic” in two ways: First, blacks (Antilleans and Africans) assumed as a type of mask the identity of the colonizers (including white illnesses and deformities), and second, blacks denied their own actuality; that is, they denied their own existence as black. Thus, Fanon observed a virtual absence of oedipal psychology in Antilleans and Africans. He also contended that the African libido functioned in an entirely different context from that of the European. The denial of one’s own psychological grounding and culture was a pathological alienation that led to self-contempt. The insurmountable paradox of the black person’s quest to incorporate white values was that those values excluded the colonized “other” by the racial stereotyping that was at their core. In attempting to become white, the black man or woman could only discover a further source of self-hatred for him- or herself.

Fanon did not find a resolution to these problems in Black Skin, White Masks. The concept of negritude, however important in shaping his first reflections on the race question, had come to seem to him a mere colonial variant by now, imposing the simplistic vision of a unitary black character on very diverse populations and cultures. It also ran counter to Sartrean existentialism, which in its denial of any essential human character had deeply impressed Fanon. Rather plaintively, Fanon asserted in the book, “I am wholly what I am. I do not have to look for the universal. . . . My Negro consciousness does not hold itself out as a lack. It is.” What that “is” was, however, was precisely what he was unable to specify.

Fanon completed his medical training at Saint Alban under the direction of François Tosquelles. Fanon attempted to put into practice Tosquelles’s notions of group sociotherapy when, in October, 1953, he took a position as head of the psychiatric department at the Blida-Joinville Hospital (now the Frantz Fanon Psychiatric Hospital) outside Algiers in Algeria. Fanon conceded that the results, however, were largely discouraging. The hospital staff resisted innovation; Fanon failed to learn Arabic, the language of most of his patients; and he concluded that, under colonial conditions, psychotherapy itself that is, adjustment to the colonial norm was itself ultimately a form of oppression. In one case, he described a torturer who came to him, concerned because he had begun to abuse his wife. The man sought a cure, Fanon recounted, so that he could resume his professional work with a good conscience.

Fanon resigned his position in 1956 and was expelled from Algeria in January, 1957, for his collaboration with the Front de Libération Nationale, or FLN (the national liberation front), which had declared a war of independence against the French in 1954. He took up new positions at clinics in Tunis, where he also lectured (until forced out by French pressure) at the University of Tunis and wrote for the FLN journals El Moudjahid and Resistance algérienne. He worked secretly at FLN military hospitals and refugee centers, traveled on the FLN’s behalf to sub-Saharan Africa, and was the FLN representative to Ghana in March, 1960. He renounced his French citizenship and defended a massacre of French civilians in 1957 on the grounds that “the Frenchman in Algeria cannot be neutral or innocent.” He nonetheless remained ambivalent both about France and about the necessity of revolutionary violence, a “radical liberal,” in David Caute’s description, who fully embraced revolution only in the last two years of his life.

Fanon’s personal experiences as well as his evolving theories of colonialism and resistance were expressed in A Study in Dying Colonialism (1965), originally published as L’An V de la révolution algérienne (1959) and the posthumously published Pour la révolution africaine (1964; Toward the African Revolution , 1967). The former work, a study of the sociological and psychological effects of colonialism, embraces revolution as the only cure for the deformities it has inflicted on Algeria. The latter book expresses Fanon’s hopes and strategies for a pan-African revolution to liberate the entire continent.

Fanon was nearly killed when a car he was riding in either was blown up by a land mine or crashed. He suffered twelve fractured vertebrae and was flown to Tunis and then to Rome for treatment. While hospitalized, another attempt was made on his life. Fanon recovered, but in 1960 he was diagnosed with leukemia. He wrote the bulk of his final work, Les Damnés de la terre (1961; The Wretched of the Earth , 1963), in a ten-week stretch between March and May, 1961. While undergoing medical treatment, he continued to work on the manuscript, and he read final proofs of it just weeks before his death at the Bethesda Naval Hospital in Maryland on December 6. The book was published that month with a preface by French philosopher and writer Jean-Paul Sartre, and it soon became the classic anticolonial text of the postwar period.

The Wretched of the Earth revisits the themes and methodologies of Fanon’s earlier studies. Fanon uneasily accepts Sartre’s definition of colonized Africans as a proletariat, but he continues to insist on the uniqueness of the African situation and the necessity of an indigenous revolutionary solution. Independence requires, for the African, not merely the withdrawal of the colonizer but a purgative violence what Fanon referred to as the “royal pardon” which would negate the violence of colonialism itself and form the basis of true emancipation. This violence operates at the levels of both political necessity and personal therapy, transforming both individuals and the liberated social whole.

Fanon shrewdly anticipated the development of neocolonial dictatorship in the emerging states of Africa, even as his notion of violence helped lay the ground for it. His insistence on the absolute opposition of colonizer and colonized created a logic of violence as the only possible relation between them. Revolutionary morality could be judged, as Leon Trotsky had argued, only in terms of the revolution itself, and revolutionary violence was therefore a foreign concept to those outside it. The oppressor would be as naturally appalled by that violence as the rebel would be as Fanon termed it cleansed.

The great appeal of The Wretched of the Earth was thus precisely to those who saw in revolution not merely a practical means to national independence but an ultimate existential catharsis. Hypothesized as praxis and disciplined as struggle, it would continue to play a permanent if unspecified role even when the immediate goals of revolution had been achieved.

Significance

Fanon’s influence on revolutionary movements from the 1960’s and into the twenty-first century has been continuous. From Che Guevara and the western Maoists to the South African, Northern Irish, Basque, Palestinian, Kurdish, and Tamil insurgencies, his ideas have been repeatedly invoked, and his emphasis on the cathartic power of violence affirmed. For the student of revolutionary decolonization, arguably the defining act and experience of the developing world, he remains both an essential and an iconic figure.

Bibliography

Caute, David. Fanon. London: Collins Fontana, 1970. An early, astute evaluation of Fanon’s achievement from a skeptical liberal perspective.

Fanon, Frantz. The Fanon Reader. Edited and introduced by Azzedine Haddour. London: Pluto, 2006. A collection of writings by Fanon. Recommended for those new to his work.

Gibson, Nigel C., ed. Rethinking Fanon: The Continuing Dialogue. Amherst, N.Y.: Humanity Books, 1999. An assessment of Fanon’s relevance at the turn of the century.

Grendzier, Irene L. Frantz Fanon: A Critical Study. New York: Evergreen, 1985. A reprinted study (from 1973) that combines biographical treatment with an analysis of the major texts.

McCulloch, Jock. Black Soul, White Artifact: Fanon’s Clinical Psychology and Social Theory. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983. Focuses on Fanon’s clinical practice and theory and their impact on his construction of social reality.

Macey, David. Frantz Fanon: A Biography. New York: Picador, 2001. One of the few available studies focused primarily on Fanon’s life and career.

Sekyi-Otu, Ato. Fanon’s Dialectic of Experience. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996. An analysis of Fanon’s philosophical engagement with Western thought.