Читать книгу Frantz Fanon - Christopher J. Lee - Страница 13

2

France

In the world I am heading for, I am endlessly creating myself.

I show solidarity with humanity provided I can go one step further.

—Black Skin, White Masks ¹

With the exception of Martinique, Frantz Fanon spent more years of his life in France than in any other country, including Algeria. The Second World War initiated this long, contentious relationship. The war significantly affected Martinique, as it did the rest of the French Empire. By the same stroke, it profoundly changed the course of Fanon’s life. On June 22, 1940, the French government signed an armistice agreement with Nazi Germany, only eight days after German tanks had entered Paris and less than two months after Germany had invaded France. Its swift defeat astonished the international community and especially France’s overseas colonies. This course of events generated an immediate response in support of resistance. Before the truce was signed, General Charles de Gaulle (1890–1970) rejected its terms and called on a Free French movement to liberate France from foreign occupation—a declaration known as the Appeal of June 18 (L’Appel du 18 juin), later broadcast by the BBC on June 22, 1940. He specifically called on France’s imperial territories, declaring, “France is not alone. She has an immense Empire behind her.”²

French colonies in Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean gradually aligned with de Gaulle, a bulk of support coming from Francophone Africa.³ Popular political sentiment in Martinique also fell behind de Gaulle. Fanon’s introduction to continental France consequently came through the roles of patriot and liberator. Movement forms an essential part of Fanon’s personal history, constituting the extensive geography his life encompassed. His service in the Free French forces initiated this theme.

Military Service

Despite de Gaulle’s appeal for imperial loyalty, the high commissioner for the French West Indies placed Martinique under the authority of the Vichy regime that collaborated with Nazi Germany. While the war in Europe may have been geographically distant, it did have a local impact, as it did in other parts of the empire. Shortages of food and other everyday needs became commonplace. Naval blockades contributed to this scarcity. Over time, this situation generated anxieties that cropped up in small acts of resistance—petty theft, sugarcane fields set ablaze—as well as desertion from the island. Fanon pursued this latter course of action, leaving Martinique in 1943, as did approximately 4,500 others during this period. He went north to the island of Dominica in order to join the Free French and received some basic military training. But he soon returned to Martinique, which fell under Free French control later that year. Fanon volunteered once more to fight overseas, and he left in 1944, against the wishes of his family, with the 5ème Bataillon de Marche des Antilles, a small infantry battalion.

After crossing the Atlantic via Bermuda, Fanon’s unit was stationed in French-controlled Morocco for training, where it joined a diverse assemblage of military brigades that supported the Free French from across the empire.⁴ Peter Geismar, in an early biography, writes that Fanon observed “noticeable barriers between the French from the metropolitan territory and the settlers in North Africa; both groups, though, looked down on the Moslems [sic] in the army, who [in turn] didn’t care for the blacks. Fanon’s company of soldiers, from Martinique, held aloof from the African troops, especially the Senegalese.”⁵ Such racial and cultural differences influenced Fanon’s views regarding the diversity to be found across the French Empire and the pervasiveness of colonial racism—a fact that would later shape his political thinking. Fanon’s time in North Africa also marked his introduction to Algeria. Stationed at Bougie (Béjaïa today) on the Algerian coast, Fanon was disturbed by the racism and poverty he encountered. “It was far worse than anything he had seen in the Caribbean,” Geismar writes. “In Oran, Fanon had to watch French soldiers tossing crusts of bread to Moslem [sic] children fighting each other for the food. In Bougie, he went into a rage when he came upon Moslem children picking through military garbage.”⁶

Fanon’s unit ultimately formed part of Operation Dragoon, a plan promoted by de Gaulle to invade southern France from Algeria. In tandem with Operation Overlord—the D-Day assault on Normandy by American, British, Canadian, and Free French troops on June 6, 1944—this invasion would provide a counterassault from the south. The two operations combined would crush German forces occupying France. The Allied invasion of southern France began on August 15, though Fanon’s battalion did not cross the Mediterranean until almost a month later on September 10. Fanon eventually joined a regiment of the tirailleurs sénégalais—as soldiers from Francophone West and Equatorial Africa were called—and later a European unit. As the season of autumn and their movement north progressed, Fanon endured challenging weather conditions in addition to combat. He suffered wounds from mortar fire in November 1944, eventually receiving the Croix de Guerre in February 1945 in recognition of his bravery. But any sense of honor this medal bestowed was paralleled by physical exhaustion, growing emotional discontent, and homesickness as the war reached its end in May 1945.

Indeed, the experience of fighting for France proved to be highly ambiguous for Fanon, with racism in its multiple forms generating a sense of constant unease. Despite a principle of shared patriotism, sharp differences materialized during his time in North Africa as indicated, with whites occupying the officer ranks and the tirailleurs sénégalais commanding the most respect among the colonial troops. Though Fanon and his two close friends from Martinique, Pierre Marie-Claire Mosole and Marcel Manville, were known as spirited troublemakers, Fanon remained deeply affected by his brief time in Algeria, due to the abject poverty and colonial racism there.⁷ He himself faced discrimination from many Arab North Africans; they were not immune from racist French attitudes. In Europe, Fanon experienced further racism that many colonial troops were subjected to by local communities, despite their status as liberators. By the end of his service, he looked forward to returning to Martinique.

On his arrival home in October 1945, however, Fanon encountered Martinique with a different sense of the world. Though his military experience left him uncertain about his position as a French colonial, his decorated war service had provided him with an enlarged worldview—imperial in scope, but also beyond it. Alice Cherki writes that he was “disappointed to have taken part in the war, but his opposition to Nazism never wavered and the culture of the Resistance pervaded the whole of his life.”⁸ Fanon would later recall that the Second World War not only affected his perspective but changed how black Martinicans viewed France—a shift away from “the great white error” of an omniscient French colonialism that promised much, but offered little.⁹

Still, at the age of twenty, Fanon had an education to complete and a choice of career to make. The island of Martinique appeared small, with limited opportunity in the present and for the future. Contemplating both law and dentistry as options, Fanon passed his baccalaureate at the Lycée Schoelcher and left for France in 1946, with the benefit of state tuition support due to his veteran status. However, before leaving, Fanon, along with his brother Joby, worked for Césaire’s campaign as the local communist party’s candidate to represent Martinique in the French National Assembly.¹⁰ Césaire already had been elected to the provisional postwar French assembly and as mayor of Fort-de-France in 1945, a position that he held for a remarkable fifty-six years until 2001. Césaire eventually served in the French National Assembly from 1946 to 1993. In fact, he supported Martinique’s status as an overseas department—an often overlooked paradox given his political reputation and critical rhetoric later captured in Discourse on Colonialism.¹¹

This political path would further distinguish Césaire from his former student.¹² Césaire would continue to believe in the possibilities of working within a revised framework of French republican ideals, whereas Fanon would gradually depart from this premise. Although Martinique continued to be home for Fanon for reasons of family, it started to recede into the backdrop from this moment of departure forward—being a place of origin, not destination.¹³

An Elite Education

Joining his friends Manville and Mosole, Fanon arrived in Paris to study, but soon transferred to Lyon to pursue medicine—a part of France he was familiar with from his wartime service. It was an unlikely decision given the presence of his friends in Paris, as well as of his sister Gabrielle, who had recently moved to nearby Rouen. Similar to the war, this choice marked an initiation into French cultural life distinct from his Négritude predecessors. The provincial character of Lyon contrasted with Parisian cosmopolitanism. It was a time and place apart from the urbane life that Césaire and his compatriots embraced, a fact that Fanon would later reflect upon.¹⁴

His first year in Lyon was largely isolating. The sudden death of his father in 1947 enhanced feelings of loneliness and vulnerability. But compounding these sentiments was his ineluctable status as a racial minority, despite his privileged upbringing, his military service, and his French citizenship by birth. Fanon was well aware of this demographic limitation of Lyon, joking to his friend Manville, “there are too many Negroes in Paris, I want something more milky.”¹⁵ Among four hundred university students, fewer than twenty were black. Of those, most were from West Africa.¹⁶

But Lyon fortuitously reacquainted him with Algeria. A sizable Algerian community had been established there during the economic depression of the 1930s, forming part of the working class that labored in the city’s factories. Fanon’s encounters with Algerian patients in Lyon would presage his future experiences during the Algerian War. In the meantime, he gradually developed a new social life. Though he did not become a formal member, Fanon was involved with the French Communist Party, in addition to the university’s Overseas Students’ Association—settings that stirred his political awakening. With education a priority, he took courses in chemistry, biology, and physics to make up for the limited qualifications in the sciences he had gained in Martinique, a necessity before he could formally undertake medical school. This narrow background not only left him unprepared for certain aspects of medicine but also reinforced his literary bent: Fanon was soon drawn to lectures and readings in philosophy, phenomenology, and psychoanalysis.¹⁷

It is important to stress the differences between psychiatry—a medical field that treats mental health as part of the biological functioning of the brain and human nervous system—and psychoanalysis—a field pioneered by Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), who was trained as a neurologist, but stressed the importance of lived experience, rather than intrinsic biological nature, in determining psychological fitness. David Macey has argued that this distinction is often overlooked by readers of Fanon, who tend to view his pioneering perspectives strictly on psychoanalytic grounds.¹⁸ The conflation of these fields can partly be attributed to the prominence and influence of psychoanalysts, such as Jacques Lacan (1901–1981), in France during the 1950s. While it is true that Fanon specifically trained as a psychiatrist, it is fair to argue that psychoanalysis had a significant bearing on his thinking, given its general influence at the time and its particular validation for treating patients on an individual basis, rather than institutionally through asylums and hospitals—a phenomenon that had spanned Europe during the nineteenth century, resulting in the confinement of many. Fanon’s entry into the field therefore occurred at an exciting time when the discipline of psychiatry was undergoing a stimulating redefinition, motivated by the popularity of psychoanalysis. Both trends held appeal for the self-searching student.

Other developments were also afoot. Fanon arrived during a vital period in French intellectual life, when a number of thinkers were grappling with the effects and meaning of the Second World War. His enrollment in classes given in the philosophy department at Lyon, where he attended lectures by the phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–1961), is indicative of his engagement with this emergent scene.¹⁹ The war occasioned many disasters and challenges of broad human importance—the rise of fascism and totalitarianism, the Holocaust and its genocidal violence, and the advent of the nuclear age, among them—that raised fundamental questions of individual ethics and community politics for the postwar period. Like Fanon, some—such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus (1913–1960)—had directly participated in the war, as members of the Free French. Other intellectuals—Simone de Beauvoir (1908–1986) and the African American writer Richard Wright (1908–1960), then based in Paris—applied similar scrutiny to intensifying issues of gender and race in the public sphere.

This intellectual milieu represented in part by the journal Les Temps modernes, edited by Sartre and de Beauvoir, paralleled and interacted with the intellectual circle surrounding Présence africaine, the leading journal of black culture published in France. Founded in 1947 by Alioune Diop (1910–1980), a Senegalese writer, Présence africaine provided a crucial literary venue for the Négritude movement, but it embraced pan-African concerns more generally. Comparing Présence africaine to Les Temps modernes, the philosopher V. Y. Mudimbe has written that the former sought “to bring in the very center of . . . French power and culture what was being negated in [the] colonies, that is, the dignity of otherness.”²⁰ Présence africaine, put simply, sought “to incarnate the voice of a silenced Africa.”²¹ These two publications consequently framed the intellectual world within which Fanon intended to find a place.

Unlike Négritude, Fanon first encountered French continental philosophy primarily through reading, not personal connections. The prevalent trends were phenomenology and existentialism. Interrelated in scope, these philosophical approaches built on the nineteenth-century thought of German philosopher Georg W. F. Hegel (1770–1831), who argued that individual consciousness emerged dialectically between a person and the world, rather than solely through individual deductive reasoning as proposed by René Descartes (1596–1650), the French thinker considered to be the founder of modern philosophy. Drawing on Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) and his Critique of Pure Reason (1781), Hegel’s engaged method has since become known as phenomenology, as captured in his work The Phenomenology of the Spirit (1807). Among its most influential sections is the rumination on lordship and bondage—more often referred to as the master-slave dialectic—that articulated how self-consciousness (and power) depended on the presence of another person.²² Martin Heidegger (1889–1976), drawing on the parallel work of Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855) and his own mentor Edmund Husserl (1859–1938), extended phenomenology’s parameters in Being and Time (1927), to consider factors of place and time for further defining the dimensions of self-consciousness. One’s existence was not solely shaped by the presence of others, but also by these two situated aspects.

These sources of thought from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that largely originated from a German philosophical tradition fundamentally informed the French phenomenology and existentialism that Fanon encountered. Being and Nothingness (1943) by Sartre and Phenomenology of Perception (1945) by Merleau-Ponty outlined French variations of these philosophical approaches, stressing the importance of personal experience and perception for self-realization. These ideas soon reached a popular audience, with Sartre’s Anti-Semite and Jew (1946) and de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1949) powerfully utilizing the roles of public perception and regard for understanding the construction of specific social group identities, rather than dwelling on the individual alone.

This burst of philosophical inquiry held considerable appeal for a European intelligentsia recovering from the devastating effects of a war that had destroyed much of the continent physically, culturally, and morally. The notion of an indifferent world as conveyed by existentialism resonated with a public coping with the aftermath of violence and genocide—a sentiment reinforced by the absurdism and nihilism in popular fiction like Camus’s The Stranger (1942), set in his native Algeria.²³ Existentialism’s argument for free will, which drew on Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) as well as Kierkegaard, and the concurrent need to recognize and work against “bad faith”—a practice of self-deception defined by aspirations to meet generic social standards or political demands, but ultimately preventing individual fulfillment—provided one answer for creating meaning in an uncertain postwar era.²⁴

This prescription for self-actualization caught the attention of Fanon, as it did for so many—as did the bridging of academic and public realms. Indeed, Fanon’s interest in phenomenology and existentialism is readily understandable, given his early engagement with Négritude and surrealism through Aimé Césaire. Like psychiatry and these aesthetic movements, the philosophical approaches of phenomenology and existentialism drew on notions of the conscious and the unconscious and the vital importance in understanding these realms to advance and consummate self-understanding. Fanon’s early attempts at writing included plays in the vein of Sartre’s existential dramas. But these philosophical influences had a greater bearing on the manuscript that would result in Black Skin, White Masks, which soon preoccupied him—as did rapid developments in his personal and professional life.

Fanon became romantically involved with two women during this period—experiences that likely informed his essays on gender and interracial relationships in his first book. Fanon had one child, Mireille, out of wedlock with a fellow medical student in 1948. His eventual neglect of this relationship can be attributed to the relationship he soon had with his future wife, Marie-Josephe Dublé (1931–1989), better known as Josie Fanon, whom he met in 1949.²⁵ Dublé came from a politically progressive background; her parents were trade unionists. Fanon and Dublé married in 1952. These personal changes overlapped with several equally fast professional transitions.