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4

Dr Frantz Fanon

It was a familiar scenario. He had watched them leaving Fort-de-France. He had seen the families accompanying the young men to the foot of the ship’s gangway, and had glimpsed the coming mutation and the power in the eyes of the exile-to-be as he ironically hummed or sang ‘Adieu foulard, adieu madras’.¹ This is the sad song in which a girl from Martinique laments the loss of her white sweetheart or doudou²:

Adieu foulard, adieu madras,

Adieu graine d’or, adieu collier chou,

Hélas, hélas, c’est pou toujours

Doudou à moi, lui parti

Hélas, hélas, c’est pou toujours

[‘Farewell foulard, farewell madras,

Farewell graine d’or, farewell collier chou,

Alas, alas, it is for ever,

My sweetheart has gone.

Alas, alas, gone for ever’]

Fanon turns the lament into a farewell to a certain Martinique and to the image of Martinique conveyed by the clothes and jewellery worn by the girl in the song. That image figured on the banknotes and stamps that were issued when Martinique was still a colony and not a département; it still appears on the labels on bottles of rum. A madras is a skirt or dress of checked cotton, and a foulard a headscarf twisted into a turban; a graine d’or and a collier chou are highly prized and expensive items of gold jewellery. Fanon’s version of the song can also be read as a farewell to the doudouiste literature typified by the dedication to a Creole poem by Gilbert Gratiant, the brother of the councillor he had approached in his unsuccessful attempt to obtain his student grant:

Aux jeunes filles créoles:

Câpresses, droites et provocantes,

Békées de lys et de langueur altière,

Chabines, enjouées marquées de soleil,

Coulies si fragile aux purs traits d’Indiens

Bel ti-négresses fermes et saines,

Mulatresses aux grand yeux, souples reines de tout le féminin possible

[‘To the Creole girls:

Straightbacked and provocative câpresses,

Lily-like békées in their haughty langour,

Coolies, so fragile with their pure Indian features,

Beautiful little negresses, firm bodied and healthy,

Mulatresses with big eyes, supple queens who could not be more feminine.]³

He had seen them leaving, and he had also seen them returning. The Martinican who had been to the metropolis was, like the ‘been-to’ of Anglophone Africa who is so proud of having been to London,⁴ a demi-god but he could also be a pathetic figure. Anyone who had been to France and had not succeeded in seeing a mounted policeman there was the object of mockery.⁵ Those who came back so convinced of their superiority that they refused to speak Creole were soon put in their place, and Fanon knew the story of the been-to who could not recognize a familiar piece of agricultural equipment . . . until his peasant father dropped it on his foot.⁶ He also knew that the Martinican who landed in France could be a comic figure, especially if he hyper-corrected his natural tendency to ‘swallow’ his ‘r’s’ by addressing a waiter in Le Havre as ‘garrrçon’, and then giving the game away by ordering ‘un vè de biè’ and not ‘un verre de bière’.⁷ He knew that a magic circle surrounded the young man who was leaving, and that the words ‘Paris, Marseille, La Sorbonne, Pigalle’ were its keystone.⁸ The erotic promise of Paris was the stuff of adolescent male folklore and he could recall how, as he finally approached a delayed puberty, a friend had told him of how he had held a young parisienne in his arms.⁹ Curiously, he appears to have been unaware before he left that many Martinican men were so eager to sleep with a white woman that their first port of call was a brothel in Le Havre; in Peau noire, he remarks with what sounds like genuine surprise that this was a recent piece of information.¹⁰ Many of the fantasies and hopes about Paris mentioned – and no doubt entertained – by Fanon could of course have been shared by any provincial youth dreaming of the capital, but they are overdetermined by the racial question. The dream of sleeping with a white woman in France was all the more alluring in that it was virtually impossible for a young black man to do so in Martinique. The opening sections of Peau noire, masques blancs paint a composite picture of the lived experience of the young Martinican in France – and it is a specifically male experience. Fanon’s sister Gabrielle, who also left for France in 1946, would have had a different tale to tell.

Writing of his childhood in the black-mulatto society of Fort-de-France, Fanon remarks: ‘I am a nègre, but naturally I don’t know that because that is what I am.’¹¹ His experiences in the army and in liberated France had begun to teach him what he was in the eyes of most French people. The lesson was now to be reinforced. And it is a lesson that is still being learned by students from the ‘French’ West Indies: ‘The West Indian who comes to France is steeped in what he believes to be French culture; he is sometimes “more French than the French” and believes that he will find a milieu into which he will be accepted, into which he can merge immediately. Despite his (legal) Frenchness, he finds that he is a foreigner living amongst whites and other foreigners. Because of his colour, he is rejected by a world whose culture he had, he thought, absorbed.’¹²

Sitting on a train on an unspecified date, Fanon heard a Frenchman who stank of cheap red wine rambling on about the need for a National Union to defend French values against foreigners. Looking towards the corner where Fanon was sitting, he then added ‘Whoever they are.’¹³ Fanon knew that Europeans had a definite idea of what a black man should be. He knew that he would probably be asked how long he had been in France, and be complemented on his ‘good French’.¹⁴ He realized that he would suffer the humiliating experience of being addressed in petitnègre, or the French equivalent to pidgin English, by white people who called him ‘tu’ because they spoke to blacks in the way that an adult speaks to a child;¹⁵ Cézette can still recall how it felt. In 1946, Fanon had probably seen neither the image of the grinning Tirailleur sénégalais on the posters advertising Banania nor the images of Bamboulinette, the black maid from Martinique whose broad smile was used to sell shoe-polish. At home in Martinique, he had no reason to know that for many of his fellow French citizens, he was that soldier and that his sister was that maid.

Nothing could prepare him for the most devastating experience of all. It occurred on a cold day in Lyon when Fanon encountered a child and his mother. This is possibly the most famous passage in Peau noire, masques blancs. The child said to his mother: ‘Look, a negro’ and then ‘Mum, look at the negro. I’m frightened! Frightened! Frightened!’¹⁶ Fanon’s own analysis of this traumatic encounter is discussed in detail in the next chapter. In the meantime, it is useful to ask how and why the child knew that Fanon was a negro. Part of the answer may come from a geography textbook for use in schools that was published in 1903:

Paul is usually a very punctual pupil, but one day, he is late for school. ‘I’m sorry, sir’, he says, ‘I didn’t realize what time it was. I was watching a nègre on the Grand’ Place.’ ‘Was he a real nègre?’ ‘Yes! Yes sir. A real nègre with all black skin and teeth as white as milk. They say he comes from Africa. Are there lots of nègres in that country?’ ‘Yes, my friend.’¹⁷

A more complete explanation comes from the extraordinary childhood correspondence of the nine-year-old Françoise Marrette, who, as Françoise Dolto (1908–88), became a psychoanalytic grandmother to the nation. During the First World War, she met a black family on the beach at the fashionable Normandy resort of Deauville; her nanny laughed at the sight. Another significant encounter came when she met a wounded Tirailleur sénégalais who was being cared for by her mother. The soldier kissed the little girl because she reminded him of his own daughter. Her nanny washed her vigorously. There follows an exchange of letters with relatives. Her uncle warns her not to play with any black troops she might meet on the beach: they are handsome, but not as good as ‘our’ mountain troops. From London, her father sends her a comic postcard of ‘four little nègres’ who look as though they were a group of street minstrels. Young Françoise describes a school composition she has written about a bayonet charge. It features a Tirailleur she calls Sid Vava Ben Abdallah, whom she describes as having a black face, white teeth, a flat nose and a red turban – she clearly identifies with him, as ‘Vava’ was her family nickname. Finally, her mother sends her a postcard of a Tirailleur smoking a cigarette. On the back, she has written: ‘Here is Bou’ji ma’s portrait. Are you frightened of him?’¹⁸ After this, there are no more images of black people in Dolto’s juvenilia. French children of her generation were, in other words, taught to recognize a nègre when they saw one, to laugh at him and then to be afraid of him.

In late 1946, Fanon was twenty-one. He was a decorated war veteran and had passed his baccalauréat. His bac gave him the right to go to university, and legislation introduced on 4 August 1945 gave veterans free tuition and the right to small maintenance grants. He was free to study any subject he liked at the university of his choice. He had good reason to be somewhat apprehensive about leaving Martinique, but he was not reluctant to do so. On the contrary, like many young Martinicans he felt he was ‘a prisoner on his island, lost in an atmosphere from which there was no way out’ and the appeal of France was irresistible.¹⁹ Fanon and his siblings were the first members of their family to attend university, and their entry into higher education was a further advance in the family’s upward mobility. This could be described in class terms as a move from the petty bourgeoisie to the liberal professions, but Fanon does not speak in class terms and was not the classic boursier, or ‘grammar school boy’. The Martinican conflation of class with race meant that going to university was a further stage in becoming French, or in other words becoming white: ‘The West Indian who comes to France sees his journey as the last stage in his personality. We can say quite literally and without any fear of being mistaken that the West Indian who goes to France in order to convince himself of his whiteness will find his true face there.’²⁰ And yet Fanon was in one sense a boursier rather than ‘an inheritor’, whose family and extracurricular activities equipped him with the symbolic capital that allowed him to negotiate the system and to profit from it.²¹ Some of the decisions he would make about his education were to be strange, even perverse, and one explanation for them is quite simply that he made them alone and had no one and no training to guide him through the system.

His destination was Paris. The Atlantic crossing took twelve days, with the weather growing colder as he went north. Fanon’s port of entry was Le Havre, which he had seen from the decks of the San Mateo just over a year earlier. Like so many Martinicans, he landed in a port that had once fitted out slave ships for the triangular trade that took their distant ancestors from Africa to the Caribbean. Fanon’s first sight of France had been the invasion beaches of the south and the shattered city of Toulon. His second introduction to la métropole was another city in ruins. Le Havre – Bouville in Sartre’s La Nausée – had been badly damaged by Allied bombs and German resistance in the last months of the war. The docks the San Mateo had been unable to use in 1945 were now functioning, but the town itself was still a bomb-site. It was not an auspicious time to go to France. The economy was in as bad a condition as Le Havre. The Fourth Republic, which had been in existence for only two years, was already revealing its chronic instability and weakness. The transport system was still in chaos, and fuel supplies were poor. It was to be a cold, harsh winter. Food rationing was still in force, and by May 1947 the daily bread ration had been reduced to 250 grammes. In September, riots broke out when it was further reduced to 200 grammes per day – 75 grammes less than in the bleakest years of the Occupation.²² By the end of the year, or just as Fanon was settling down to his studies, a wave of strikes was in progress throughout the country. When the miners of northern France also struck in November, the government sent in troops and the mining areas were under virtual military occupation.²³

For Fanon, Le Havre was no more than a staging post and he continued his journey by rail to Paris. He planned to enrol at the School of Dentistry there and, in the absence of any pre-entry selection or pre-enrolment, this was quite literally a matter of queuing up at the relevant office. The decision to study dentistry must have been taken suddenly; in September 1945, Fanon had spoken of becoming a lawyer. There are minor but unresolved discrepancies in accounts of Fanon’s experience at the dental school. According to his first biographer, he lasted three weeks before walking out, complaining that he had never met ‘so many idiots in his life’.²⁴ According to his uncle, he did not even complete the enrolment formalities, and suddenly decided that he did not want to study dentistry and that he did not wish to be in Paris. All sources agree that he left Paris quickly. There were, he told both his brother Joby and his friend Marcel Manville, ‘too many negroes [nègres]’ in Paris.²⁵ There were fewer of them in Lyon, and that was where he was going . . . to study medicine and not dentistry. The reported comment on the number of nègres in Paris may well have been a joke, but it is not easy to interpret. According to Manville, Fanon wanted to ‘lactify’ or whiten himself, ‘as though the man who had committed himself to France during the war was at once regretting and rediscovering his merits and qualities as a Frenchman’.²⁶ His brother takes the view that Frantz wanted to get away from Paris’s resident Martinican community – a community at once cemented together and isolated by its ritual loyalty to a culture founded on rum, the beguine and accras – deep-fried fritters of cod or prawn. That was one of the possibilities open to the Martinican student in Paris: rejecting Europe, using Creole and ‘settling very comfortably into what we can call the Martinican Umwelt’.²⁷ Fanon himself remarks that he disliked the Martinican students’ tendency to deflate anyone who attempted to initiate a serious discussion by accusing him of being self-important and cutting him down to size by reverting to Creole.²⁸ The other possibility was to identify with and become part of the white host community: ‘I am French. I am interested in French culture, in French civilization.’²⁹ Whilst he may have been reluctant to join in the classic expatriate culture of the Martinican community in Paris, when he did spend time there while visiting his brother during vacations, he spent it with that very community. He did, after all, enjoy rum, accras and the beguine. Edouard Glissant, who met him briefly in Paris in 1946, describes Fanon as being deeply concerned with developments in Martinique, which was now beginning the process of departmentalization. He was, according to Glissant, ‘extremely sensitive’. Fanon was un écorché vif, which literally means someone who has been flayed alive and whose every raw nerve has been exposed.³⁰ Fanon’s attitude towards his fellow Martinicans was based upon a profound ambivalence and a deeply troubled sense of his own identity, but it was the characteristic combination of impulsiveness and determination that took him to Lyon, just as it had taken the teenage dissident to Dominica in 1943.

Fanon’s decision to read medicine may, according to his brother Joby, have been prompted by the mistaken belief that it required a shorter course of study than dentistry, but that does not explain the decision to leave Paris. Lyon was not the obvious place to study, though the fact that the cost of living was lower than in Paris may have been part of the attraction. Although the Lyon medical faculty was perfectly respectable, it did not have the prestige enjoyed by Paris’s Ecole de Médecine. A brass plate on a surgery door saying that Dr Fanon had studied in Paris and had worked in a Parisian hospital would have made a much better impression on Martinican patients than one describing him as a graduate of a provincial Faculté Mixte de Médicine et de Pharmacie. Joby Fanon suggests that his brother chose to go to Lyon because he had made friends in Nantua during his wartime convalescence, and had kept in touch with them.³¹ Lyon was close enough to Nantua to maintain the connection. Even so, he had no direct contacts in Lyon itself. In Paris, Fanon could have remained in close contact with friends and family. Mosole was studying dentistry in Paris and Joby was studying there in preparation for a career in the customs service that would take him much higher than his father. Manville was completing the final year of his law degree and would be called to the bar in October 1947.³² It would also have been much easier to remain in touch with Gabrielle. She was studying pharmacy in Rouen, which is a short train journey away from the capital. He did visit her when he could and may have had some further contact with the hospitable Lemonnier family, but travelling between Lyon and Rouen was far from easy.

Fanon had, probably without realizing it, chosen to live and study in a city which was – and is – notoriously unfriendly to strangers. Lyon was neither more nor less racist than any French city, but even white fellow students like Robert Berthelier, who was born in Royan, felt themselves unwelcome there. Berthelier’s outsider status, together with his love of jazz – he played piano – meant that he felt more at home with Fanon and the handful of black students at the university than with the native lyonnais students.³³ Living in Lyon accentuated Fanon’s sense of isolation and estrangement. He was already familiar with the town-country relationship that existed between little settlements like Basse-Pointe and ‘the imposing Fort-de-France’; he could now detect a similar dialectic between Paris and Lyon. ‘Take a Lyonnais in Paris; he will boast of how peaceful his city is, of the intoxicating beauty of the banks of the Rhône, the splendour of the plane trees and all the other things that are praised by people who have nothing to do. If you meet him when he comes back to Paris, and especially if you do not know the capital, he won’t stop singing its praises: Paris-city-of-light, the Seine, the open-air cafés, see Paris and die . . .’³⁴ Fanon could play all the parts in the scenario of exile and alienation.

Like the rest of France, Lyon suffered a severe housing crisis after the war. In Paris, the crisis was so acute that, according to urban myth, anyone who saw a potential suicide poised to leap into the Seine would run up to him – not to offer help, but to ask if he was leaving an apartment free. Matters were not quite so bad in Lyon, but the accommodation crisis does explain why Fanon found himself living in a former brothel requisitioned by the Ministry of Education and converted into rudimentary student housing.³⁵ It was one of the famous maisons closes, or state-regulated brothels, which were closed in 1946 when the Assemblée Nationale adopted a bill pushed through by a zealous Communist Party member. Although Fanon’s accommodation was rather unusual, this was a convenient solution, as a lone black student with no contacts and little money would not have found it easy to obtain rented accommodation in the private sector.

There were indeed fewer nègres in Lyon than in Paris, but France’s second city stands at the junction of major trade routes and has absorbed wave after wave of immigrants. Italians, Greeks and Armenians flooded there before and during the First World War. In the 1920s and 1930s, the deteriorating economy of Algeria forced many peasants – the majority of them from Kabylia – to migrate and find work in Lyon’s factories. Others had simply stayed on after being demobilized during the First World War. In the early 1930s, the Algerian community in Lyon was estimated to be 2,200. Most were single men, living ten or twelve to a room in the slums of the rue Moncey and the Guillotière quarter, only a few hundred yards away from the city’s historic centre on the east bank of the Rhône.³⁶ An Algerian who migrated to the city in 1950 describes his living conditions thus: ‘I was living in a rooming house [un garni] in the rue Garibaldi. There were a lot of us in that garni, twenty or thirty people. It’s true. We paid 1,000 old francs a month; at the time I was earning 13,000 . . . We were overrun with rats in that garni. It was a scandal, yes, yes . . . pitiful, yes . . . and a scandal.’³⁷ The garni and the café – a poor imitation of the Moorish cafés of Algeria, but always a major centre of political activity – were the social poles of the urban immigrant’s world. Conditions had changed little since the 1930s, when a local Communist paper described the rooming houses in the Molière area:

In order to get an idea of the social wound known as a slum you have to have gone down those narrow corridors, climbed the wooden staircases with their uneven or missing stairs, breathed the revolting smells from the gutters, cesspools and courtyards of certain houses. Let’s not talk about the flats. Let’s not talk about the garrets they call rooms, as their low ceilings and sweating walls defy description. And yet miserable wretches live in them, and at a horribly high price they are sold the right to sleep under a roof, despite the rancid smell and the inadequate air-space.³⁸

Compared to this, a cubicle in a former brothel was luxury indeed.

It was in Lyon that Fanon first came into contact with the North Africans he had been unable to meet during his brief stay in Algeria in 1944. Although Lyon was, even in the harsh climate of the post-war years, a relatively prosperous city, the home visits he made to the rue Moncey as a young doctor taught him that the wretched of the earth were not far away. The Algerian community had rapidly acquired the reputation for criminality and violence that still clings to North African immigrants. According to a 1923 police report, the rue Moncey was a nest of filth, a centre of anti-hygiene, a threat to public order and a social danger.³⁹ Such views were – and are – not uncommon; the image of the Algerian with a knife is deeply rooted in a certain French imaginary⁴⁰ which, since at least the 1930s, has seen the ‘Sidi’ as a barbarian who is invading the white citadel.⁴¹ Given their living conditions, it is not surprising that the Algerian immigrants provided Lyon’s hospitals and psychiatric centres with large numbers of patients, and it was in that context that Fanon first came to know ‘all these men who are hungry, all these men who are cold, all these men who are afraid . . . All these men who make us afraid.’⁴²

Fanon’s sense of isolation was increased by the news that reached him in the first week of February 1947. Félix Casimir Fanon had died unexpectedly on 30 January at the age of only fifty-six. A telegram was dispatched to Lyon and, on receiving it, Fanon left immediately to talk to Gabrielle in Rouen. It was a long and uncomfortable overnight journey. Rouen is 600 kilometres from Lyon and the journey involved a change of train and station in Paris. Fanon spent a sleepless night trying his best not to think about the telegram. Despite the gestures of sympathy that had been made by friends, he could not believe that he had been orphaned, so difficult was it to imagine the death of his father. In 1945, he had written in very harsh terms to him, but was now anxious to know if his father had spoken of him before he died. He wanted to know what his father thought of him, because a paternal opinion would help him to ‘reform his norms’ and to work harder at his daily tasks. He was also afraid that his mother would lapse into despair or even die of grief, and begged her not to leave her children: ‘What would we be without you?’⁴³ His fears were not realized: Eléanore Fanon lived on in her cool, dark house in Redoute until July 1981. In Rouen, Gabrielle was also in tears. Well aware that her father’s death was a blow to the stability – and finances – of the family, she was talking of abandoning her studies and returning to Fort-de-France to find work. It took Frantz a night of persuasion to convince her that this was the wrong course. After what her brother called ‘a good talking to’, she capitulated and agreed to go on with her university course. When she did return to Martinique, it was as a qualified pharmacist. Fanon himself could offer little help in the impending financial crisis, as his grant was proving almost inadequate for his own needs. Joby was able to help a little. He was playing semi-professional football on a part-time basis and was able to send his younger brother a little money occasionally.⁴⁴

Fanon’s geographical-racial isolation was compounded by the need to study a new and unfamiliar subject. His lycée education had left him able to cite Kant on the sublime⁴⁵ (not that this implied any great acquaintance with critical philosophy), but had given him little scientific knowledge. As a preliminary to his five years of medical studies, he therefore had to take a year-long foundation course in biology, physics and chemistry. Peau noire tells us little about Fanon’s medical studies, though it is informative about his initiation into psychiatry. It does, however, tell us that he was bored by the ‘objectivity’ of anatomists who could describe the tibia, but reacted with astonishment when he asked them how many pre-peroneal depressions they had. It rapidly became clear that he was not destined to be a surgeon. As he should have foreseen after his reaction to watching the autopsy in Le François, even basic dissection made him feel nauseous and a more hardened student’s advice to regard the cadaver as though it were a mere cat did not help.⁴⁶

Fanon had some difficulty in integrating himself into the academic community, and often remained both aloof and isolated. There were few other black students, and it would have been more usual to find a young West Indian washing the floor of the dissecting room than cutting up cadavers in it. Fanon was older than most of his fellow students and, unlike them, had fought a war that had left him bitter and angry, and with his supposedly ‘French’ identity largely in tatters. Yet he rarely talked about either his experiences in Dominica or during the war in France; a close acquaintance like Nicole Guillet, who is now a psychoanalyst in Paris, had no idea that he had been a soldier and had been decorated. Some younger students such as Jacques Postel found him slightly intimidating. He was not always easy to approach, and was sharp-tongued and ferocious when involved in arguments, as he constantly attempted to defeat people on their own ground, to make them admit defeat. He could be cuttingly aggressive, but also often appeared to be under great stress. Guillet suggests, with hindsight, that the displays of aggression were a defence against an underlying sense of self-doubt or insecurity.⁴⁷

Yet, the same Fanon could also be boisterously outgoing, and was given to declaiming from memory – and in a very loud voice – long passages from Aimé Césaire’s Cahier d’un retour au pays natal. He enjoyed dancing and listening to his Stellio records. This was a very Martinican taste. Alexandre Stellio (1885–1939) was the leader of the most famous of the Creole orchestras that took France by storm just before the Second World War. He was an accomplished clarinettist, and his beguine music was a pleasantly syncopated dance music with hints of New Orleans jazz. By 1946, the beguine was no longer particularly fashionable in France; Fanon was quite simply listening to the music of his childhood. He had no great liking for classical music but claimed to have an interest in jazz, although a friend who worked with him in Algeria and then Tunisia believes that he was less interested in the music itself than in the sociological phenomenon of black music in the racist white society of the United States.⁴⁸ The parody of the ‘negritude’ vision of Louis Armstrong’s music in Peau noire suggests that this was indeed the case: ‘I am black, I bring about a total fusion with the world, a sympathetic understanding of the earth and lose my ego in the heart of the cosmos; no matter how intelligent he may be, the white man cannot understand Armstrong.’⁴⁹ In 1959, he discussed the reactions of white jazz fans to the development of new styles such as be-bop, which he saw as a reflection of the new-world view of a black community that had glimpsed a new hope for the future. For the white fans, this was a betrayal: jazz had to be ‘the broken and despairing nostalgia of an old negro trapped between five whiskies, the curse upon him and the racist hatred of whites’.⁵⁰ The sociology of jazz and the blues does appear to have interested him more than the music itself.

Fanon is reported to have been close to the student branch of the Parti Communiste Français (PCF) but he did not become a member, even though he was active in student politics and took part in anti-colonialist demonstrations. Some of the demonstrations concerned the case of Paul Vergès, the leader of the Communist Party of Réunion, who was arrested on a murder charge in May 1946. Convinced that he could not hope to have a fair trial in Réunion, anti-colonialist groups there succeeded in having the hearings transferred to metropolitan France. Between April and August 1947, when he was acquitted, Vergès was held in prison in Lyon.⁵¹ In the course of a demonstration organized to demand the release of Paul Vergès, Fanon was clubbed and trampled underfoot by the police, and he did not forget the experience.⁵² The tone of Peau noire, masques blancs and his other early texts indicates that Fanon’s political views were at this time a product of his own anger and a spontaneous sympathy with the ‘wretched of the earth’ rather than of any interest in party politics.

The outgoing side to his personality that had made him the dominant figure in games of football in Martinique now made Fanon an imposing participant in the Association lyonnaise des étudiants de la France d’Outre-mer, or Overseas Students’ Association. Sadly, there appear to be no extant records of that small organization’s activities. Fanon’s forceful personality also made him very attractive to the women he encountered in the caféteria and meeting rooms of the Association générale des étudiants, or Students’ Union. It probably helped that Fanon, who could be seductively charming when he wanted to be, always dressed very smartly and conservatively, as Martinicans of his generation tended to do (the habitually dishevelled Manville was, even in later life, a conspicuous exception to the rule). His contacts were not restricted to his contemporaries. He was in touch with the Martinican Louis-Thomas-Eugène Achille, who taught English at the prestigious Lycée du Parc – still regarded as Lyon’s best school. Born in 1909, a prolific writer of articles on black issues and an authority on negro spirituals (he had recorded with the ‘Park Glee Club de Lyon’),⁵³ Achille, whose brother taught at the Lycée Schoelcher in Fort-de-France, was a Catholic and of a different generation to Fanon. But they had experiences in common, and Fanon could recognize himself in Achille’s anecdote about going on a Catholic pilgrimage in June 1950. Seeing a ‘tanned’ man in his flock, the priest in charge approached him with the words ‘You done left big Savanne, why come long us?’ The impeccable French of Achille’s courteous reply meant that it was the priest who was left embarrassed by the exchange.⁵⁴ His good French did not, however, make it any easier to find a hotel in Paris; the hotels refused to take in the black pilgrims ‘simply because the Anglo-Saxon guests (who, as everyone knows are rich and negrophobic) might have moved out’.⁵⁵ Although novelists like Richard Wright, who lived in France from 1947 onwards, and musicians like Bud Powell found Paris less hostile than the United States, the city was by no means free of racism. Like Achille, the American novelist Chester Himes recalled being turned away from the cheap hotels frequented by young white Americans: ‘They said they couldn’t rent to noirs; their clients wouldn’t like it.’⁵⁶ An Algerian would have found it even more difficult to find a room.

At the beginning of his second year in Lyon, Fanon wrote to his mother to tell her that the days when his teachers had had to complain to her about his bad behaviour were long gone, that he was working very hard and that he was anxious to bring her the joy she had always taken in her children’s academic success. He was, he said, making up for lost time, and outlined an ambitious programme: a second diploma in February, his second medical exams in June and then, at an unspecified date, a non-resident post in a Lyon hospital.⁵⁷ He did not in fact keep to this programme, and made another change of direction as his studies progressed, but he was working hard and not only at his medicine. The footnotes to Peau noire indicate that he was reading very widely, and that his reading was by no means restricted to medical textbooks. The plethora of notes and quotations is an indication of a major change that had occurred when he moved from Fort-de-France to Lyon: he had moved from a book-poor to a book-rich culture, from the limited resources of the Bibliothèque Schoelcher to the bookshops and libraries of a large university town, and he was taking advantage of the facilities on offer. He was reading journals like Esprit, the voice of the Catholic left, and Sartre’s Les Temps modernes and Présence africaine, which began publication in 1947. He read quite extensively in philosophy, showing a particular interest in the Hegelian-existentialist strand that was so important in the immediate post-war years, and attended lectures by Maurice Merleau-Ponty, but later told Simone de Beauvoir that he found the philosopher ‘distant’ and never tried to speak to him.⁵⁸ The opening words of the first chapter of Peau noire come directly from his study of phenomenology: ‘I attach a fundamental importance to the phenomenon of language. Hence, I believe, the necessity of this study, which should provide us with one element that will help us to understand the for-others [pour autrui] dimension of the man of colour.’⁵⁹ The appeal of phenomenology was that, as will be argued in Chapter 5, of all the philosophical discourses available to him in the late 1940s, this was the philosophy that could be best adapted to an analysis of his own ‘lived experience’. The classics of French phenomenology – Merleau-Ponty’s Phénoménologie de la perception and Sartre’s L’Etre et le néant – are obviously not treatises on racism and anti-racism, but they provided tools that were much better suited to the analysis of ‘the lived experience of the black man’ than either Marxism or psychoanalysis.

In Peau noire, masques blancs, Fanon’s vocabulary is that of the modernism of the 1940s. And it is the modernity of his non-medical reading that is so striking: most of the books cited in Peau noire were published in the period 1947–50, which makes it likely that its final composition dates from 1950–51. Richard Wright’s Native Son and Chester Himes’s If He Hollers Let Him Go (which appeared in translation in 1947 and 1948, respectively) were of obvious interest to someone intent on analysing the lived experience of the black man, but it is also significant that they were part of the new ‘committed’ culture so actively promoted by Les Temps modernes in particular and provided a contemporary counterbalance to Présence africaine’s more traditionalist approach to African culture. The novels were also his main – if not sole – source of information about race relations in the United States. When he contrasts the surprise expressed by Americans in Paris on seeing so many racially mixed couples with Simone de Beauvoir’s experience of hostility from an old lady when walking through New York with Wright, he is, although he gives no reference, alluding to a book published in 1948.⁶⁰ Whilst Fanon’s reading was wide, it was also very selective and tightly focused. He was reading philosophy and psychology in order to find the theoretical tools to analyse his lived experience, and fiction, poetry and drama to illustrate it. He read Beauvoir’s account of her travels in America and of her friendship with Wright, but there is no direct evidence that he knew her Le Deuxième sexe.⁶¹ Feminism was not on Fanon’s agenda. He refers to and cites Sartre’s play La Putain respectueuse, which was inspired by the Scottsboro (Alabama) affair of 1931, in which nine young black men were sentenced to the electric chair for the alleged rape of two white prostitutes and served long terms of imprisonment (the last of the Scottsboro boys was finally freed in 1951), but not the novels of his Les Chemins de la liberté (‘Roads to Freedom’) trilogy, which do not deal with the race question.⁶² His knowledge of the personalist philosopher Emmanuel Mounier was restricted to a reading of his account of a journey through France’s West African colonies.⁶³

Fanon was now beginning to write, but nothing has survived from this period. He used a roneo machine in the Students’ Union to produce a small magazine entitled Tam-tam (Tom-tom), and appears to have been its sole contributor as well as its editor. Whilst nothing is known of its content, the title has a very Césairean ring to it – the word tam-tam appears in the title of three of the poems included in Césaire’s first collection⁶⁴ – and suggests that Fanon was experimenting with some variant of negritude. Although sections of Peau noire, masques blancs reveal a certain gift for narrative, he does not appear to have tried his hand at prose fiction but he was very interested in the theatre and frequented the Théâtre de la Comédie, where he saw early stage productions of Roger Planchon, who was director there from 1952 to 1957.⁶⁵ The interest in drama explains some features of Peau noire, in which Fanon makes use of an almost theatrical delivery and writes fragments of dialogue that are most effective when read aloud. By 1949–50, he had written three plays. They remained unpublished and were never performed, even though a very optimistic Fanon sent at least one of them to the actor-director Jean-Louis Barrault, who never replied. One friend recalls having seen them in manuscript and, whilst she has no real memory of their content, does remember that they were ‘not very good’.⁶⁶ According to Fanon’s widow, the manuscripts were lost during one of the many moves that took them from Lyon to Algeria, from Algeria to Tunis, and then to Accra. In a rare interview, she recalled only that they dealt with ‘philosophical themes’ and above all with that of ‘action’.⁶⁷ This, together with the titles – Les Mains parallèles (‘Parallel Hands’), L’Oeil se noye (‘The Eye Drowns’ or ‘The Drowning Eye’) and La Conspiration (‘The Conspiracy’) – suggests that they were variants on the themes of Sartre’s plays of the 1940s. In the late 1940s, Sartre was a very major figure in the French theatre, and he had created a philosophical style of drama centred on the themes of ‘action’ and responsibility, notably with Les Mains sales (1948), and Fanon was an assiduous reader of his work.

According to his own account, it was soon after his arrival in Lyon that Fanon began work on what was to become his first book. He writes that Peau noire, masques blancs was the conclusion of ‘seven years of experiments and observations’, but also that it was ‘three or four years’ before its publication that he began to experiment with the free association tests whose findings he incorporates into his text.⁶⁸ The book was published in 1952 and, allowing for submission and production, this indicates that the project dates back to either 1945, which is improbable in the extreme, or to about 1947–8. Although Fanon attempted to submit it as his degree dissertation, it is unlikely that Peau noire began life as a thesis. There was no indication in 1947 that he was going to study psychiatry, and it is a very odd first-year student who begins to prepare – or even think of – a final-year project in his first year at medical school. There is the further possibility that the idea for it was sparked by the study of ‘the genesis of the myth of the negro’ launched in the second issue of Présence africaine. Fanon administered what he calls his ‘free association tests’ to some three to four hundred individuals from the white race, inserting the word ‘negro’ into a random series of twenty or so other words. Almost 60 per cent of the tests produced the associations: biological, penis, sport, sportsman, powerful, boxer, Joe Louis, Jess (sic) Owen, Tirailleurs sénégalais, savage, animal, devil, sin. A white prostitute told him that the idea of going to bed with a black man brought her to orgasm. Subsequent experience taught her that black men were ‘no more extraordinary’ than her white clients: ‘I was thinking (imagining) about everything they could do to me: that was what was fantastic.’⁶⁹ Fanon does not say whether he approached her in the interests of research, or as a client. Technically, Fanon was not using free association but a Jungian word association test in which the subject’s immediate response to the stimulus word is interpreted as revealing a thought process, personality characteristic or emotional state.⁷⁰ The terminological slip that allows Fanon to describe this as ‘free association’ (in which a patient lying on an analytic couch describes everything that comes into his mind and in which the analyst listens with suspended attention, and without supplying any stimulus) implies a surprisingly slight acquaintance with Freudian practice. Here, Fanon is not exploring the unconscious of an individual but the stereotypical associations of a culture.

Peau noire, masques blancs supplies a few indications as to the nature of Fanon’s extra-curricular activities in Lyon, and his difficult situation there. He was both respected by his colleagues and the object of their casual and unthinking racism. He recalls, for instance, that ‘just over a year ago (i.e. 1949–50) I gave a lecture in which I traced a parallel between black poetry and European poetry’. After it, a metropolitan friend congratulated him warmly but unthinkingly said: ‘Basically, you’re white’.⁷¹ Assuming that Fanon’s dates are correct, it seems reasonable to assume that the lecture was a discussion of one of the first anthologies of Black and Malagasy poetry to be published in French.⁷² He was also asked by the Association lyonnaise des étudiants de la France d’Outre-mer to respond to an article that had described jazz as an irruption of cannibalism into European purity. In his angry reply, he told the ‘defender of European purity’ that there was nothing cultural about his ‘spasm’.⁷³ Neither Fanon’s talk, the article about jazz nor his response to it have survived, but one extant document provides a useful insight into the cultural concerns of his circle.

Nicole Guillet believes that the unsigned fifty-six-page typescript entitled Le Surréalisme dating from her student days in Lyon and still in her possession is Fanon’s work, but the internal evidence suggests otherwise. A reference on the sixth sheet to the lecture ‘your brother Frantz’ gave on the ‘solar poetry’ of Negro art makes it improbable that Frantz Fanon wrote it (‘Frantz’ is not a common name, and the likelihood of there being two black students called ‘Frantz’ in Lyon at the same time is almost absurdly slight), but it could be an allusion to the talk on black and European poetry. It does, however, indicate that the typescript originated from within the circles in which Fanon was active. Given that the author mentions having seen an exhibition of Central African masks and ‘idols’ in Brussels and comments that it had inspired in him a feeling of ‘sacred horror’ that he had never experienced while looking at ‘art from your countries’, it would appear that he was a black student speaking to a mixed audience. Although the text is undated, it refers to Julien Gracq’s essay ‘Lautréamont toujours’, which was originally published in 1947, and it therefore cannot have been written before that date. A frustratingly vague reference to Glissant also points to a date after 1947 – the year in which he published his poem ‘Terre à Terre’, followed by ‘Laves’ in 1948 – as does the author’s ability to cite in its entirety André Breton’s ‘Sur la route de San Romano’, written in 1948.⁷⁴ It is, then, more than probable that this is the text of a talk given to a group of students in Lyon in about 1949 or 1950, and that it is representative of cultural concerns shared by Fanon.

Whoever did write Le Surréalisme clearly had a very good knowledge of the subject, and a passion for it. It must have taken the better part of two hours to read the lecture, which deals in some detail with the origins and development of surrealism, looking at its beginnings in the ‘Cubist’ poetry of Apollinaire and in the manifestos of Breton, at the techniques of automatic writing, and even at the parallels between Salvador Dali’s notion of critical paranoia and Lacan’s early theory of the origins of psychosis. Obviously addressed to an audience with no more than a passing knowledge of surrealism, this is a paper by a young enthusiast anxious to share his passion for the topic rather than an academic intent upon analysing it. The general characterization of surrealism as a ‘new poetic activity characterized by mysticism and the spirit of revolt’ is unexceptional but not inaccurate, and it is the concluding remarks that are of most interest. Summing up, the anonymous author describes Rimbaud as one of surrealism’s most important forebears, and then refers to him as the first link in a new poetic chain which, through its ‘absolute and brutal aspirations’, links surrealism to the black poetry of Césaire, Senghor, Glissant ‘and so many other contemporary black poets’.

Reviewing Peau noire in 1952, the Martinican novelist Léonard Sainville remarked that it reminded him of Légitime défense, a little magazine published in 1932. Légitime défense was one of the first attempts to create a specifically Martinican literary-political culture, and the precursor of Tropiques. René Ménil worked on both journals. Légitime défense was an angry little magazine, and its brutal denunciations of social conditions in Martinique led to its being banned as subversive. Only one issue was published. The title is borrowed from that of the 1926 pamphlet in which André Breton both declares himself in solidarity with the coming Communist revolution and denounces the PCF daily L’Humanité for its intellectual ‘cretinism’ and its failure to play its self-appointed role as an organ of proletarian education.⁷⁵ The young collective that produced Légitime défense was not so critical of the PCF, but one of its contributors – the twenty-five-year-old Ménil – outlined a programme that was scarcely in line with the orthodox Marxism of 1932:

The coloured West Indian expresses the feelings of an Other because the powers of his passions and imagination are not recognized. The black West Indian should therefore begin by recognizing his own passions, express only himself and, going against utility, take the path of dreams and poetry. In the course of his effort, he would encounter the fantastic images of which African and Oceanic statuettes are one expression, poems and stories, the jazz of black Americans and French works which by going beyond industry and by using the powers of passion and dreams, have conquered the freshness of Africa.⁷⁶

A footnote points out that the ‘French works’ in question are those of Lautréamont, Rimbaud, Apollinaire, Jarry, Reverdy, the Dadaists and the surrealists, or in other words the very authors discussed by the author of ‘Le Surréalisme’. These were also the authors to whom Césaire introduced his students at the Lycée Schoelcher.

Sainville added that it seemed to him that Fanon knew nothing of his predecessors, and that his prise de conscience began with Césaire.⁷⁷ When Sainville remarks that Peau noire ‘reminded’ him of Légitime défense, he is in effect saying that there is nothing new in it. It might be fairer to say that, without realizing it, a small group of students in Lyon had returned to the starting-point for a distinctively Francophone tradition that goes back to the publication by an earlier group of students of Légitime défense, or in other words to the Caribbean version of surrealism that so influenced Aimé Césaire and the poets of negritude.⁷⁸ In Martinique itself, the tradition of Legitime défense was of course continued by Tropiques. The circle in which Fanon was moving in Lyon thus reproduces the cultural programme of the forefathers of the negritude of the 1940s and 1950s. It would in fact have been extremely difficult for them to have known the work of their predecessors in any detail. It is improbable that Légitime défense circulated widely outside Paris, or even outside the Latin Quarter, and the war and occupation must have destroyed any continuity between 1932 and 1949. Jazz, surrealism, existentialism and the poetry of negritude were all part of a young, modern culture and whilst Lyon was not the bohemian Paris where Miles Davis was pursuing an affair with Juliette Greco in 1949⁷⁹ and whilst the Students’ Union building was no cave in St-Germain des prés, Fanon was nevertheless deeply involved with the modernism of his day. He enjoyed discussing surrealism, and it is apparent from his degree dissertation that he was familiar with Henri Ey’s article on psychiatry and surrealism.⁸⁰ As will be argued later, the cultural politics of Peau noire can be read in terms of his ambivalent relationship with both negritude and existentialism.

The student circles in which Fanon was moving were racially mixed, but the racial mix was not reflected in the sexual mix: there were few or no black women. Whilst mixed race couples were far from uncommon in Paris, Lyon was a deeply conservative town and Fanon’s first relationship with a younger white woman cannot have been an easy one. Michelle B. was a fellow medical student and a daughter of the middle classes – her father was an engineer who had worked on the Rhine’s dams – though not of the formidable bourgeoisie of Lyon. The relationship was not long-lasting, but it was one-sided and her commitment was much greater than Fanon’s. It ended in disaster for the young woman. In 1948, Michelle B. gave birth to Fanon’s daughter. The scandal was devastating. Pre-marital sex was bad enough, but having a black baby was worse still. Abortion was of course both illegal and unacceptable. Fanon was unwilling to marry her, having fallen for someone else, and had probably never taken the relationship as seriously as her. After some considerable persuasion from friends and family, and although he was under no legal obligation to do so, Fanon did recognize the child as his own, which allowed her to use the name Fanon in later life. Although there is a striking family resemblance, Mireille Fanon never knew her father and it was only as a young adult, and on Joby Fanon’s initiative, that she became part of the extended Fanon family. Inevitably, the brief affair with Fanon put an end to Michelle B.’s hopes of a medical career; she failed her exams and never qualified as a doctor. She did, however, marry a psychiatrist and eventually pursued a successful administrative career in that sector.⁸¹

Fanon had refused to marry the mother of his first child because he was now involved with Marie-Josephe Dublé (known to all as Josie), whom he met in 1949 when she was still at her lycée. She was a strikingly good-looking eighteen-year-old classicist, slim, dark-haired and with a contralto voice and the eyes of a gypsy: according to family memory, she was of mixed Corsican-gypsy descent, and had the temperament – and the temper – to match. Her family was from the Lyon region, and her parents were trade unionists working in the postal service. Their leftist politics meant that there was no parental disapproval of the relationship and no opposition to the marriage that followed.⁸² Josie Fanon, who committed suicide in Algiers in 1989, was always very reluctant to talk about her private life, and especially her life with Fanon, and their relationship has never really been described. The couple married in 1952 and it is clear that she played an important role in the composition of Peau noire. Fanon never learned to use a typewriter and dictated his text to Josie as he strode up and down the room like an actor declaiming his lines. Traces of the oral origins of the text are visible in the sudden breaks and changes of direction, as Fanon suddenly recalls or thinks of something. If there is an element of free association here, it is Fanon and not his informants who is free associating. When he writes, or rather says, ‘When my ubiquitary [ubiquitaire] hands caress these white breasts, I am making white civilization and dignity mine,’⁸³ he is speaking to the young woman he will marry. Commenting on the mythical size of the black man’s genitals, he adds: ‘One can easily imagine what such descriptions could provoke in a young Lyonnaise’, but then hesitates: ‘Horror? Desire? Not indifference, in any case.’⁸⁴ But he does not ask the young Lyonnaise who is with him and taking down his words.

As he pursued his studies, Fanon began to turn away from general medicine and to develop an interest in psychiatry. The reasons for this new change of direction were probably subjective. It is not unusual for psychiatrists in the making to take up the specialism in an attempt to understand their own behaviour, even their own problems. Peau noire is many things, and it can be read as a self-exploration or even as a wild self-analysis; to the extent that it is a socio-diagnostic or an analysis of the social origins of psychological phenomena,⁸⁵ Fanon is his own case-material: the écorché vif encountered by Glissant and others. The overlap between psychiatry, psychology and philosophy also allows Fanon to pursue his interests in ways that would not have been possible in other areas of medicine. He has no difficulty in introducing elements of Sartrean phenomenology into his socio-diagnostics, but would have found it difficult indeed to produce a Sartrean theory of dentistry. He had found his subject. Although Fanon is often described as a ‘psychoanalyst’, he was not and his relationship with psychoanalysis was always fraught.⁸⁶ His references to psychoanalysis are grafted on to his phenomenology and his knowledge of psychiatry.

Psychiatry was not a prestigious specialism at the time, and the training was not particularly rigorous. Nor was it particularly well developed. Only the universities of Paris, Strasbourg and Algiers had chairs in psychiatry. The discipline was marginalized in medical schools in general and Lyon in particular was a ‘psychiatric desert’, according to one who traversed it at much the same time as Fanon.⁸⁷ The city’s Vinatier psychiatric hospital would have provided a better training but, being both unsure of his career direction and ill-informed as to the possibilities open to him, Fanon followed only one year of a basic course there and opted to study at the university’s medical school. The teaching of psychiatry there was dominated by Professor Dechaume, who was interested solely in psychosurgery, neuropsychiatry and neurology. The fact that Dechaume had lost an arm in the First World War, and therefore could not operate himself, did nothing to deter him: every morning he could be seen in theatre, directing his surgical assistant by prodding him with his stump.⁸⁸ He presided over a large psychosurgical ward and the basement of his clinic housed an impressive ECG unit, but the child psychiatry unit was crammed into a room with a total surface area of forty square metres. Witnesses like Guillet, Berthelier and Postel do not recall that patients received particularly progressive treatment, or that they were given anything to do other than lie in their beds all day. The Lyon faculty was dominated by an organicist and neuropsychiatric approach to both diagnosis and treatment: patients suffering from anxiety were treated with ECT, which is more normally used to treat depression.⁸⁹ Social psychology was unknown, and so was psychoanalysis. There were no psychoanalysts in Lyon at this time, and therefore no means of having any practical training in analysis. An enthusiastic novice could have gone to Paris or Geneva to hear lectures, but Fanon could obviously not have gone into a personal analysis requiring daily sessions of an hour, and still less a subsequent training analysis. The references to psychoanalysis in Peau noire are evidence of Fanon’s wide reading, and not of his official studies. His knowledge of the subject – and it is far less sophisticated than some recent readings would suggest – was textually based, and it was only from 1952 onwards that he began to acquire some rudimentary analysis-based clinical experience.

As his initial clinical training was coming to an end in 1951, Fanon took a temporary post as a houseman in the Saint-Ylié hospital in Dôle, a small town in the Jura 150 kilometres north of Lyon, but with a rail connection that allowed him to go back for Saturday ward rounds with Dechaume. He may now have regretted his decision not to study in Paris; the salaries of junior doctors working in the psychiatric hospitals of the Seine département were 20 per cent higher than those of their provincial colleagues.⁹⁰ Financial considerations aside, Fanon’s stay in Dôle was not a happy one. Twenty-two years after the event, his consultant, Dr Madeleine Humbert, replied to Jacques Postel’s enquiries about Fanon’s early career: ‘I have no memory of Fanon deigning to note down any observations. He left the most unpleasant memory possible of his stay, and treated the nurses . . . like a colonialist. It has to be said that, at the time, he was the only intern for five hundred patients.’⁹¹ The claim that Fanon acted ‘like a colonialist’ is clearly grounded in a retrospective vision filtered though a negative perception of Fanon as theorist of colonization, but Humbert’s memory is faulty. The final section of Peau noire, masques blancs shows quite definitely that Fanon did note down observations at Saint-Ylié, and that he made good use of them.

The case he discusses was brought to Fanon’s notice by the doctor in charge of the female ward – presumably Humbert herself – and involved a nineteen-year-old who was suffering from obesity as well as a variety of tics and other nervous problems. The symptoms had first appeared when she was ten and had worsened at puberty. Now that she was living and working away from home, she was also suffering from depression and experiencing panic attacks. During an interview with the consultant psychiatrist, it emerged that she was experiencing hallucinations, and she described them in a waking-dream state: ‘Deep, concentric circles that expand and contract to the rhythm of a negro tom-tom. This tom-tom brings to mind the danger of losing her parents, and especially her mother.’⁹² When she glanced towards the drum, it was surrounded by half-naked men and women performing a terrifying dance. Told not to be afraid of joining the dance, she does join in. The appearance of the dancers changes immediately; they are now guests at a splendid party. Further sessions revealed more hallucinations of a group of negroes dancing around a cooking pot, and preparing to burn a white man in his fifties.

Having read his colleague’s case notes and having held ‘many conversations’ with the patient, Fanon concluded that the young woman’s fear of negroes dated from the age of ten and was associated with a memory of her father, who had served in the colonial army, listening to radio broadcasts of ‘negro music’. As she lay in bed, the house throbbed to the sound of a tom-tom. She could see negroes dancing and hid from them under the blankets. Circles would then appear and ‘scotomize’ the negroes or make them disappear; they were a defence against the hallucinations. At a later stage, the circles appeared without the negroes; the defence mechanism was now coming into play in the absence of its determinant, and the circles alone were enough to trigger the facial tics. Fanon argues in conclusion that her condition was the result of a fear of negroes and that its emergence had been triggered by ‘determinate circumstances’.

The Saint-Ylié case was of obvious interest to someone working on the psychology of negrophobia: ‘It shows that, in extreme cases, the myth of the negro, the idea of the negro, can determine an authentic alienation.’⁹³ But it also provides an insight into the clinical methods and techniques with which Fanon had become familiar in Lyon. He is clearly more interested in the effects of the ‘myth of the negro’ than in how a neurosis originates in the individual unconscious of the patient, and does not trace it back to unconscious sexual fantasies. He explicitly refuses to elaborate on ‘the infrastructure of this psycho-neurosis’, but it is surely of more significance that he devotes so little of his discussion to the figure of the patient’s father – not something that any Freudian psychoanalyst would overlook. He refers to the use of the ‘waking dream’ technique without comment or question, indicating that it was something with which he was so familiar as to find it unremarkable. The technique was originally developed in the 1920s in connection with research into mental imagery, but Robert Desoille’s Le Rêve éveillé dirigé (1945), which was presumably the source of Fanon’s knowledge, gave it wider currency. Although the technique has something in common with Freud’s free association technique – the patient lies on a couch and describes the ‘affects’, or emotions, associated with the images that come into his or her head – it is more closely related to Pavlov’s research into the higher nervous system than to psychoanalysis. The material thrown up during the daydream allows the therapist to provoke new situations so as to observe the subject’s affective reactions and gradually to reduce the level of anxiety by releasing tension at both the psychological and physiological level. There is no attempt to establish transference, or the relationship that allows the patient to actualize unconscious wishes by projecting them on to the figure of the analyst. Infantile prototypes and memories re-emerge and are experienced with a very powerful sense of immediacy.⁹⁴

Fanon has no criticisms to make of waking dream therapy. Yet one word indicates that he was also interested in going beyond the parameters of the psychotherapy in which he had been trained. He writes: ‘Then increasingly small circles appear and scotomize the negroes.’⁹⁵ Scotomiser is a very rare word, and it has a very peculiar history in French psychoanalysis.⁹⁶ It derives from the Latin scotoma, and originally meant an obscuration of part of the field of vision due to a lesion on the retina. Tentatively introduced into psychoanalysis by René Laforgue to describe a process of psychic depreciation by means of which the individual attempts to deny everything which conflicts with his ego, it was rejected by Freud. It was then used by Lacan in his 1938 article on the family to describe the mechanism that triggers a psychosis (Lacan later ceases to use the term and replaces it with ‘foreclosure’).⁹⁷ The discussion of the Saint-Ylié case indicates that there was already a tension between the tradition in which Fanon had been trained and a Freudian-Lacanian discourse which he knew only from his personal reading. The same tension structures his medical dissertation of 1951. Although Fanon’s dissertation is often referred to as his ‘thesis’, it was part of a first degree and not a submission for a postgraduate qualification. Its purpose was to demonstrate his competence within his field and not to make any original contribution to it.

Fanon remarks that he had intended to submit Peau noire, masques blancs as the dissertation he was required to write in order to qualify as a doctor of medicine, and then adds somewhat mysteriously ‘And then the dialectic forced me to take a much firmer stance’.⁹⁸ His failure to submit it had in fact nothing to do with any ‘dialectic’, and it is wounded pride that prevents him from admitting that the planned thesis was angrily rejected before he was able to submit it by an outraged Professor Dechaume on the predictable grounds that it defied all known academic and scientific conventions. A medical thesis is not the place for such an experimental exploration of the author’s subjectivity or for such lengthy quotations from Aimé Césaire. Fanon had to begin again with a more conventional topic, and rapidly produced a seventy-five-page typescript (typed by an unknown hand) with the cumbersome descriptive title of ‘Altérations mentales, modifications caractérielles, troubles psychiques et déficit intellectuel dans l’hérédo-dégénération spino-cérébelleuse. Un cas de maladie de Friedrich avec délire de possession’ (‘Mental disturbances, changes in character, psychic disturbances and intellectual deficiency in spinal-cerebral degeneracy. A case of Friedrich’s disease with delusions of possession’). Defended before a board of examiners on 29 November 1951, it deals mainly with the mental symptoms associated with a case of Friedrich’s ataxia, which is a recessive hereditary disease of the central nervous system. As is the convention with a thesis, the first section summarizes the literature on the condition whilst the second summarizes Fanon’s observations of the female patient in question. In the concluding section, Fanon moves into a discussion of the respective roles and nature of neurology and psychiatry.⁹⁹

Fanon never again mentioned his thesis, and made no attempt to publish it. He was, on the other hand, sufficiently proud of it to dedicate a copy to his brother Félix with a rather wordy inscription:

To my brother Félix,

I offer this work.

The greatness of a man is to be found not in his acts but in his style. Existence does not resemble a steadily rising curve, but a slow, and sometimes sad, series of ups and downs.

I have a horror of weaknesses – I understand them, but I do not like them.

I do not agree with those who think it possible to live life at an easy pace. I don’t want this. I don’t think you do either.¹⁰⁰

Although Fanon did follow the academic conventions this time, even to the extent of citing Dechaume (of whom he had a very poor private opinion), the dissertation still reflects the main concerns of Fanon’s earliest writings as it looks at the issue of the causality of mental illness. The academic context means, however, that he does not introduce the socio-genetic theory of ‘Le Syndrôme nord-africain’ outlined in his first published article, and that the discussion concentrates on organo-genesis and psycho-genesis or, in other words, the relative roles played in the triggering of mental illness by organic-somatic and purely mental factors.

There is a significant indication of just how rapidly Fanon wrote his thesis. The section dealing with Lacan refers to the latter’s thesis of 1932, and to his 1938 article on the family, but primarily to a text that he claims is entitled La Causalité essentielle de la folie. There is no such text by Lacan: the title given by Fanon is the subtitle of the second part of the paper ‘Propos sur la causalité psychique’;¹⁰¹ to make matters worse, Fanon gives no page references, and most of his quotations prove to be from the third section, which is subtitled ‘Les effets psychiques du monde imaginaire’. These are easy mistakes to make when working at speed and under pressure, but the fact that Fanon’s examiners apparently failed to pick them up during the two-hour viva voce examination he took up says little for the academic standards in force at Lyon’s Faculté mixte de médicine et de pharmacie in 1951. More significantly, it may indicate just how unknown a quantity Lacan was for Fanon’s examiners.