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Foreword

I cannot recall just why I first read Frantz Fanon. Perhaps it was a recommendation from a friend, perhaps it was the Sartre connection. But I do remember where and when I discovered Fanon. I was twenty and spending a year in Paris as part of a degree course in French. It was a good year and provided an introduction to many things, but it began with a severe culture shock. When I went to the Préfecture de Police on the Ile de la Cité to obtain a temporary resident’s permit, I saw a group of Algerians – all men – being turned away from the counter on the grounds they had not filled in their application forms correctly. Individually, they were addressed as tu. To address a friend or relative as tu is to signal intimacy and affection. To address an adult stranger as tu is to insult and humiliate him or her. Collectively, those men were treated with utter contempt by officials who knew a bicot (‘wog’) when they saw one. It transpired that the Algerians simply could not read and write well enough to complete the forms.

To watch anyone being humiliated – to recognize the look of hurt in the eyes of the other – is distressing. I had rarely seen people looking so forlorn and lost, and I do not think I had ever seen such a naked display of racism. When my turn came to approach the counter, the photograph I tendered was rejected: my hair concealed too much of my face, and I had to have new photographs taken with it pulled back off my face. For a year, I therefore carried a resident’s permit bearing a photograph in which I was almost unrecognizable. This was a source of amusement rather than humiliation. I was treated brusquely, even rudely, but not with contempt. After all, I was a white European, not a bicot, not a bougnole, not a ‘Mohammed’ and not a ‘Sidi’. In the circumstances, it seemed only natural to at least try to help the Algerians with their application forms. I should have known I could never have been of any great help. Any encounter between undergraduate French and Gallic bureaucratese is always going to be an unequal struggle. I could not speak the language of these men and they could not speak mine. I could not help. I assumed that they were immigrant workers. If and when they did get their papers, they probably helped to build the rapid transport system that exiled most Algerians from central Paris by displacing them to distant suburbs. It was a good moment to encounter Fanon.

Now very battered, my old copies of Les Damnés de la terre (The Wretched of the Earth) and L’An V de la révolution algérienne (Studies in a Dying Colonialism) were bought in the spring of 1970 from François Maspero’s La Joie de lire bookshop in the rue Saint Sévérin. Maspero was Fanon’s main publisher, and this was where Les Damnés de la terre first went on sale in late 1961. It is also where, on the very day that the news of Fanon’s death reached Paris, copies were seized and taken away by the police because they were deemed seditious. My copies are not first editions but the reprints published in the Petite Collection Maspero edition. Copies of those elegant little books are now quite difficult to find, and the shop where I bought them has gone. The sites of its two branches – one on either side of the narrow street – are now home to a travel agency and a shop selling posters and cards. The bookshop’s name meant ‘the joy of reading’, and I always find its absence depressing.

The Algerian war had been over for eight years in 1970; almost no one talked about it. It was still impossible for Gillo Pontecorvo’s Battle of Algiers (made in 1966) to be shown in a French cinema. Plans to screen it in three Parisian cinemas were dropped when their owners were threatened with violence if the screenings went ahead.¹ It was to be almost thirty years before a French government could finally admit that what occurred in Algeria had indeed been a war and not a police operation. No one talked about how, in October 1961, or only two months before Fanon’s death, the police opened fire on unarmed Algerian demonstrators at the bottom of the boulevard St Michel. No one talked about how Algerians died in the courtyard of the Préfecture de Police. The memory of the student revolt of May ’68 had eclipsed that of an earlier generation of twenty-year-olds, some of whom fought and died in a war that had no name, and some of whom refused to fight in it or even deserted from the army. Many of those who deserted, who refused to accept their call-up papers or who even joined the small groups that gave active and clandestine support to the Front de Libération National were inspired to do so by Fanon, the black doctor from Martinique who resigned from his post in a psychiatric hospital in colonial Algeria to join the Front and who preached a gospel of violent revolution.

May ’68 had come and gone, but Paris was still turbulent. The police presence around the rue St-Séverin was both permanent and heavy. Although it certainly helped a great deal, one did not need to be black or North African to be stopped regularly and asked for one’s papers; being twenty and having long hair were perfectly good qualifications. It felt right to rebel, to be angry, even though our anger and our rebellion were largely symbolic. Running away from police charges during occasional demonstrations in the Latin Quarter was both frightening and exhilarating, but we were not facing machine guns. Was it really possible to believe that the CRS riot police were a latter-day SS?

In 1970, the political horizon was dominated not by Algeria, but by the war in Vietnam that politicized so many members of a generation. There were some vague parallels with the experience of the so-called Algerian generation. We dismissed talk of ‘peace in Algeria’ and rejected calls for a negotiated settlement in favour of a much more militant commitment. In 1970, ‘Victory to the NLF’ felt a much more appropriate slogan than ‘Peace in Vietnam’. At Christmas and the New Year, banners went up on the lampposts in the boulevard St Germain, courtesy of John Lennon and Yoko Ono: ‘War is Over (if you want it)’. It went on, regardless of what we wanted.

It was a sign of the times that my acquaintance with Fanon began with Les Damnés de la terre and not Peau noire, masques blancs (Black Skin, White Masks). In many ways he seemed to have less to do with an Algeria that had been bureaucratized than with a very general image of the Third World – that colossus facing Europe. Fanon had spoken of setting Africa ablaze, and it was on fire. Vicious colonial wars were going on in Portugal’s African colonies. A guerrilla war was taking place in a Rhodesia that would eventually become Zimbabwe. In South Africa, the armed wing of the African National Congress was waging its own struggle. It was possible to follow the wars’ progress by browsing through the collection of papers and journals on offer in La Joie de lire’s basement. This was as much a library as a bookshop and there was certainly no obligation to buy. Fanon fitted easily into the revolutionary pantheon of the day, along with Ho Chi Minh, Che Guevara, Amilcar Cabral, Samora Machel and the Mao of the Cultural Revolution. There was also a close perceived association between Fanon and the Black Power movement in the United States. Every brother on a rooftop who was taking care of business with a gun could, so it was said, quote Fanon. A lot of white students thought they wanted to be on the rooftops too. And so, we read Fanon. It was his anger that was so attractive.

I read a lot during that year in Paris. It was the beginning of the moment of theory, a time to read Althusser, Lacan and Foucault. Fanon began to look naive. His analyses were wrong so often, disastrously so when it came to Angola. It was obvious to any Marxist, to any Althusserian, that the peasantry could not lead a revolution, that the lumpenproletariat could not play a progressive role. Just look at Marx and Lenin. Just look at the state of Algeria. Fanon had feared that the national bourgeoisie would confiscate the revolution. But it was confiscated by the FLN and by the army that stood behind it in the shadows.

In October 1988, Algeria began to implode. Strikes and riots broke out as discontent with the FLN, corruption and the stagnation of what should have been an oil-rich economy turned to violent protest. Violence was met with violence and perhaps some 500 people died on the streets of Algiers when the army was sent in. According to some accounts, their deaths were a factor that contributed to the suicide of Fanon’s widow. In February 1989, a multi-party system was introduced after a referendum. One of the new parties to emerge was the fundamentalist Islamic Salvation Front (FIS). Victorious in the local elections of June, it seemed poised to win the legislative elections of December. Within a month, the president had been deposed and the elections had been cancelled. The FIS turned to armed struggle. Policemen began to be assassinated and a civil war was soon underway. Over the next ten years, up to one hundred thousand people would be killed. No one knows the exact figure.

The foreigners were ordered to get out of Algeria by the fundamentalists. Some were killed. The writers, the musicians and the intellectuals began to be murdered. The novelist Tahar Djaout spoke out: ‘Silence is death, and if you say nothing you die, and if you speak you die, so speak and die.’ He died in June 1993, gunned down outside the apartment block where he lived. In a sense, Djaout spoke on behalf of – and died for – Fanon’s wretched of the earth, on behalf of the thousands who were dying cruel and anonymous deaths. Other writers also spoke on their behalf. They have produced a literature of defiance and of terrible beauty. It is a good time to reread Fanon. Not to hear once more the call for violent revolution, but to recapture the quality of the anger that inspired it.

Fanon was angry. His readers should still be angry too. Angry about what happened in Algeria in the 1990s. Angry that Algerian immigrants could be treated with such contempt in a police station. Angry at the casual racism that still assumes that the black and North African youths of the suburbs are all criminals or at least potential criminals (which is not to say that they are all angels, merely that the repeated experience of poverty and exclusion does not make for good citizens). Angry at the cultural alienation that still afflicts the children of Martinique, so beautiful in their smart school uniforms and so convinced that they are just like other French children until someone teaches them otherwise. Angry at what has happened in Algeria. Angry that the wretched of the earth are still with us.

To read or study the history of the Algerian war is to sup on horrors. To do so against the backdrop of contemporary Algeria was worse. I have read so many horror stories about contemporary Algeria, and I have been told many others. The Algeria with which Fanon identified so strongly had become a country in which police interrogators used blow torches in cellars and in which mass murder was committed in the name of a perversion of Islam. Several of my informants were forced to leave the Algeria where they had lived since independence in 1962, and where some had been born. Some simply left as the tide of intolerance and xenophobia began to rise faster and faster. Others had narrower escapes. One morning, a doctor was informed by the police that his name figured on a death list of several doctors who were to be killed by a group of self-styled Islamic fundamentalists. He was immediately put on a plane for Paris. The other doctors were killed. The list itself had been drawn up by one of the doctor’s own students. I was told the story of what happened in a school in the Algerian countryside. A group of armed men burst into a classroom and cut the throat of the teacher. They then severed her head and left it on her desk. This occurred in front of a class of primary schoolchildren. I will never know the name of that teacher but I cannot – will not – forget the story of her death. Some things must not be forgotten. And whatever else happens in and to Algeria, it will take years for the trauma inflicted on those children to heal.

The violence in Algeria had its effects in France. Schoolgirls who wore ‘Islamic headscarves’, judged by many to be incompatible with the secularism of the French educational system, were portrayed in the press as members of a fundamentalist fifth column or even as potential Algerian terrorists, even though many of them were not Algerians at all! In the summer and autumn of 1995, bombs went off in Paris, with the shadowy Armed Islamic Groups claiming responsibility. Tension was high. From the window of a hotel room, I could watch the police stopping every car driven by anyone who looked even vaguely ‘Algerian’. No doubt those stopped were addressed as tu. No doubt a few Martinicans were stopped too, only to be let go with the gruff apology: ‘Sorry, thought you were Algerian . . .’ It happened to Fanon too.

I half expected some hostility or at least suspicion from those I approached for information about Fanon. White liberals and white leftists are, for understandable reasons, not welcome in all quarters. The Algerian war is still a delicate and difficult issue in France. I could, to some extent, empathize with the forlorn Algerians in the Préfecture, but no child has ever stared at me in a park and said, ‘Look a nigger. Mummy, I’m frightened.’ I need not have worried. One or two people – white, as it happens – expressed amused surprise when they opened their doors and found that Fanon’s would-be biographer was a white redhead. Most were only too delighted to find that someone was interested in Fanon, who is not now widely read in France. My most emotionally charged memory is that of a conversation with an elderly Martinican who played football with Fanon as a child and fought alongside him in the Second World War. He gently brushed his black fingers across my white wrist, looked at me and said ‘Fanon . . . race . . . racism: it’s nothing to do with that.’

Fanon has often been described as preaching a gospel of hate and violence. He certainly had a talent for hate and he did advocate and justify a violence that I can no longer justify. And yet, his first readers sensed in his work a great generosity. The combination of anger and generosity of spirit is his true legacy. In the introduction to his first book, Fanon writes that ‘man is a yes’. The ‘universal-inclusive’ man grates, but it is rather pointless to reproach Fanon for not sharing the political sensibilities of a new millennium and of a generation influenced by feminism. In the final chapter, he picks up the same argument: ‘Yes to life. Yes to love. Yes to generosity. But man is also a no. No to scorn for man. No to the indignity of man. No to the exploitation of man. To the murder of what is most human about men: freedom.’² Fanon, pas mort.

In 2004, Grove Press published a new – and badly needed – translation of Les Damnés de la terre by Richard Philcox. In a brief afterword – significantly entitled ‘On Retranslating Fanon, Retrieving a Lost Voice’ – Philcox describes what he calls his three ‘encounters’ with Fanon. In 1968, the twenty-three-year-old Englishman went to Senegal to work as a teacher. The textbooks he had to use spoke of daffodils and snow, but half his class would be asleep by three in the afternoon, when the temperature reached forty degrees Celsius. Philcox gradually came to realize that Dakar was part of the compartmentalized world described by Fanon in the opening pages of Les Damnés. A third encounter came in the course of many visits to Martinique and Guadeloupe, the birthplace of Philcox’s wife, the novelist Maryse Condé: ‘Any visitor from outside France visiting the French islands of the Caribbean is immediately struck by the overwhelming presence of a metropolis seven thousand kilometres away, the extraordinary alienation of a petite bourgeoisie more attuned to France than their own destiny, and he or she cannot but admire Fanon’s lucidity.’³

Philcox’s second encounter with Fanon took place, he believes, in 1971, when he returned from Senegal to France. The similarity between it and the circumstances of my own Fanonian encounter is almost uncanny, though he certainly had a harder time of it: ‘One year before Britain joined the Common Market I was not only forced to apply for a work permit, but also undergo a series of medicals, mandatory for immigrants from non-member European Union countries.’ Most of the immigrants were, predictably, from North Africa, and Philcox now witnessed ‘that very special relationship, based on humiliation and contempt, that exists between the French and the Algerians’:

We were all made to line up in front of a nondescript building near to boulevard périphérique and once inside, submitted to a series of humiliating medical examinations that would allow us to apply for a work permit at another line at the Paris Préfecture. It was obvious that all the clichés about the Algerian’s criminal impulsiveness, his indolence, his thefts, his lies and rapes, which had been inculcated into the French bureaucrats’ minds before, during, and after the Algerian war, rose to the surface and treatment was dealt out accordingly.⁴

I am not convinced by Philcox’s suggestion that it might, in part, be because we are ‘two islanders’ that we both developed an interest in Fanon – I suspect it has more to do with a fleeting glimpse of what humiliation means. But he is surely right to remark that one of the reasons why Fanon is studied more in the universities of the English-speaking world than ‘in France and the French Caribbean’ is that ‘the skeletons of the Algerian war and the colour hierarchy, respectively, are too close for comfort.’⁵ As I have tried to demonstrate elsewhere, Fanon is (or can be) a continued source of political embarrassment in both France and Martinique.⁶ This is not to suggest that the English-speaking world is innocent of racism, or to imply that France is uniquely prejudiced, but it might serve as a reminder that racism takes different forms in different places. It is also significant that disciplines such as black studies, long implanted in the American educational system and increasingly familiar in Britain, remain underdeveloped in France. Pap Ndiaye describes his La Condition noire, which is subtitled ‘Essay on a French Minority’, as a contribution to a new field of study that might be called ‘black studies à la française’.⁷ He has no option but to use the English ‘black studies’. Ndiaye’s essay was originally published in 2008, but its starting point is the very Fanonian observation that, whilst blacks are visible as individuals, they are invisible as a social group because the French Republic does not officially recognize the existence of minorities.

One of the reasons why Fanon can be such an embarrassment was inadvertently revealed in October 2010. Jean-Paul Guerlain, the seventy-three-year-old former head of the celebrated perfume-maker was being interviewed for a midday news bulletin and described how he created his Samsara perfume – a blend of sandalwood and jasmine inspired by his first wife: ‘For once I began to work like a nigger. I don’t know if niggers have always really worked . . .’ The interviewer allowed the remark to pass without comment, but various anti-racist and black groups immediately protested, called for Guerlain’s products to be boycotted and threatened legal action. The only member of the political class who thought the incident worthy of comment was Finance Minister Christine Lagarde, who dismissed Guerlain’s remarks as ‘pathetic’. The firm sent out an email expressing regrets that his comments might damage the company’s image and pointing out that he was no longer either a shareholder or an employee, whilst Guerlain personally apologized for his remarks, but the damage had been done.⁸

The most startling response came from TV journalist Audrey Pulvar, speaking on the evening news: ‘Le nègre, il t’emmerde.’ She followed this outburst up with a blog entitled ‘Nègre je suis, nègre je resterai.’ Pulvar is one of the few non-white faces to have gained a significant presence in the French audiovisual media. She was born in Martinique in 1972. Both Pulvar and the journalists who covered the story attributed the stinging ‘Le nègre, il t’emmerde’ to Aimé Césaire, described by Le Figaro as a ‘poet, politicial and resolute anti-colonialist, born in Martinique.’ Nègre je suis, nègre je resterai is indeed the title of the last book published by Césaire, who died in 2008, but ‘Le nègre, il t’emmerde’ is not associated with Césaire alone.⁹ It could also be a slightly distorted quotation from the most famous passage in Fanon’s Peau noire, masques blancs. The passage in question describes the traumatic encounter with the ‘white gaze’ that begins when a child turns to its mother and remarks ‘Tiens, un nègre’ (‘Look, a negro’) and ends with the defiant ‘Le beau nègre, il t’emmerde, madame’.¹⁰ Emmerder is, to say the least, ‘vulgar’: The ‘handsome nègre’s’ words can be rendered as ‘sod off, madame’, ‘bugger off, madame’ or ‘screw you, madame.’ That Fanon’s first book is still relevant to any analysis of racism in France is cleverly illustrated by a fictitious interview published in the journal Ravages in 2011. The pretence is that the journal’s editor Georges Marbeck is in Algiers for the first meeting of the Mouvement de fraternité universelle and suddenly notices someone sitting at the back of the room: ‘black skin, white hair’.¹¹ The elderly man is Frantz Fanon, who agrees to be interviewed. Marbeck’s questions were obviously written for the occasion; Fanon’s ‘answers’ consist of unaltered quotations from his published work. Sadly, the ‘interview’ is still of contemporary relevance.

It is significant that Pulvar is, like Fanon, originally from Martinique, where nègre can have many different meanings, as will be discussed below. In conversation, it can have friendly, even joking connotations, but the street sign ‘Pointe des nègres’ on the waterfront in Fort-de-France is a daily reminder of its grimmer associations: this was the site of the old slave market, a reminder that a nègre is the descendent of slaves. From time to time, there are reminders that there were also slave owners in Martinique, and that their descendents are still there. The békés are the descendents of the ‘white creoles’ who once owned the sugar plantations, and now own both banana plantations and the supermarkets that have a stranglehold of Martinique’s retail economy. The statistics are not easy to interpret and there is no breakdown of property ownership by ethnicity, but the widespread belief that the békés still control Martinique’s economy appears to be well founded. It is unusual for a member of this ethno-class to speak out in public, but a documentary shown on Canal Plus in February 2009 gave one of them the opportunity to do so. The documentary, Les Derniers Maîtres de la Martinique, included an interview with the béké businessman Alain Huygues-Despointes: ‘When I see mixed-race families of blacks and whites, their children are born different colours, and there is no harmony. I don’t think that’s right. We have tried to preserve our race . . . Historians speak only of the negative aspects of slavery, and that is to be regretted.’¹² Other spokesmen from the béké community rushed to condemn Huygue-Despointes and to claim that all was well in Martinique, and that such prejudices were a thing of the past. One of their number then confused the issue still further and destroyed his own case. Arguing that the béké community was now more open that it before, Roger de Jaham pointed out that his family was related by marriage to ‘both the black world and the mulatto world.’¹³ Martinique consists, by his admission, of three ‘worlds’, just like the Martinique of Peau noire, masques blancs.

Les Derniers Maîtres de la Martinique was aired at a moment when social tensions were very high. At the beginning of February, the island was paralyzed by a general strike called by a federation of trade unions to protest against the high cost of living and what was called in Creole pwofitasyon (‘profitation’), meaning both ‘excessive exploitation’ and ‘taking advantage of those weaker than yourself.’¹⁴ The protest movement began in January in Guadeloupe, where it was stronger and where there was serious violence in the streets. Most of the demands put forward were economic, and they were to some extent met when the lowest paid were awarded wage increases, but the underlying tensions have not been resolved. A collection of documents from the movement included many expressions of anger about the béké and many enraged responses to the TV documentary. It also included a poem written in 1979 by one Alain Phoebé Caprice. Entitled ‘Enfantillages’ (‘Childish Things’), it ends:

In their eyes, my people is a people of children

Of Children

Who never grow up

Of Children

You hold by the hand

By keeping them hungry

That they kill when they are disobedient

To whom they tell stories

Stories about whites

To get them to sleep more easily

Without any trouble¹⁵

This was the most significant social conflict to break out in Martinique and Guadeloupe for decades, and many took the view that the underlying issue was that of the legal and administrative status of the two Départements d’Outre-Mer (DOMs). A referendum was organized for the beginning of 2010 and raised the issue of greater autonomy, which had long been on the demands of local politicians. The offer of ‘autonomy within the republic’ was rejected by a significant majority. It is hard not to concur with Le Monde’s comment to the effect that, whatever politicians and supporters of independence might say, the population was deeply afraid of being ‘dumped’ by France.¹⁶

None of the documents in the collection published by the Liyannaj Kont Pwofitasyon mentions Fanon, and there is no record of his name or work being invoked by the protestors, even though they would probably have recognized many of their concerns in Peau noire, masques blancs and its descriptions of Martinique. Audry Pulvar’s angry outburst suggests that Fanon’s status in both Martinique and France is, to say the least, ambiguous. She used a phrase that can be associated with both Césaire and Fanon, but identifies only the former, more or less obliging Fanon. Fanon appears to have been consigned to a strange purgatory that exists between being remembered and being forgotten.

The first edition of this book appeared in 2000. Textual revisions have been kept to a minimum and are mainly concerned with factual errors that crept into the original. The bibliographical notes included in the afterword go some way to describe historical-social developments relevant to any reading of Fanon and to the recent literature on him.